The hot topic at school, naturally enough, was Soul Fire. Sam and Tucker had inflicted the band on Danny before school, and he failed to see what was so great about them. He was simply surprised Sam liked them so much; normally, the rebellious girl avoided mainstream fads at all costs. The two were mostly ignoring Danny at lunch as they discussed the upcoming concert, but he was too distracted to notice. Noon had come and gone, and the power was still up. Had Kat been wrong? Maybe she didn't have anything to do with it after all. Or was she just trying to fool him…?
Lunch ended with no problems. Back in class, Danny found himself paying more attention to the clock than the teacher, a fact that earned him a few minutes of ridicule. It was shortly after 1:00 that the lights began to flicker. Finally, around 2:30, they went out completely. There were several moments of silence before the class started cheering. Somehow, Danny could not share in the revelry.
"All right, students," Mr. Lancer said over the din. "I'm not foolish enough to expect you to stay quiet, but please stay in your seats and keep the noise to a minimum while I find out what's going on." Mere moments after he closed the door, someone produced a radio and started blasting Soul Fire's hit single, "Burn Him to the Ground." Danny groaned and dropped his head into his hands; this song was getting very old, very quickly.
"What's wrong, Fen-Tanya?" Dash yelled, laughing at his own wit. "The music too loud for the poor baby?"
Danny growled hatefully and squashed the desire to let his eyes turn green. In the semi-darkness, the glow would stick out like a beacon of light. After the Pandora incident, he had sworn never again to overshadow Dash for the sake of revenge. He was seriously considering breaking that vow when the door opened and Mr. Lancer came back in. The radio cut off abruptly, but not quickly enough.
Mr. Lancer looked at Danny, still in his seat. Then he looked at everyone else, quickly returning to theirs. "Well, Mr. Fenton," he said in that too-silky voice that meant someone had just seriously screwed up. "Since you are clearly the only one who made even the slightest effort to do as I said, you may go home. The rest of you can spend the next hour here with me in detention."
Danny couldn't help but shoot the enraged Dash a self-satisfied smirk on his way out. This was definitely a nice change of pace, even if it did mean he was going to be shoved in his locker more than usual tomorrow. He wound his way through the crowded halls to his locker and an idea struck. Maybe he could still catch whoever had drained the power. If nothing else, maybe he could find some clues. He shoved everything into his locker and ran as quickly as the press of bodies would allow to the bathroom. A blue flash of light later, and he was sky high and heading for the power station.
He scanned the ground for any sign of Electra's signature top hat; since she couldn't fly, she might be walking. Of course, she could also be traveling through the power lines, in which case he wouldn't find her.
The people looked like ants from up here, he thought. He was flying lower than usual, but everything was still so small on the ground. It struck him, not for the first time, how insane this all seemed. A matter of months ago, he had been a normal kid destined for a normal life after high school. Now, he was practically a super hero, flying high above everyone's heads. He laughed as someone caught sight of him and obligingly flew a little lower so everyone could point and/or scream.
The power station had just come into view when a voice shouted, "You're going down, ghost!" He barely had time to register the threat when something slammed into him hard enough to knock him to the distant ground.
He rubbed the back of his head and floated back into the air to see that his attacker was a young woman in a skin-tight red costume with matching hood. "Hey, Valerie," he greeted his quite human nemesis.
She seemed fazed enough to lower her ecto-grenade launcher slightly. "How do you know my name?"
He raised an eyebrow. "The whole town knows your name. Remember, your dad found out, and now everyone knows? Didn't he ban you from ghost hunting?"
She lifted the launcher again to aim at Danny's head. "Until I got my grades up, which I did! And now, you're going down!" She fired, and Danny went intangible and threw himself into the ground to come back up behind her.
"Oh, come on," he mock whined, and Valerie whirled to face him. "I said I was sorry about that whole destroying your jet sled thing."
"Heh, you're just lucky V…I mean, the guy who gave me this stuff was able to get me another one. Otherwise…" She trailed off as they both realized that if she hadn't gotten a new one, she wouldn't be here now. Instead of trying to recover the psychological advantage, she threw a few razor discs, forcing Danny to dive again.
He threw himself out of the ground directly beneath her and succeeded in knocking her from her sled. "By the way," he remarked. "It's Phantom. Not 'ghost'."
"I'll call you whatever I want to call you, ghost!" The young ghost hunter jumped to her feet and raised her arms to activate her wrist lasers.
"Look, I don't want to hurt you," Danny said as he dodged blasts and tried to figure out how to get her to leave.
"Guess the advantage is mine, then," Valerie replied. She stopped just long enough to reclaim her jet sled, then started chasing Danny with the sled's built-in laser beams.
He grumbled something unintelligible, then yelled, "I really don't have time for this right now!" He twisted around and fired a short, weak ectoplasmic energy blast at the sled, but Valerie was expecting it and quickly went higher.
"Well, make time!" She threw a few more razor discs and succeeded in slicing Danny's arm. He bit back a gasp of pain and dove into the ground again. "Hey!" Valerie yelled wrathfully. "No fair going intangible!"
"Since when do you play fair?"
The voice came from directly behind her, and she couldn't get turned quickly enough to block his punch. Fortunately, she was close enough to the ground that she wasn't injured when she hit it, although she did acquire a few bruised ribs and a new appreciation for aspirin. She cursed at having forgotten that he could be invisible, too.
"Oh! You're going to pay for that, ghost boy!" She grabbed both of her ecto-pistols and began firing quick shots at Danny, who dodged as best he could. She looked like a desperado with both arms out in front of her wielding duel weapons.
Danny could already tell he wasn't going to be able to avoid her forever; he was weakening. He thought she must have done something new to her razor discs because the place where he had been injured was starting to burn most painfully. He dropped to the ground and threw up his green, dome-shaped ecto-shield. He couldn't keep it up forever, but maybe for long enough.
"Look, Valerie," he called in a more-than-likely futile attempt to reason with her. "I'm not your enemy. I know that you think I am, but I'm really, really not."
Predictably enough, she yelled back, "Tell it to someone who cares!"
"How about me?" a new voice said. Danny lowered his shield as Valerie whirled around to face the new threat in the form of Electra in full garb, minus her half-mask but plus a copper cane. She twirled the cane like a baton and pointed its globe-like tip at Valerie. "Away from my comrade, lest I am forced to use force."
"A new ghost, huh?" Valerie asked scathingly. She was clearly making assumptions; either that, or she had a way to tell when even Danny couldn't. "Well, don't matter to me. I can take you both."
"I shall warn you once more, milady," Electra said in a low, dangerous tone. "Step back, or face the wrath of Electra, master of AC currents and galvanized copper!"
Danny slapped his forehead and chuckled mirthlessly. She was definitely her father's daughter.
"And just what are you going to do if I don't?" Valerie demanded, aiming her ecto-pistols.
"I wouldn't do that…" Danny warned her quietly.
Ignoring him, Valerie fired both pistols simultaneously. The shots were intercepted by a green shield that sprang to life directly in front of Electra's cane. "I would do this," she said ironically. Blue lighting arced from the tip of the cane to lightly shock Valerie, who jerked back in alarm. "And if you persisted, I would up the voltage. I suggest you go. Now!" The cane vanished in blue smoke; Electra gestured at the jet sled, which obediently maneuvered itself around in front of Valerie and floated there.
The confused and almost slightly scared girl looked from Electra, to her sled, around at Danny, and back to Electra. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, she wordlessly climbed onto the sled and took off.
And not a moment too soon. Danny finally lost the battle with the pain in his arm and collapsed to the ground. A ring of light appeared as his body tried to change back, but he managed to stay in ghost mode. He wasn't sure what would happen if he turned into a human with whatever was on those razor discs still in his bloodstream.
Ectoplasm-stream?
He pulled his hand away from the wound; at the sight of blood and ectoplasm, he decided it must be both.
"Boy, she got you but good, didn't she?" Kat remarked. She banished her disguise and kneeled down to look at his arm.
"Yeah…What are you doing out here?" He was almost afraid to hear the answer.
"I came to see if I could figure out what's draining the power," she answered, as Danny had a feeling she would. "It's about to make me insane. Maybe you should go human…"
"I'm considering it," he admitted. "But what if that makes it worse?"
She thought for a moment, then sighed. "Well, I may have a solution, but you're not going to like it."
"Do I have a choice?" Kat shrugged, then traced a glowing circle in the air with her hand. The inside went momentarily black before become a swirling green. "You can open portals to the Ghost Zone?" Danny asked with a sinking heart.
Kat shook her head. "Only to dad's lair, and then I have to get a permit from Walker if I want to leave it without getting arrested. Come on."
"Um, what if he's there?"
"Then he can just deal with it, can't he?" She dove through, trusting him to follow.
Danny hovered outside the portal in trepidation. As his transformation ring appeared again and tried to change him back, he decided to throw caution to winds and flew through after her.
"Oh, Daddy!" Kat was yelling. She looked around at Danny. "I guess he got arrested again. Come here and let's look at that arm."
His first look at the inside of Technus' lab-style lair would have been considerably more interesting were he not in such pain. He held still while Dr. Kat scraped some ecto-blood from his arm to look at under a microscope. "So, Technus get arrested a lot?"
"Eh, he was confined to the lab a few years ago. So every time he gets caught out of it, yeah."
"What did he do?"
Kat swiveled around to search through a drawer for something or other. "I'm not really sure. It had something to do with blowing something up, I know that." She raised a syringe and gave Danny a questioning glance. He hesitated a moment before nodding. He wanted to trust her; she had helped him defeat Pandora, although she didn't remember since it never actually happened. And she was always there to listen or give sisterly advice of a kind the entirely human Jazz would never be able to. She never volunteered information, but she never asked questions, either. She accepted completely him as he was, maybe because she was so strange as well.
"What are you?" he muttered as she drew a blood (ectoplasm?) sample from above the wound.
"Very, very complicated," she answered his rhetoric. She put the new sample on a slide and looked at it. "Okay, well, I don't know what this is, but it doesn't seem to be affecting your blood. You should be safe to change back." When he simply looked at her, she tilted her head and asked, "You do trust me, don't you?"
Danny sighed and changed back into a human. There was a brief moment when the burning throughout his body intensified dramatically, then it was gone. His arm still hurt where he'd been injured, but it didn't burn anymore. "Thanks," he said quietly.
Kat looked at him for a long time. "You don't trust me, do you?"
"No…yes…I don't know! I want to. But every time the power goes out, you're there!"
"Today was the first time I've been there in weeks," she loftily informed him.
"They caught you on the security camera, Kat!"
"Impossible! I don't f-" She abruptly broke off as though she hadn't meant to say so much.
Danny narrowed his eyes. "You don't what?"
"You should go," she answered coldly. "I'll see you at rehearsal."
He stared for a moment longer before returning through the still-open portal. It closed on his heels, which didn't surprise him in the slightest. He changed back into a ghost and decided to simply be grateful that it didn't hurt anymore as he flew back to the school for his stuff before heading home.