"Bring her back!" Danny yelled.

The smoking, empty sockets that were her eyes blazed with fire. She laughed, low and evil. "I don't take orders from you, Master," she sneered. "Because you freed me, you alone will be immune to my retribution." The smell of smoke became overpowering, and Danny finally realized that it was actually the smell of burning flesh. Pandora burst into flames that quickly engulfed the room. Danny fearlessly charged past her.

"Mom! Dad! There's a ghost!" He jumped from the top of the stairs to the bottom. "Mom, you have to-" He slid to a stop at the sight that met his eyes. The kitchen was in flames; Pandora was already there. Hanging in the air behind her, as yet unharmed, were the inert forms of his parents.

"So now you think to undo the harm you've caused?" the vengeful fire spirit asked in her most scathing tone.

"I haven't done any of this!" Danny exclaimed. "It's been you!"

"Oh, no? I did only what you asked, little boy. And now you have released me, I can finally destroy this hateful, evil world."

"You're not going anywhere! I'm going ghost!" The ring of light that signaled the beginning of his transformation vanished suddenly as a tongue of fire lashed out to knock him across the room. He tried to pull himself to his feet, but burning restraints appeared around his wrists and ankles, pinning him to the floor.

Pandora watched his struggle for a few moments. "Well, I'm not without some mercy," she said, although her tone said otherwise. "Perhaps you should get some sleep."

A second blow, this time to the head, rendered the abused boy unconscious.

He spiraled down into an endless void. Flames lapped at his flesh as a dog does water, and voices whispered all around him. They spoke to him of betrayal, of despair, of hatred. Suddenly, he knew what the voices had been trying to tell him all along, if only he had listened.

"Danny?"

Pandora was evil. She wanted nothing more than to destroy the world that had betrayed her trust. And now, he had freed her to do just that. Nothing was safe from the flames that had once consumed her.

"Danny! Wake up!"

Hands reached out from the darkness to pull him down, but this time he didn't struggle. They were only trying to help.

He blinked several times to clear the fog from his eyes.

"Danny, are you okay?"

Tucker's voice. He shook his head and pulled himself to a sitting position. "Ugh…Tucker?" he asked vaguely.

"Right here, man."

Sam appeared on his other side and grasped his hand. "What happened here?"

Danny shook his head again. "You guys should run," he answered. "Get as far from town as you can. This was my fault."

His friends looked at each other over his head, but he didn't need them to prompt him for the story. "I robbed the museum," he confessed. "There was a ghost in that box. I thought I could trust her, and I let her out."

"Is this Electra?" Sam asked. She and Tucker helped Danny to his feet.

"No, I can trust her. This one's name is Pandora."

"Um, that probably should have tipped you off," Sam pointed out.

"I wasn't thinking. Look, just run. As fast as you can." Danny became a ghost and looked despairingly at both of his friends. "I let this thing out. I've got to put her back."

"Maybe we can help," Tucker offered.

"You can't. Even if you could, this is my responsibility. Please, guys. Just run."

After a few moments, they complied, but Sam turned back. "Danny, I…I…" She bit her lip and blushed. "Good luck." Then they were gone.

Danny smiled; no matter what else happened, they had always been his friends. "Now," he muttered, back in business mode. "If I were a ghostly, opera-loving techno geek, where would I hide?" He knew he would never beat Pandora on his own; he needed help. He just hoped Electra would hear him out before she tried to kill him.

The Fenton Goggles had been destroyed with his room, meaning he would have to look for her the old fashioned way. He sighed with impatient worry and shot straight up through the smoldering remains of his home only to stop again with a dismayed gasp at the nightmare come to life. The entire neighborhood had been devastated by Pandora; the city skyline was in slowly spreading flames. Danny shook himself out of his shock with some difficulty; there was no time to loose.

Flying at his fastest speed, he made his way through every location he could remember from the last two times he had tracked her down; few of them were still standing. He checked the cemetery and found nothing. He even checked the school, although he knew she wouldn't be there. He had just resigned himself to taking on Pandora alone when he realized he hadn't checked her favorite parking garage yet, and had to smack himself for the oversight.

He did not honestly expect her to be there, but there she stood, completely without guise for once, sadly watching as the flames engulfed her beloved city. "Electra!" he called.

When she saw who it was, her eyes and hair sparked with barely contained electricity. "You again?" she demanded.

"I'm sorry!" he said with the utmost sincerity as he landed. "I was stupid and paranoid and I haven't been sleeping well and…I'm sorry! Please, I need your help!"

Electra glared for a long time, but his obvious distress finally swayed her. "Is this about that?" she asked coldly with a sweeping gesture at the ravaged city.

Danny swallowed around the lump in his throat and took a breath. Red-faced from shame at his own shortsighted stupidity, he told her the whole story, every humiliating word of it. He stared at his feet throughout the telling, and refused to look up even once he had finished. He was afraid she wouldn't help, or worse, that she would just try to kill him anyway.

"Long ago," Electra began after a protracted silence, making Danny jump slightly. "When the world was young, mankind was given a box and told never to open it. One woman, named Pandora, thought the box must contain great riches for the gods to want to keep it closed. She let greed and curiosity overcome her and opened the box."

"And released evil into the world," Danny interrupted. "And that's exactly what I've done."

Electra put a finger under his chin and forced him to look her in the eyes. "Would you quit flapping your jaw and listen? Yes, once she opened the box, all the evils of the world escaped. And although she tried to close the box again, evil was far too strong and got through anyway until there was only thing left: hope.

"From what you've told me, this Pandora's weapon of choice is not fire, but metaphor. You can use that to your advantage."

"But how?" Danny wailed hopelessly. "She's too strong; how do I put her back in the box?"

Electra rolled her eyes theatrically and gave an over exaggerated sigh. "Weren't you paying attention? You don't! You can't fight evil with force, but you can fight her with hope."

"So, you won't help?"

"I just did. Like I said, I abhor violence. You've got what it takes to beat her, all by yourself, Phantom. You'll see."

Danny looked down at his feet again and clenched his hands into fists. Pandora had taken away everything; his parents, Jazz, his home, his town…She wasn't going to get away with it. He looked up, his eyes filled with new purpose. "Thanks, Kat," he said, and launched into the sky.

Kat raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly. "And Dad says he's completely brainless…"

"Just as soon as I get out of here," Jack yelled from the confines of a fiery cage. "I'm going to make you wish you'd never heard of me."

"I already do," Pandora answered scathingly. "The only reason you're still alive is because I need hostages." She turned her blazing eyes back to the beautifully destroyed city and spotted Danny. "There you are," she muttered. He flew over her head to land between her and his parents.

"You!" Maddie exclaimed. "I should have known you'd be involved in this somehow!"

"Yeah," Danny agreed. "I'm the one trying to save you." He turned back to his quarry. "Pandora, stop this, now! Before anyone else gets hurt!"

The enraged ifreet merely expanded the flames surrounding her and laughed. "Before anyone gets hurt?" she mocked him incredulously. "Maybe you should have thought of that before you started making requests of me, you greedy little boy."

"I didn't know you were going to do those things!" he protested. "If I had-"

"And just how, pray tell, did you think I was going to make the love of your life fall in love with you? You didn't think. You never even asked what I did to her; you only cared about the results."

Danny opened his mouth to protest, then realized she was right.

"And the school? Oh, so concerned were you that you went straight to the mall without even letting your mother and father know you were all right."

"No, I…" Again, he was forced to trail off.

"And the explosion, well, you didn't even bother to ask if I was responsible for that one."

"Why?" he whispered.

"Oh, come on, Danny boy! Use that brain for thinking of something besides girls! You've been wishing those boys would get their comeuppance since the moment you laid hands on my prison."

Danny's breath caught as he realized that he probably knew the names of single kid was killed. "And the police station…" he muttered, although he already knew the answer.

"What better way to stop an investigation?"

"All this time I thought I smelled smoke, it was you. My nightmares, you. Why?"

Pandora floated into the air to look down on him; she almost looked like an avenging angel with a halo of fire. "I was killed in flames because there is no good in humanity. I will destroy humanity in flames because there is no good left in me. And I will start…with them." She pointed past Danny to his parents, and a dozen whispers spoke into his mind with a single voice, Stop me!

"No!" he yelled, and lunged forward to obey the voice of Pandora's discarded humanity. She caught him as effortlessly as she might have a rag doll, and tossed him aside in much the same way. He watched his parents cower together as they must have realized their time was up. "Pandora, stop!" he yelled, on the verge of tears. "Take me instead!"

He didn't really expect Pandora to stop. He certainly didn't expect her to turn. "What did you say?"

"Take me," he repeated. "I'm the one who let you out. It was my greed, my stupidity. I deserve to die, not them. Just let them live and take me instead."

Pandora's flame faltered as she looked between the frightened humans and the despairing ghost boy. "You would…sacrifice yourself…?"

"Yes!" he cried. "If it means you'll let everyone else live, I'd do it in a heartbeat!"

"There…is good left…" she muttered. Her flames died completely, and she looked at her hands as though she had never seen them before. "What have I done?" She buried her face in her hands, then screamed as the flames sprang up around her. Danny lunged past her to rescue his parents, but he got caught in the blaze.

It burned for only second, and he was plunged into darkness. He looked around frantically for some sign of anything, and his eyes fell on the smoking, charred figure of a lost child. She looked up at him with her eyeless gaze. "I'm so sorry," she whispered. A tear slid down her soot smudged face.

"Pandora," Danny began, but she shook her head.

"My name…is Hope. Hope Williamsdaughter. Or, I guess, you'd say Hope Thatcher now."

Danny let out his breath in something that was half sigh and half amazed laugh. "When all the evils escaped into the world," he muttered. "Hope was left in the box."

"And now you've freed that, too," she agreed. "I thought there was no good left in the world. You've shown me what a fool I've been all these centuries. Let me give you one last wish." She held out her hand; hesitantly, he took it.