Chapter 1
Author's note: This is really just a chapter just a filler, but it kicks the story off. Enjoy!!!
So, as I was saying earlier, if you are easily scared or if you don't like descriptions that enduce graphic images in your mind, then, don't read past chapter three. Anyway, on with the tale.
It started out as a normal day. We fought some ghosts, Dash tried beating me up-as usual-and I failed a test. Overall, a casual day. Until it happened. What's the dreaded it? Oh my. It, stands for the worst of all things that I have gone through in the past year and a half, being Danny Phantom, ghost-fighting teen, and Danny Fenton, class failure who would end up working at Home Depot or Walmart. But, that's a little off-topic.
After my long day at Casper High, it was nice to come home to peace and quiet. The second I walked in the front door, I heard not a sound. My parents were gone, Jazz was away in England on a student-exchange program, and the Fenton Portal was deactivated for upgrades. Everything was still outside as well, making it a wonderful day for outdoor activities. Many kids were outside instead of playing video games or surfing the web, no doubt from the fact that Amity Park usually didn't get weather like this. It was always cloudy and cold, or sunny and hot, as I remember. I thought about spending an hour or two outside myself, but my only real friends were Sam and Tucker. Valerie? Eh, not as much. She's more a 'fair-weather' friend. She's fine as long as you don't make her too angry. But she did, after all, live in an apartment in the El Norte district downtown. It would have taken her at least thirty minutes to get to my house. So, I decided to take the normal route. I headed upstairs to my room and flipped the power-switch to my new laptop, bringing the screen to life with color. It didn't take too long before it was booted and I was on my Yahoo! IM page. A very fast computer it was, only it had Windows Vista on it. Ugh! I hate Vista so much. The laptop I had couldn't really run Vista all too well. The operating system took up too much bandwidth, and often would force me to restart the computer if I was running Club Penguin or RuneScape on top of other programs. Thus, I would have to use my other computer for graphics. Slow and sluggish, that's what it was. A junk-heap. My dad had rescued it a few years earlier when our neighbors house burned down. Fortunately, the computer worked just fine--most of the time. It had subsequently taken on smoke damage in the blaze, and seemed to crash every three to four months or so. But it still worked when I needed it too, which was just fine for me. The only bad part about it was that the firewall was incompatible with the version of Linux that I have on it, and because of it, hackers found it easy to break into my files. Every day, I kept trying to remind myself to move all of my ghost-related files and folders off of there and put them on a separate hard-disk. But I always forgot, even though I would someday get to it.
A message suddenly popped up on my screen. It was from Tucker. Silently, I typed to him; You got your webcam installed yet? Shortly after, he signaled a, 'yes'. I turned on my camera about the same time he did. But Vista slowed me down quite a bit with software updates, resulting in my techno-geek friend having to wait for nearly ten minutes before we could converse. Time passed slowly in that ten-minute interval. Although we could still type to each other, the webcam was far more efficient. Took less time to get a point across for one thing, and for another, it was more secure than typing. Or, was it? That was a question that I never was able to answer. Tucker always has said that the internet video chat is easier to hack, but I've always known it to be surprisingly secure. It had a lot of security features on it. So many, it would take hours for me to list them all.
The software updates finally finished installing. Chat time, I thought to myself, opening the video server.
"Hey Tuck," I said, virtually face to face with my African-American friend. "Any new developments on the Specter-Detector?"
"Nothing new. But I did manage to find your dad's left over ecto-wieners." I sighed in frustration. My dad-who forgot almost everything-still hadn't taken those hot dogs out of the house yet. They had just been sitting in the fridge for a year and a half, trying to jump him whenever he reached for the left-over cake. Sort of an built-in security measure.
I glanced to the window as I heard the Fenton RV pull into the driveway. Home early. Darn, I thought out loud. They usually weren't back this early after a paranormal conference. I flashed a look back at Tucker, signaling him to sign off. But he was already one step ahead of me. When my eyes met the comm. window, Tucker showed to be off-line. As if by impulse, I ran my finger across the mouse pad and clicked on the 'start' menu, then moved the pointer downward toward the 'power off' selection. I clicked it, and hit the enter key as soon as I had the final selection to the 'power down' option. Almost instantly, my computer turned off, and the screen went blank. I closed the lid, and exited my room, headed down the stairs. Wait, a voice in my head began. Forgetting something are we?
That was when I realized that I still needed to get my ghost files saved to another drive. Not wanting to blow it off any longer, I powered up the old clunker. The hard-disk clinked and clanked as the system began to boot.
It was probably time to sell this thing. It was after all a piece of junk. But first things first. I needed priority to get done. The large rocks needed to be put in the bucket first. Then, and only then, could I work on the smaller rocks, and work my priorities to sand. A few minutes passed by the time I accessed my files. Finally, I could get them off of there, and out of harm's way. I plugged the portable hard drive into the USB port and copied the files to it. Slowly, the old computer performed a task that my laptop could have done in seconds. Three minutes. I counted three minutes that had gone by by the time it was finished. Not acceptable. But, again, that was just a small pebble in the bucket of priorities. Now all that was left was to delete the files still on the original memory system. I was just about to hit the delete key, when a small window popped open. It read; "Copying files 2 of 17". That wasn't normal. I had since removed the separate memory drive, and everything cleared when I did so. And even more odd, the internet on this computer was temporarily disabled so that I could upload the Norton Anti-Virus. Then I looked closer. The transfer destination was something I never would have expected; C:\Documents and Settings\Vlad Masters...nothing...wait a sec. I passed it off for a moment, but the last part of the destination was a red flag. VLAD?! My mind screamed in horror. He had mentioned of doing it before, but I never really thought that he would. Although I should have expected it sooner or later. In a panic, I attempted to shut off the system, only to discover that Vlad had full control of it. And I couldn't cut power to it by unplugging it. It was a specific design that would cause damage to the system if it were suddenly deprived of all power. I was hopeless. And, it was too late anyway. Vlad had finished transferring the files. He had all of my ghost profiles, worse yet, my personal logs. Personal logs. A very bad thing for a hacker to get hold of. At the time, I didn't know what he would do with them, and I knew that he wouldn't really need my personal logs...or, would he? My mind began racing. So many thoughts were bustling around that I couldn't hear myself think. What if he used it against me? What if he would find a weakness in my tactics? What if...Oh shit! I whispered to myself. Uncontrollably, I spoke aloud, "What if he exposes me?" Little did I know, that was exactly what he was going to do...
Hope you liked the first part of my story. The next chapter won't be my point of view though, it'll be Vlad's. I'll update soon! So, how's about leading your pointer to that little review button?