Hello again, my devoted readers!
As promised, my chapter… But first, something important to get over with…
From this point on, I will only be replying to signed reviews! Unsigned reviews will not be replied to!
This is because I don't want to go through more trouble than I have to for the purpose of replying… Yeah, I'm lazy, I know.
As of right now, I won't be blocking anonymous reviews. If I ever actually have the sense to do so, which would really just clear up this problem in a second and I wouldn't have to waste time typing this, I'll tell you all. So, pretty much, if you want a reply, please make it signed. If you don't want a reply, or just don't care, then feel free to review anonymously.More trouble than it's worth, really, and besides, wouldn't my time be better spent writing the next chapter?
Anyway, I'll be replying to the unsigned reviewers for the previous chapter, because you could have had no way of knowing that I would suddenly instate this random policy, right?
Fuzzytoesocks: Heheh, first I must say: love the name. And everyone loved Vlad in bunny slippers. But I kind of got that much about the eye thing; I was just wondering if someone said "Hey, let's make Danny's eyes turn green when he's angry!" because of those people whose eyes change color depending on what they're wearing. Anyway, thanks!
Rachel: (whistles) Um, I didn't exactly have a cliffhanger in the last chapter... But, oh well. Glad you like it, and here is more like you asked!
Anyway, I still have managed to drown in reviews. And I'm now on a grand total of 2 C2's, and have much more than a somewhat vague idea of what they are. Heheh… Thanks, everyone, and I've sent out the replies to all of the signed reviews with the wonderful new replying feature. (Note that if you replied with a signed review and didn't receive a reply, fell free to hit me! I have a hard time keeping track…)
(sighs) Anyway, all that over with… I watched the Ultimate Enemy again yesterday, and had an argument with my TV. (Aw, come on! Where's the bunny suit, darn you! You really are evil, to not humor me and wear a fuzzy pink bunny suit!) And I've also noticed, after watching them both back-to-back, that TUE is the DP equivalent of Channel Chasers. Well, except for the fact that future Timmy isn't exactly evil (or wearing a bunny costume), but you get the idea.
And on that subject… I drew evil Danny (who I've decided to call Phantom, because that's what a lot of the characters referred to him as) in a bunny costume. And I'm not that great at drawing… Okay, well, actually, I am pretty good at drawing, but not DP-style, but I think it turned out very funny. And then I just had to write a whole bunch of random bunny-themed quotes beneath, such as 'What's up, doc?' and 'Uh-oh, somebody get the Holy Hand-Grenade!' My only regret is that I have no scanner, and cannot show you. (sobs)
Ugh, I just rambled for two whole paragraphs! Eek, is this a fanfiction or a ramble-fest? But on a more fic-related note, I've come up with a name for the ghost language! Yureigo. It's Japanese, which is really the only other language I know, and 'yurei' means 'ghost' and 'go' pretty much means language. Clever, aren't I?
Well, anyway, all rambling aside… I think I'm trying to make up for the lack of review replies by taking up the space with pointless stuff that you may or may not care about… Like what I'm doing right now. So here we have chapter eight (or chapter nine, if you count the prologue), and I'd better to get on with it before I write a whole page of random notes! (Ack, believe it or not, this actually did take up a whole page! I really need to stay on track, don't I?)
Disclaimer: Ugh! Nine chapters in and I still have to write this? Well, I guess I don't exactly 'have' to, but… I don't own Danny Phantom.
Chapter 8: Decoding
Danny awoke, much thanks to the annoying ray of sunlight which was shedding golden light upon his face. When you are tired, sick, and have a handful of complicated mysteries to solve, having a bright light shining in your eyes is definitely not welcome.
Danny rolled away from the golden pool of light, which was now left dripping upon his pillow, and very nearly rolled out of the bed as well. He caught himself at the last minute, and teetered there for half a second before finally sitting up, stretching, and clambering out of the bed.
He glanced at the clock, the red digital numbers of which were reading 10:47. He thought with a jolt that he was late for school, then remembered that his parents wouldn't allow him into school even if he wanted to go. Which he didn't.
It was probably all for the better, though, he thought as he pulled his shirt over his head. At least he would have extra time to work on finding a cure...
But first thing's first, and the reality that he had not eaten for over half a day caught up with him in a sharp twinge of hunger.
Danny emerged from his room, fully clothed and with his stomach growling. He trotted downstairs for breakfast, and was immediately bombarded by his parents (mostly his mom) with questions about how he was feeling.
Danny fended them off, which proved difficult without a long stick. He finally sat reluctantly at the table with a thermometer shoved in his mouth, which is not the best substitute for food when one is hungry.
His mom pulled the thermometer out of his mouth and peered at it intently.
"Now, this can't possibly be right!" she said. Danny leaned over for a glimpse at the thermometer, which read at 84.7 degrees Fahrenheit. He blinked and looked up, wondering how he would explain this away. The off-handed, "It's probably broken," was answered in the most unpleasant way: Danny was submitted to the thermometer being shoved in his mouth three more times. He was beginning to wonder whether the acrid after taste of metal would remain on his tongue forever.
"You know, maybe you're right," Maddie sighed as she placed the thermometer (now reading 82.3 degrees) upon the table. "I think it is broken."
"I'll get the Fenton Thermometer!" Jack exclaimed, jumping up to dash off and bring back the device.
"Jack, we don't have a Fenton Thermometer," Maddie reminded him.
"Oh," her husband replied, pausing in mid-step and looking crestfallen. Then he brightened up. "Well, I guess I'll just have to make one, then!"
"Jack! Wait! I'll come with you!" she cried, leaping up herself and pulling the blue hood and red lensed goggles over her head. They dashed down to their laboratory, leaving Danny blinking, wondering with surprise, They actually don't have a Fenton Thermometer?
Danny was up in his room five minutes later, a bowl of cereal and a glass of milk upon his desk, and the computer slowly starting up.
And then Danny was looking through that website on the language again. He had to start somewhere, and that looked as good as any place. He finally came to a section at the bottom of the website, where he found a section entitled: All characters identified by language.
Seeing possibility here, Danny carefully copied down the characters, almost despite himself in green ectoplasmic ink.
Danny put the pen down after he had finished the last one, and studied the paper. He recognized quite a few of the characters from the lid itself. He numbered them absently, wondering if this was going to be useful at all, and if it wouldn't be better to take Robitussin with ectoplasm extract and hope it worked.
Danny stopped at the last character, with a small 26 beside it. And he felt a jolt of sudden realization: the alphabet had 26 letters. So if each one of these symbols stood for a letter, then he would be able to translate it into something he could remotely understand. He didn't want to think beyond that; probably all the words he managed to form would be complete gibberish. But at least it was something.
In fact, it was like a whole bunch of strings tied in knots. Each of the strings represented a different mystery. Each knot he untied, the closer he would be to solving it. And just by getting one string, one mystery, free, the others would become easier to untie.
The triumphant feeling of having solved a part of a puzzle was quickly dissolving, though, as he realized that he had no idea which symbols stood for which letter.
Danny took a bite of his breakfast, then picked up the book and opened it upon the desk. The first page contained three distinct sections of symbols; a group of three 'words' and a group of two 'words', and sandwiched in between were three words, in much larger and bold text than the others on the page.
xxx xxxxxxxxxx xx
XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
xx xxxxxxxxx
Danny decided that, if anywhere, here would be the place to start. He could assume that this was a title of the book. Then he had an idea. It was vague, and didn't make any sense, and later Danny could not explain why he had even thought of it. It was more pure instinct than anything.
He wrote down the words 'The Sleeping Sickness' underneath the list on his piece of paper. Then he scribbled down the three largest words from the book underneath that, making sure that each symbol was aligned underneath the letters. And the result was either a coincidence, or the first steps towards solving this puzzle.
'The' had three letters, and three symbols were matched under that word. Similarly, 'Sleeping' was matched perfectly with eight characters, as was 'Sickness'. Danny looked back up at the list, and matched the letters T, H, E, S, L, P, I, N, G, C, and K with the corresponding symbols. And it all fit. The S in sleeping and the three S's in sickness were all represented by the same character. The same was true with the E's, I's, and N's; the only letters to occur more than once in these three words.
It wasn't a language.
It was a code.
Danny applied this code to the remaining five words on the page, and came up with this translation:
THE CHxxNxLxGx xx
THE SLEEPING SICKNESS
xx CLxCKxxxK
The code didn't seem to distinguish between capital and lowercase letters, but that didn't exactly matter. He had eleven letters out of twenty-six accounted for, which was quite an accomplishment. Danny ate some more of his cereal, then decided it was time to decode the remaining fifteen symbols.
He pulled the gray lid towards him, unable to guess anything else from the letters upon the first page. It contained a long list of characters, and Danny didn't feel like writing them all out. Instead, he felt it was reasonable to translate the characters upon the box that had not been there that previous Monday.
SKXLKEX
XEXTXXNX
PENELXPE SPECTXX
GXIXXIN
XXX GHXST
XXNNX PHXNTXX
TECHNXS
XLXX PLXSXIXS
Danny groaned. Only more mysteries. He needed to find another word he could guess at that had different characters, or one that had only a few letters missing from it, so he could figure out the rest of the word easily. It was back to the book for him.
He could figure out nothing more from the first page, so Danny turned the page, to be confronted by more confusing symbols, some of which he recognized by now.
THEXE IS XNLX XNE XISEXSE THXT HXS XEEN KNXXN TX INXECT GHXSTKINX. IT IS KNXXN XS THT SLEEPING SICKNESS, THE XXEXXEX XXXLICTIXN THXT STXIKES XXXN XLL XHX CXXE IN CXNTXCT XITH IT. THIS CHXXNXLXXX HXS THXS XEEN SCXIXEX XXX THE SXLE PXXPXSE XX KEEPING THIS XXLXXX XT XXX, SHXXLX EXEX IT STXIKE XXXIN, XXX THXSE XHX XXIL TX LEXXN HISTXXX XXE XXXXEX TO XEPEXT IT.
Danny sighed as he finished translating the last known letter of the paragraph upon the page. There were a few complete words here, but not many. The best place to start was at the beginning. THEXE. The word was missing only one letter. So what was that letter? Danny wrote down all the words he could think of that were similar to THEXE, and came up with only two: 'these' and 'there'. Either the letter was an S, or it was an R. So which one was it?
It was then that Danny remembered that he already had a translation for S. Which eliminated 'these', and meant that the symbol must be an R.
Now he was getting somewhere. Danny scribbled an R down next to the R symbol, and replaced all of the R symbols with the letter on paragraph, title, and lid. He then sighed, and took another bite of his cereal. This could take a while.
It had taken Danny a full two hours to finish decoding the whole paragraph, title, and lid. Even so, he had yet to discover the symbols which corresponded to J, Q, X, and Z. He supposed he would be able to find those later, and he sat back and observed his work.
The chronology of
The Sleeping Sickness
by Clockwork
Skulker
Bertrand
Penelope Spectra
Griffin
Box Ghost
Danny Phantom
Technus
Vlad Plasmius
There is only one disease that has been known to infect ghostkind. It is known as the Sleeping Sickness, the dreaded affliction that strikes down all who come in contact with it. This chronology has been scribed for the sole purpose of keeping this malady at bay, should ever it strike again, for those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it.
The paragraph was entirely useless; he already knew that much about the Sleeping Sickness anyway. Danny was surprised to find his own name, as well as so many other familiar names, upon the list from the lid.
But what surprised him the most was to find that the book had been written by Clockwork. If he had written the book himself, then why did he need Danny to find the cure? Couldn't he have just done so himself?
Danny sighed and flipped to the next page. His breakfast had been consumed an hour and a half earlier, but he was still somewhat hungry.
Danny groaned at the amount of symbols on this page. He pulled a notebook out of his backpack-he didn't really take notes in Algebra, anyway, and he would need much more than a single piece of paper to finish decoding the book. A lot more.
Danny took up the pen again and began translating the characters upon the page. It was going to be a long day.
Kitty sniffed wearily on the backseat of a motorcycle, her arms clasped tightly around Johnny's waist.
"Johnny, I'm not feeling well! Can't we stop?" she whined.
"Aw, come on, Kitten! Don't you want revenge on that goody-two-shoes ghost boy?" he said. "Besides, there's the portal ahead!" he said, pointing. Kitty replied with a painful-sounding cough.
"Kitty, are you feelin' alright?" he asked, glancing over his shoulder at her. Johnny felt her go limp and her grip slip. He braked, and turned around to look at her.
"Kitty? Kitten!" he shouted. She wasn't moving, wasn't breathing... Oh, yeah, that's right; she's a ghost. But still, ghosts didn't just collapse...
"Kitty?" he asked again with concern. "Aw, come on! Kitty, wake-c-cough cough- wake up..." but he himself elapsed into a coughing fit.
And it wasn't soon until Johnny was lying limp beside Kitty, and lying just as limply beneath the motorcycle was the dark form of a shadow ghost.
Vlad poked his head into Danny's room, to find Danny bent over a book, the pen gripped in his hand moving furiously across a page halfway through a notebook. Vlad coughed, although it wasn't exactly a fake cough to make Danny aware of his presence.
"Hello, Vlad," Danny said coldly, without looking up and the pen not faltering. Vlad blinked.
"How did you know it was me?" he asked, very taken aback.
"Jazz it at school, so're Tucker and Sam, and they'd ring the doorbell, and Mom and Dad are working on the, um, 'Fenton Thermometer', and nothing's blown up yet so they're obviously nowhere near done," Danny said very quickly, still writing.
Vlad blinked again; Daniel was becoming almost too perceptive for his own good. The room was silent, but for the steady scratch of the pen. After a few minutes had ticked by, Danny sighed.
"Okay. What d'you want now, Plasmius? In case you haven't noticed, I'm kind of busy," Danny said irritably.
"Busy doing what, may I ask?" the millionaire questioned, his curiosity aroused.
"Writing," Danny replied dryly. Vlad rolled his eyes and walked up to the desk to peer over Danny's shoulder. Danny was scribbling furiously upon the notebook, which he was over halfway through by now, and paused only to turn the page. Vlad raised an eyebrow.
"Daniel..." he said slowly, looking at the bright green letters that Danny had translated. Was it just him, or were they glowing slightly?
"What?" Danny grunted. He was very annoyed at Vlad, barging in like this. Didn't he have anything better to do?
Danny answered his own question. Vlad did have something better to do, although it depended upon how you defined 'better'. When it all came down to it, Vlad bothering Danny was probably better than Vlad flirting (or attempting to flirt, as the case may be) with Danny's mom, or Vlad plotting on how to kill Danny's dad.
"Ah, nothing, nothing..." Vlad answered, but it was clear that it most definitely was not 'nothing'.
"Hmmm..." Danny said, and paused again, tapping his pen against his chin as he tried to remember the corresponding letter for a particularly complicated character. Remembering, he wrote down the B and continued with the translation.
Vlad looked around the room. Didn't the boy ever actually clean? His gaze finally rested upon the strange gray lid, which he recalled from the previous night. He picked it up and looked it over.
It was just a small gray rectangle lined with red velvet, nothing special except for the fact that the whole top was covered with luminous green symbols, akin to the ones Danny was translating.
"Can I have that back?" Danny asked. He had actually stopped writing to look up at Vlad, and held out his hand expectantly. Vlad hesitated, then returned the lid. Danny looked at it for a few seconds, then Vlad watched as his expression turned from something bored and scathing to a look of surprise.
"More letters?" he muttered quizzically to himself. Danny pulled out a sheet of paper; a sheet, which Vlad noted, contained not just Danny's name, but his own as well, and several of the ghosts he had consorted with at some point or another.
Danny translated the three new names at the bottom of the list, then put the pen down.
"Kitty and Johnny Thirteen, and his Shadow ghost..." he said. "But how...?"
"How what?" Vlad asked. He was just slightly more than completely baffled by now. "Daniel, what exactly are you doing?"
Danny sighed and turned around to face Vlad.
"Fine, if you really have to know... I'm translating that book into words recognizable as a human language."
"Why?" Vlad asked. Danny sighed again.
"You heard Jazz last night. I have to find a cure for this Sleeping Sickness. If I don't..." Danny didn't finish.
"So you're translating an entire book?" Vlad asked.
"Yeah. Well, it's not even that long, but..." Danny shrugged and turned back to the desk, then picked up the pen but didn't begin writing. "...I still have a long way to go," he finished, and turned the page of the book, and began writing again.
Vlad turned towards the door, gave a backwards glance towards Danny, then shut the door and left.
Um, not another non-cliffhanger-ending chapter! Wow, I'm on a roll! That's got to be some sort of record for me…
Anyway, I found this chapter somewhat tedious to write. I had originally followed every step that Danny took to figure out the code, but it was long, and pointless, and kind of boring. So I just sort of skipped over that part, and hoped it would still turn out all right.
Also, because I forgot to mention at the beginning of this chapter, I made a slight mistake involving a long list of X's in the previous chapter. I've fixed it, so it corresponds with this chapter. And speaking of those X's, I seriously hope that by now you should all have a good idea of what that writing on the lid represents... And if you don't even have at least the vaguest idea, then you should reread this chapter until you do.
Okay, so then… I have no idea when the next chapter will be up, as per usual. Hopefully before Friday, but I'll shoot for Wednesday, because the story is finally heading towards the 'finishing line'. The beginning of the end, if you will. And… I'm really eager to begin writing 'The Halfa That Time Forgot', so the sooner I finish this... the sooner I can start that.
So… See you all next update!
-E.P.