It was a bright and sunny day. The only clouds that graced the sky were fluffy and white. The weather forecast announced that it would be seventy-four degrees for most of the day. There was no school; there was no homework. In short, it was a perfect Saturday afternoon.
Anyone who noticed the three friends walking towards the museum would not have been struck by how ordinary they looked simply because they looked so ordinary. The apparent leader of the trio was Samantha Manson, a girl who favored black and purple as the colors of choice for clothing, and would clearly have been quite at home in most Goth bars. To her right walked the obvious dissenter to their destination, a young black boy known as Tucker Foley, who always wore a red beret and never went anywhere without a PDA sticking out of his pocket. Finally, on the end slouched the most remarkably unremarkable member of the party, apparently just an ordinary boy named Danny Fenton.
"Look, Tucker," Sam sighed. "I agreed to go to that stupid movie with you. You are coming to the Edvard Munch exhibit with me."
Tucker muttered something about boring paintings and replied, "Will there at least be girls there?"
Danny grinned at his two bickering friends and shook his head. "Hey, don't I get a say in what we do today?"
Sam snickered. "Oh, trust me. We will end up doing your thing at some point. We always do."
"Yeah," Tucker agreed. Suddenly, he brightened considerably as a thought occurred to him. "Hey, maybe someone'll interrupt this stupid museum thing."
"They'd better not!" Sam objected. "I've been waiting months for this."
"Oh, I wouldn't worry," Danny assured her. "I don't think too many of my enemies are art connoisseurs." The cashier in the museum lobby, wondering at the boy's choice of words, gave Danny a politely curious glance as Sam paid their way in, and was subsequently ignored.
"That's because they have no sense of taste," was Sam's rejoinder as they made their way past the obligatory dinosaur exhibits. "Edvard Munch's art is practically the embodiment of the Goth mentality. The man had more angst than Friday nights at my favorite book store."
Tucker sighed and looked around as though desperately seeking a source of entertainment. However, the modern art, Crusades exhibit, and Eighteenth Century fashions did little to alleviate the boredom he was already feeling. He yawned rather conspicuously.
"Look on the bright side," Danny said quietly, torn between sympathy amusement. "The movie starts in an hour, so we won't be here long."
"I heard that!" Sam announced. "Honestly, I try to introduce a little culture into your lives, and this is thanks I get." The humor in her eyes gave lie to the resentment in her voice.
"Hey, I got plenty of culture," Tucker contradicted her.
Danny shook his head as his two friends began a good-natured squabble and turned his attention to a painting of man standing on a bridge, screaming. He thought it looked familiar, but he couldn't place it right off. A sudden chill and the sight of his breath coming out in a fog saved him from considering it further. "Uh…hey, guys?" he began. The sound of a painfully familiar voice yelling rendered any explanation void.
"I am the Box Ghost!"
Sam huffed and crossed her arms; Tucker appeared overjoyed. Danny glanced around and noted that they were alone. "This shouldn't take long," he sighed. His eyes turned glowing green and a ring of light appeared around him; it split in two to move towards his feet and outstretched arms simultaneously. The light display over, Danny now appeared in a black jumpsuit with white hair, gloves, and boots. An emblem on his chest of a black "P" inside a white "D" betrayed him as his alter ego, the ghost boy Danny Phantom.
He opened his mouth, perhaps to say something witty, but was interrupted the Box Ghost's battle cry of "Beware!" He rolled his eyes instead and, with an ironic salute to his friends, quickly flew from the room.
"Hurry back!" Sam called after him.
"No worries there," he muttered under his breath. Of all his ghostly foes, he sometimes thought Box Ghost was worst. He was certainly the most persistent and annoying in addition to being the weakest. While Danny did not necessarily enjoy having his butt kicked, it was nice to have a challenge once in a while.
He flew over the heads of some screaming pedestrians and spared a brief moment to remember how he had once been concerned when ghosts showed up. It was amazing how even the scariest of monsters seemed commonplace to him and his friends now. Then he found the Box Ghost in the Crusades exhibit and spared a second moment to cross his arms and raise one eyebrow.
"…And once I have freed you from this square container of glass," the less-than-genius spook was saying to a gold box inside a display case. "Your squaryness and boxyness will be mine and-"
"Hey, Box Ghost!" Danny yelled. He displayed a metal, thermos-like contraption and continued. "Why don't you just make it easy on yourself this time? I've got things to do."
Rather than make any sort of response, the Box Ghost gave Danny a slightly panicked look, then reached through the glass to steal the gold box and fled. "What? No parting 'Beware'?" Danny asked his retreating figure. This was not like the Box Ghost; normally he at least tried to put up a fight. He never succeeded, but he tried. Danny shrugged and rushed to follow.
The path of pursuit forced him to become intangible and fly through several walls within the museum before finally going through the ceiling and into the open air outside. Box Ghost glanced behind at Danny to yell, "I am the Box Ghost! I will not let you take my precious magic box!"
"Magic?" Danny called back skeptically. "Oh, come on! There's no such thing as magic!" The irony of a being who is not supposed to exist saying that something doesn't exist belatedly occurred to him, but he was too busy laughing at the Box Ghost to dwell on it.
Box Ghost stopped at last and whirled on the Ghost Zone's most wanted. They were near a warehouse; somehow, Danny was not surprised. "With this box," Box Ghost announced in an overly loud voice. "I, the Box Ghost, will defeat you at last! Beware!" A ghostly glow surrounded the box, and he threw it at Danny…
…who caught it…
Box Ghost barely had time for a frightened squeak as he was sucked into the Fenton Thermos by a dubious-looking ghost boy. "Wow," Danny addressed the thermos in a deadpan voice. "I'm just so defeated." He slung the strap of the thermos over his shoulder and examined the heavy gold box. It was obviously very old; the gold was scratched and had flaked in several places to reveal rusted iron beneath. An ornate silver cross adorned the lid, and a simple keyhole was built into the front. As the boy looked at it, he thought he heard whispering and dismissed it as his imagination.
"Okay," Tucker said, looking at his watch. "He's got five more minutes, then I'm going on to the theater."
"Go right ahead," Sam said. She scanned the sky distractedly. "I'll wait here for him. What do you think's taking so long?"
Tucker shrugged. "I dunno. But it's Box Ghost; he couldn't be having trouble."
"I'm here," called a voice from above. Danny, still carrying the box, flew down to hover just above his friends. "Sorry, I had to chase him halfway across town."
"What's that?" Sam asked.
"Just a box, I guess. He swiped it and ran. Let me just return it, then we'll go." He became intangible to float through the wall. That strange whispering was getting louder, but Danny continued to ignore it. He found the glass case exactly as he had left it and started to return the box, but something stopped him.
The cross on the lid seemed to glitter with a life of its own. The gold suddenly seemed to be a deeper, more pure shade. It seemed almost warm.
I am yours… something seemed to say. Danny was not really sure why, but he wanted that box more than anything else in the world. It was with great difficulty that he made it intangible to set it back in its case. The whispering stopped the second it left his possession, but he still gazed at it a bit longer than was necessary before becoming human again and running out to meet his friends. The rest of the day passed in relative peace, but the box haunted the edges of Danny's mind.
It was dark. That was the first thing he noticed. The second was the young woman who hung in the endless void before him. Her hair might have been blonde at one time; now it was singed and blackened. Her eyes were charred, smoking cavities within which glowed a light the color of burning coals. She wore a simple white gown; like everything else about her, it appeared to have been in a fire.
"I am yours," she whispered. She held out a ghostly, glowing hand and smiled. "Only free me, and I will give you everything." He felt his arm rise almost of its own volition to brush fingertips with her.
Suddenly, the world exploded into flame around him. Tortured screams filled his mind and ears, and a pair of black eyes stared at him from just beyond the veil of fire. He felt like he was falling, then-
Danny jerked awake and transformed into his ghost self, then looked around in confusion. He was in his room; it was dark, but certainly not the endless void from his nightmare. Flickering orange light from outside his window proved to belong to a police car that sat parked behind a second car across the street. He dismissed his ghost form and chuckled at himself. If he still sounded a little nervous, well, it had been a scary dream.
He lay back down, but sleep stubbornly refused to return. Despite the fact that his ghost sense was not going off, he could not help but think that he wasn't alone. The image of those two eyes seemed to have burned itself onto his retinas, so that he saw them wherever he looked.
The clock informed him that it was 3:19 AM. He stared at it cantankerously and wondered how long it took for sixty seconds to go by. At last, he muttered something about stupid nightmares, became a ghost again, and flew through the ceiling.
"So glad tomorrow's Sunday," he muttered. The chill night air felt refreshing after the overpowering heat his nightmare had conjured up. He grinned and corrected himself, "No, today is Sunday." Either way, it wasn't Monday yet, and that was all that mattered.
He became invisible and flew a little lower in the hopes that he would surprise a ghost and have a nice fight that would tire him out enough that he could sleep. When the first few rays of sunlight crept over the horizon, he decided to call it a night (day, whatever) and went back home to play computer games in his dad's lab. He had zoned out over his thirtieth game of solitaire when he was brought abruptly back to reality by his mother's voice.
"Daniel Fenton! Have you been there all night?"
He jumped and turned sheepishly in his chair. "No, just a few hours. I had a nightmare and couldn't go back to sleep."
Maddie stared disapprovingly at her son for a moment more, then her face softened and she smiled. "Well, alright. Come up and have breakfast, and then you can go to the mall with Sam and Tucker."
Danny grinned and shut down the computer before following his mom back up the stairs. He arrived just in time to hear the tail end of Maddie's explanation of his whereabouts.
"You…had a bad dream?" his sister Jazz asked from over her latest psychiatry book. Her expression reflected barely contained laughter. Danny stuck his tongue out at her.
"You know," Jack, head of the household (more or less), began. "Ghosts can cause nightmares. It wasn't a ghost nightmare, was it, son?"
"I think it was just a nightmare," Danny answered without looking at his dad. It always felt a little weird to talk to his ghost hunting father about ghosts. Neither of his parents knew about his secret identity as Danny Phantom, despite all the clues he had inadvertently given over the months since he attained his powers. Consequently, they often went on long tangents about hunting ghosts with this piece of equipment or that one, all of which usually became active in Danny's presence. They had, in fact, hunted Danny himself no few times, an occurrence that he took in relative good humor since he knew that they wouldn't try if they knew about him.
He brought himself back to the conversation in progress.
"No, it'll be great!" Jack was saying. "We'll just camp out in Danny's room, and when that ghost comes, we'll use the Fenton Peeler on it!"
"Dad, it wasn't a ghost dream," Danny objected uselessly since neither of his parents seemed to be paying attention. He glared at his snickering sister, who hid behind her book.
"Honey, we won't be able to see it if it's a dream ghost," Maddie pointed out.
"Sure we will!" Jack announced brightly. He jumped up and ran down to the lab only to come running back a few minutes later carrying some new contraption.
Maddie blinked. "Honey, what is that, and why didn't I know about it?"
"I call it the Fenton Spectral-Vision Goggles," he explained happily. "They work like thermal goggles, only they pick up ghost energy instead of heat."
"And they work, do they?" his wife asked dubiously as she folded her arms. Jack grinned with all the enthusiasm of a Labrador retriever and handed over the Fenton Goggles for her examination.
"Oh, look at the time!" Danny said quickly. "Gottagobye!" He fled the kitchen at a run. He heard his mom call after him, then mutter something about how he was always in such a hurry. It was all Jazz could do to not fall over laughing.
He huffed peevishly and rubbed his eyes. Although he was usually very glad that his sister had discovered his secret, there were times when he wished she hadn't. Now was one them. He got changed, grabbed his cell phone, and fled the house before his parents could figure out where the trace ghost energy was coming from. Always assuming, of course, that his dad's invention even worked without his mom's help. Jack Fenton had some great ideas, and his inventions did usually work. Usually. But Maddie often had to help before they would. Still, it wouldn't do to risk it; his dad did have his moments.
He called Tucker and Sam, and they decided to meet at the Nasty Burger since none of them had actually succeeded in breakfast yet. The sky was overcast, perfectly suiting the boy's mood as he stared at his feet. He still couldn't get that nightmare out of his head; he could almost feel those eyes on the back of his neck.
So lost in his thoughts was the boy that he did not even realize where his feet had taken him until he happened to glance up and realize that he was outside the museum. He sighed in irritation and tried to push all thoughts of that strange gold box out of his mind. Sam and Tucker would be waiting for him by now.
He looked around and casually hid around the corner of the building to invoke his ghostly alter ego and become invisible. He flew straight up, then stopped in thought. The museum would not open for another thirty minutes; he could probably slip in and get that box without-
He angrily banished that train of thought and resumed his airborne voyage to the Nasty Burger. He was determined to have a good time with his friends today, and no stupid dreams or strange boxes were going to stop him.