Sam pushed the inedible cuisine around her plate with her spork and chuckled quietly. "A few, but as soon as they get to the part where Fiona turned you into a girl, they all will be."
"I kept that one in the other file," he explained, relaxing marginally.
'Wait, wait," Tucker laughed. "Not only do you keep a diary, you keep two of them?"
"They're journals," Danny shot back. "I'm kind of trying to lead a double life here, guys. They…help me remember who I am…" He shrugged as though attempting to imply that the confession was only obvious. "Okay, how many people know me well enough to put two and two together?"
"I think just us," Sam replied.
She shot Tucker a warning glare as he opened his mouth, but he merely added, "And Valerie." Immediately, the ghost boy tensed up again, earning a hissed, "Danny! Eyes!"
He closed them until he could get the glow under control again. "Maybe she won't figure it out…" he moaned without much hope. "Is she watching me?"
There was a long pause, during which he finally opened his eyes to see his friends try to look around without being obvious about it. At last, Tucker said, "Actually, I don't see her anywhere."
"Me neither," Sam agreed, worried.
Danny sighed and dropped his head onto his fist. "She's probably hiding somewhere waiting to ambush me."
The goth girl shook her head dubiously. "I can't believe Kat would do something like this."
"Oh, I'm not surprised. She's Katrina Technus, after all," he pointed out, emphasizing her last name. "I am going to kill her when I see her."
"Can she even be killed?" Tucker asked, snickering. Although the question was mostly rhetoric, his two friends found themselves wondering the same thing.
"Well, you said she's not a ghost, right?" Sam offered.
Danny thought about that for perhaps a second or two longer than necessary. "Technically, she's an astral projection, but she might as well be a ghost. I mean, I've caught her in the Fenton Thermos before; she can't get through ghost shields unless she uses her power to disrupt the field." He shrugged and changed the subject to something less potentially volatile.
Dash wasn't the brightest fellow in school. Everything he knew about science could be summed up in the two words "It worked." He knew about nanobots; they were all over movies and television, after all. However, he didn't really know what they were, or how they could cause Danny Phantom to suddenly, for all intents and purposes, go insane.
'I don't feel so good. Skulker got me with something today. Man, I thought I was going to die there for a while. At least my powers still seem to be working okay. Maybe whatever he did didn't work. Oh well, I'm about to go out and test them to be sure.'
It wasn't too bad in that entry. The next one started to get a bit confusing.
'01001111kay, now I'm bored. I know everything! This is so coo1. 01001101an, I don't know00100000what Skulker was trying to d01101111, but I don't th01101001nk it was supposed to make me a00100000genius00101110'
Dash was actually confused enough that he asked the nerds for help, but they said they didn't speak binary. Since he had no idea what they said beyond the fact that they couldn't help, he shoved them all their lockers. As a last resort, he finally found Tucker, who at least offered to help figure it out.
"I think that's a space," he said, pointing at one of the codes.
"I got that," Dash snapped, even though he didn't. "I'm not stupid, you know. What's this one say?"
'010010010010000001101010011101010111001101110100001000000110100001100001d the weirdest dream ever00101110 Serious0110110001111001. 01010100011001010110001101101000011011100111010101110011 was there fo011100100010000001110011011011110110110101100101001000000111001001100101ason, and Vlad, and there were 01101100011010010111010001110100011011000110010100100000011100110110100101101100011101100110010101 1100100010000001100010011101010110011101110011 everywhere and011010000110010100100111011100110010000001101001011011100010000001101101011110010 010000001101000011001010110000101100100001000000110011101100101011101000010000001101000 011010010110110100100000011011110111010101110100001000000110100100100000011010110110111001101111 0111011100100000011010000110010100100111011100110010000001110100011010000110010101110010011001010 010000001010100011001010110001101101000011011100111010101110011001000010010000001001001001000000110 10110110111001101111011101110010000001111001011011110111010100100000011000110110000101101110001000000 11010000110010101100001011100100010000001101101011001010010000100100000010001110110010101110100011 011110111010101110100011001110110010101110100011011110111010101110100011001110110010101110100011011 110111010101110100'
Tucker stared at the entry, vaguely wondering if Danny had ever even noticed he'd done that. "Um…" he tried. After a moment, he began tapping on his PDA. "There's got to be a program to translate that somewhere."
Dash stared down at the ever increasing number of zeroes and ones, glad to know that it wasn't just him for once. He waited somewhat impatiently while the computer nerd apparently found what he was looking for and started trying to feed the numbers into his PDA. "Okay!" he announced at last. "It says, 'I just had the weirdest dream ever. Seriously. Technus was there for some reason, and Vlad, and there were little silver bugs everywhere andhe's in my head get him out i know he's there Technus! I know you can hear me! Getoutgetoutgetout'
The two boys stared at each other and unanimously decided that they did not want to know after all.
Had anyone thought to look up, they might have seen the mysterious ghost hunter race across the sky. They might have wondered what invisible spectral villain their second hero was chasing this time, for she was moving far too fast to simply be out and about. It probably would not have occurred to anyone that she might be running away from something, or that she might be flying blind, lost in grief.
She didn't know who he was anymore. Consequently, she didn't know who she was anymore, either. She had dedicated her life to hunting down the ghost kid, but the ghost kid was the only boy in school she had even considered calling more than a friend. He was Danny, and he was Phantom. It couldn't be possible.
So if she was trying to hunt down Phantom, then she was also trying to hunt down Danny, and she liked Danny, but she hated Phantom, and-
"Argh!" she yelled, clutching her head. Flying wasn't helping; she landed on an apartment building and started to pace.
"They're the same person!" she wailed. "No Fenton; no Phantom…just…just…"
Just Danny. And she liked Danny. And she hated him. "Why didn't you tell me?" she demanded, as though he could magically respond. Or as though the answer weren't obvious…
Two choices: love or hate. Fenton or Phantom. Human or ghost. Because it couldn't be both. It could never be both. The human was good, sweet, loveable. The ghost…
But no good, sweet, loveable human would turn around and be an evil, sarcastic, lying ghost. No, but the ghost might be pretend to be human.
"I thought you liked me…" she whispered. For just a moment, she was tempted to fall to her knees. But if Danny lied, then Sandruu lied, and Clockwork lied, and…
They were ghosts, and ghosts were evil.
And ghosts needed to be destroyed.
A/N: I'd now like to apologize for the formatting on the binary. It was supposed to have been one long string of code, but it stretched the screen. So I kind of broke it up at random. So if you try to run it through a translator, you might get an odd translation. Sorry.
