Danny rolls, unhappy. Her alarm clock won't shut up. She's all kinds of twisted in her own blankets, how did she- Her alarm clock won't shut up. She's awoken in a cold sweat again, dark baby hairs damp and stringy around her face, clinging limply to her skin, and her alarm clock is still going off.
"Please." She whimpers, a soft groan in the back of her throat. The alarm clock was merciless and uncaring to her plight, and the relentless sound continues. Her whole body ached, from the balls of her feet to her smallest knuckle. She sat as quickly as the sharp twinge in her ribs allowed her to and punched the off button sharply with her finger. She expects rising to be another challenge, but Boxy must not have fucked up her knee as bad as she thought he did, because her legs, while they feel like part of the one giant bruise that is her body, do not buckle underneath her weight. She pulls the blanket close around her. Danny Fenton can have a cape, even if Phantom doesn't and shouldn't. Her well worn cotton rocket pajama pants are already covered in blanket lint, anyways.
Jazz shuts her door behind her, already dressed and ready for school as she passes Danny in the hallway. She stops in front of Danny, waiting in the silence for a second for any sign of their parents.
"What truck hit you, Danny?" Jazz asks, concern written into her frown.
"Skulker, but he's in a thermos and I'm not," Danny smiles smug, "So I'm winning."
"You call this winning?" Jazz's voice pitched high and alarmed.
"Jazz." Danny says, pulling her blanket cape tight around her shoulders. Her voice drops low as she continues, "I'm about to go eat mom's pancakes, and then go to school. I came so, so close to being dissected in our basement last night."
"Danny, Jazz! These pancakes won't stay ectoplasmic-free for long!" Their mom calls from the foot of the stairs.
"Coming!" Jazz hollers as Danny squares her shoulders and says, "This is a win. I'm going to enjoy it."
She's not usually this sore often anymore, not like sophomore year, when she learned all the flavors of pain bouncing in between Vlad, Skulker, her parents, and everyone else out for a piece of her or her town or both. She's made it through the learning curve, though. At least, Danny hopes so.
She hollers a goodbye to her parents down in the lab, but doesn't wait for a response. They're definitely already engrossed in something ghostly and awful. The ride to school with Jazz is soothing. She seems content to drive quietly, radio playing softly. Danny catches ten more minutes of sleep. There have been more and more ghosts out of the ghost zone lately, and she can't figure out why. The new ghosts won't talk to her, and they're old, from places Danny hasn't physically mapped yet. Age and power aren't always correlated, but some of these new ghosts have power that Danny feels ring deep in her core, a heavy base line instead of the usual bright vibrations her ghost sense presents as. It could be something going on, or it could just be a response to the ghost zone shifting, with Danny in the mix it was hard to tell.
She slumps into her seat next to Sam two seconds after the bell rang, officially late. Mr. Falluca doesn't say anything, and he won't mark her tardy either, but he looks at her, disappointed. Sam's hair is in space buns today, and her lips are painted a deep purple. She glances at Danny as Mr. Lancer starts in on the announcements.
"Dude." She says, voice low.
"Skulker." Danny shrugs a reply. "And Box Ghost, just a little bit."
"Boxy hit you?" Sam asked, shocked.
"I think there's something wrong in the ghost zone." Danny sighs, "I've never seen everyone on edge like this before."
Sam hums, concerned, but Mr. Falluca has started the lecture, so they both turn to attention. Danny misses too much school not to pay attention while she's here.
Danny's phone vibrates in her pocket, an incoming text from Tucker, no doubt. Tucker was removed from Sam and Danny's math class for being too good at math, but Sam had subtly sent him a text with her FentonFone™️ to let him know what Danny said. Disturbances like this are almost always bloody, blowout fights, and just because Danny hasn't lost yet doesn't make her invincible, or so Sam and Tucker keep reminding Danny.
Danny is three math problems from being completely asleep when her core sings from within her, a deep hum when she exhales pale frost into the heated classroom.
"Mr. Falluca," Danny is already on her feet, "May I please use the restroom?"
Dash will be making period jokes for months after this, which is ironic because she hasn't had hers since she died. She doesn't wait to hear his response, hand outstretched for the doorknob. The door swings open before she makes contact, a tall green-tinged man in leather armor is on the other side. He lunges for her, and Danny scampers back. She's never seen anyone who even looks like this guy before, much less this ghost. At least Skulker and Vlad respected the secret identity. Paulina is screaming at her desk. Dash, ever the helpful guy, yells, "Ghost!"
Danny scuttles back, sweeping her arms out to push her classmates behind her. Sam catches on pretty quickly, and she's already herding everyone towards the corner, away from the ghost, by the time he lunges for Danny again. Danny abandons Star, who sits in the front row and was clinging to her biceps, to Sam's capable hands so she can meet the leather donned spectre mid-leap.
She grabs the spirit, slipping her fingers into the seams of the leather with a little intangible help, plants her feet, and throws him towards the windows on the wall opposite the door. He passes through the wall, and part of a window, intangible, rocketing past the scope of view the window provided.
This was usually when Sam and Tucker made their exits. It was about to get ugly. Of course, things couldn't be easy; the universe hates her.
Sam was having trouble convincing the class to leave the corner. The corner, they'd decided, was safe. No way in hell would they follow Sam Manson out of the only safe space, right now.
Sam Manson says, "The ghost will be back, you dimwits. Just because you can't see him anymore doesn't mean he stops existing!"
All the more reason for them to stay right there, in the safe spot, Sam Manson, duh.
"What happens next is your fault," Sam Manson snarls, "Just know that."
Then, Sam Manson pulls out a gun. Or at least, something that looks like one. Smooth, cold metal presses into her palms, the breath in her lungs only steady because she's learned how to force it to be. Flash, behind her, seems to be almost hyperventilating, poor kid. It's an Ectogun, capable of delivering a fast and hard punch of weaponized ectoplasm. It'll leave a human with a nasty ectoinfection, and it takes even Danny off her feet for a few hours.
Danny is staring at her with wide icy eyes. Mr. Ghost will be back any second, and the class is still huddled in the corner. A flash of green and brown outside the window is all the warning they get. Danny turns into a dead sprint towards the door, but it's too late. The spirit dives for Danny, and she collides with the floor, head connecting to tile with an audible thump. She doesn't flinch, even as Paulina starts crying in the background. Instead, Danny tussles with the ghost for an intense five seconds, she gets her first real blow in, a crack across the sternum that she added a little extra ghostly oomf into, hoping no one notices. Sam sees a clear shot and takes it, and the ghost cries out in pain, falling limp. Dark green ectoplasm drips steadily from a deep hole in his chest.
A lone figure rises: Danny rolling to her feet. Smears of red and green painting a violent picture on her white shirt. Sam is at the door, managing to have herded the class from their huddle in the corner. Her dark hair is tangled into wild knots, and blood drips from her nose. Paulina is staring at her, wide eyed, and the class along with her.
Danny wipes her nose with the back of her hand, shoulders squared. "Follow Sam's lead. I'll follow behind you guys."
Paulina didn't like Danny Fenton. Danny Fenton was a loser who dressed like a boy and acted like all of this was below her, even though she was at the bottom of the high school food chain and Paulina took great pleasure in reminding her of that. Not on her own, of course not, she would never get her hands dirty like that. She simply told Dash, in the first grade, after Danny Fenton named all the planets on her handmade model for show and tell on her first day, that he should push her into the mud, and it's only escalated since then.
Danny Fenton was bleeding because she got into a ghost fight and saved them, even Star, who spread that rumor Paulina made up about Danny being a slut freshman year. The door opens, Manson's doing, she wants them to leave.
"Danny." Sam says from behind her. Danny's baby blues focus on a point past Paulina's face, which is not a new phenomenon, not anymore, but still an entirely unwelcome one. She looks horrified, and maybe even scared for a second, before she grits her jaw and pushes through her classmates to the door.
The door opens into a vast green darkness. There don't seem to be walls or planes of any sort, aside from what's built on the floating islands. Some are rocky, dull and lifeless bases that support bustling castles. Some, seems grassy, and sprout flowers of odd colors. When they both turn around and shut the door behind them, the class shakes, apprehension running through the lines of their huddled mass.
"Where are we?" Kwan asks. His voice echoed the class's body language, an undercurrent of fear.
"The ghost zone." Valentine answered, his voice a deep contrast to Danny's identical echoing answer. They make eye contact. Danny Fenton looks away first.
"The good news," Danny starts, "Is that I know where we are."
"You know where we are?" Valentine's voice is strife with tension. His eyebrows downcast, confusion giving way to suspicion. He's smart, as Valentine and Red Hunter.
"What's the bad news?" Paulina asks, looking small. Danny sends her a sympathetic look before wandering over to her where her backpack, kicked over and forgotten in the struggle that had occurred. The ghost seems to have disappeared for now, sunk through the floor to lick his wounds. Danny pulls out several pieces of printer paper taped together, all folded neatly like a map. The paper had Danny's messy scrawl all over it in different colors, it was obviously color coded and well worked on. Danny unfolds it all the way, making her way back to the door. She lets it swing open, revealing the strange green tinged world once again. She holds the map up, and a patch of her messy hand drawn shapes vaguely resemble the rock formation and door layout around them.
"The bad news is that we're quite a way away from either of the closest stable portals that open back up in Amity Park." Danny pauses, pensively, "Though the ghost zone does populate unstable portals to Amity Park that last long enough to get the class through, that if we stumble upon one, we should take the risk and pass through."
"I'm sorry," Valentine snarks, "But you just happen to have a map to the ghost zone with you, and you know where we are?"
"This is the last thing I would have asked for." Danny snaps back. Paulina shuffles backwards at the snarl in Danny's tone, so she takes a deep breath and tries to calm down.
"It's a day and a half hike, mostly through Walker's territory, to my parent's Portal." Danny swallows, eyes scanning the horizon.
"But running into Walker with all of us would be a disaster. It's three days to Vlad's, with the 'Dora's as rest points." Sam says, tracing her finger along another route.
"Three days!" Paulina shrieks, and it echoes across the emptiness of the ghost zone. The room falls silent after that, unease permeating the air.
"What was that?" Star finally asks, concerned as Paulina unglues her hand from her mouth.
"In the ghost zone, humans are the ghost. You can go intangible and float. You can't go invisible though." Sam answers, demonstrating by kicking both feet into the open air outside the door.
"We need to get going. Follow Sam, it's about eight hours to Pandora's." Danny says, zipping her bag and throwing it over her shoulder. "And we need to get out of Walker's haunt, ASAP."
"Wait." Paulina says. "I am absolutely not spending three days in the ghost zone. That would be our whole weekend. Take us to your parents portal."
"No." Danny scoffs.
Paulina shrieks, enraged and unintelligible.
"There's no way we'd all make it past Walker. If we head that way we'll all die here." Sam states bluntly.
"Who the hell is Walker?" Valentine interjects.
"The Ghost Zone's Warden." Sam answers, if a bit sarcastically. "He won't be happy with your general existence here."
"Why?" Dash asks, head tilted. He seems a bit checked out, staring at Danny listlessly. Shock. She needs to get the class moving, or they'll never make it.
"To avoid him, we need to get going." Danny repeats, trying to crowd the class out the door. Danny manages to get everyone out the door, but the second Sam starts heading for Pandora's, Paulina stops.
"Paulina," Star asks, thin fingers wringing together, "What are you doing?"
"I told you I'm not spending my weekeND IN THE GHOST ZONE." She screams, the sound creating a wave of energy in the air. "If you're going that way, then I'm going this way."
With that declaration, she turns and starts heading deeper into Walker's haunt.
"Paulina, no!" Dash cries, headed after her. The class freezes, unsure. Danny takes in a deep breath, and turns to Sam with a determined set to her jaw.
"Take the rest of the class through the Dora's to Vlad's." She tells Sam, who nods with all the seriousness of a general. "Have Tucker meet us with the speeder so we can catch up. I'm almost definitely going to prison again."
"What?" Star sounds alarmed. "Don't leave us, Danny."
"Someone has to go after the airheads, Star." Danny says, sounding exhausted. "Sam will keep you safe."
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