Chapter XCVI
Danny had gone through his fair share of surprises in his short life. The ones that occurred before his accident paled in comparison to the ones that happened after. But no amount of experience could have prepared him for the sight that greeted him as he exited the restroom of the Nasty Burger. Star's shocked, widened eyes stared into his own.
"Fenton?"
" . . . Whatever your last name is?"
"What the heck are you doing?!"
Danny scowled. "What does it look like I'm doing? I'm coming out of the restroom!"
"More like coming out of the closet!" Star pointed to the sign on the bathroom door. The pink stick figure stood on the plaque above his head just over the word "WOMEN'S".
Danny paled. "Oh, that. I can explain-"
"That's the second time I caught you in the girl's room, Fenton."
"And I swear it will be the last." Danny glanced around the Nasty Burger, searching for his friends. He spotted them; Sam laughing and Tucker shaking his head. "Where's your crew?"
"Who, Paulina? She's off with Dash or something. I don't know."
Danny felt a pang of jealousy at the explanation. "Oh."
"Yeah, so Tucker invited me to hang out and now I'm trying to go to the bathroom. And you're in the way."
Danny sidestepped, allowing the blonde girl entrance to the women's room. He breathed a sigh of relief and hurried over to his friend's table.
"Nice one, Danny," Sam joked with a smirk.
"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. It could've happened to anyone," Danny retorted.
"How did you not know what one was the guy's room?" Tucker asked.
"I don't know, I just phased through the roof and turned back to my human form. I wasn't really paying attention."
"Big surprise there. So, how was your date with the Huntress?"
Danny grinned. "She says she's starting to like us time."
Sam's jaw dropped slightly. "Us time?"
"Yup. I think she's really starting to develop a thing for Phantom."
"Well dude, start dating!" Tucker said excitedly. "It would be like super dating! Then you can go super steady, super make-out, super . . . you know, then have a bunch of super babies and have a super family! It's the start of a super life! I can be Super Uncle Tucker!"
"Super dream on," Sam mocked as she threw a French fry at him. "Danny isn't that stupid, unless Phantom is."
"Actually, you can call me Danny in both modes," the boy corrected. "Tweedledee almost blew my cover."
"He called you Danny?" Tucker asked concerned.
"Well Daniel, but you know, same difference. So now Valerie thinks I'm Danny Phantom."
"So wait," Sam started irritably, "I suggested we call you that, like, last year and you said no because it would be too obvious. Then Valerie calls you it and suddenly it's the perfect ruse?"
"You've been really moody lately," Tucker jumped in before Danny could fail miserably while trying to defend himself. "Every time another girl comes up in conversation, you go into attack mode."
Sam glared daggers at the boy. "Let me tell you something, Fryer Tuck, I-"
"Sam, come on, relax a little," Danny said calmly. "We're done with school and we have the whole summer ahead of us to do whatever we want. Why are you being so worked up about everything?"
Sam took a deep breath and sighed. "I don't know."
"We've all been stressing out about stuff lately. I mean, me more than you two obviously-"
"What, you think your problems are more stressful because you're part ghost?" Tucker asked accusingly.
Danny frowned. "My son came all the way back from the future to kill me to stop me from destroying the world," he counted on his finger. "The billionaire-president of the school wants to dissect me or make me her son and kill my mom," the second finger went up. "There's about a million other ghosts that want me dead for some reason or another," he threw his hands up in exasperation. "I think I'm allowed to be a little more stressed out than you."
"Touché," Tucker mumbled.
"But come on, Sam," Danny beamed a winning smile at his gal pal. "Where's my fun-loving friend that used to be hate all the right things, not just everything?" Sam rolled her eyes, but she couldn't keep the smile off her face any longer. "Ah HA! There she is. See, Tucker? We didn't lose her. Now pay up."
"Well gosh dang it," Tucker pretended to reach into his wallet.
"That better be compensation for having to fight with Danny for the girl's room again," Star said with a cheerful expression.
The four students laughed and, for the first time in a long time, Danny was truly happy. Surrounded by friendly faces in a friendly place, he felt at peace. But Tempest and Folium knew that what he was experiencing was the calm before the storm. Unfortunately for the teenager, his life would never yield true peace and true happiness.
Not for long, anyway.
Danny ambled into the cafeteria, stifling a yawn as he slowly and deliberately made his way over to the lunch line. The first three periods had been spent watching boring movies in his classes. Study hall had been a nap period, as it had been for most of the year. Valerie was conspicuously absent, but Danny thought he had heard the unmistakable sound of her banshee board outside the building.
Then came lunch. His favorite period of the day had almost been a chore getting to. Three and a half hours of being awake and doing absolutely nothing was more exhausting than an average day of school. As he plodded through the line, allowing the lunch ladies to pile a smorgasbord of unpalatable foods onto his tray, he noticed that the fatigue was not exclusive to him. The peppiest of peppy students acted normally. The normally sluggish and slow looked like tired zombies.
Danny relented and allowed a yawn to creep out from within his throat. His eyes slowly shut and tears amassed around the ducts. His jaw extended as far as it would go and the low, monotonous tone drifted through the air. Several people next to him followed suit and soon, everyone in the cafeteria was doing it.
"Hey Danny!" Except Sam, who waved to him from their table. Leave it to Sam to be chipper on a day like this.
"Hey Sam," Danny mumbled as he pushed his tray to the end of the table and rested his head in his arms. "How'ya doin?"
"Great! Why is everyone so sleepy?"
"I think the better question," Tucker said sluggishly as he took a seat, "is 'why are you so not sleepy?'"
"I don't know, today just feels like something awesome is gonna happen!"
Danny rolled his eyes. "As if."
"Well you're gonna ace that make up test after school," Sam offered. "That's awesome."
"No, that's good; it's good that I'm gonna ace that test. Awesome would be if he gave me a hundred for the quarter without having to do it."
"Awesome would be if Sam-" Danny tried to stare Tucker down, but it came off as a halfhearted gesture, "let us eat our lunch in peace," he finished, unfazed.
Sam pouted. "Not even a joke today?"
"I'm too tired to pick one."
Danny grinned. "Maybe something awesome did happen today."
"Shut it," Tucker mumbled.
Danny stood up and took his lunch over to the garbage, throwing all of it away including the tray. Too tired to care, he plodded out of the cafeteria just as the bell rang. More pointless classes, then two hours after school to save his grade. Danny liked that part, but ghost attacks had been few and far between with the release of DOOMED. He was starting to crave some real action.
Valerie made her way down the halls of Casper High, weaving through human traffic like she had been doing it all her life. It was the end of the day, and she was doing her best to go against the flow of student bodies. Behind her was the exit, which was where all of the school's populace was headed; all but her. In front of her were classrooms, which was from where all of the school's populace was trying to flee; all but her.
Finally squeezing through the last swells of the crowd, the dark skinned teenager slowed her pace and headed for Mr. Falluca's room. There was a matter of a test she had been absent for to attend to. Her grades had been stable enough throughout the year, dipping ever so slightly when her mother died, but she bounced right back. The kindly teacher had said he would be in his room after school. She just hoped she wasn't too late.
Sam watched as the hacky sack descended from the air. With cat-like agility, her foot came up to meet the object. She hadn't calculated how fast her foot was traveling, however, and the hacky sack flew out an open window. Tucker looked from the window to his friend with an agitated look.
"Oops," she giggled. "Sorry!"
"You better be," Tucker gestured to the window, "go get it."
"Yeah, ok. I'll get right on that," she tugged at the ends of her skirt. "I'm not climbing out of and back through a window without pants on."
Tucker sighed and walked over to the window. As he steadied himself against the windowsill in preparation of climbing out of the building, a red blaring light winked on above his head. Startled, Tucker fell off the sill and landed in a heap on the floor.
"Tucker!" Sam rushed over to him. "Are you ok?"
"Oh, I'm just dandy!" he snapped sarcastically. "What the heck is that thing?"
"Fire drill?"
"Are you kidding? We aren't worthy of such a high tech warning system." Tucker was already hacking into the school system's mainframe to get his answers. "Well look at what we have here!"
"What? What is it?"
Tucker opened his mouth to reply, but his peripheral vision caught movement on the other side of the room. From the wall, a steel barrier was sliding across the gap left open by the door.
"Later! Go, move!"
Tucker pushed Sam out the doorway and darted from the room himself. Luckily, the steel barrier was moving quite slow. They made it out with time to spare.
"What the heck was that?" Sam looked at the sealed door frame like it might attack.
"Automated security defense system," Tucker scrolled through the data on his PDA. "Designed to protect students and faculty during ghost attacks."
"And we're out in the hallway?" Sam asked.
"Yeah? So?"
"If it was designed to protect us, then shouldn't we be in there?"
Tucker's eyes widened in realization. "Oh . . ."
Sam winced as the blaring siren grew louder. The red flashing lights didn't ease the unsettling feeling in the air. "Can you shut this down?"
"Yeah, gimmie a second . . ." Tucker tapped away at the numerous buttons on his device. In seconds, the alarms shut off.
"Thank you," she sighed in relief. "Come on, we better go find Danny."
Tucker nodded in agreement and the two hurried off. "I just hope he's ok. This system is designed to defend the school against ghosts."
"Well this is Plasmius' school," Sam said bitterly. "I don't think she would risk having her prodigal son zapped by her own system."
"Maybe. Or she had this was installed overnight by ghosts in order to capture him."
"What?"
"Yeah, says right here the company that installed the system is Dalv Co. I dunno what that means, or why Plasmius would bother making a company to shroud her own operations instead of just operating them."
The two ran in silence. Mr. Lancer's room was up one floor and on the opposite end of the building. "I really hope he's ok," Sam whispered.
"I know you do," Tucker teased through gasps for air. "Dang, I really need to get in shape."
"I know you do." Sam smiled. "How is it that the macho man on Team Phantom is as fit as a walrus?"
"I'll have you know that walruses are very-"
"Can it, we're here."
The two stopped right outside Lancer's door. Or rather, Sam stopped outside his door. Tucker stumbled to the end of the hallway and bumped into the wall. His body fell back like a tree and, for the second time in less than ten minutes, he was on the ground.
Sam rolled her eyes and studied the door. "Same thing happened up here," she stated. "Come on, Tucker, get this thing opened!"
"Just gi . . . ve me a se . . . cond; I ne . . . eed to ca . . . tch my bre . . . ath."
Sam leaned against the wall and waited for Tucker to slow his breathing. Finally, he shakily stood to his feet and pulled out his PDA with an even shakier hand.
"Good grief, Tuck, we ran for a minute and a half! You can't honestly be that worn out!"
"You know what? Fu – Oh," Tucker's attention fell completely on his PDA. "That's not good."
"What?"
"I can open all the doors inside the school, but I can't get access the controls to the exits or the windows."
"The windows are sealed shut too?"
"So it seems," Tucker rubbed his chin. "See if Danny can't get out of the room on his own, I need some time to work on our way out."
Sam rolled her eyes and knocked on the door. It felt strange, not like metal should. Instead, it felt smooth. Almost as if it was coated in some kind of –
ZAP! "Ow!"
"Are you alright?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, Mr. Lancer. Just, uh, static shock, that's all."
Sam grinned at the sound of her friend's voice. "Danny, you ok?"
"We're fine," he confirmed. "Get Tucker to work some of his technical hocus pocus on the door."
"He's trying to open our exits. Seems he has free reign over everything but the way out and the windows."
"I think we could be more help to him out there instead of trapped in here," Danny snapped.
Sam glared at Tucker. "Hey geek-wad, would you mind springing our best friend and favorite teacher from jail first?"
Tucker sighed. "Fine. Hang on."
No sooner had the words left his mouth did the barrier sealing off Lancer's room retract back into the wall. Danny cautiously poked his head out into the hallway. Confident it was safe, or at least that he wasn't going to be electrocuted again, he took several tentative steps out. Lancer wheeled himself from his room behind the boy.
"A Tale of Two Cities, what happened?!" Lancer exclaimed.
"New security system has a bug," Tucker replied. "I'm doing my best to crack the protection around the exits, but the firewalls are strange. Like they're adapting to better defend themselves."
"That can't be good," Danny remarked.
"It's not. Unless Danny Phantom can come in and phase us out of the building-"
"Which would be impossible, I'm afraid," Lancer interrupted. The three students shared horrified expressions, believing the teacher had discovered his secret. Lancer didn't seem to notice. "The security system is designed to be ghost proof. I don't think Phantom's intangibility would help us."
"Oh, yeah, I guess you're right," Danny mumbled, relieved beyond expression that his secret was safe.
"But why did you call him Danny Phantom?" Lancer asked Tucker.
"Oh, well, he kinda feels like he owes Danny a debt of gratitude for freeing him from the Ghost Zone so he can help people," Tucker explained.
"And he took my first name as his to, uh, honor me, or something," Danny finished.
Lancer rubbed his chin. "Fascinating."
"Yeah, it sure is. Now let me see what I can do with this-"
"We should find Bob," Lancer interrupted Tucker, much to the boy's annoyance. "Er, Mr. Falluca. He could probably do something with it from the school's mainframe. You said you can access all the doors inside the building that don't lead to outside?"
"Yeah," Tucker keyed in the biology/math teacher's room number. "I've got it. Let's go, it should be opening right now."
The three students started to sprint down the hall, but remembered their handicapped teacher and slowed. Lancer shot past them, accelerating down the hall faster than the trio thought possible.
"Last one there gets an F on the first test next year!"
Danny, Sam, and Tucker sprinted off after him.
Technus watched as the ghost boy and his allies worked together to bypass his security lockdown. The boy, Tucker, had enough data on his PDA to expunge the ghost master of technology from the system permanently. But that would only be useful of the boy ever learned of his presence. Hopefully, he would not.
He could easily have denied the boy access to the doors inside the building as effectively as he blocked the exits and windows. But there was something of a kindred spirit he shared with the African American teen. He used technology to solve problems, in this case, ones caused by technology. How ironic.
There was, however, another force at play that allowed Tucker Foley to free his friends and teachers; a desire that had been building up in Technus ever since he had become a DOOMED II phenomenon. Technus wanted a challenge. He no longer was immune to physical attacks, as the Guys in White had solidified his binary form, but he was still virtually unstoppable. And he knew either the techno-geek or the ghost child would prove to be worthy adversaries. If only he knew how worthy. . .
The organism watched Technus with its red, sinister eye. It had finally sorted through its false memories; the memories of Daniel Fenton. It had angrily come to terms with the truth of its existence. It was a failed experiment, an amorphous conglomeration of cloned flesh and circuitry. But its mind was not feral. There was a sentience inside the clone, but one that only knew hate and vengeance.
But driving that hate, driving that desire for vengeance, was knowledge. During its short stay at Plasmius' Wisconsin castle, it had started out as a monster, looking to consume any and everything as food. Information and data stored on Plasmius' computers was copied over and over in a vain effort to satiate this craving. It failed to deter its hunger, but it was stored in the technological half of its mind. Once it had attained sentience, the information was reviewed. And the creature was disgusted by what it saw.
Plasmius wanted to clone again. The organism had to stop her. The only surefire way to do so would be to kill two birds with one stone. It had to destroy Danny Phantom and use his power to destroy Plasmius. It didn't want to kill its 'father', but what choice did it have? With an inaudible hiss or resentment, the organism finished the intricacies in its plan. One it hoped that Danny Phantom would fall right into.
To Be Continued
A/N: Show time, people! Take your places! And sorry I ruined a perfectly good cliffhanger. Or, if you liked it, then I'm glad I did my job. Also, I didn't really go back all too often to check over this chapter for spelling mistakes. If you find any, please point them out to me. It makes me less inclined to make the same one again in the future.
And thus begins a new age; the TEMPORARY and EXPERIMENTAL age of anonymous reviews. Everyone else is doing it, and I thought I'd give it a try.
Transformers Animated toys hit US stores en masse! To those of you everywhere else who had them already, well, I extend my middle finger to you. Do you know how painful it is waiting for them when the show is almost through with the second season? Probably not. So look out Wal-Mart. I've got a guap of grad money burning a hole in my wallet, and I'm looking to fill my shelves.
Maybe you will find the allusion to another character in this chapter? He will make an appearance at the end of this segment. After that, it's the Maternal Instinct redux followed by Control Freaks and Public Enemies rolled into one. After that . . . REALITY WARS!
I'll have to bring up a concern I have on that before I get to it. It involves length and the Roman Numerals. Until then, enjoy this chapter. Danny and Valerie shippers? Uh, yeah . . . enojy it while it lasts.
Thanks to all my reviewers, especially Fulcon, inukagome15, MissMeliss4251, Bitchy Princess, Silverline Scimitar, Vorago Atrox, darkbunny92, Shining Zephyr, and Thunderstorm101.
Oh my God, it's Alfred Molina! – Spider-Man in the Laser Collection (and me in every movie I see him in)