Ach...I was trying for so long to figure out a plot point that would help draw everything together next chapter. I finally figured it out really late last night, so I was able to get a huge amount of writing done.

Happy July 4th, everyone!

Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom or Naruto!

"So there's this whole world where ninjas are still in power, and have their own countries and politics?" Valerie asked disbelievingly.

"Yup. And Sam, Danny, and I all became fully-fledged ninjas."

"And you walked up the wall using your…chakra, was it?" Tucker nodded.

"That's all well and good," Chouji interjected, "but can you tell us about this world? And more importantly, can you get some snacks? I'm starving!" Tucker looked to Sam.

"Could you run back to the Nasty Burger and get us some food?"

"Why can't you go?"

"I kinda stand out a bit, Sam," he replied. Sam took one look at the green jumpsuit and knew he was right.

"Fine…but don't make any major decisions while I'm gone!" An instant later, she'd disappeared out the window.

"I'm guessing the Nasty Burger is that restaurant we were outside during the fight earlier?" Tenten asked.

"Yeah," Tucker answered.

"Fight? Who were you fighting before I got there?" asked Valerie. Tucker sighed.

"Two ghosts, and two ninjas that came with us to this world," he replied. "They have Danny and another one of our comrades hostage."

"So that's why he's not here…we need to get him back!" Valerie asserted.

"Y-yes, we n-need to rescue D-danny and N-n-n-naruto," Hinata added, barely able to squeak out the end of her sentence before turning scarlet and reverting to pushing her index fingers together. Valerie cocked an eyebrow at the girl's weird behavior, but nodded nonetheless.

"But how are we gonna go about it?" The huntress inquired. Shikamaru sighed.

"It's troublesome, but as it is we have not idea where they might be hiding and we can't figure out how to get Danny and Naruto out without that information. If we can figure out what they're after, maybe we can deduce where they are."

"That makes sense…what do you think they want with them?" asked Valerie.

"That's the problem-I have no idea. They can't be holding them for ransom, because we're too far away from Konoha for anyone to be able to pay it. And there have only been a handful of sightings of those guys in black cloaks, so nobody really knows what their goals are. They targeted Naruto specifically, though, so there must be something about him that they're after."

"So we're not sure why they want this Naruto guy…but what about Danny?"

"I think," Tucker interjected, "I think they want to try and make Danny evil." He shot Valerie a wry look. "No matter what you thought of him before he disappeared, Danny was always good. He always fought to defend this town, and what happened between the two of you was an accident. He isn't evil. But the ghost in him can be. I think that they want to bring that evil out." Suddenly, they heard someone groaning. Everyone turned to the source of the noise, which turned out to be Neji awakening from his unconsciousness.

"N-neji?" Hinata asked nervously. Neji's eyes flicked over to his cousin, at which point they widened considerably and he jumped two feet in the air. He ran behind Tenten and put the chocolate-eyed kunoichi between himself and Hinata, using her as a human shield.

"K-keep her away from me!" The Hyuuga prodigy whimpered.

"Neji? Why are you afraid of Hinata all of a sudden?" Tenten inquired of her teammate.

"What has befallen my eternal rival?" said Lee. Ino stepped forward, her posture and facial expression emoting an air of expertise.

"The mangekyo sharingan," she explained. "Whatever it was that Itachi made him see, it must've involved Hinata doing something to him that made him scared of her. Let me take a look inside, I'll try and see what's wrong." She arranged her fingers into her family's unique seal, one that looked like a rectangle that, when she held it up to eye level, had Neji in its center. "Shintenshin no jutsu!" She cried, then crumpled to the floor. Valerie immediately ran over to her and laid her down in a supine position.

"Don't worry, guys, I know CPR!" She exclaimed. Everyone stared at her blankly.

"Uh…what are you doing?" asked Chouji.

"What do you mean, what am I doing? She's fainted!"

"No I didn't," Ino replied matter-of-factly. Valerie stared at Ino's prone form and briefly wondered whether or not she was crazy. "No, over here!" Ino said. Valerie turned to where Neji was standing, and the Hyuuga boy nodded.

"You guys aren't going to believe this one," Ino said through Neji's body.

"Why, what is it?" Chouji asked excitedly. Valerie was looking from Ino's body to Neji, her facial expression similar to that of any normal resident of Amity Park upon having seen a ghost.

"In the genjutsu that Itachi showed him, Neji was tortured by Hinata and her little sister for twelve hours straight."

"What's so unbelievable about that?" Shikamaru inquired.

"They…" Ino giggled. "They gave him French braids and put beads and ribbons in his hair!" Everyone present sweatdropped. An instant later, Neji was blinking and furiously rubbing his eyes as Ino returned to her body, stood up, and stretched.

"Wha-how-what did you do?" Valerie sputtered.

"Who did what?" Asked Sam, who had just climbed through the window, several take-out bags of Nasty Burgers clutched in her small hands. She tossed one bag to Chouji, and took out foil-wrapped burgers from the other bags.

"These are called Nasty Burgers," she told the assembled shinobi, then unwrapped a burger from its packaging. "You take them out of the foil and eat them." She gave a burger to everyone else and watched as they unwrapped their burgers and took their first bites. She noticed that Neji had quickly grabbed his burger at sat on the other side of the attic, behind a decrepit purple couch and as far away from Hinata as possible. She quirked an eyebrow but ignored the strange behavior, instead watching her friends' reactions to their first Nasty Burgers.

"Awesome!" Chouji exclaimed, and began to tear into his burger. Ino eyed hers warily.

"It tastes good…but it looks like the unhealthiest thing on the planet."

"It probably is," Tucker replied in-between bites. "But in our line of work, we burn off the fat, calories, sodium, and cholesterol after a couple hours of training, so it's no big deal." Ino kept glaring at her burger as though it was evil incarnate (which it was, to someone as concerned about their figure as she was), but decided that it was the only food she'd probably get for a while. She reluctantly took another bite. Everyone else ate their Nasty Burgers slowly, except for Chouji, who had already finished his first and had dived into the bag Sam had tossed to him for another.

Meanwhile...

Drip

Drip

Drip

A tiny drop of ice-cold wetness landed on the end of Danny's nose. The shock of the coldness of the water forced him out of unconsciousness. He scrunched his eyelids, shutting them even more tightly, before finally opening them slowly. The action did him little good, however, since the environment in which he'd found himself was nearly pitch-black, save for a slight blueish glow originating from beneath his field of vision and the glowing green of his prison guard.

"You're awake," Zabuza noted gruffly.

"Danny!" Shouted a loud, loud voice over to his left. The halfa turned and saw Naruto. He was standing with his arms above his head, one end of a glowing chain wrapped around his wrists while the other end snaked upwards until it disappeared in the darkness above. A pair of manacles were locked around his ankles, their other ends bolted securely into what appeared to be a stone wall behind him. The floor, or what Danny could see of it by the glow of Naruto's chains, was also made of stone. Danny noted that he was in a similar position.

"Don't even think of escaping," rumbled Zabuza. "those chains are nearly indestructible, and absorb any chakra that you try to force into them. You aren't breaking out. And even if you do," he hefted his zanpato menacingly, leaving the rest to the boys' imaginations. Just then, the entire area was filled with a diabolic cackling.

Clap, clap

Immediately, Danny and Naruto's prison lit up. It turned out that they were in a large, limestone cave. Every once in a while a drop of freezing water would coalesce on the end of a stalactite and drop to the ground, thus explaining Danny's rude awakening. The two genin found themselves bound to a pair of huge stalagmites nearly eight feet around. Zabuza was perched on what looked suspiciously like a stalagmite whose point had been sliced off, with one leg curled up on the ledge and the other dangling lazily. He held the grip of his zanpato in his right hand (his left was draped over his knee), and the end of the blade rested on the ground. The spirit that activated the clap-on floodlights installed in the cave became visible as Dan decided to reveal himself in a flash of green energy.

"What do you want, you flame-haired weirdo?" Naruto shouted at him.

"Weirdo, eh? Is that the best you can come up with?" Dan asked, an amused grin playing on his lips. Within seconds, the grin vanished. "If you can't say anything intelligent then be silent, fool." He vanished and reappeared directly in front of Naruto, and quickly brought his knee up and slammed Naruto in the face. He swiftly turned around, the whirl of his Akatsuki cloak absorbing but a few drops of the rivulets of blood traveling down Naruto's downturned face. The rivulets began beneath his forehead protector, then slid to the end of his nose and dripped onto the floor. As Dan stalked away from the sun-kissed jinchuuriki, Danny watched as the blonde's forehead protector came loose and fell to the ground, clattering slightly on the stone floor of the cave as it landed.

"I have no use for a weakling such as him; Kyuubi or no Kyuubi, he is not part of my plans." The specter walked over to Danny, then grabbed his chin and forced his face up, so that he was looking his alternate future self in the eyes. "It is you that I am interested in, Danny-boy, and only you."

"Why?" Danny growled. Dan feigned surprise.

"Come again?" He asked politely.

"You exist outside of time, you don't need me to become you. What do you want with me?" Dan cackled softly.

"That puny fourteen-year-old mind of yours is correct for once, I don't need you to watch your precious people die before you in order to force you to become me. I've forced you to watch it countless times with mangekyo sharingan and you're no closer to begging release from your sniveling humanity than before. No, I don't need it. But I want it. I want to see the real thing, I want you to suffer knowing that, despite all I've forced you to watch before, this time it isn't an illusion. And you wouldn't come running to the cheesehead even after that," he chuckled to himself, "as if you even could at this point. But I digress. You won't become me after I've destroyed everything you've ever cared about, but hey, that's okay. You'll be scarred for life, an empty shell of what you once were. And I'll stand over your crumpled, defeated body and laugh, and laugh, and laugh some more…because then I will have had my revenge…my revenge for having been defeated by my weaker, human self and being stuffed into that ridiculous thermos. That's what I want." Danny glared up at the perversion of his ghostly self in utter hatred, until one line from Dan's soliloquy stood out from the rest.

"As if I even could…what happened to Plasmius?" Dan laughed heartily.

"Ah, you picked up on that, very good. When we first encountered Akatsuki, we were one person too many. So we had to…how do I say this…cut him from the team."

"Was a real shame," Zabuza added as he beat a tattoo on the pommel of his zanpato. "Took us hours to get the ectoplasm off our cloaks." A large lump formed in Danny's throat.

"You…you killed him…you monsters," he whispered hoarsely.

"Ghosts, to be exact," Dan added jovially, "though you've no right to criticize us, seeing as half of you is one as well. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to arrange the space for our other guests, not to mention our partners…" He slowly slipped out of the visible spectrum, leaving Danny and a semi-conscious Naruto under the care of the Demon of the Bloody Mist.

"Ta."

Clap, clap, clap.

Darkness.

Yes, I gave their lair clap-on lights.