Hello! Thank you for reading and reviewing! This story hit 100 favorites today. Wow!
Today has been a slow day for writing so far, so tomorrow will likely be a skip day. Sunday may also be a skip day. I want to get my buffer back. Thank you for your understanding. :)
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Chapter 24: Window
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"It can't possibly be that easy," protested Ricky.
"I didn't say that it would be easy," said Danny, rolling his eyes. "Besides which, we still need food, water, sleep, and even if they can get us to the door, they aren't going to be able to guide us beyond that." Danny whistled a few bars of a winding, questioning melody. The wisps sang back at him, a dozen symphonies. Danny made a quelling motion with his hands, and asked them-
"Daniel," interrupted Mr Lancer, "is that... their language?"
Danny winced. "Um. Yeah?"
"How did you learn it?"
"How does anyone learn any language? It wasn't that hard. I'm not exactly fluent, mind you. I don't typically change color." Wow. That was a lie, a serious lie, right there. He changed color all the time. "Do you mind? I've got a conversation going on."
"My apologies," said Mr Lancer.
Danny was able to finish his question and Leader, flashing green, answered. Danny smiled, and thanked him.
"Okay, so they do know where the door is," said Danny. "But they said that it's a long way off, and that the way is... strange." He tilted his hand back and forth. "At least, I think that's the best translation. It could also mean circuitous, or convoluted. Or possibly stormy, or that there's a lot of wind. Or... You know. A bunch of things that don't translate well."
"I don't get it," said Paulina. "Those are all, like, totally different things."
"Well, it's like, uh, there isn't a direct translation for quinceaƱera in English, because English speakers usually don't celebrate a person's fifteenth birthday like that. These guys are really light, so something being windy and something being windy would look the same to them." Danny blinked for a moment, visualizing how that sentence would look on paper, and suppressed a smile. "Also, I'm not super familiar with this dialect. The wisps who hang out in Amity Park use different indicators for adjectives and... you know what? It doesn't matter," said Danny, rubbing his face. He hummed. Leader hummed back, and bobbed up and down brushing against Danny's arm. Maddie started, and glared at the little ghost as if she would like nothing better than to fight it with her bare hands. Never mind that that wouldn't work. "They also think that there might be human food on the way, but, well, they aren't experts. So that's good. But these guys are fast, so them saying the door is a long way off means that it's a really long way off."
"Then we should start immediately," said Mr Lancer. "Lead the way."
"Right," said Danny, looking towards Leader. Leader bobbed, then zoomed over the crowd to hover over the stairwell.
"No," said Mikey. "No, I am not going back underground."
"Come on, Mikey," cajoled Mia, "I'm sure that it'll be fine. I mean, nothing really bad has happened here so far, right? We're all in one piece."
"Except for the horror movie monster threatening us all and the demonic snow!"
Rude. The snow wasn't demonic. It was affectionate, and comfortable. It was just trying to make sure everyone got enough sleep, because staying up like this wasn't healthy...
Danny shook his head. He needed sleep, too, apparently.
"Mikey, I know that things have been weird here, but... You trust Phantom, right? I mean, I know that you were in that one fan club."
"Yeah," admitted Mikey, grudgingly.
"Well, this whole place is Phantom. Kinda. What happened before was a knee-jerk reaction to being shot at. This is just a dream right now. Nothing here is after you."
(Some things might be after his parents, though. The shadow was not happy with them.)
There was some more grumbling, and some outright whining. Surprisingly, Paulina wasn't one of them. Instead of being upset, she was excited to be going 'inside the Ghost Boy.'
It was becoming increasingly difficult to recall that he'd once had a serious crush on her. It was almost unbelievable that they'd been friends in grade school. If he couldn't switch forms, he'd be seriously looking into restraining orders. As it was, he'd spent some time looking up methods to discourage stalkers.
(Wasn't Danny supposed to be the creepy one, anyway? Seeing as he was the ghost?)
Danny went down the stairs right after the first wisps, despite his parents' protests. He reasoned that he was the only one who could understand the wisps (for some reason, he hadn't felt the need to mention Tucker's translation program), and that if they were to shout (sing?) a warning, he was the only one who could react quickly enough to make that warning worth anything.
The stairs gently spiraled down and down and down. After a few turns, the iron banister was replaced by a stone one, and then by a solid stone wall. The steps, and the spiral, became wider. There were delicate carvings on both walls, flowers, clouds, and hidden faces, their curves highlighted by crystals embedded in the stone.
Then there was a window.
It was a tall, narrow thing with no glass set in it. More like a arrow-slit than a proper window. Bright stars shone through it, and a soft breeze licked at Danny's fingers when he held his hand up to it.
Logically, it should not have been there. They should be deep underground. Several people pointed this out while crowding around it, and trying to see if the stars it showed were some kind of illusion. Danny let them, it didn't hurt anything, and he needed a moment to rest. Also, the wisps thought that it was hilarious. They kept chiming, periodically, like little silvery bells. It was their version of muffled laughter.
Danny withdrew from the window, fading back until he was among his friends again. No one else was paying attention to anything but the window. Even the adults had gotten distracted.
"So," said Tucker, "do you know how there's a window down here?"
"Come on, Tuck," said Danny, rolling his eyes. "We're in a pocket universe located behind a floating door in the Ghost Zone, which itself is a parallel universe filled with, among other things, the unquiet dead, portals to other time periods, and areas- can you even call them that?- with extra spacial and temporal dimensions. Did you really expect this place to be topographically consistent? This is Phantom, we're talking about."
Jazz gave him a very strange look. "Are you feeling alright?"
"No. No I am not."
Jazz made a face. "Sorry. I shouldn't have asked. Is there anything I can do to help?"
"I don't know," said Danny, his fingers drumming on his chest. "I think- I think that last thing really damaged Phantom," he said. It was best not to say anything out of line with their official story. Someone, his eyes darted to first his parents, then Valerie, and then Mr Lancer, might be listening. "I'm worried," he admitted. "This... I know what I said to Mikey, but people do things in dreams that they'd never do awake." He clenched his fists as he remembered some of his nightmares.
(Remembered what he did in them.
Gone, but not forgotten.
Inevitable.
Standing over his own broken body, fire licking his skull, greedier than ice could ever be.
A city in ruins and laughing, laughing, laughing.
A family trying to hide. He could hear all of them, their breathing was so loud compared to his silence, but he thought it more amusing to bait them into revealing themselves visually. It was so easy. Just break the mother's legs, the one who hadn't hidden fast enough, make a new cut every few minutes... They didn't deserve a mother. Not when he didn't have one.)
Danny was shaken out of his reverie when his sister put her arms around him, giving him a hug.
"Danny," said Jazz, whispering directly in his ear, "I know what you're worried about. But this isn't exactly a dream. It's your subconscious, yes, but dream and subconscious are two different things, even if the later is often represented in the former. Your nightmares are things you fear, not things you want."
"But what if I do want it? Deep down? He had to come from somewhere."
"He's not you, Danny. You made this beautiful place. You made sure there was light, and food, and that the temperature was good for everyone. I know you like it colder. You've been worried about us this whole time. You've been taking such good care of us."
Danny relaxed a little more with each of sentence. When Jazz finally pulled back, still murmuring reassurances, he felt much better. He was still tense, of course, but the tension was closer to his normal levels. "Thank you," said Danny. "I needed that." He looked at his friends. Even if he felt better, there were other things he still had to say. "There's something I need to tell you. Do you remember when Phantom first got his ice powers?"
"Considering everything that happened when he got them? Yeah," said Sam, raising an eyebrow. "Is this about the snow?"
"Not exactly," said Danny. "You remember that freak snowstorm a couple months later?"
"Yeah," said Sam, slowly. Tucker nodded. Jazz made a concerned face. She already knew where this was going. He had told her when it happened.
"That was Phantom." Before his friends could say anything, he continued, "There was- There was that accident, the week before. I- He was upset, and not thinking straight. There was a lot of other stuff going on, too. I- He- I guess he thought that if everyone was snowed in then there couldn't be any accidents like that. That everyone would stay where they were, and they would all be safe, and everything would just stay the same, otherwise, which in retrospect isn't rational, but, well. It made sense at the time." He took a deep breath. "I'm worried that... something like that will happen here. It's just, here, it makes a lot more sense, logistically."
"Okay," said Sam. "Okay, I can see why that looks like a problem, but I don't think it is."
"Why?"
"You- Phantom can't stay in here and get to the Far Frozen at the same time. Also, if you try to leave us, sneak off by yourself and go through the GZ in your condition..." Sam let the threat hang in the air. Then her face crumpled, and she gave Danny a quick hug. "I will hunt you down. Got it?"
"Got it," said Danny.
"Besides," Sam said, "even if we're delayed, that's not the end of the world. Not to mention, and I know you don't want to hear this, but this isn't on you. Jazz and I aren't totally useless."
"Hey!" said Tucker.
"We can help," continued Sam. "We will help. We've dealt with ghost weirdness before, and we're more than happy to deal with this. This won't even be the weirdest thing we've encountered, even if Phantom's subconscious decides it wants us to stick around. I mean, just look at that," she said, hooking her thumb over her shoulder.
"Hey!" said Tucker. "She's right, though," he added. "Even if you're out of commission, we can do this. I mean, don't stop what you're doing, but, your health should be top priority, okay, man?"
Danny made a face. "I'll try to keep it a priority but..."
"It's okay," said Jazz. "You can only do what you can do."
"Right," said Danny.
He returned his attention to the group by the window just in time to hear Jack exclaiming about "Inconsistent internal topologies!"
His lips quirked up.
"Okay, guys," he called. "We should really keep going now!"
