"You know, I'm actually surprised she waited as long as she did," Danny mentioned idly. He was, of course, talking to his two best friends since Kindergarten, Sam and Tucker. The three of them were sitting at the food court of the mall discussing the events of the day before. Namely, Jazz's reaction to his injury.
"So she really freaked out, huh?" Tucker asked.
That would have been putting it mildly. The second their parents had gone to bed, Jazz had barged into his room, demanding to know exactly what had happened. She had then insisted on checking the wound herself and redressing it, despite the adequate job Danny had done. The fight hadn't been any worse than any other he'd ever been in. If he hadn't had to worry about protecting the spectators, he never would have been injured so badly in the first place. That guy with the camera just didn't know when to run. Maybe he thought it was a publicity stunt or something.
Danny shook his head and sighed. "I don't get it. She laughs at me when the Ghost Gabber tries to translate what I'm saying, which is just totally pointless. Then she goes completely nuts because of a little scrape."
"Um, Danny?" Sam cut in. "If it didn't heal when you went human, it was probably a little worse than 'a little scrape'."
"Yeah, yeah. The point is she's worrying over nothing." He stabbed his sundae with his spoon and winced as the movement jarred his injury.
Tucker and Sam exchanged a knowing look. "Nothing, huh?" the goth girl asked innocently. Danny shot her a withering glare.
Tucker spared a moment to snicker quietly, earning the same look from his friend, before he said, "You know, if it's not healed yet, maybe you should have it looked at."
"Tuck, my blood has ectoplasm in it. I don't think showing that to a doctor would be a very good i-" He broke off suddenly as a chill passed through him that turned his breath into a visible fog. "Oh, come on…" he moaned.
"Can I have your ice cream?" Tucker asked, ever the opportunist. The disgruntled ghost boy slid it to him without even bothering to look and dashed off to find a nice, unobserved hiding place.
In ghost mode once again, Danny flew toward to the source of the screaming to find a painfully familiar enemy. "You, again?" he demanded. "Didn't Mom send you back to the Ghost Zone?"
The banshee rushed forward to rake him with her talon-like fingernails. He waited until it was practically on top of him, then grabbed the creature by the wrists and threw it into a wall. It screamed its rage, and Danny cried out as the ear piercing sound split through his head. Fortunately, as a ghost who apparently had a little banshee in him, he had a certain resistance to the attack. Also fortunately, teenagers had more sense than adults when it came to saving their own skin and had already fled. Squinting against the dancing lights the pain in his head had caused, he raised his arm and fired an ectoplasmic energy blast in the general area he thought the banshee must be. He must have been right; the sound cut off abruptly to leave his ears ringing. He blasted the ghost a second time and sent it flying into the parking lot.
A solid black motorcycle cruised slowly to a stop on a hill with a decent view of the parking lot. The rider killed the engine and lifted the visor of her helmet, the better to see through her binoculars. That "Danny Phantom" kid was fighting the weird old hag from the day before. How a kid could have that much power was beyond her, not that it mattered.
That thing had come out of Fentonworks. Angel didn't know what it was exactly, or how it had gotten inside the Fenton household to begin with. Her reconnaissance from the day before had led her to the conclusion that the Fentons were enemies with this creature. She wasn't here to wonder, but she was curious by nature.
Her mysterious employer had tried to tell her Phantom was a ghost. She didn't believe in ghosts, but she wasn't stupid either. He was definitely not natural, and neither was the thing he was fighting. Whether they were actually paranormal remained to be seen. It was definitely a good light show, though. Definitely would have competed with the Pink Floyd laser show she snuck into once.
Pink Floyd. Now there was a band. You couldn't get music like that anymore, what with those whiny, grunge-whining wannabes that-
Oh, yeah. She was supposed to be watching the fight.
Danny blasted the banshee into a car and wished he had remembered to bring the Fenton Thermos. This fight was not going well. It wasn't that the ghost was too strong; it was just that he couldn't end the fight. The thing kept coming back, no matter how many times he beat it. It was infuriating.
A few news vans had pulled up. They were smart enough to maintain a considerable distance, but they were still in danger. Danny ducked as the banshee tried to blast him with something that looked like green ecto-lightning and charged forward for a well-placed punch in its stomach. It howled, a bone-chilling sound, and lunged at Danny with much gnashing of teeth. He defended himself more or less well, but it was like trying to defend against a tornado. By the time he fought free, he was bleeding from a dozen different places and hoping vaguely that the cameras didn't catch the flecks of red mingled with the green.
The Live Breaking News van arrived at last; someone would be fired for that later. Danny didn't pay much attention because he was too busy trying to spar with a Tasmanian Devil. The banshee screamed briefly, apparently nothing more than a battle cry, and used its ecto-lightning again. Danny, who had cringed at the noise, was unable to dodge quickly enough. The blast caught him in the chest and flung him across the asphalt parking lot like a skipping stone. He finally came to a painful halt against the side of a news van and gasped when an attempt to move his injured arm revealed that the gash had reopened. The pain had been dulled by his ghost form, but not anymore. Now, it was every bit as painful as it had been when he first got it.
So much for it healing quickly. He forcibly shoved the pain aside and threw himself at the banshee, both fists in front of him. It ducked, but left itself open to a kick that knocked it several feet. Before it could recover fully, Danny body slammed it and shoved it back to a safer distance from the reporters.
Jack Fenton sat at the kitchen table with a screwdriver in one hand and the Ghost Gabber in the other. He was determined to make the thing work properly; it had become personal. Having checked and rechecked its programming, he had come to the conclusion that the problem had to be hardware related. Unfortunately, that all seemed to be in working order as well.
"Jack, honey," Maddie said lovingly. "You've been working on that thing for days. Just let it go."
Jack grumbled something incoherent and replied, "I can't. There's absolutely no reason for the Ghost Gabber to keep malfunctioning. It should be in perfect working order. I don't know why it keeps trying to translate Danny." He grinned and added, "Unless Danny suddenly became a ghost."
The two adults shared a laugh until Maddie broke off with a thoughtful look. Fortunately for their son's secret, a news broadcast interrupted the background noise of the TV, and such frivolous thoughts as the state of Danny's humanity were driven away.
"Are...are we on?" the anchorman asked someone behind the camera. "The light's not on. No, the light's not-" He broke off suddenly and grinned into the camera. "We interrupt your regularly scheduled broadcast for this breaking news bulletin. Ghost attack at the local mall. We go now live to the scene. Courtney?"
That was all the Fentons needed to hear. As if by magic, they were in the Fenton RV and driving at least two hundred miles an hour through the residential area. How Jack Fenton could avoid being stopped by the police for driving with the intent to kill was destined to remain a mystery. Perhaps they all knew him and where he was going. Perhaps he was just one of those people who don't get pulled over. More likely, they simply lost him somewhere in all the twists and turns he managed to make without crashing the RV.
Whatever the reason, they made it to the mall in record time and spared the tiniest moment to gripe about the return of the banshee before jumping out to deal with the problem. Or problems, if one cared to count the ghost boy.
Angel watched the fight with great interest. Phantom definitely had superpowers or something; he clearly had no weapons, but he was shooting some kind of beam at the creature. Movement in the corner of her vision drew her attention to the steel-plated Fenton RV as it came careening into the parking lot. She smirked and lowered her arm.
"All right, Sweetheart," she said as she dismounted to begin pacing. "We are to target the man, but the woman is not to be hurt. We'll have to separate them. Shouldn't be hard; people are like sheep. He's not going to be a problem, but the boy is. Still, he's nothing we can't handle."
She stopped next to the bike to check the progress of the fight. Phantom seemed to have fled, the creature was gone, and the Fentons were posing for a photo op. After a moment's thought, she stowed the binoculars in Sweetheart's saddlebags and remounted. "Let the games begin!" she yelled joyously.
A/N: Oh, yeah. The bike's name is actually Sweetheart. That's not just a term of endearment. Also, just so no one tries to ream me out for letting the character get distracted in the middle of something important, Angel's Pink Floyd tangent was to demonstrate how completely unmoved she is by what's happening. And finally. I know what the defenition of a Mary Sue is, but I've never had experience with OCs who weren't. So I can't tell if Angel and Kat fit into that category or not. I know I'm trying very hard to keep them from being Sues, but I don't know how well I'm succeeding. If someone could point out areas of improvement and what-not, I would be most grateful.