You know, I've always wondered something about Danny's eye color(s). Is it just a random coincidence that they (meaning whoever controls the color of Danny's eyes) just wanted to express Danny as particularly angry by causing his eyes turn green, or is it a subtle statement about those people with blue eyes that can be blue or green depending on what they're wearing? Hmm...
I really come up with some strange comments. I wonder why... Oh well. Anyway... I believe I owe some reviewers replies and such and such. And such ;)
Silverstagbeauty: Oh! I don't want that on my conscience!
leilanisangel: Good, good… It's supposed to make sense!
SF: Chapter 6 and 7? Hm… Heheh, well, I'm glad you love my story! Why else would you review? Um, on second thought, don't answer that ;) And no, I don't do this to all of my readers; you guys are just the exception. But I do it because I luv you guys so much! (hugs readers) Sorry, just one of those moments… ;PYtak: Thank you! But as for your question… It's a little confusing, I must admit. It's mentioned in the, ah, the second paragraph of this chapter. The point I'm trying to make is that Danny can at least recognize the language when he hasn't EVER seen it before. He CAN'T read it, but subconsciously, he sorta-kinda can. And I've just confused myself. Maybe I should just stick with Japanese… (Which, coincidentally, has absolutely nothing to do with this story.) Anyway, for all clarification purposes: DANNY CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE!
DannysGirlForever: Thank you! Heheh, and you're right; I used all caps above and I think it really did get my point across.
Moonbay: I like cliffhangers too… Even when I'm the poor reader who is forced to endure cliffhangers, I still luv them.
PhantomKat7: I did? Really? Yay! I was having some trepidation about whether or not I did him correctly. It's wonderful to know I did a good job!
CrazyCosmoFan: Thanks. I can just imagine Jack doing that. Actually, he probably has done that at some point in an episode and I forgot about it. Heheh… And ditto to the review :)
phantomgirl07/phantom101: Yay! Now how many people have told me how much they like this story so far? Why if I had a nickel (named Phillip, of course!) for every time someone said that… I'd be richer than Vlad.
Juanis: Mm-hm. Short chapters annoy me. But likewise, hugely long chapters are as bad. Too many events happen and make it hard to review. My happy medium is somewhere over 2000 words and under 4000.
good story: I'm going to put chapter 8 up… RIGHT NOW! Yay! Let us celebrate with chocolate cake!
Eternally-Forgotten: You're not alone on that, my friend. Thank you, thank you, thank you! (What else can I say?) Oh, um, gracias, and arigatou gozaimasu! (note: phonetically pronounced ah-ree-gah-toe go-zai-mahs)ModernDayPrayerxx: Thanks. And I'm on your C2 list? Really? Yay! I'm on a C2 list! And although I really only have the vaguest idea of what that is… YAAAAAAAAAAY!
Drowned in the reviews again. Good thing I hired a lifeguard, hm? Anyway, for the record, I now have over 60 reviews, over 1200 hits, 14 favorites, 22 story alerts, and I'm on a C2 list. I am officially shocked that my story has been loved that much and that warmly accepted. (hugs readers) I luv you guys!
Anyway, here is chapter 7; and relatively cliffhanger-less it is. Celebrate while it lasts ;)
Disclaimer: I don't own DP... Blah blah blah... How many of you are actually bothering to read this anymore?
Chapter 7: Raising the Stakes
Danny could not sleep. Who would have been able to sleep, having just been told that they needed to solve a mystery to save an entire dimension?
Instead, he flipped through the book for what seemed like the hundredth time. He could not read a single word, make sense of a single character, but it was still there; that irking, nagging feeling that he had seen this somewhere before...
But he hadn't. The characters inscribed upon the pages were as alien to him as Russian, or some other foreign language he did not know. For all he knew it could be Chinese. So why on earth had Clockwork thought that he would be able to understand this?
Danny slammed the book shut with the finality of a reader closing a book halfway through; not yet having pieced together the plot, but still knowing that he would inevitably return to it later. He placed it upon his desk, beside the gray lid of the box. Danny gave it a scrutinizing glare, but got up and plodded over to the door. He intended to get a glass of water, or something. Finding dead ends everywhere he looked made him thirsty, and well, to be honest, he just wanted an excuse to get up and walk around.
He nearly walked into Vlad, from a combination of drowsiness and not expecting to find anyone in the hallway at this time of night. And by nearly, I mean: neither of them were really paying much attention, but they both became intangible from sheer instinct, and thus walked into one another.
Or, at least Vlad had. Danny had fallen to the floor, and sat there trying to stop coughing uncontrollably. He had by now decided that, apart from the traditional symptoms of a cold, the ghost virus was causing his usually quite good subconscious control over his powers to waver, particularly when he coughed or sneezed.
The archenemy himself was also on the floor, wearing a bathrobe and with a book on knitting lying half-open next to him. Danny might have found the situation hilarious had he not been coughing so hard, particularly as Vlad was wearing bunny slippers in a shade of pink that would have made Sam retch.
Danny managed to regain control of his small coughing fit, and the ever-annoying power of intangibility, and clambered to his feet, his throat feeling very sore.
Vlad did likewise, and retrieved his book from the ground and tucked it under one arm. Danny would have laughed then, but he was afraid he would begin coughing again, so he allowed himself a smirk in the general direction of the Sam-offending slippers.
Vlad glanced down at his feet, and Danny could have sworn he'd blushed. Not the whole classic face turning red from embarrassment, but there was definitely more pink color in his cheeks than he could remember.
But Vlad now looked at him with something reminiscent of grave concern in his eyes.
"Daniel, could I talk to you for a moment?"
Despite the serious tone in his voice, Danny's retort tumbled out before he could stop it.
"Can I have about fifteen witnesses, including my mom?" Danny sighed and folded his arms in a stubbornly angry way, and followed his statement quickly before his foe could reply. "Fine. But first you tell me why you came here in the first place."
Vlad wondered for a moment which was more disconcerting to be glared at with: cold, furious green eyes or icy, penetrating blue eyes. Considering the look Danny was giving him now, he decided upon the latter.
"I... Well, I, ah-" but he was saved from a lot of intelligible stammering by a loud grunt from the open door to Danny's parents' room.
"Oh, darn it, not here!" Danny said hurriedly, and pushed Vlad into his own room. Danny closed the door, with the same feeling of a person locking himself in with a hungry tiger. He wondered vaguely if this was how Daniel had felt when he had been shoved into the lion's den; then mentally kicked himself as he remembered his own name was Daniel.
"Okay. So why did you show up randomly at my door? This whole Sleeping Sickness thing isn't your fault, is it?" Danny said in the accusing tone of a prosecuting attorney interrogating the suspect.
"I- no! Why on earth would you-?" Vlad began. He was swiftly cut off by an angry Danny.
"Maybe because the whole Pariah Dark thing was your fault, not to mention half of all the other ghosts I've fought!"
"Daniel, listen to me! I had no intention of unleashing something that could potentially harm myself. I only came because I was concerned about your condition, and whether or not it had the capability to inflict myself as well."
"And because you thought you would score points with my mom," Danny added in a fierce mutter.
"Well, that too," Vlad admitted. Danny glared, and he decided to continue. "Now, Daniel, there is something I would like to ask you." He flinched as though expecting Danny to lash out with a whip, but Danny did not say anything (although he clearly wanted to, if anything could be judged from the look on his face) he continued. "Ah, yes, those Observant characters. One of them mentioned something along the lines of, 'Your future self remains locked in Clockwork's abode'. Now, what does that mean?"
Danny let out his breath in a long, sorrowful sigh. The vision that had only recently stopped haunting his nightmares came back to him now, with startling clarity. His parents, sister, friends, and teacher, tied to a vat of highly combustible Nasty Sauce which was slowly heating towards the temperature which was not only the boiling point, but the exploding point as well.
It also brought another image to his mind. Vlad, ten years older and reduced to living meagerly in an abandoned cave...
Vlad eyed Danny; he was now strangely quiet and had a shadowed look in his eyes that he had never seen there before. It looked somewhat guilty, sad, and angry...
Danny finally spoke, and when he did, he was quoting the same words that Vlad himself had spoken in that cave.
"Some things are better left unsaid."
Vlad raised his eyebrows inquiringly, but didn't say anything. Danny's tone of voice had said quite plainly that he would say no more than that. But the position was now very uncomfortable, and Vlad had not answered more for the reason of not having anything to say than to respect Danny's wishes of not inquiring further. The best thing to do in any situation like this was usually to change the subject (and fast), but Vlad was at a loss for anything to say.
He was saved the trouble of having to think of a new subject, but it was a bittersweet victory. Vlad began coughing, in the horrible, rasping way that Danny had been for the past two days...
"Uh oh," Danny said, and then added, despite himself, "Are you okay?"
Vlad nodded, and the coughing subsided. But Danny still found himself unnerved, and couldn't help thinking that Vlad was the latest victim of the Sleeping Sickness. He was beginning to understand why ghosts dreaded it.
More for something to do than anything else, he walked over to the desk where the book and lid were currently residing. But there was something different about that lid, and he couldn't put his finger upon it... Almost as if there was more writing upon in than had been when he had first found it...
But, no. That was impossible. No one had written on the lid since Danny had found it, and besides, it wasn't as if anyone he knew could actually write in that language. But the difference was enough to want him to make sure. Danny wished he had a record of what the lid had said last Saturday...
But then he realized: he did have a record! And perhaps Monday was a bit after Saturday, but still...
Danny fished out the crinkled piece of paper out of his pocket. It was entitled 'Notes- Science', and was written half in black ink and half in green ink. But he didn't care about that; all that mattered were the nineteenth and twentieth lines. He placed the paper next to the lid, and compared them.
Sure enough, the lid had much more writing on it than the paper. In fact, there were twelve whole more sections of the symbols, sections which Danny supposed could be called words. They were arranged somewhat like this:
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXX XXXXX
XXXXX XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXX XXXXXXXX
Danny shook his head. Great. Just another mystery to add to all the rest of the mysteries he was already trying to solve. But, still...He supposed that this new puzzle still could be counted as a clue of sorts, and might help him solve another more pressing of those mysteries: how to cure the Sleeping Sickness.
Vlad was looking curiously over his shoulder. For the second time that day, Danny had forgotten he was there.
"Why is it in green? You didn't...write this, did you, Daniel?" he asked quizzically
Danny sighed and looked at the paper; all previous tension was forgotten.
"Yeah, I wrote it. But that's the least of our problems." Danny sighed again and looked up. "I hope Jazz is still awake."
Jazz, as it turned out, was still wide-awake. They found her at her desk, reading through a college textbook at a furious pace. By the size of the pile at her feet on the floor and the neat stack on her desk, it was clear that this was not her first book, nor was it the last she would read that night.
"Um, Jazz? Found anything yet?" Danny asked, entering the room with Vlad trailing behind. Jazz looked up at Danny, holding his science notes and the gray lid, and at Vlad and his bunny slippers.
"Not really. Unless you have pneumonia, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, small pox, bronchitis-" she stopped herself before she had recited the entire content of the small pile of books clustered around her feet. "Well, I can say this much for sure," she said, closing the book definitely and laying it upon the desk. "It's not any disease known to mankind."
"Wow, there was no way I could have ever figured that out on my own," Danny said sarcastically. "Here, Jazz, what do you make of this?"
Danny handed her the notes and lid, pointing out what he had just discovered. As Jazz observed this more closely in silence, it occurred to him that he had been pointing out a lot of things regarding these notes lately. He looked around mildly at Jazz's room before she sighed and put the paper aside.
"To tell you the truth...I have no idea," she said. Vlad sneezed, becoming momentarily invisible as he did so. Jazz blinked, and narrowed her eyes thoughtfully.
"You're half ghost too, right Mr. Masters?" she asked. Vlad nodded, with a sidelong glance at Danny.
"And have you, hm, 'gone ghost', for lack of a better term, since you arrived here?"
He shook his head, supplemented with a firm "No," from Danny.
"Danny, how would you-? Oh, never mind," she said. It was a few moments before she spoke again.
"Well, if I'm right-"
"-And you always are," Danny muttered. Jazz glared and continued.
"If I'm right, then I'm pretty sure that this Sleeping Sickness isn't too much different from other diseases. Well, except for the fact that it's a ghost disease. But it, like other viruses, has the capability to mutate. Meaning that, because it has infected you, Danny, and you're half ghost, it will have the capability to mutate to a point where it can infect humans as well. Vlad's the proof of that beginning, although hopefully it will take a bit longer to infect anyone else, because he's half ghost too."
"And your point is, Jazz?" Danny asked.
"Well, those Observant guys said something about it... that 'It was intended to prove fatal, but ghosts could not die. So the Sickness did the next best thing: it sent all who were touched by it into an irreversible slumber.'"
"How do you guys remember that word for word?" Danny asked bemusedly. Jazz rolled her eyes and continued.
"Anyway, the only reason it was not fatal was because ghosts could not die. And the mutation of this strain of the virus shouldn't change that aspect. In a normal human, it could prove fatal."
Silence met this remark. And then...
"And what about us?" Danny asked, with a nod of his head to indicate Vlad and himself.
"I'm not sure. But I don't see why the situation would be any different."
"So you mean that, if I don't find the cure..." Danny couldn't bring himself to finish.
"We'll find it," Jazz said confidently. "Danny, I've seen you fight all those ghosts...Pariah Dark included... and you've never lost before. You'll win this time too, I know it."
Danny smiled at his sister's reply. "Thanks, Jazz. But, all those times before... I was fighting something that I could see, something I could touch, something I could understand..."
"And it's really easy to fight invisible and intangible beings, I'm sure, but you can't fight something you can't see and can't touch," Jazz said, with mock seriousness, the corners of her mouth twitching upward slightly.
"I- okay, okay, Jazz..." Danny said in defeat. He yawned widely. "I might as well go to bed now..."
Jazz nodded her approval. "Good idea. Ghost sickness or not, you should still get plenty of sleep and drink plenty of fluids."
Danny left her room, and Vlad left her room, and Jazz turned out the light.
It wasn't until Danny had clambered into bed, flicked the light off, and turned over to his side that he remembered: he never did get that glass of water.
Danny sighed and rolled over, closed his eyes, and drifted into sleep.
But at this time, at least,he would awake the next day.
What the-? Okay, something's missing here. Could it be... a cliffhanger? Oh my gosh, no cliffhanger! AHHHH! It's a sign of the apocalypse! Run!
Oh, but I did do some serious foreshadowing at the end there. But NOT a cliffhanger. So let us celebrate while it lasts!
So, for whatever reason, I had to add a whole bunch of TUE stuff in there. Why? I do not know. But do you honestly think that Vlad would hear about Danny's evil future self and not investigate?
Anyway, speaking of Vlad… particularly, Vlad in pink bunny slippers... I just couldn't resist! It's like the mustache. Heheh, sorry... I just like making fun of the bad guys. I could put evil Danny in a fuzzy pink bunny costume with floppity ears if he were in this story. And he isn't, but just imagine that for a second! (Note that I hate people calling him Dan Phantom- my grandpa's first name is Dan and I resent that.)
Okay... ranting off track... Bad penguin!
Anyway... Thanksgiving weekend is fast approaching, meaning a whole lot of free time for me! Meaning that I will have extra time to work on the next chapter! Meaning that it should come very soon! And I'm beginning to wonder why I've been ending all of these sentences in exclamation marks! Ahh! I can't stop! Why can't I stop writing in exclamation marks!
Exclaimably randomly hyperly!
-E.P. (!)