Hello there! Just want to say again, sometimes even when I post a new chapter, sometimes ffn does not properly move it up the update queue. If the story seems to have jumped oddly, you've missed a chapter! (Probably. It's also possible that I just wrote something strangely. Usually I pick up right where I left off, though.)

Also, as this is chapter 21, I believe that this is a good place to remind you all that I do not own Danny Phantom. Danny Phantom belongs to Nickelodeon. We good? Good.

Thank you for reading and reviewing!

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Chapter 21: Rotunda

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It took an unreasonably long time to convince everyone to move. A number of people were suspicious of Danny on the grounds of 'he's possessed!' There was a group who objected specifically to the building because it was a tomb and might be haunted. Or full of zombies. (Danny didn't know whether to laugh or cry). A smaller group wanted to dare the forest.

This new argument was only resolved when Mr Lancer, bless him, noticed that the intermittent snowflakes were making people drowsy (more drowsy than they had been, anyway). After that, people practically raced uphill.

Once he was sure everyone was reasonably distracted, besides Valerie, who wouldn't stop staring at him, and, of course, his friends, Danny whistled a quick request for the wisps to follow him. Danny felt bad, taking advantage of them like this. He had just met them and he was already relying on them so much. But he needed the help.

The building, when they reached it, was a cute little rotunda. The pillars and carvings gave it a Greek flare. The sides were solid, except for one gap between pillars, which served as a doorway to the interior. A flowering vine curled up one stone wall.

Jack checked the building first, and proclaimed it 'No more infested by specters than the rest of this place!'

After that, everyone kind of packed in. It was, as Mikey had predicted, a squeeze. More so than Danny would have thought from the outside, because the center of the single room was taken up by a descending spiral staircase, the well for which was blocked off by a wrought-iron fence.

No one volunteered to look and see what was below.

The interior walls and ceiling were covered with intricate carvings. Abstract images of birds and flowers, of stars, snowflakes, and gears, of people holding hands. There were tessellations. Geometric figures. With a sense of mortification, Danny recognized some of his own doodles. Actually... These... All of these were things that he had drawn, wanted to draw, or admired at one point or another. Yes, that one he had done a few weeks ago, and that was an Escher woodcut that he had particularly liked.

There were benches against the walls, and against the fence. There was some argument about who would get to sit on the benches. The A-listers, predictably, won the argument. They had the muscle to back up their claim, after all.

The wisps followed. Some phased through the walls and ceiling. Others came in through the door. Soon, the rotunda was filled with a coruscating rainbow of light.

Danny glanced out the door and sighed with regret. The snow looked really nice, especially now that the flakes were getting larger and falling faster. They could have had a snowball fight.

"Danny," said Mia, hesitantly. Danny looked back inside, and located his classmate. She still had her one eye closed. "You said that you had a solution to our problem?"

"Oh! Right. I-"

"Wait."

Danny's eyes snapped, instantly wary, to his mother. "What?"

"Phantom."

Danny flattened his lips. "You still think I'm overshadowed?"

"I don't know," admitted Maddie. "But before this goes any farther, I need to know what's going on. I need to know why the four of you, why my children," the 'who should have known better' was unspoken, "would... conspire with a ghost. I need to know how you got those scars."

"We've actually already told Valerie, Ricky, and Mikey some of it," said Danny, quickly, thinking fast. They didn't need conflicting stories from Tucker and Jazz. The lies needed to match up. "But then the wisps told us what you were doing here and..." He shrugged, helplessly.

"Heh. Yeah," said Mikey. "At least it didn't turn out to be the monster from the id thing, like you thought."

"What are you talking about? It was exactly that."

"But- But it disappeared."

"That doesn't mean it's gone," said Danny.

"Hold on," said Paulina, "that creepy thing that was obsessed with Fenton is still out there?"

"Way to go, Foley," said Dale, harshly, "now we're all going to get killed by a horror movie reject, just 'cause you thought it was 'the right thing to do,'" the football player pitched his voice up at the end, waving his hands.

Tucker scowled. "At least I'm not a college reject."

Yay! Distraction! Way to go, Tucker. Now Danny had time to think about what lie he was going to tell while Tucker managed to suck half the class into a fight.

(Danny was sure this would come back to bite them eventually. Everything always did.)

Once the combined efforts of Mr Lancer, Jack, Maddie, Hannah, and Mia, had calmed the combatants down again, Danny had a halfway decent story.

"I'm still waiting for an explanation," Maddie announced.

"I know," said Danny, running a hand nervously through his hair. "Okay. So, I guess I should start at the beginning." He inhaled. Here goes nothing. "Phantom was the first ghost to come through the portal. He came out, what, minutes after the portal shocked me?"

"Sounds about right," said Sam.

"He was a really new ghost back then," continued Danny. "Like, brand new. But we didn't know that at the time, so we all kind of freaked out, then he freaked out, and, well. Once you guys got home we kind of... We weren't totally sure if what we had seen was real or not, and we all were really more focused on my electrical burns, and after that you were so excited about the portal working, we didn't mention it. Which sounds silly now, but you know what that day was like.

"A week after that," Danny continued, "other ghosts started to come through our portal. Before you say anything, I know you didn't notice. I didn't either, at first. But they started to come after me. They'd trip me, push me down, knock things out of my hands. This was during the first few weeks of school, freshman year. You know how I was back then, Mr Lancer."

"If I recall, that's when you were permanently banned from handling school glassware. You're saying ghosts were to blame?"

"For a lot of it, yeah. Mostly they'd stay invisible, or just show up out of the corner of my eye. I thought I was going nuts. I'm not one-hundred percent sure why they picked on me, specifically. We've speculated, but it isn't like any of them ever told me. Then one day, I think that it was getting towards the end of September, Sam, Tucker, and I were walking home, and we were straight-up attacked. Ectopi. We were really in trouble, which, again, I know, seems silly now. But we didn't have any practical experience with ghosts back then. But Phantom saved us."

"That seems to be an odd coincidence," said Maddie. "That he was there just when you were attacked."

"It wasn't a coincidence. He'd been following us."

"What?"

"Well. Me mostly. You know how your ghost detectors kept picking me up? That was why. Which, yes, was kind of creepy, but we were basically the only people he'd ever met who hadn't attacked him on sight. At least, if you have a very loose definition of 'met.' We talked a little after that. He mostly wanted to make sure that we weren't hurt. But you know how he is after a fight. He vanished pretty quickly. Then there was the Lunch Lady ghost, and he somehow got a Fenton Thermos during that fight. He told me that you had thrown it at him? I never quite believed that..."

"I'd never give a ghost Fenton Tech!"

"Right. Anyway. There were a couple of other ghost fights around the school, and at that point he had figured out that FentonWorks was a dangerous place for a ghost to hang around. But the Thermos got full. So he asked me to empty it. I have to say, I didn't exactly trust him at that point, but he wasn't acting like a mindless killing machine, either. He was acting like a person. So I agreed to empty it."

"Why didn't you bring the ghosts to us?" asked Maddie.

"Um. Honestly? Some of the stuff you talked about doing to ghosts, I wouldn't be comfortable doing to animals, and the Lunch Lady ghost could talk. So. Yeah. That wasn't going to happen. Also, you guys hadn't done a super awesome job with the ghosts you had run into, and I didn't want you to get hurt. If Phantom was going to take care of the problem, I was going to let him. Still, I didn't trust him. Not until the locker 724 incident."

"Hah! So that locker was haunted!" shouted Hannah suddenly. The blonde girl was a... He didn't want to say 'conspiracy theory nut.' Considering what Amity Park was like, he didn't want to say that Area 51 wasn't a thing. "Did you meet Poindexter?"

"Um. Sort of? I don't really remember most of what happened. I had blackmailed Phantom into helping me prank Dash. Yes, I know, not a great decision, but I was tired of being picked on all the time. I had been standing next to the locker, watching the latest prank unfold, you know? And then Poindexter just comes out of the locker and starts lecturing the two of us about how we were bullying Dash-"

"Serves you right, Fentoad!" erupted Dash, suddenly. "You shouldn't have blackmailed Phantom! And you shouldn't have messed with me, 'cause now you're gonna-"

"Mr Baxter!"

"Considering that you locked me in my locker just yesterday, and the fact that you made me do your science homework all last week, and you periodically hang me on the flagpole by my underwear, I can't say I feel particularly guilty about stuffing your locker with Fenton-Wipe once, two years ago, and getting Phantom to tie your shoelaces together once, two years ago. I guess I still feel slightly guilty about getting him to run you into the lockers, but all things considered, I think that I've more than paid for it at this point. Anyway, the three of us got into a fight, and Poindexter overshadowed me."

"Overshadowed?"

"You'd probably call it possession, Mom, but overshadowing has technical differences. I'll get back to that later, if you remind me. But that whole thing was a nightmare, because, apparently, getting shocked by the portal messed me up more than we thought it did. Like I told these guys," Danny gestured to Ricky, Mikey, and Valerie, "overshadowing does not work properly on me. Poindexter got stuck. Normal methods of disrupting an overshadowing would not work. He didn't realize it at the time, though. He tricked Phantom into getting trapped in his lair, and by 'his' I mean Poindexter's, and, um. I'd better leave the rest to Sam and Tucker, actually, because I spent the rest of the day overshadowed."

"You say 'stuck' like it was a bad thing for both you and Poindexter," said Lester. "But wouldn't it actually be good for him? He'd have your body, if no one could get him out."

"It was a bad thing," said Danny. "There's a reason that ghosts don't overshadow people long-term. It isn't healthy for them." Danny licked his lip as he thought about how to explain. "A ghost can't get the energy it needs when it's overshadowing a human body. It still has access to the emotional energy of the human it's overshadowing, but other than that," Danny shrugged, "it usually isn't going to get anything. Human bodies don't have the ability to absorb ectoplasm. I mean, you might pick up some from breathing, or eating contaminated food, but even then, that's not generally going to get to the ghost, and most other energies are going to be deflected by the body. The ghost would starve, eventually, especially if they were using their powers."

"And Poindexter was definitely using his powers," Tucker said, jumping in. "That's one of the ways we noticed that Danny was being overshadowed. It took us longer than it should have, in retrospect."

"Yeah, especially when he kept going on about egg creams," added Sam. "But there were plenty of other weird things going on. He didn't act like Danny at all."

"He'd apparently decided that he needed to make things up to Dash, and he did that by intangibly messing with the soda machines in the school and giving Dash and the rest of you guys free sodas. We didn't know how he was doing it, but we did know that Danny wouldn't steal stuff, and he especially wouldn't steal stuff for Dash."

"We didn't know for sure, though, until Phantom contacted us. It turned out that the mirror in the locker was a kind of portal to the Ghost Zone, and Phantom could reach through, a little bit."

"Still couldn't get out though. It was kind of funny, because apparently Poindexter's lair is a copy of Casper High from the fifties, and people kept walking by Phantom and giving him wedgies and stuff while he was trying to talk to us."

"It wasn't that funny, Tucker. Anyway, the three of us came up with a plan to trick Poindexter into going back into his lair." Sam grimaced. "We basically took advantage of his obsession, and pretended that we had shut someone in Locker 724, and pushed him through the mirror when he came to look. I don't know what happened in there after that, but after a while, Phantom came out with Danny. Actually... It looked a little like you were blasted out?"

"That's because we were," said Danny. "Poindexter pushed us out. Apparently that was the only way to get out."

"Yeah, you never told us what went down in there," said Tucker. "We didn't press 'cause you looked pretty sick, but..."

"I felt pretty sick. Having two ghosts fighting over your body is not fun, even if you manage to kick both out afterwards, and one of them is trying very hard not to hurt you. I still don't remember what led up to that. I think that Phantom was loosing pretty badly, and he only took Poindexter by surprise because Poindexter tried to leave but couldn't? I don't know. He always changes the subject when I bring it up."

"You trusted Phantom after that?"

"Well... Yeah. He could have overshadowed me himself instead of working with me, but he never did. This was before we had figured out the whole 'Danny isn't fun to overshadow' thing, remember."

Maddie nodded slowly. It wasn't a nod of agreement, or of acceptance. It was an 'I'm thinking' nod. "And you Jazz? How did you get into this? And why did you think it was a good idea?"

"Uh," said Jazz, and Danny started praying. Jazz wasn't always very good with the on the fly lie. "That's complicated. Do any of you remember Ms Spectra?"

"Penelope Spectra?" asked Mr Lancer, surprised. "You mean the school psychologist from when you were a sophomore? What does she have to do with this?"

"Well, everything. To begin with, she was a ghost."