Diclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom or any characters affiliated, nor am I making any money off of this.

Chapter Three

Well, the DNA test only took a few minutes. A couple of scientist-doctor people took a blood sample and swabbed the inside of my mouth, and told me to scurry along and that the results would be in within two days. Something about 'advanced analysis.'

During the whole thing I was sitting there, hoping beyond hope that that test would come up negative. I'm not sure why I was so worried: I was already there, right? What much more could being their property do to me?

I got back to my room, trying to ignore my sore arm. Too many needles. The clock blinked 9:01. Meaning I'd been awake for three hours. I shouldn't have been. Getting up at six o'clock is not natural. Especially when there seems to be no reason for it.

The more I think about it, the stranger this place gets.

Suddenly I felt the urge to just try and escape. They must be waiting for me to do this. None of it's real. As soon as they get me back in they're just going to cut me open like they're supposed to be doing. So I transformed, went intangible, and flew up towards the ceiling as fast as I could with such a small area to gather momentum.

WHAM! I hit the ceiling, head first, and fell back towards the floor, transforming on impact. "Owwowowow." I rubbed my head, confident now that there would be some kind of a knot there soon. My temper was drained, and I just felt stupid, now.

Speaking of my temper - why wasn't I yelling more? And why was I taking everything Ms. Redd said at face value? They'd explained away these things, in a way, with their reward systems and various other things. But you can't get that many people - especially that many people with a serious ability to hurt - all in one building without some kind of an uprising. But nearly everyone at breakfast earlier that morning had seemed resigned.

For all I knew this place really was a fortress, and they'd all figured that out. I wasn't getting out any time soon, at any rate, without pretty much killing every employee here. Which wasn't going to happen.

And then that thing about the possibility of me becoming the government's property. Why had I just submitted to the test, without kicking and screaming and the like?

I knew why, actually. The thought hadn't occurred to me at the time. Which was equally strange.

The thought came up to just ignore it and accept this all, too. I pushed it away, it came back. I pushed it away again, and it just kept popping up. This was a battle that went on for awhile. Finally, I couldn't push it away anymore, and I just leaned against the wall.

Maybe I ought to just stop resisting. I'm not getting out, I thought.

Suddenly I felt better. The image of some faceless, generic . . . thing, reaching out to me sprang up in my field of vision. "Resistance is useless," it said, and I nodded, grabbing its hand.

Then I let go, as a sudden wave of awareness washed over me. Maybe I was ready to stop worrying a little. Especially since the idea of doing just that was so doggedly taunting me. But as for joining in on the ignorance fest that seemed to be this place - well, I wasn't going down without a fight.

- - -

Day two came and went, as did day three. Day three I had a medical examination, but beyond that I just went up to grab some breakfast, stayed in my room for a bit, went to go see Ms. Redd, and then went back to my room.

With Jane I just talked about how much I hated this place (which was less than I would've thought. I began to suspect they put drugs in the food, or something), and told the occasional story about the stress of being Danny Phantom.

Dang it. I hadn't thought about that in what seemed like forever. Though it had only been four days since I came here. That was my new definition of forever. Every day my just dragged by.

I finished eating on day four about thirty minutes later than usual, so I had to go straight to Ms. Redd's office.

"Come in," she sighed when I knocked on the door. I walked in.

"Hi," I said.

"Good morning, Danny."

I slid into my chair. "What do you want to know today?" I asked, slightly disdainfully. I far from enjoyed this. It was just becoming oddly routine.

"Yesterday you were talking about your school."

I sighed. "Yeah. Okay. Where was I?"

She flipped through several pages of notes. I hated that clipboard. "Mr. Lancer."

"Right. My English/math/world lit/chemistry/history teacher. And vice-principal. Who uses book names for curses and assigns an unholy amount of homework."

"Did you have any other teachers?" she asked.

"Mr. Folucca, who taught biology. I really have no idea why they even bothered to get another, seeing as Lancer taught everything else."

"Mm." She scribbled something down. "How did Mr. Lancer feel about you?" she asked. "You clearly don't like him."

I snorted. "He didn't like me, either. A 2.3 GPA doesn't get you anywhere with the teachers. That, and the fact that I was constantly skipping class . . ."

She raised an eyebrow. "I wouldn't have taken you for the type to play hooky."

"I didn't! I had to constantly go off and fight ghosts."

"I guess things make sense to him now, then."

"Yeah, I guess."

This kind of chatter went on for our allotted period of time. At the end, however, Jane looked up at me. "It's time for you to get your results from the lab," she said quietly.

I sighed, and nodded. "They're in, huh? I'm guessing you already know what they are."

She looked up, startled. "No, I don't. Don't . . . never mind. It's time for you to go."

I stood up. "Whatever." I tucked my hands into my pockets (I'd replaced my clothes with some I'd found in my dresser on the second day), and left. I heard Ms. Redd hyperventilate slightly as I shut the door.

The lab was two floors above the main one, and I so I hopped on the elevator as soon as I got to it. I jammed the button for floor four, when suddenly somebody behind me spoke.

"Lab date, eh? That must suck." I whirled around. There was no way I could have missed that guy coming in. He was standing dead center in the back.

"Where'd you come from?" I asked, as soon as I got control of my heart rate.

He half-smirked, half-grinned. "I get that a lot. Uncontrollable invisibility. The least dangerous power in all the land, and they still feel the need to package me up here. Toby, by the way."

Someone I could sympathize with, at least in terms of powers., although I actually could be labeled a threat to society. "I'm . . . er . . . Danny."

Why was the elevator so slow . . .?

"What's your power, anyway?" he said nonchalantly. How could anyone ask that so casually?

Then I remembered where I was.

"I'm, well, half-ghost," I said. Odd that some random stranger I met on an elevator would be the first person I would ever actually just come out and say that to.

He raised an eyebrow. "That's certainly interesting. No one else here like that . . ."

Finally, the elevator came to a halt and I got off. I noticed he was going to floor five.

What's floor five for? I wondered. Mark never mentioned floor five on his tour. Then I began to wonder why I cared.

I walked up to the receptionist type person. "Danny Fenton," I said. She typed something in with a bored expression on her face.

"ID?"

"99325718." It had taken me a while to memorize that. Luckily, however, I have nothing if not free time.

She typed something else in, and said, "Lab ninety-two." She paused, and looked at me. "Good luck."

"Yeah," I said, and walked on. No one seemed to have any faith whatsoever that I was, in fact, human. I glanced down at my hand.

Solid flesh and bone. Like, well, nearly always. I was not green, I was not made out of rock, and I was not overly prone to dripping slime.

Appearances, I would've thought, would matter something here. Apparently, not so much.

I knocked on the door of lab ninety-two. "Just come in," I heard my 'doctor' say.

I opened it up, and walked in. "You're three minutes late," Dr. Jared said gruffly. Though this was hardly a tragedy, given my record, I muttered a quick 'sorry.'

"You're here for your test results," he said, not once looking up from a stack of papers he was looking through.

"Yeah," I said nervously.

"Just sit down, then," he said, gesturing to dentist-style chair. I sat down without hesitation. This guy had a general aura of 'interrupt me and I'm putting arsenic in your medicine.'

Dr. Jared put down his papers, and flipped through several file folders before coming up with several more sheets of paper. "How's life been treating you?" he asked absentmindedly.

"Erm . . . fine, I guess." Not the truth, but hey . . .

"That's good," he mumbled. He was attempting to make some sort of conversation, which was commendable, given how engrossed he was in his reading and for the fact that he didn't seem the social type. "As found with the aid of information supplied by the Guys in White, you have an ecto-classification of R12, and a spectral power classification of 7.9."

I didn't ask what that meant, exactly. I was too busy waiting for him to answer the million dollar question.

"You also have blood type AB positive, and several dangerous diseases can be found in your blood."

I also didn't ask why the heck he was telling me all this.

"But beyond this extra information, the test came up positive. I'm sorry."

I watched my world crumble before my very eyes.