Hey, people! How're you today? I hope this makes it better, because I wrote chapter 3! Yay!

I'm even happier because I promised it would be on Wednesday, and it is Wednesday! Whee!

Ah, but first, the much-appreciated reviewers!

crazyvi: Don't we all. That part will come soon enough ;)

purpledog100: Yep. Destroying stuff is one of my hobbies. :D

CrazyCosmoFan: That was probably one of my favorite lines myself; I live to entertain :)

Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom.

Here we go!

Chapter 3: Green Ink
Danny groaned as the science teacher told them to open their books to page 287. With the exception of the griffin he had fought, the weekend had been ghost-free. He'd actually been able to finish his homework, and actually got enough sleep. But still, a Monday was a Monday.

"Today, class, we will start chapter one of section nine. Now, then, can anyone tell me the difference between a virus and a bacterium?"

Danny kept phasing in and out of attention, his mind half-wandering as often happens in such classes, particularly when there is something on your mind.

And Danny's mind was on a mysterious gray lid.

It had hit him (literally) that the box came from the Ghost Zone. With a luminous sheen and slightly glowing letters, coupled with the open Fenton Portal as proof, what more evidence did he need?

The fact that the lid had come from the Ghost Zone was enough to make him wary. Not much good came out of the Ghost Zone. Danny, however, had kept the lid against instinct. Something looked vaguely familiar about the strange symbols etched upon the lid, and Danny could have sworn he'd seen similar characters before somewhere. The problem was, he couldn't remember where he'd seen them.

Danny absent-mindedly scratched down the notes from the chalkboard onto his paper in an untidy scrawl.

"Correct. Bacteria can be treated with antibiotics. Viruses, however, cannot. Now, how many here have gotten a vaccination from a doctor's office before?"

Everyone raised their hand in the air. Danny decided he should at least try to pay attention; he had a D in the class as it was.

"Very good then. Vaccinations are one of the few guards against viral infections. An immunization contains a form of the virus; however, it is not an active form. As such, the virus cannot infect the person. This would be entirely pointless, if not for the human's immune system. Now, can anyone tell me what that is?"

Danny began spacing out again, thoughts still on the mysterious lid. Where on earth (or in the Ghost Zone, more like) had he seen those symbols before? And where had the box come from? Things didn't just fly out of the Ghost Zone, at least not that he knew of.

"Yes. The immunization trains the white blood cells to recognize and destroy the virus. That way, if ever the person is infected by the virus, they will have a much better defense against it. Vaccinations can be made for bacterial infections as well. But the tricky part with immunizations is that there are different strains of viruses. Meaning that, if the strain you are infected with was not included in the immunization, you will be infected by the virus.

"An example of this is the common cold. There are so many mutations of this virus that it is impossible to make a vaccination for all of them. Every time you come down with a cold, it is a different strain of the virus."

Danny drifted off again, and began doodling on a scrap piece of paper. He was actually in the middle of a very good caricature of Plasmius (at least in his eyes) when he heard his name called.

"How about... Daniel."

Danny looked up at the sudden mention of his name and covered his work, not to be seen doodling on his paper.

"Wh-what?"

Giggles were stifled as the teacher gave him a severe look. He walked over to Danny's desk.

"Mr. Fenton, may I please see your notes?"

Knowing that he was in trouble now, Danny handed him the sheet of paper. Mr. Murray placed good notes in high regard, and Danny's work often came up as sub-par due to his sleeping in class.

"I don't remember instructing you to use green ink?" he asked. That was another thing. Mr. Murray was one of those teachers who was bothered by little things, like unusually colored ink and fringes on pages torn from notebooks.

"I- what?" Danny asked, surprised. He had made sure that he used black. Furthermore, he didn't own a single pen containing green ink.

The teacher shook his head.

"Improve on your note-taking skills, Mr. Fenton, and you will go far. And, don't doodle on your notes." He replaced the paper and returned to the front of the class and scribbled the homework assignment on the board.

Danny was, by now, completely baffled. He hadn't doodled on his notes; he'd made sure that his picture was on a separate sheet. Perhaps the ink had bled through...

Danny looked at the sheet with surprise. This was definitely something he needed to tell Tucker and Sam.

The bell for lunch rang, and he placed his book and notebook in his purple backpack. The perplexing notes he placed inside his pocket.

He showed the paper to Tucker and Sam over lunch.

The notes began in black ink, with his name at the top and the creative title of 'Notes- Science'. The first few lines were scribbled in the same black ink. However, in the sixth line, the ink made a startling color change: from inky black to stark, luminous green.

The strange paper, however, got stranger. The lines, from sixth to eighteenth, were scribbled in green, with two breaks of black in the eighth and twelfth lines. And the nineteenth line wasn't even written in English. It was written in strange symbols sketched with bold, firm strokes, as well as in the twentieth and twenty-first lines of the notes.

"So, what do you think about that?" he asked them.

"I don't know... Hey, maybe it's a new ghost power!" Tucker exclaimed excitedly.

"Wow. Bright green handwriting. I can't think of anything more helpful in fighting ghosts," Danny replied sarcastically.

Sam observed the paper critically.

"Danny, do you still have that lid you found?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, pulling the gray rectangle from his backpack. "Why?"

Sam placed it down on the table next to the notes, and pointed to the last three lines.

"Look familiar?"

Danny gasped; the letters in the lines were exactly the same as the letters on the box. Or... no. They weren't exactly the same. The same recognizable language, yes. In fact, the symbols were a perfect match for the nineteenth and twentieth lines. But the twenty-first line was entirely different. It even included symbols that weren't on the box in the first place.

"What d'you make of this? Look," Danny said, pointing out what he had just noticed. "It matches perfectly for these two lines. But on this last line, here, it's entirely different."

"And you wrote this?" Tucker asked with amazement.

"Well... Yeah. I mean, I think I did. I don't really remember actually writing it, but... It's in my handwriting," Danny explained.

He looked at the writing where it shifted to black. Danny realized that he could trace his thought process with this. The black writing was when he was paying attention. The green writing occurred where he had been spacing, writing absentmindedly and thinking about that lid.

And he also realized that the two lines which matched the symbols on the lid had occurred when he was trying to recall what exactly the lid had said.

"Well, there's only one way to find out how this happened," Danny said suddenly. He picked up the pen and pulled out a bit of scrap paper. He concentrated on making the pen ink green. It didn't exactly work. He succeeded only in causing the pen to become intangible, and several scribbles later caused the pen to run out of ink.

"Darn it!" he muttered, and threw the pen down. "This'll never work."

"Hey, what's this?" Tucker asked, and flipped the paper over to reveal Danny's sketch of Plasmius. Tucker looked up at Danny.

"Well," he said, quite serious. "If we learned nothing else from this, it's that Plasmius looks good in a mustache."

Skulker looked at the green blob. It gave a feeble sort of cough, and closed its eyes, going limp in the skeletal ghost robot's metallic hand.

"Third one today," he muttered to himself. "This is taking the fun out of the Hunt."

Skulker shrugged and threw the limp blob into a blue trashcan labeled 'Expired Prey'.

He groaned. He just couldn't understand why his prey supply was suddenly dropping. Of the thirty-three ghosts he had once held captive in various cages and let out only so he could tone his hunting skills, only eight remained. It was almost as if a disease were spreading through them, decimating them one after another. And it all began with coughing...

But that was impossible. Ghosts couldn't be infected with any sort of disease.

He was startled by a sudden sound behind him. An orange-tinted squid he had dubbed Percy began coughing. Skulker groaned; Percy was one of the most fun to hunt, and he would hate to loose it next...

Skulker sneezed suddenly. This was quickly followed by a horrible, hacking cough that he had heard far too often over the past few days.

Now he was coughing too? What was the Ghost Zone coming to?

Skulker coughed again, feeling faint. He should probably lie down for a bit...

He stomped into a room. An immense bed took up most of the space, and the walls were lined with various trophies and weapons. At the foot of the bed, a sign in red ink read 'Reserved for ghost-boy's pelt'.

He blew his nose, coughed again, and lowered himself onto the bed.

Skulker was unconscious before he touched the covers.

Danny walked into his house. He could hear strange noises coming from his parent's lab. He deduced that they were working on some sort of new invention and decided not to bother them.

The telephone rang, quite suddenly, in fact.

"Danny! Can you get that?" Jazz called from upstairs in her room. "I'm working on my philosophy essay."

"Sure," he shouted back, and picked up the phone.

"Hello?" he asked.

"Ah, hello. This is Alex," the other voice responded. "Alex Fuller. Can I talk to Jazz?"

"She's kind of busy right now," Danny replied.

"Well, can she call me back? But I don't think she has my number..."

Danny pulled a pen out of his pocket, and moved the pad of paper next to the phone for message-taking purposes towards himself.

"Okay. So what is it?"

"Eight four three..." There was a pause as Danny scribbled this down. "Seven eight four two. You got that?"

"Yep," Danny said as he finished the numeral two. "So, I'll let her know then. That's all?"

"Yes, and thanks. Bye."

"Bye," Danny said. He hurried up the stairs to tell Jazz. He had a pretty good idea of who Alex Fuller was...

"Hi Jazz," Danny said as he peeked through the door. Jazz was sitting at her desk, her pen moving at a furious speed. Danny cleared his throat.

"You've got a message. From a one Alex Fuller."

Danny couldn't help grinning at the expression on Jazz's face. She looked very white.

"He left his number. Now, I wonder why he didn't just leave a message for you. Nothing personal, is it?"

"I- I can't imagine..." Jazz began. "Um, can I have that paper?"

"Maybe..." Danny trailed off, grinning maliciously at his sister.

Jazz jumped up from her chair, knocking it over, and lunged towards the scrap of paper in Danny's hand. Danny held it away from her.

"Now that's no way to ask for it," he said in a falsely hurt voice. "I didn't hear you say 'please'."

"Danny, what are you-" Jazz stopped at the look on his face. "Oh, all right. Please?"

"Say, 'pretty please'."

"Oh, that's it Danny! Give me that!" Jazz cried angrily, grabbing for the paper.

A brief tug-o-war ensued. Danny won by making the paper intangible and pulling it straight through Jazz's fingers. He placed it against the wall and clicked his pen.

"I think we need a few hearts on this..." Danny said, placing the pen on the paper. Nothing happened.

"Oh, darn! Ink's out," he muttered. "Okay, fine. Take it, Jazz." Danny thrust the slip at her.

Jazz took it, blushing slightly. She looked down at the scrap, and had only one confused word to say about it.

"Green?"

"Wh-what?" Danny said suddenly, hurrying over to look at the paper. "Jazz, let me see that!"

Jazz held it over her head. "You should say 'please' first," she replied mockingly.

"No, Jazz! This is serious!" Danny leapt up and yanked it out of her hand, staring at it.

Sure enough, '843-7842, Alex Fuller' was written upon the paper, clear as day in bright green ink.

Danny pulled the pen from his pocket, and, despite the fact that it was out of ink, drew a squiggly line. A bright, green squiggly line.

Danny looked up at Jazz, then slowly handed her the paper. Then he turned to leave the room.

"Danny, can I have that pen?" came the slightly puzzled voice from behind him.

Danny shrugged and tossed it to Jazz. "Here. But it's out of ink."

"But... If it's out of ink, then how did you-?"

"I don't know. But I'm going to find out," Danny replied determinedly, and walked to his own room.

The black, shadowy form of Dr. Penelope Spectra crumpled the paper in her clawed hands and threw it over her shoulder to a wastebasket.

"This has got to be one of your worst plans yet, Bertrand," she snarled. "How am I supposed to get rid of that ever so annoying ghost-boy while you can't think of a decent revenge scheme?"

"I'm trying to, Penny, but that ghost-boy's a lot smarter than he looks!" the green blobby assistant argued.

"Bertrand, I thought I told you not to call me Penny?" Spectra replied in a voice so sweet it was malevolent.

Bertrand blew his nose in a handkerchief before replying.

"Well, what would you have me call you then? Besides, don't get mad at me, I haven't been feeling well lately."

Spectra coughed slightly. She hadn't been feeling well herself, but she couldn't let Bertrand know that, so instead she responded harshly.

"Hmph. I don't care if you haven't been feeling well. You're a ghost, for heaven's sake! And you haven't been-" the ghost psychiatrist paused suddenly, as Bertrand keeled over and fell to the ground. Far from being concerned, she scoffed angrily, "Good help is hard to find."

Spectra coughed again. She felt quite dizzy, and could barely keep her eyes open. Perhaps she should go lie down, or have some tea...

The shadowy psychiatrist's eyes closed as she slumped in her chair.

"So... tired..." was the last thing she muttered, as sleep took her.

Ahhh... Isn't it wonderful how karma gets back at the villians? I think so.

Heheh, I think I'm getting more mysterious as I write this. Maybe 'Enigmatic Penguin' is a really descriptive pen name for myself...

And, is it just me, or are my chapters getting longer?

Anyway, I'd like to see some comments on this chapter. Let it be known that I have a bit more information I'm going to spill out for you before Danny falls ill. Rest assured, though, if not the very next chapter, then it will be chapter 5. So be patient, and bear with me here.

All the best,

-E.P.