The overhead lights snapping on woke Danny with a start. He scrambled to his feet surprised that he had fallen asleep given his situation. His captor stalked through the room not looking at him, muttering under her breath what sounded like an endless repetition of a single curse word. Danny wondered what could have set her so badly.

She looked like she was dressed for a night on the town, tight, black pants, a silky lavender blouse with black bead earrings and necklace. Her hair was gelled up and twisted into hundreds of little spikes. Her feet, now sticking out from under the console of another of the glass cylinder devices were in high heeled ankle high boots of the kind that his sister often looked at in the mall, would make some disparaging remark and walk away, only to stop and look at them again the next time she passed the store.

Thinking of his sister filled Danny with depression. Like most little brothers he found his sister an annoying buttinski but also an intimate part of his life, like one's mother or father, but unlike one's parents, an older sister was also a peer, someone one could yell back at, complain about and openly respond to. It's hard to see that as love, but the thought that he wouldn't see Jazz, or Sam, Tucker or his parents again because his captor was planning to kill him was more than he could bear. He beat against the glass wall of his prison which only to set off the alarms and getting him shock for his effort.

In a desperate rage, he changed to Danny Phantom and again attacked the cylinder. When all his pounding, ecto-plasmic blasts and intangibility efforts failed, Danny sucked in his breath and let go of his Ghostly Wail. The profoundly powerful vibrations hit the glass walls -- only to bounce off. They echoed back at Danny, driving him to his knees. As so often was the case, Danny passed out momentarily from using the Wail and woke to find himself a naked Danny Fenton. Discouragingly, all his efforts hadn't disturbed at all the girl working under the other cylinder device.

Perhaps because she was still cursing up a stream. Instead of a monotonous "frick, frick, frick," she was now interspersing them with the occasional "'ouch', 'damn', and 'crap.'" A small motherboard with a half-dozen dangling cables suddenly fly across the room to smash against the brick wall. A screwdriver followed a moment later.

"You'll never get anything finished like that," Danny comment, then had to laugh when he realized that he had not only repeated something his mother frequently told him, but said it in her own cadence. It was true, you really do turn into your parents!

The girl scrambled out from under the device to paw for another screwdriver and sub-assembly. She paused to tell Danny to do something impossible.

"I'm just saying," Danny said, ignoring her suggestion. "Dad always told me that when you lose your temper with machines its time to walk away. Because you're going to make some kind of mistake that going to blow up in your face. He was right, you know. One time, I got so mad trying to take apart a Fenton Finder I just slammed a screwdriver into it. Hit one of the capacitors. Fully charged. It threw me across the room. Took half a day before feeling returned to my fingertips. True story."

It was too. Of course Danny had been jury-rigging all the Fenton Finders in the house to not pick up his specific spectral vibration and not actually helping his father with anything. Also it had been his mother who had told him about walking away when one becomes too angry. Sadly, this was one lesson his father, Jack Fenton had still not learned.

Danny hadn't considered any strategic advantage when he'd said his father had given him that advice. He was just a boy who liked his father but the effect on Kat Bowen was total.

"Your father," she snarled, "is a big, fat, idiot who couldn't find his way out of a paper bag even if he had a map."

"Hey! That's my father you're talking about."

"It sucks to be you, doesn't it!" and with a laugh she ducked under the console where half a minute later she screamed then came out sucking a bleeding finger. "Not a word out of you, ghost boy," she snapped as she went over to an old first aid station mounted near the doorway.

She bandaged her finger was went back to the machine she was working on. Instead of getting back under it she opened the purse she'd thrown on the console top when she'd first come in and pulled out an inhaler. She took a couple puffs from them, shaking her head violently after each hit. She smiled for a moment then dug in her purse again for a pill box, shook out a couple small tablets and swallowed them without water. She looked at her hand trembling, apparently a reaction to one of the things she'd taken and dug out a different pill bottle and took something fro it.

"geeze, lady, how many drugs are you on?" Danny asked

"None of your business."

"I'm just saying, you know, this might not be the best time to mess up your body with drugs."

"It's my body and I'll do with it whatever I want to, OK? Why should you care? You're going to be dead in a few minutes, anyway!"

Danny slumped down in his prison, acutely aware of what she said. He was going to die if he couldn't find some way out of this prison, or if he couldn't talk her out of doing what she was doing.

"Have you ever considered that maybe its just the drugs speaking?" he asked. "Maybe if you stayed off the drugs, you know, things might not look so bad?" Danny suppressed the smile he felt coming to his lips. This was right out of one of those high school videos they were always showing in health class. Those heart-to-heart talks always worked there. She looked like someone who would respond to a little sympathy.

"Go to hell!" Kat Bowen advised him.

"You don't really want to kill anybody..."

"Yes I do!" the girl interrupted. "I want to kill them slow and painfully. I want them to look into my eyes with their last dying breathe and ask 'why?' so I can tell them, 'cause I'm not a 'dude,' dude! I want them to know my pain!"

"Are they, seriously, people who could know other people's pain?"

"I'll take what I can get, as long as they end up dead!"

"After you kill them, then what?" Danny was floundering since his high school self-help video idea had collapsed under him. "How are you going to live with yourself knowing that you killed a couple guys?"

"I'll feel fricking great!"

"God, you're crazy..."

"Of course I'm crazy," the girl laughed. "I told you that before. "I'm plumb fricking crazy. I've thought long and hard about this. Crazy was the only way forward."

She paused to flip a switch on the console. All the lights came on, some blinking through a sequence of colors before settling on green. She seemed satisfied with everything. "And now, my little turtledove.....it's show time!" She laughed as she sat down and directed an over-head crane to move over the glass cylinder mounted on her console and drop a hook that met and snapped onto a loop in the cylinder's top. A push of another button caused a hiss of pneumatics and faint pops as the clamps on the base of her cylinder released. Slowly the crane lifted the cylinder high enough to her to stand on the bottom of the enclosure.

The girl stood up. Her hands went to her ears and removed the several earrings and stubs there, dropping them on the top of the console. A necklace and a belly button piercing followed. She swept her hands over her face, apparently looking for any other studs or piercing in her face. Satisfied with that, she gathered the bottom of her shirt and pulled it over her head. She dropped it on the table then reached behind her for the hooks in her bra.

"Hey! What are you doing?"

"Getting right." she answered.

"Why are you taking off your clothes?"

"So they won't interfere with the transference."

"Clothes has nothing to do with it. You don't have to take your clothes off. You didn't have to take my clothes off. You don't even have to do this. Look I could beat your ex-partner's up and pretend to be you. That'll teach them a lesson in sexual harassment and no one has to die."

She dropped her fancy stiletto shoes to the floor and reached for the zipper of her slacks.

"Please, if I'm going to die, I don't want to the last thing I see to be your fat ass..."

"Hey, this is choice material here," she snarled, slapping one cheek loudly. "People have fought to get their hands on this!"

"Oh, lord," Danny groaned and turned away.

After a moment he heard her call out, "Computer, voice command mode 'on.'

A synthesized voice responded "Voice command mode initiated."

"Identity check."

"Voice identify as Kat Bowen."

Initiate ghost transfer procedure."

"Ghost Transfer Procedure initiated."

Danny braced himself for who knew what but the computer slowly worked its way through a long number of steps. Lower the cylinder; securing the cylinder; charging capacitors, warming up this or that device. Danny found himself thinking about the people he'd miss when he was die.

A burning, incinerating blast of electricity snapped through a cylinder Danny was in. Pain blotted out all thought. Pain so intense that he couldn't breath, wasn't sure his heart was even pumping. He could faintly smell his flesh singeing. With a spastic convulsion his muscles lost all control and he fell in a flop to the bottom of his prison. As he blacked out he could feel himself being torn atom from atom.

****

Bolt-cutters had opened a gap through the fence surrounding the deserted factory. An electric saw had cut through the deadbolt of the door leading into the lighted build. Jazz had fretted that the noise would attract someone. It hadn't.

They had raced through the building looking for the room with all the lights. It was the sound of breaking glass that brought them to the right place. The room was cluttered with a scattering of packing crate surrounding three odd-looking machines. Heavy steel benches lined the walls. One of the odd machines looked half finished, another had a six foot tall glowing glass tube like some kind of giant neon light stacked on top of it. The third was much like the second except that a tall form in a skintight black jumpsuit was climbing out of the wreckage of the glass tube. The person was tall, with snow-white hair, somewhat shaggy in length, glowing green eyes and an angular face not unlike Danny's, but older and crueler looking. There was a large stylized "D" on the chest.

"Oh, Lord, no!" Tucker groaned. "It's Dark Danny. He got loose!" Wild-eyed, Tucker threw himself behind one of the packing crates. Cautiously he looked around the wooden box to see if the creature had noticed him. Dark Danny was a survival from an aborted reality ten years in the future. He was what Danny could have become if he had lost all humanity. Dark Danny was mean, cruel and vindictive. And ten times more powerful than Danny was now. And supposedly a prisoner inside a Fenton Thermo stored deep inside the Ghost zone.

"That's not Dark Danny," Sam called from the packing crate next to his."That's a woman."

"Dark Danny's a woman?"

"No, that's probably Kat Bowen with Danny's powers."

The corner of packing crate Tucker had ducked behind exploded. His glasses protected his eyes from the burst of splinters but he could feel a bunch of them sticking in the rest of his face.

"What's she trying to do?" Tucker complained as he pulled one or two of the longer splinter from put of his cheek.

"Trying to kill us, dontcha think?" Sam replied

Tucker looked at the Fenton lipstick blaster he had been carrying and pocketed it. The Fenton lipstick was a surprisingly power blaster built inside a standard tube of lipstick. It was light, maneuverable and, with practice, very accurate. "We're going to need bigger guns," Tuck muttered as he slipped off the MK1 blaster off his shoulder. Jazz had brought it along from the Fenton's Weapons Vault. His first shot caught the ghost woman right in the middle of the "D", knocking her to the floor but she instantly bounced back up, looking unhurt. Tucker gulped. "Doing a dang good job, if you ask me," Tucker muttered.

Sam popped up from behind her packing crate and fired a couple rounds as well. Tucker noticed that instead of her usual goop gun, Sam was sporting a Mk1 as well.

"I thought you didn't believe in hurting ghosts?" he asked as more of his shelter was blown away by the mad woman with Danny's ghost's powers.

"For Danny I'm willing to make an exception."

Jazz made a dash from the work bench she's jumped behind to Tucker's packing crate. "What's going on?" she demanded. "Where's Danny?"

"I'm more thinking how are we going to get out of here alive."

"I'm not leaving without Danny," Jazz replied.

"Well, I don't see him and if we don't get out of here quick, I don't think we're going to get out of here at all."

"Sam?" Jazz called across to her.

"I'm staying till we find Danny."

"He could be anywhere," Tucker argued.

"He has to be here," Jazz countered. "It looks like Bowen just stole his powers. She doesn't seem to know how to use them yet. So Danny has to be close by."

Jazz had been pulling parts out of various pockets in her shirt, pants and jacket and snapping them together. When she finished she was holding a rifle-like device at least twice as large as the Mk1 blaster. She stood up and snapped a shot at the Ghost Woman The shot slammed the ghost woman against the far wall of the room, scorching the paint off the bricks around her. Jazz watched in amazement as the ghost woman seemed to blur for a moment, throwing off two shadows, one of a tall, twenty-something woman and the other a much smaller and definitely male boy.

Tucker threw himself at Jazz's knees knocking her to the floor just as the ghost woman recovered and fired an ecto-blast in her direction. They both scrambled for cover at the woman suddenly flew across the room.

"I can fly!" she laughed. "I can blow things up with a thought. I'm like a God!"

"Then thank goodness I'm an Atheist!" Sam answered, standing up to unleash a long burst from her gun. The woman staggered under the impacts and dropped to the floor.

"You're on my list girly!" the Ghost Woman grunted between clenched teeth.

But Sam had dodged from behind her protective packing crate to the device with the man-sized glowing tube. "Danny!" she called. "He's in here!"

The huddled thing on the floor of the cylinder stirred. Danny's dark hair lifted. He gazed at her with unfocused eyes. "Sa--" he whispered before his head fell back down.

"What did you do to him!" she screamed and fired another round at the Ghost Woman.

Jazz and Tucker race up to join Sam. "What is this?" Tucker asked.

"Obviously, it's some kind of extraction device to suck Danny's ghost powers out of him and feed it to someone else." Jazz replied.

"Obviously?" Tucker echoed dubiously. A blast from the ghost woman made them all duck behind the machine.

"Can we reverse it?" Sam asked.

"Hardly," Tucker said, "she broke the other machine when she got out."

"Can we get Danny out of here?" Sam insisted.

"Maybe. Let me have a look at these controls."

"Hurry up. Danny doesn't look well."

"I think he's dying." Jazz whispered.

"Damn it!" Sam cursed. "Help me find something to break this glass." She scuttled along the floor looking at various broken timbers and boards. Nothing looked big enough or strong enough for the task.

"Sam, get back here," Tucker ordered. "I think we've got to shut down this machine before we try to get Danny out of there. Yiiips! Someone give me some cover!" A blast from the Ghost Woman had scored a burnt furrow on the console near his hands.

Jazz stood up and took another shot, hitting the woman again on the chest. Again she was blown against the far wall of the room they were in. Again there was the strange impression that for that instant the ghost woman had split in two.

Sam was wresting with a length of 2 by 4 from one of the blown up packing crates. She finally pulled loose a three foot length which she leaned against the console Tucker was working on. "Just in case,"

Jazz had moved some distance away from Tucker, seeking shelter behind a steel workbench pushed up against a wall. The ghost woman would have to either attack her or Tucker but not could not do both. Sam ran to join her.

"You've got to call your parents," Sam said as she slide in beside Danny's sister.

"I can't call them, then they'll know."

"If you don't call them Danny will die. We don't have a choice."

"I...."

"It's too late to hope to protect Danny's secret. We've got to keep him alive."

"They're too far away," Jazz protested.

"The way your father drives?" Sam scoffed. "If you tell them Danny was attacked by a ghost they'll be here in under five minutes! Look, your father's a lot smarter than all of us combined. He could figure out that machine and reverse whatever it did to Danny in no time."

"But...."

"It's Danny's only hope."

They'd been taking turns popping up and firing at the Ghost Woman keeping her too distracted and pinned down by gun fire to do more than hover in one corner of the factory room and send occasional ecto-plasm blasts their way.

"I don't th -- think Danny has five minutes," Jazz choked out. "We've got to think of something now, before he -- he --" Jazz couldn't bring herself to finish her sentence. "She's learning, too. I think that last time she almost deflected my rifle blast. We can't let her learn how to use Danny's powers."

"Right." Sam had a strange look in her eye but before Jazz could ask what she planned to do, Sam jumped up screaming "Die you miserable son of a ...." the rest was lost in an endless scream as the Goth girl charged straight for Kat Bowen, pouring out a continue stream of blaster fire,

"Sam, no!" Jazz cried, then jumped up to add her weapon's fire to Sam's.

Sam got to within twenty feet of the crazy women before Kat hit her with an ectoplasm fireball. Sam was knocked off her feet and skidded on the cement floor back to where Jazz could run out and drag her behind a packing crate. Half of Sam's T-shirt was burned away. The exposed skin was reddened, blisters seemed to form even as Jazz watched. She'd kept hold of her gun though and was already struggling to her feet as Jazz tried to hold her down.

"Tucker, come here, we need you!" Jazz called.

Tucker was finding the security on the strange machine more difficult than imagined. It had taken him longer to get a command line interface open then he had even expected and then found that the command structure wasn't like anything he'd ever used before. He was just beginning to understand the command structure when Danny lifted his head. "Tuck? Is that you? Tell Sam I--" and he collapsed again.

"Don't go all weird on me, " Tucker told the unconscious boy. "We'll get you outta there."

Then Jazz called. Tucker debated whether it would be better to continue working on the machine or see what Jazz wanted. A look at the file directory convinced him to run over to Jazz.

"Keep Sam from getting herself killed," Jazz ordered.

"She won't call their parents," Sam complained.

"What's that got to do..." Tucker began, then throw himself on Sam when she started to run down the aisle again.

Kat was able to dodge most of Sam's blaster fire this time, showing a mobility in flight she hadn't had a few minutes before. But she was so busy dancing around Sam's shots that she didn't notice Jazz standing up, carefully aiming and letting rip with a half dozen bursts. The heavy rounds of the Mk2 blaster caught her once again in the chest. Not only did it blow her back to the far wall of the building but again there was that split image, one decidedly smaller than the other.

Jazz squatted down and pulled out a thick cylinder from a back pocket. She opened up a sleeve of the blaster, ejected the cylinder that was in it and inserted the new one. "Either of you guys pick up extra batteries for your blasters?" she asked.

"Call your parents!" Sam insisted.

"Does she always split up when you hit her with your blaster?" Tucker asked.

"I think."

"But why? I've been Danny get hit by ectoplasm lots of time and he's never done anything like that."

"Of course, that's it! She's got Danny's powers but she's not Danny, right. So I don't think Danny's powers have actually integrated with her. I think if we hit here with all our blaster power at the same time we might be able to force Danny's ghost powers out of her body."

"Then what. It's been just going back to her. We've got to make it go back to Danny."

"I know how to take care of that," Sam exclaimed and jumped up before the others could react. She dashed back to the machine holding Danny and grabbing the two by four smashed the glass tube he was in. Danny groaned as the broken shards feel on him but was too weak to move.

Kat Bowen swooped down towards Sam with an evil grin on her lips. She was forming a huge ball of plasm she obviously intended to drop on Sam but blaster fire from Jazz and Tucker knocked her off her course. Reflectively she threw the ectoplasm at them, forcing them to dive out of its way. Before she could form another plasma ball Sam had her gun up and was pumping fire in her direction.

Jazz and Tucker joined her. Caught in a cross-fire Kat found herself unable to move in any direction that didn't make the attacked fire worse. She tried to draw up a shielding wall, She'd seen ghosts do this before and finally had figured out how to extrude the ecto-energy from her body to make the screen. But the charges from the big Mk2 blaster just ripped right through her screen. And then something seemed to go wrong.

Pain wracked her body. Her movements became heavy, leaden. She forced herself to pull up more energy from where these ghost powers came from. And every time she did so it seemed like something was ripping in her body. She felt a power rippling up from her body and out her throat. She opened her mouth to scream but all that came out was a racking smoker's cough. Lights flashed before her eyes, then winked out. She fell to the floor with a sickening thud!

Jazz, Sam and Tuck stopped their firing when Kat Bowen fell out of the air. Behind she left a hovering shadow, a formless form, that roiled and spun on itself for a moment then drifted over to the center of the room where Danny lay in a pile of broken glass, as still as death. The shadow seemed to pass over him, or maybe it just evaporated under the brighter lights in the middle of the room. It was gone just like that.

Jazz, holding her blaster at ready slowly walked over to where Kat Bowen had fallen. The woman lay crumpled on the floor like a naked rag doll. Jazz pushed her with her foot and Kat moaned weakly. Satisfied that the crazy woman wasn't a threat she joined Sam and Tucker who were lifting Danny out of the wreckage of the machine. Tucker was starting to pull out some of the larger shards of glass while Sam, spying an abandoned blouse on the floor, pulled it over her ruined T-shirt.

"Is he?" Jazz whispered.

But before Tucker could answer Danny groaned and sat up. "What happened?"

With a cry Jazz gathered Danny up in a big hug, then leaped back with a "Eeeew. What happened to your clothes?" she asked.

"She must have took them off when she put me in that thing. Anyone see them? By the way, where is Kat? Did she get away?"

"She over there," Jazz pointed. "I don't think she's doing well. We've got to call 911 and get am ambulance." She reached into her pants for her cell phone.

"Don't bother, an ambulance won't help her," Danny said with surprising certainty. "Wow. It's like I remember everything she did while she had my ghost powers. Something happened when she lost those powers. Like what happened to me when she took my powers away. It's like some vital spark has gone out of her. Without it she'll die, but I don't know how to get it back in."

A wad of clothes fell on his lap. Danny looked up to see Sam coming back from the corner of the room where she had found them. "Thanks. But I've got a better idea," he said.

Danny concentrated for a moment, longer than it usuaully took him to change. Then abruptly a ring of light sprang from his waist, split in two and raced to either end of his body. As they moved he changed from naked Danny Fenton to clothed Danny Phantom. "Yes!" he exclaimed. "I can still change!"

"You thought you couldn't?" Tucker asked.

"I wasn't sure. I know my powers came back to me. I can feel their energy but I wasn't sure I could still control it. He floated into the air, did a somersault, turned invisible and fly through a packing crate, testing out his powers.

"Just like that you were inches from death and now it's like nothing happened?" Sam groused somewhat uncharitably since she was hurting a lot from the second degree burns on her chest.

"I feel like I got hit by a truck, Sam.. I feel like I could sleep for a week, but, yeah, I feel OK. Are you all right? You don't look so good?"

"Thanks for noticing. Just a little collateral damage..."

"We've got to get you to a hospital!"

"What about Bowen?" Tucker reminded them. "Are we just going to leave her to die?"

"Oh shoot! Danny exclaimed and flew over to where the former Extreme Ghostbreaker lay on the floor. He winced at the extent of her injuries.

"If an ambulance can't help her, what are we going to do?" Jazz asked as she joined her brother.

Before he could answer there was a faint sounding "Hey!" Danny looked down to see Kat Bowen's eyes were open. But the dying woman wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were focused on Sam. "That's my shirt, you bi--!" Her eyes closed and she began coughing harshly.

Sam whipped off the lavender blouse and threw it at the woman. "Take it!" She snarled. She then grabbed the T-shirt out of the pile of clothes Danny was still holding and pulled it over her own ruined T-shirt.

"I've got an idea." Danny turned to Tucker, "Can you rig this stuff to blow up?"

"A Few short circuits should do the trick."

"Good, this stuff shouldn't be left lying around." He stooped and piled up the woman, who moaned painfully as he moved her. "I'll meet you back at the house."

"Danny, Sam and Tucker both need to go to the ER. You do too."

"House. I'm too tired to argue." And Danny slowly flew up through the roof of the old factory and was gone.

"Great," Jazz said. Tucker was already lying under the extraction machine Danny had been in, working on it. "How big of an explosion do you think that thing will make?"

"More than an M-80 and less than a stick of dynamite." Tucker said from under the console.

"How does he know this stuff?" Sam wondered, pulling the front of Danny's T-short away from her chest. "When was the last time Danny washed his clothes?" she asked.

"Who knows," Jazz said, rolling her eyes. "OK, here's the plan. Once the fire's started we phone it into the police than go County General Hospital for Sam's burns and Tucker's splinters. We were looking for Danny. You two were walking by when the building exploded. You called me. I called 911 and drove you to the ER."

"The explosion isn't going to be that big," Tucker objected. "It won't reach the street."

"That's not important. Our story is we were hurt in an explosion and there will be an explosion to confirm our story. I don't think anyone is going to look much deeper into it than that."

"Jazz you are way too glib for your own good," Sam said.

Tucker slid out from under the machine. "Should be two to five minutes for the capacitors to blow."

"Do we have to wait for the explosion?" Sam continued. "I'm beginning to think this shirt is rancid."

They raced out of the building.

***

"What are you doing?" Kat whispered as Danny flow over the city back to FentonWorks and his parent's Ghost Portal.

"Trying to save your life."

"Why bother. I'm effed up everything I've ever done in life. I couldn't even do a good job of killing one kid."

Danny wasn't sure how to answer something like that so he let it ride.

"Go ahead, say it," she continued. "I don't mind."

Danny had no idea what she expected him to say.

"Say it," she persisted. "I know you want to."

"Say what?"

"I told you so."

"I wasn't going to."

"Why not? It's true. You said the drugs would eff me up and they did. You said clothes didn't matter and here I am dying in my birthday suit...."

"Save your strength. I'm trying to save you."

"They all say that, the boys; but in the end none of them ever really do...." her voice faded away. Her eyes closed, her head lolled back.

They flew silently for a couple minutes. Then her eyes popped open as a long groan oozed from her mouth. "Who knew dying could hurt so much."

"Hang in there. We're almost there."

Danny had seen the twenty foot high neon "FentonWorks" sign in the distance. Its lights continued to blink and flash even though the rest of the building was dark. He turned intangible and flew through the walls of the brownstone building and into the basement lab. The lights were off except a couple Safety lamps. It was the middle of the night and his parents were comfortably asleep upstairs.

Danny slapped the hand-plate of the Fenton Genetic Lock, opening the shutters to the Ghost Zone Portal. Green lights swirled in an endless vortex. Occasionally structures would momentarily appear, then fade out. What they were or what they meant no one knew. The Ghost Zone Portal was a cylinder thirty feet long in this world, surrounded by machinery at least five feet deep. But the interface itself. The division between being in the normal universe and being in the Ghost Zone was a plane of zero dimensions. Danny slipped through it feeling the usual twisting forces as he did so.

And then he was there. The zone was an endless sky. Over there to one side were row after row of floating doors, in the other direction was where islands floated. The portal itself was anchored to one of the floating islands. Here it was just a floating disk of twisted green light, a rip in space and time. Over time Danny had contrived to disguise the Portal somewhat by bringing in rocks and trees to cover the rip in space. He had left space enough, of course, to bring the Specter Speeder through but on the whole, if a ghost didn't know where the portal was they would have a hard time finding it.

He laid the limp girl on the ground and waited.

After a moment she opened her eyes; looked around, then stood up. She was stretching stiff limbs when she looked down -- and screamed.

Kat Bowen was still laying on the ground.

She threw herself at Danny. "What did you do to me!" she screamed as she tried to get her hands around his neck.

Danny pushed her off. "I saved your life."

"Do I look alive?" She pointed to the body lying on the ground.

"Yes. As alive as you'll ever be." Danny replied. "That's not you on the ground. That's what you were. Now you're like everyone here, a ghost. I couldn't save your body but I thought if I could get you here while you were still alive I could at least save you."

Kat Bowen paced around the small space in front of the portal, shaking her head in denial. "I'm freaking out. That's it, I'm freaking out. I need some Valium. I can't be dead." she said over and over.

"Kat.-- Kat -- Dude! Listen to me." At the sound of the hated word the woman stopped paced and glared at Danny.

"There was nothing I could do to save your body. I don't understand all this myself. Mostly I'm going on guesses and vague memories that must have come from you when you had my ghost powers. But when you took my ghost powers I felt you rip something else from my body, something I must need to live because the minute that happened I could feel myself dying. I didn't have any strength. I could hardly think or breath or move. Then when my friends rescued me and my ghost powers came back so did that other thing and suddenly I felt well, strong -- well, not that strong. I felt like I'd been ran over by a train, but I wasn't dying.

"I think there must be some kind of -- I don't know, call it an astral body, that each of us has. But it holds us together. It makes the nerves work, or something. I'm sure my Dad could explain this a lot better. He's the genius in the family. I'm just a kid with freak powers.

"Anyway: I think that's why you couldn't fuse with my ghost powers -- they were still attached to my astral body, and when my friends broke the containment field around that glass cylinder you had me in, my astral body, or whatever, snapped back to me like a rubber band, and dragged my ghost powers back as well. But because you had partly fused with my ghost powers your astral body got ripped from your body. I don't know why it didn't just snap back to your body like mine did for me. Maybe it was damaged. Maybe those drugs you were taking changed your body in a way that your astral body couldn't handle. Maybe my astral body has more experience going from ghost to normal and back. I don't know but I did know that the moment I looked at you I could sort of see your astral body - maybe it's a larval ghost thing - but I could see it hanging around outside your body and slowly getting weaker. I knew and I don't know why, that you would die if that astral body didn't get back into your body and without your body the astral body would fade away too. Then I thought, that if I could get you here, before your body died, maybe your astral self could draw enough energy from the ghost dimension to survive. It was a long shot except that I was as certain it would work as I was certain that nothing on earth would keep you alive. So I brought you here."

"What am I supposed to do here?"

"I don't know. Make friends? The Ghost Zone isn't uninhabited. Though I suppose most of them are a lot like you, self-centered, vengeful...."

"I'm supposed to be happy about this? You've marooned me in stinking nowhere!"

"It's better than being dead, isn't it?"

"You think? You think? I'd rather be dead than stuck here!"

"I'm sorry. There's no way back. If you ever re-enter the Earth zone your astral body will disintegrate. There's nothing to hold it together."

"Don't count on it, Danny Phantom. I'll find a way. I'm a lot smarter than you think. I'll find a way make to Earth and I'll make you pay! You and your little dog too!" She started cackling crazily before it turned into sobs.

"Great, another enemy," Danny sighed, then lifted off and flew back through the portal, slapping the close button as he passed. Silently but empathetically, the shutters closed.