There was a flash of light, a terrible twisting sensation – and Daniel Fenton, aka Danny Phantom, fell through the portal, his ghost form's jumpsuit smoking from the enemy ghost's ectoblast. It was a new opponent, one Danny hadn't ever met before literally stumbling upon its lair in the Ghost Zone, a realm with a bad habit of creating short-lived space-time portals leading who-knows-where-and-when.
Danny grumbled in annoyance, rubbing the smoking patch. Stupid ghost. Stupid Ghost Zone. Stupid weird, violent portal. It looked like he'd been spit into a stone castle – medieval, by the chill and the drab construction. He looked around, searching for the portal so he could return before it closed – and he saw, to his horror, only the last vestige of the portal before it closed with a small pop.
Danny swore viciously; finding another natural portal to take him home would be a giant pain in the ass. Cursing portals, the Ghost Zone, and cantankerous ghosts in general, Danny closed his eyes and focused, seeking anything that would feel like a portal. It was an extension of his ghost sense that Frostbite had showed him how to use in such a manner. He, Dora, Pandora, and Clockwork had been taking care to teach him little things about his ghostly abilities. (It pissed Vlad off to no end.)
Then Danny realized something was terribly, terribly wrong.
For one thing, the buzz of the Ghost Zone – always present, if very faint, even in the real world because it was tied so closely to the Zone – was completely missing. For another, when he opened his eyes and looked, he could now see glowing lines of script floating in the air, revealed by the extra energy he'd pumped into his senses. He was almost touching several. And for a third thing, there was a palpable sense of menace that exuded from the stone walls and the lines of script. He'd stumbled somewhere dark. Possibly evil. Danny shivered, carefully made note of where the lines of script were, and pretzeled his malleable body so he wasn't in danger of touching any of them. He didn't want to find out what would happen if he touched one. It was a miracle he hadn't blundered through several of them during his tumble from the portal.
Then he noticed the green stone in the center of the room.
It was smothered with script, but if Danny let enough energy drain from his eyes, he could see the stone. The script surrounding the stone was, if anything, even more menacing than the script that laced the room and covered the walls, floor, and ceiling. There was also some script weaved into the stone itself that Danny could barely make out, which both looked and felt different from the rest of the script in the room. It felt old and binding – a pact, not aligned toward good or evil in any way.
By the security surrounding it, Danny surmised that the stone was important. He vowed to keep his distance while he figured out how to get himself out of this mess. He couldn't phase through the walls, floor, or ceiling without touching the script; he didn't know if the script was triggered by mass or by energy and didn't want to experiment to find out just yet. The wooden door was an even worse idea, completely buried as it was with script. And he had a feeling he'd be waiting a long, long time before another portal opened in the room.
He was pondering the dilemma when something caught his attention. It was a cry, less auditory and more waves of feeling. The lines of script shivered, but otherwise did not react. Danny looked around, but nothing had changed in the room. He thought it originated from outside the room when he heard it in his mind again, louder and stronger, coming from the stone.
Danny drifted closer to the stone, threading his way through the script. He couldn't ignore something that sounded like it was in pain. He listened closely and heard it again, this time even clearer. Accompanying the cry was a wave of feelings and ideas that almost had Danny staggering into the script: desperation, sadness, loneliness, grasping, help me, get me out of here.
Before he could think about what he was doing, he grabbed at the stone, triggering several lines of script. Immediately, a foreign force surrounded him, binding him in place. Danny concentrated his ectoplasmic energy in an acidic wave that originated from his core, burning away the bindings.
Danny took a moment to regret his leap-before-looking action before his empathy for the stone – which was obviously sentient – overpowered the guilt. The script was mostly gone from the room, but it was slowly reasserting itself, grasping at the stone and at his limbs. He shook them off with another wave of ecto-energy, frowning. It seemed as if the lines of script melted away in the face of ecto-energy. But why had they been there in the first place? And why did they seem so malevolent?
Then he didn't have any more time to think before a grasping metaphysical hand reached for him. He could see it glowing darkly, bloated with power. He dodged the hand, and it groped blindly for a few moments before it retreated.
The hand returned as a wave, swamping the room. Danny quickly constructed a shield to protect himself, and the wave crashed against it, seething in fury. Danny shuddered under the strain. The wave beat relentlessly against his shield, seeking weakness. Danny held fast. He had a bad feeling that there were horrible consequences if he didn't.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the wave retreated. Danny shook and almost fell to the floor, exhausted as he was for defending for so long. He saw that, in the struggle, many of the lines of script surrounding the stone had come unraveled. This time, when Danny tried to pick up the stone, it came easily. He cradled it gently, mollified by the gratitude he could feel from it. Now he just had to get out of here, wherever here was.
Danny had been attacked from above. He'd make his escape from below. He fired an ectoblast at the floor, scorching the flagstones and burning a hole in the lines of script, and phased himself and the stone downward. He felt the pressure of another vicious wave of energy approaching and sped his flight, maintaining intangibility as he crashed through multiple floors. Then he hit the bedrock, but the wave was still coming. Danny gritted his teeth and continued downward.
Before he had time to react to the change, he fell straight through the bedrock and into an underground river. He sputtered as he lost the intangibility and the river tugged him along at dizzying speeds. He didn't try to fight it; rather, he followed it away from the mental wave, speeding down the center of the river, where he could feel the current was fastest, so he didn't crash into the walls. He couldn't see a single thing, but trusted the river to guide him to someplace safe.
It felt like he was flying through the river for hours before the mental wave finally gave up. He felt a flash of seething rage before it retreated, and Danny was free to continue cruising the river without pursuit. He breathed a sigh of relief, bubbles tickling from his mouth. He was glad he didn't need to breathe in ghost form, otherwise he would have drowned not long after finding the river. He gripped the stone tighter.
Then he realized there was a feeling of desperate suffocation coming from the stone.
Danny panicked. He hadn't realized the stone needed to breathe! He was about to go intangible again and shoot for the surface when the tunnel he'd been following abruptly widened into a vast space of water. Danny powered upward through the water, seeing sunlight in the distance. He knew his ghost body was durable enough for such a swift ascent and hoped that the stone didn't suffer from a rocky version of the bends or something.
Danny broke the surface, breathing deeply. Just because he didn't have to breathe in ghost form didn't mean he found it comfortable. He held the stone above his head, and water trickled from tiny pores. There was a sense of relief from the stone. No, Danny reasoned, it was probably an egg of some kind instead of a sentient rock. Either way, though, it seemed unharmed by the pressure change or the almost-drowning.
Danny was floating in a vast freshwater lake. He could see an ugly, pointed spire of rock in one direction and a small city in another. Both features made him feel uneasy, but he might be able to find out where he was at the city. He floated out of the water, turned briefly intangible to dry himself off, then flew for the city, holding the egg close to his chest. He turned both himself and the egg invisible as they neared the city, still troubled. When he was close enough to make out the details of the city, he understood why.
There was nothing of the modernity he knew from his home. Even poorer cities had electrical lines. But this hodge-podge of a city had none of that; it was just a mismatched array of houses surrounding a cathedral at the center of the city.
I need information, Danny thought grimly, and he floated down to the teeming masses. He held his nose and tried not to gag as a strong odor of unwashed human hit his nostrils.
And there was another problem: despite them being pale in color, he couldn't understand a single word of what anybody was saying. Due to international ghost attacks, he could at least recognize most of the European languages and many of the Asian languages. It sounded like something of a crossbreed of German and English.
Then there was how people were dressed. If Danny hadn't just flown through a portal, he would have thought he was in a large-scale historical reenactment, but as it was, the plain shirts, tunics, and pants did not look out of place in a medieval setting. Danny swore out loud, not caring when several people looked up in confusion. He probably was in the middle ages, if everything he was seeing around him wasn't some kind of horrible hallucination.
Danny hated medieval times. Once upon a time, he'd thought knights and princesses and peasants were cool, but then he'd gone on several unwitting trips through time, most of which involved gruesome witch hunts or ghost hunts, and he'd learned to strictly avoid blood blossoms – which he had an allergic reaction to even in human form – and dungeons.
Danny made a face and flew through the streets, looking for a secluded alleyway. There was an offshoot of overshadowing that he could use to look through a person's memories and experiences, but he hated using it, as it was a horrible breach of a person's privacy. Now, however, he could use it as a quick-and-dirty way to learn the local language so he hopefully wouldn't stand out as much.
Danny amended the thought when he remembered his modern t-shirt and jeans. He'd probably have to steal clothes off a line or something. The very thought made him feel guilty, but he was extremely tired of running away from villagers with torches and pitchforks, and if the worst he had to do was steal to blend in, then he'd steal. Preferably from someone who could afford to be stolen from.
Like that guy. Danny saw a rich noble striding pompously down the street. His clothes were cleaner and more colorful than anyone else's, and he held his nose up in the air in a manner that suggested he thought many of the people he was passing to be beneath him. There was a fat money pouch dangling from his belt.
Danny maintained his invisibility and turned intangible as he glided to street level, passing through several people as he went. When he was close enough, he slid a hand into the coin purse, turned a few heavy coins intangible, and then took off into the air with his prize.
While he was flying, Danny finally found what he was looking for: a well-hidden cranny, hardly visible from the street, where a poor beggar lay. Danny frowned as he floated above the gaunt woman. No one would notice if she suddenly stopped begging for a few minutes. He gently laid the egg and the stolen coins behind the woman, out of sight, and overshadowed her.
Danny grimaced as the woman's consciousness temporarily faded. He could feel the ravages of disease and hunger on her body. Reassuring himself that he would leave some coins behind for her, as payment for the information she could provide, he dove into her sleepy mind.
He looked for her knowledge of the local language first. It was easy to find, nestled in a separate portion of her brain specifically dedicated to speech and language. He languished in that area for a while, soaking up her knowledge of the language like a sponge. It would take some time and practice before he could speak it fluently, but he was learning. Once he figured he was proficient enough to understand the common tongue, he cautiously backed out of her mind so as not to cause any damage.
But then a memory caught at him. It was bright; something significant or interesting to the woman. Despite his efforts otherwise, he spun uncontrollably down into it.
She was near the gate, begging as she had to now. It was a normal day: no one paid her any attention. Then, suddenly, she heard the gate guards frantically yelling to close the gate. Guards lined up in front of the gate as it screeched downward. Two horsemen careened down the road in a crazy, desperate escape. She could tell they weren't going to make it.
But then one of the horsemen yelled something, and the guards were swept aside by an invisible hand. The other shouted, and the gate shrieked as it halted. The two horsemen rode safely out of Dras-Leona, leaving behind a gaping crowd. No one had ever seen anyone perform magic before.
Danny wrenched himself from the memory and left the woman's body before another could catch at him. He shakily left a few coins hidden in the folds of her rags, then scooped up the egg and flew away from the scene of the crime.
Danny's conscience was screaming at him for accidentally falling into the memory. Another part of his mind was reeling from the casual display of what was apparently magic. A final, analytical part was whispering about Clockwork's lesson on portals to other dimensions, not just different times.
Danny was left a bit confused, a little upset, a lot panicked, and completely overwhelmed.
He'd never heard of the city of Dras-Leona. He'd never seen magic. And, thinking back, he'd never encountered a portal so rough before.
Danny sank to a rooftop, panicking. He frantically reached for the Zone. Once again, he felt nothing. Well, no, he felt something, but it was more of a void and less of a Zone and maybe the closest afterlife dimension to whatever world he was in. It was more than enough confirmation that he had had jumped dimensions.
Danny frantically recalled what he'd learned from Clockwork. All of the Zone's portals were technically dimensional portals – the Zone and the real world were entwined but still distinct entities – but the Zone had enough unstable energy that it could access other dimensions, as well, both living and dead. These portals were rare and dangerous, violent things that could rip someone apart if they entered it wrong. Furthermore, if one found oneself falling through one of these portals, and the portal closed, one could be waiting for years for another portal to open, never mind if one could find where the next portal would open. Clockwork had stressed that.
Danny laughed hysterically. Fat lot of good the warning had done him.
He sat for a while, letting himself wear the panic out. He'd gotten out of tougher situations before. He would get home eventually. Danny repeated that to himself in English – a small comfort – as he bleakly watched the city from the roof.
Plan of action? Not much had changed. Danny still needed to get ahold of some local garb, and maybe a bag, if he was going to keep carrying the egg around. He was tempted to leave it to be someone else's problem, but then he recalled its misery and stopped. He was a sucker for sad animals. However, it hadn't peeped since the lake, when it sent a rush of relief from the exposure to the air. Maybe it was sleeping? Either way, Danny wasn't leaving it. He'd chosen to save this egg from its prison; now it could be his traveling companion.
There was a market nearby that Danny could see, from all the stalls and wares set up, and he headed invisibly in that direction, finally floating off the roof he'd curled up on. He found a clothes stall in short order and left the rest of the coins he'd pilfered in place of a shirt, a belt, pants that were long enough to hide his tennis shoes (because he refused to walk around in the uncomfortable-looking boots everyone else wore), and a traveling sack that was big enough to hold the egg and still have room in it besides. Danny packed his new clothes away before leaving the store, glad that the shopkeeper hadn't noticed the transaction before he left.
Slinging the sack over his shoulder, he soared upward. He had no idea which way to go, except not east, because that was where he'd fled from. Not west, either, he decided as he looked around and couldn't see the opposite coast of the lake. He didn't want to be flying for an indeterminate amount of time, especially with his strength flagging. It had been a long day, and Danny had spent half of it fighting and the other half either intangibly fleeing or invisibly sneaking around.
So, north or south. Danny spun in a slow circle. He shivered as he caught sight of the towering, jagged, menacing peaks outside the city. They were mostly east, but a little south, and that was enough to make up Danny's mind.
He headed north.