AUTHOR'S NOTES: I USED THE FIRST PERSON POINT OF VIEW IN CHAPTER ONE TO HELP WITH DANNY'S PERSPECTIVE IN THIS STORY, BUT I USED THE REFERENCE TO 'HOLOGRAPHIC SECURITY FOOTAGE' TO ALLOW ME TO SWITCH TO THE THIRD PERSON. I FIND FIRST PERSON POINT OF VIEW TO BE LIMITED AND TRY TO AVOID IT IF I CAN. THE REST OF THIS STORY WILL BE IN THE THIRD PERSON POINT OF VIEW. PLEASE ENJOY. ALSO, DANNY PHANTOM DOES NOT BELONG TO ME, BUT TO BUTCH HARTMAN.

CHAPTER 2

Wakefulness returned slowly at first, but as soon as Danny's eyes opened and he saw Vlad Plasmius standing (or floating, rather) in front of him, he was wide awake. A familiar sound caught his attention, and he looked to Vlad's right, his own left, and saw a computer monitor.

There he saw himself, shifting from his human to his ghost form, and with that transformation came the sound of his change, a ring of light snapping into existence around his waist and trailing over his body. Not just once, but perhaps half a dozen times or more, he watched himself undergo the metamorphosis which gave him his power. But more than surprise at the fact that Vlad had been watching and recording him to retrieve these videos, was a sense of anger.

"You've been spying on me? Okay, I've said it before and I'll say it again: You really are one seriously crazed up fruit loop!"

Vlad moved toward another monitor, this one larger. "A fruit loop would not have been able to make his first million with a series of invisible burglaries. A fruit loop would never have thought to overshadow enough millionaires to become one of the richest men on the planet! I. Am. Not. A. Fruit. Loop!" Vlad paused. "And I am not a villain. All I wanted was love."

Vlad lifted his right arm and pressed a button on the wall. A hissing noise signaled the opening of a large metal container to Danny's right. He turned his head to see what his arch foe was referring to, and gasped. Inside the device was an exact duplicate of himself.

"It's taken months," Vlad continued, "And the good clone still needs a little more time before he can accept your DNA."

Danny thought back to his opponents over the last few days. It all made sense. Even his alleged 'cousin' was one of Vlad's failed attempts at copying him. "So those ghosts. . . ?"

"Bad clones, mistakes." Vlad confirmed, as a tiny, ectoplasmic particle flew past Danny's face and took its place next to Vlad. It expanded into an inconstant, wavering version of Danny and screamed it him, its left eye falling out in the process. The organ landed on the floor and melted into ectoplasm, leaving behind a small splotch of the green ooze. Vlad continued, "And I would watch a hundred more failures devolve into ectoplasm, to get the perfect, half-ghost son."

"Oh, yeah." Danny remarked with a chuckle. "Nothing loopy about that."

Vlad raised an eyebrow in an expression of amusement. "Are you under the impression you're getting out of this?" He brought a hand to his chin in contemplation, then bent over so that he was face-to-face with Danny. "I believe you are quite mistaken, Daniel. No one knows you're here, and no one is coming for you. You see, I need a DNA sample of you mid-morph, to complete my work. And in just a few more hours, with your DNA to stabilize his form and his powers, your clone will be perfect."

Vlad snapped his fingers, and the unstable clone next to him returned to its miniscule dot-like form and phased into Danny's forehead. Danny felt an odd, strangely cold sensation somewhere inside his skull. It quickly engulfed the entirety of the inside of his cranium. "Get out of me!" He yelled, but it wouldn't stop; he squeezed his eyes shut as the sensation took over, then opened them to glare defiantly at his nemesis. The last thing he remembered was looking at Vlad through a haze of green as the man smiled at him.

"And then you," he said, "will be obsolete."

'Where am I?' Danny stood alone in the dark, unable to see his surroundings. Everything was fuzzy, unclear, hazy. Then he thought: 'What is this stuff?' and suddenly he was treading water.

No. Not water. Something black and murky. Something opaque and mysterious.

The first tendrils of fear began to wrap themselves around Danny's heart as he realized that he was completely exposed; whatever wanted to attack him here could do so freely. He instinctively reached for the ghost power deep inside his body, but couldn't find it. The fear began to grow into panic. What was going on here?

There was no time to find out. The black liquid began to flow away, at first taking him with it, but then leaving him standing on solid ground once again. Voices began to echo across whatever expanse surrounded him. And suddenly, one of them was right in his ear.

"Subject secure, Dearest!" His mom's voice.

Danny snapped awake with such violence that every muscle in his body spasmed, leaving his chest, arms and legs with a strange thrumming sensation. His vision was back to normal, but his breathing was heavy, and sweat was creeping down his temples and neck. He lifted a hand to wipe the liquid from his skin, but his arm stopped several inches from his face, stopped by some sort of barrier. Danny looked down to find that he was standing in a sort of pod-like device, his hands restrained by cuffs of some sort.

For a moment, all Danny could think about was the tickle of the sweat making its way down the sensitive spot on his neck, but the notion was forgotten as he examined his surroundings. The 'floor' of the containment pod was elevated and stood about two feet above the floor of the room it was in. Danny could also see banks of computer equipment lining the walls and several other cloning devices in another corner of the room. One of them held the duplicate earlier indicated by Vlad.

It occurred to the fourteen-year-old that Vlad Plasmius was standing in front of him. Danny could feel his eyes harden as his facial expression transformed into one of rage.

Vlad simply grinned that sly, fanged grin that he always wore when he thought he was winning. "Glare at me all you like, boy. But it won't break that containment unit open, and it won't do me any harm. Now, if you know what's good for you, you'll morph now so that I won't have to force you to."

"No good, Fruit Loop. You didn't say please."

Vlad's smug grin turned into a frown of irritation. "Really, Daniel, you haven't been very polite to me. I am your host, after all, and you are staying in my house."

Danny simply continued to glare at the man before him. "You kidnapped me! I don't think a welcoming host would do something like that."

"No? Well, it's no matter to me. All I need is a sample of your genetic code, and if you won't give it to me of your own volition, I'll have to take it from you."

"Go ahead and try, Vlad. Even if you can get a DNA sample, I've spent months learning what little I know about my powers. This clone won't know anything!"

Vlad folded his arms. "Whether he knows is irrelevant, boy. You will be either dead or completely human when I'm finished with you, and you won't have the means to stop him. Besides, I'll be teaching him everything I've learned in the years that I've had these abilities. Your pathetic collection of knowledge about what you are amounts to little more than a fragment of what there is to learn."

Without another word, Vlad nodded to an unseen figure to Danny's left. A holographic figure, obviously designed to look like his mom, reached up and turned a dial on the container in which the teen was standing.

There was a tell-tale 'power-up' sound, quickly followed by a tingling sensation in Danny's wrists. He was just beginning to realize what that meant when the sensation started to intensify into discomfort, stimulating his muscles and causing them to tense; his hands fisted as the power flowing through his body increased. But the fact that he was practically being electrocuted wasn't what was bothering him; he knew that electricity wasn't the only component involved in whatever Vlad was doing, because the pins-and-needles sensation wasn't just affecting his muscles. It was crawling through his organs and surrounding the core of ghostly power sheltered within his body.

Danny could feel the foreign energy in his body toying with his ghost power, and closed his eyes as he focused on shielding his currently contained ghost half from the probing fingers of Vlad's energy. As the tendrils of power began to retreat from Danny's body, he could feel a decrease in the pins-and-needles sensation and the pain that had begun to invade only moments before. He opened his eyes and grinned at Vlad.

'Is this all you can do?' he thought. 'You'd be better off-'

The thought was cut short when Vlad snarled and turned to 'Maddie.' He unfolded his arms, his right dropping to his side and the other gesturing toward the containment unit. "What is the current power level?"

"Currently running at level two, darling!"

"Turn it up to level four."

"Acknowledged, Dear-heart!" The false Maddie replied as she reached for the machine's dial once again.

Vlad's snarl became a smirk as he refocused on the boy in front of him. 'He thinks he can fight? Well, that should become evident enough in the next few minutes.' Vlad thought as he reviewed what he knew about the biology of the bodies that he and the boy possessed. Both he and Daniel contained within themselves a human form and a ghost form. Whichever form was not being manifested was contained within the body and protected by a core of energy located somewhere behind the intestines and in front of the spinal column. When he or Daniel wanted to transform and take on their alternative body, all they had to do was focus in the core and 'break' it; this would allow them to direct the contained energy over their bodies, causing them to change into whichever form was contained within. The release of energy was what caused the halo of light around Daniel's waist and the ring of shadow around his own.

It was this knowledge that had revealed to Vlad how to force Danny to transform. He had designed the machine himself to probe into the sphere of energy located within the boy's body. He knew that both electricity and ectoplasmic energy were able to be manipulated, and that he intended to use both when creating his machine, but since electricity was more predictable in nature, Vlad had decided to use it as his primary tool rather than try to invent a device that could conduct ectoplasmic energy in the same way. And since electricity was also a 'lazy' energy, it tended to seek out other sources of power so that its own journey through space and matter would be easier. For that reason, it would latch on to the ghost power within Daniel's body. As for the use of ectoplasmic energy, Vlad had learned that it was attracted to itself, so he had supplied some of his own power, lacing the electricity flowing through the containment unit, and through Danny's body, with some of his own ghost power. Not only would Vlad's spectral energy seek out and attempt to break Daniel's core, the additional, natural voltage would saturate it and weaken it.

All of this had gone through Vlad's mind in the second and a half it had taken 'Maddie' to turn up the dial.

Danny felt his resolve challenged as the machine began to work harder, forcing more of the foreign power into his body. Clenching his fists even tighter, he willed himself to keep fighting and once again pushed the unwelcome energy away from his ghostly core, but even as he resisted, he could feel himself weakening.

The humming sound within the machine grew louder as it funneled more energy into Danny's body, and still the boy rebelled. Although Plasmius admired the boy's fortitude, he had to admit that it was also counterproductive. He would have to fix that, and quickly, before the child's resolve could grow.

No sooner did the thought cross his mind than Danny locked eyes with him and bared his teeth in a grim, determined smile. And while the demonstration displeased Vlad, it heartened him as well, for he could see pain in those eyes, and pain was an enemy to the survival instinct.

However, instead of ordering the hologram of his beloved to increase the voltage, as the boy surely expected, Vlad waited. He wanted to see just how long Daniel thought he could hold out, and just how strong the child thought he was.

Danny was holding back Vlad's mysterious energy, albeit with great difficulty. However, he wanted the man to know he wasn't afraid, so he clenched his jaws shut and forced himself to smile. Then, for good measure, he stared straight into the man's eyes. He was somewhat disheartened when Vlad's grin only briefly faltered, then returned with more enthusiasm. Danny saw the other half-ghost glance at the Maddie program, and thought he would tell her to increase the power again, but Vlad did not. Apparently, he wanted to see just how long the younger hybrid could stave off the energy attacking his body.

'Well,' Danny thought, 'if he wants a contest of will, he's got one. I don't plan on giving up any time soon.'