A/N

I'm just going to put it out there now that while I am going to take direct content from the show, I will be taking liberties here and there to make some aspects 'fuller' or make all around more general sense. I know it's long, but it was either long and quality or short and sucky so I went with quality. Enjoy :)

Disclaimer: If I actually owned Danny Phantom, it would look like this. But I don't, so it doesn't, and the world is a darker place.

Mystery Meat

(Part I)

Amity Park wasn't small enough to be a town, but it wasn't quite a city either. It was built a bit like a mix between a flat, and much less exciting, San Francisco and Chicago, but the pizza wasn't as good. The buildings were dull and fairly monotonous...except for one. 'Fenton Works' was a brick red building that sat on the corner of Blossom Street and Venkman Avenue. Built onto the top sat, or rather, perched, a huge gray structure that appeared to have been pulled from a Dr. Seus book. The structure was garishly labeled 'Fenton Works' and stuck out like a rottweiler in a field of new born chihuahuas. Inside the home beneath it lived the bane of the town's existence: Jack and Maddie Fenton.

Inside, Maddie was pulling her goggles down over her eyes and clicking on her blowtorch. Across the kitchen table, Jasmine Fenton lifted her book, Surviving Adolescence through Therapy, higher over her face while her brother Danny munched his cereal, head resting on his left hand and a bored expression on his face.

To be totally honest, Danny was dead tired. Ghosts had been doing nothing but flying out of the Fenton Portal ever sice Danny turned it on. Sam had convinced him to stay up all night in front of the stupid thing and throw whatever came out of it back in. He'd slept in front of it every night for the past four weeks before sneaking back up to his bed at six in the morning before Jazz woke up. Nothing too bad had come out of it yet, but Danny wasn't betting on his luck holding out. On one of the first nights, Sam and Tucker had tried to stay over and help but... they kind of got caught.

By his dad.

"So, Danny," he remembered his dad saying after he had sat them all down in spare desk chairs in the lab and walked toward one of the many cluttered counters, "you and your little friends wanna hunt ghosts."

"Uh...actually, Dad?" Danny raised his hand a little and immediately felt stupid for doing so. "I want to be an astronaut."

"Sorry, Mr. Fenton," Sam sat in her chair with her arms and legs crossed. "I was into ghosts, but they're so mainstream now. They're like iPods."

"Waste these looks and charisma hunting ghosts?" Tucker gestured to himself. "Criminal."

"Well if you do want to hunt ghosts," Jack went on as if he hadn't heard them (maybe he hadn't), "there are a few things you need to learn."

Danny rolled his eyes behind his dad's back and was about to comment to Sam when his throat got cold. Really cold. He tried to hold back a coughing fit as best as he could, but the crystalline air that shrouded his breath was a dead give away to his friends. He covered his mouth with both hands. He hated the feeling of his ghost sense going off, but not nearly as much as what would follow.

Oh no, he thought, panicking a little. This isn't good.

As Danny was thinking, a red light lit the room and the portal doors opened with a loud buzzer for a final warning as two scraggly, green, floating, octopi swam out. As Danny's dad began monologue, totally unaware to everything, Danny, Sam, and Tucker all stiffened in their chairs. They didn't dare say a word, or else alert Jack to the specters presence. The trio exchanged a look as Jack continued to talk about something along the lines of being prepared. They had all agreed before-hand that they wouldn't call for help from Mr. and Mrs. Fenton. As much as they seemed to know about ghosts, the more time they had spent actually fighting them, the more they realized that his parents had gotten wrong. Sure, they did know some stuff, but the teenagers had come to the conclusion that the two adults would only get themselves killed in a fight. They had not, however, expected either of them to be in the room when a ghost showed up.

While they were trying to think of what to do ("...so will you, whether you wanna be or not...") the octopi spotted them. As Danny watched, their red eyes locked onto his friends and scraggly green tentacles wrapped themselves around them and lifted them from their chairs ("...it all starts with..."). Danny locked eyes with Sam who was obviously holding back a scream. Danny barely had a few seconds to debate his next choice. He could fight and risk his Dad seeing, which isn't as likely as one might think, or he could just sit there and...who was he kidding?

As if the sight of his struggling friends wasn't a dead giveaway.

Danny knew that from Jack's perspective, all was right with the world. "It all starts with your equipment," he was saying. He lifted a gray and green thermos from the counter and turned back to his charges. Sam and Tucker were looking worse for wear, Sam's short pony tail sitting on the top of her head was messed up and Tuckers hat was crooked, but he paid no mind. They must have been like that before and he hadn't noticed. It's not like they had ever left their seats. "Sam, Tucker, this is the Fenton Thermos." Jack shoved the thermos into Sam's shaking hands. "It's supposed to trap ghosts. But, since it doesn't work yet, it's just a thermos..." He sighed, but perked right back up. "A thermos with the word 'Fenton' in front of it!"

Jack turned back around, totally unaware of the gruesome creature that just flew across the room behind him. "And that?" Jack turned toward the portal, now closed on the wall. "That's the Fenton Portal. It releases ghosts into our world whether I want it to or not. Someday," Jack rapped his finger on the yellow and black doors, "I'll figure out how that works, too. Now." Mr. Fenton turned back to the kids to find Sam and Tucker exactly where he left them and his son leaning heavily on Tuckers chair and panting a fair amount. "Who wants to hunt some ghosts?" Jack placed his hand on his hips and thrust out is large (fat) chest and the kids continued their trembling and panting. "You kids, look at 'cha! You're too excited to speak!

"So I'll just go on speaking. I was born many years ago in a log cabin in the woods. I don't exactly remember where but I know I wanted a pony... never got the pony... As a matter of fact we had to eat horse meat - during the war. I had a problem with that..."

That had been about when Danny stopped trying to pay attention through his gasps for air. He had managed to shove the ghosts in without his dad noticing, but he hadn't gotten out unscathed. He twisted his right wrist funny when he tossed the... 'ectopus' across the lab. All he could do was ignore it and try his best not to look like the very air made it sting. If his parents found out he was getting hurt they'd eventually get suspicious, and he couldn't make an excuse for everything. But how long could he hold out? Should he even try to hide it? Maybe they could fix him. If he told them they would understand right? He was still Danny, he was just half... well... dead. Half ghost. Half of the creature that his parents wanted to capture, pick apart, and destroy...

Danny lifted his hand to take a bite out of his cereal, wishing with all of his being that the air itself would quit hurting his wrist when he felt something... in his hand and heard his spoon clatter into his half-empty bowl. Danny's heart skipped a beat and he grabbed his right hand in his left, as if to make sure it was solid again. It was, but for a split second there his hand had been intangible. Untouchable.

Like a ghost.

Why couldn't he control it?

Danny was too focused on being irritated with himself to see his ginger sister raise an eyebrow at her brother. Something was clearly wrong with the boy. She was about to say something when her mom turned the blow torch off and proudly stated, "Ok, two more days and it's done."

"What did you say?" Jack entered the kitchen accompanied by his ever present lingering scent of fudge. "It's done?" He grabbed the strange contraption his wife had been working on off the table and proclaimed to the kitchen ceiling light, "The Fenton Finder is done!" Both kids gave the device strange looks. It had a miniature satellite dish and a red light bulb decorating the face next to two oddly shaped antennae and a green radar screen. The sight of the married couple was strange enough without the crazy contraptions they made. Both wore skin-tight, hazmat jumpsuits, Maddie's blue (which looked good with her lilac eyes but made her own ginger hair stand out) and Jack's orange, just about 24/7. They had even insisted that their children should too. Danny's was white, Jazz's was green, and they got fitted for new ones every year to go with the black accessories (gloves, boots, belts), but Jazz's always disappeared within hours and Danny's was normally never touched. Danny was pretty sure Jazz dumped hers into the sewage and that there was a pile of them down there somewhere. Maybe he could go look for it now that he was a-

"This baby uses satellites to lead you right to the ghosts!"

Danny snapped out of his train of thought to stutter, "It uses what to track... what?"

Danny's father pressed a few buttons on the machine and it started speaking. "WELCOME TO THE FENTON FINDER," it said in an automated woman's voice. "A GHOST IS NEAR." Jazz lowered her book a little and gave her parents a skeptical look and Maddie gave a slight gasp. Danny's mind was racing. His ghost sense hadn't gone off so that would mean it was sensing him? Danny stood up out of his chair and made to pick up his bowl when the Fenton Finder spoke up again. "WALK FORWARD." Jack and Maddie began to step towards him, eyes on the contraption. Danny quickly abandoned the bowl and started backing away until they had cornered him against the wall. "GHOST LOCATED. THANK YOU FOR USING THE FENTON FINDER."

Danny placed a nervous grin on his face as his parents looked down at him, confused. "Well that can't be right!" His father exclaimed. He began to tinker with it but Danny could just see over the top of it that the little blip on the radar refused to move. As Danny stood there, nerves being stretched to their limits, he could only think about the monologues his parents would give about what they would do when they finally caught a ghost. All the biology classes they'd taken, all the different tools they kept clean and sharp at all times, all the samples they would take... He just wanted to disappear.

And then he did.

Danny was quick to notice that his nose had suddenly disappeared and, looking down at the rest of him, he panicked at the fact that... there was no rest of him. He could still feel the air hitting him, so he wasn't intangible, just invisible. Of course that didn't scare the crap out of him any less and he jumped, letting out a yip of panic, before becoming visible again.

"Well, I did try to tell you I needed two more days, sweetie," his mom was saying, pulling down her hood and goggles.

I have tell them, he thought to himself. They'll find out eventually, better sooner than later. But flashes of dissection videos from his new freshman bio class kept coming to mind and his imagination kept inserting him and his parents. But he shoved it all to the back of his mind and took a deep breath.

"Actually, I-" Danny started to say, "I... need to tell you guys something..." Danny hung his head and his parents looked at him curiously.

"That's not all you need, Danny." Three heads turned as Jazz clapped her book closed and stood. "You need guidance, and parents who can provide it."

"Sweetie," Maddie started as Jazz came to stand beside her brother where he stood against the wall. "I know what we do doesn't make sense sometimes, but you're only-"

"Sixteen." Jazz crossed her arms. "Biologically." Danny raised his eyebrows but was actually great-full he had interfered. As she kept talking, he began to slowly inch himself away from them. "But psychologically I'm an adult and I will not allow your insane obsession with ghosts to pollute the mind of this impressionable little child!" As her voice grew, she linked her arm around Danny's and pulled him closer again. "Come, you unwanted wretch," she told him in an oddly kind voice that was scaring him more than the wails of ghosts, "I'll drive you to school." With that she sent one last glare to her parents before hauling Danny back to the kitchen table where they began to pick up their things.

Danny knew Jazz couldn't hear it, but Danny could just barely pick up the hushed words of his mother as he tossed his bowl in the sink.

"Huh. That's weird," she was saying. "Jasmine never offers to drive Danny to school."

"That could mean only one thing..." his dad began and Danny picked up the pace. He threw his bag over his shoulder and hurried Jazz out the door, telling her they should pick up his friends on the way so they needed to hurry. He didn't need to hear Jack as he shut the front door behind him to know he was saying. "That's not our daughter, that's a ghost." As he shut the passenger door to Jazz's blue Ford Focus, he could hear him yell, "DANNY NO IT'S A TRAP!"

But Jazz was already pulling away from the curb as their father burst through the door, his wife in hot pursuit.

Danny slumped down in his chair, relieved to be away from his parents. Not like school was any better, but at least there he could blend in among the crowd and no one would notice if he fell through his chair for a second or if his feet disappeared.

"Where did you say you meet with them?" Jazz asked, referring to how Danny would walk to school with Sam and Tucker every morning. Danny let out a sigh and sat up straight again. "Turn left here."

Hidden amongst a crowd of high-schoolers was the perfect place to talk secrets. Anything over heard would quickly be lost in the swirl of other voices and the sounds of shuffling feet, burping and laughter. No one would pay any mind to what three kids with nothing special about them were saying. Anyone would just waltz right on by, missing any conversation they might be having about robbing a bank or stealing from a jewelry shop.

Or how to take down a ghost.

"So adding to the list of things we've learned," Tucker was saying as he typed on his PDA, "we have 'Octopi ghosts, ironically, do not like water."

"How do you know they don't like water?" Sam asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Well, see yesterday we needed a lot of water," Danny said, referring to how Tucker had come to his house while his parents were away. "We had to get buckets of it because the more you drink the faster you have to pee, and we were trying to see how far we could-"

"Ok," Sam let go of the strap on her spider backpack to hold up her hands, show casing her many Gothic wrist accessories, and turned her head in disgust. "I think I get the point." Tucker snickered and Danny gave him a high five behind her back. "Anyway," Sam turned from the curb where Jazz had dropped them off and started walking toward the front doors of Casper High School, not waiting as her friends ran to catch up. "I think we need to add, 'Dying does not increase maturity levels'."

"Aw, c'mon Sam! It's the first comfy clothes Monday we've had since...well, y'know." Danny stopped awkwardly at the near mention of 'the accident' with the ghost portal that had pretty much screwed over their hopeful high school careers. "But don't wreck comfy clothes Monday," he said smirking. On the first Monday of every month, Danny, Sam, and Tucker would wear their favorite outfits to school; a kind of motivational tool for the bullied and Monday haters. Danny had his white and red shirt and jeans, Tucker had his cargo pants and horribly clashing yellow shirt, and Sam had Gothic ensemble number 42: midriff-showing black tank top, green and black plaid skirt, purple tights, combat boots, black collar, and all topped off with a skull for a belt buckle. Just because everyone else at school sacrificed comfort for acceptance doesn't mean they had to.

"How long is this list now, exactly?" Sam asked Tucker, letting Danny open the front door for them.

"Well," Tucker pulled out a stylus from the back of his PDA and began to scroll across the screen. "Starting from a month ago, we have, 'Danny's half-dead', 'Danny's being half dead gives him ghost powers', 'Danny's powers come with a semi-cliché wardrobe change', 'White hair does not necessarily equal old', 'Danny's parents learning their son is half of their favorite prey is not, and never will be, anywhere near the top of the to-do list'...need I go on, or do you need me to keep reading through lunch about Danny's inability to aim a gum wrapper into a dumpster two feet away?"

"Hey!" Danny flushed a bit as they walked past yet another couple making out in the hallway under a heavily vandalized 'School Spirit!' sign. "My aim's getting better, and - and..." Danny faltered and let out a huge sigh. "I think I should tell them." Sam and Tucker barely heard him through the chatter of the halls and comments about lost underwear.

Danny's shoulders slumped and he started climbing the stairs to the second floor. Sam and Tucker exchanged a quick glance. Nothing's more of a downer than a best friend walking around depressed, but then they couldn't really blame him. Poor kid had been raised by ghost hunters who told him nothing but stories about how Hansel and Gretel were almost eaten by a Ghost Witch, the Maleficent Ghost and Sleeping Beauty, and how in Little Red Riding Hood a Ghostbuster came and exorcised the ghost that killed grandma. In a Fenton's eyes he had been thrown into a fairy tale and forced into the role of the villain. Sam and Tucker knew he wasn't, but would his parents? Did Danny?

"Why?" Sam followed Danny up the stairs. "Parents don't listen. Even worse, they don't understand!" Tucker and Danny stopped on the landing and turned, waiting for Sam to finish shouting to the ceiling, "WHY CAN'T THEY ACCEPT ME FOR WHO I AM?"

"Sam, I-" Danny figured he better stop Sam from embarrassing herself. No matter how much he enjoyed looking at how goofy Sam looked when she shouted her irritations to the world. Which she actually did quite a bit lately. That, and the funniest clown on earth couldn't lift his mood right now. "I'm talking about my powers. My problems." Danny thrust his thumb toward his chest and Tucker just had a sarcasm dripping, incredulous look on his face.

"Oh, right," Sam chuckled and glanced down at an awkward angle. "Me... too?"

Danny let it go without a second thought and continued a little panic in his voice, "It's been a month since the accident and I still barely have any control! If someone catches me..." Danny crossed his arms as he continued speaking and glared ahead of him, only wondering in the back of his mind what that weird feeling in his legs was. "...I go from geek to freak around here!"

"Kinda like what you're doing now?" Tucker asked, teal eyes looking down at him.

Down at him?

Danny looked down and suddenly realized that the floor had come up to his waist - or rather his legs and what was left of his torso were sinking down through the floor. He let out a strangled yell and lifted his arms above his head, as if the sand were quicksand, and felt himself freeze up while to sets of arms grabbed him under his shoulders and hoisted his feet back up to their level. It only took a moment to figure out how to re-solidify his legs again (he'd been going through the same process with pretty much every other body part for the last month) so his friends could drop him to the ground again. Going intangible was an interesting and fun power, but there was something about it, Danny couldn't quite put his finger on it yet, the he really didn't like.

"Darn it!" Danny shouted at his legs, remembering all the talks his mom and dad (and his third parent, Jazz) had given him about not giving into the peer pressure of using 'language so dirty it should only come from the mouth of a ghost' (well, not so much the ghosts part for Jazz). Speaking of his dad... "If my dad can invent something that accidentally made me half ghost, why can't he invent something that turns me back to normal!" As Danny finished climbing the steps, Sam and Tucker in tow, he shoved his hand into his jean's pockets and let his head drop again. All these sleepless nights had left him unable to even hold a temper for more than a few minutes anymore. He didn't even notice when he walked past the next row of pale green lockers and straight through a vending machine.

"Danny," Sam ran in front of her friend, hoping to reassure him and that no one had seen that, "your powers make you unique. Unique is good! That's why I'm an Ultra Recyclo Vegetarian!" Sam placed her fists on her hips, jangling the black array of accessories on her wrists.

Danny and Tucker both stopped in front of her. Danny still had his hands in his pockets but Tucker let a bewildered look set onto his face as he asked, "Which means...what?"

"She doesn't eat anything with a face on it," Danny deadpanned, only glancing at Tucker.

"Oh, who cares about that stuff?" Tucker lifted a hand and pointed at himself. "Two words, Danny. Meat. Connoisseur." Tucker leaned over and sniffed Danny's shirt that he knew he hadn't changed out of since the previous day. Straightening back up, on hand still in the air, he stated, "Last night, you had sloppy joes."

Danny smirked. "Impressive," he admitted.

"Meat heightens the senses," Tucker recited. "My all-meat streak is fourteen years strong."

"And it's about to end." Sam crossed her arms, a proud smirk playing on her face. "The school board finally agreed to try a new cafeteria menu. I wore them down," she sighed.

"Wait." Danny and Tucker both gaped at her, but Tucker was falling into worry. "What did you do?"

As they approached the lunch lady with their trays, Tucker had his head leaning back toward the large sign above their heads that read: THIS WEEK ULTRA RECYCLO-VEGITARIAN! Danny didn't need to look to know Tucker wasn't actually looking at it though. His head had been stuck up in that position for the past five minutes as they waited through the line, but his eyes had closed four minutes ago as he tried fruitlessly to wake himself up from this nightmare.

Danny watched, pale faced, as the lady behind the counter dropped...something onto Star Strong's tray. When a similar...item landed on his own he took in a deep breath and held it, unwilling to let go. "You can open your eyes now, Tuck."

Tucker peaked down as his tray and let his face drop in utter horror. The look would have been comical to Danny if it didn't show a slight exaggeration on the same thing he was feeling.

Sam on the other hand, laughed.

"What is this?" Danny asked, unwilling to touch it. "Grass on a bun?"

Which it literally was. Apparently the lunch lady's didn't really have much to work with because what Danny was looking at literally appeared to be grass growing out of a slice of bread. And not even good grass. Danny was pretty sure he just saw Mikey Baker walk away with a dandelion sticking out of his.

Tucker, with an over dramatized flair accented from the drama class he took in eighth grade, shouted, "What have you done?"

Sam just lifted her turf-wich and proudly told him, "Tucker, it's time for a change."

Danny had to drag Tucker across the floor to their table.

In most homes holding teenagers, the average volume is unbearably loud and obnoxious save for the eight to ten hours in which the kids are away at school, sports, or part-time jobs. This time is when the adults cherish the quiet of their city block. The adults will go for jogs, walk to the park, or simply read a book in their gardens.

Unless they lived near Fenton Works.

Jack and Maddie Fenton crouched on the cluttered ground of their lab over their newest invention. The last several attempts had been proven explosive, but between the extra cables trailing from either end of the room, scribbles and notes how not to finish the experiment, and the visually assaulting day-glow orange of Jacks jumpsuit which they had finally cleaned from the last explosion, they were pretty certain that it would work this time...maybe.

Behind them, the Fenton Portal in the wall lay open, heavy metal doors spread wide. Earlier, Maddie had been experimenting with the thin, natural barrier of energy created between the air of their world and the mysterious energy on the other side. The Fentons dare not touch the barrier before they quite understood it, but couldn't stop them from doing science. While Jack spent his time working on something akin to a fishing rod that he would be able to use to 'fish out ghosts', Maddie had worked from a more observant stand point. She was curious about the spiral pattern the energy took, almost as if the ghostly energy of the other world were flushing into theirs, or vice-versa. Maddie had begun working on a device to measure reading of ecto-energy when her husband had called her to help finish the urgent matter of their daughter.

"Maybe this is a bad idea..." she said, thoughtfully.

"No, it's perfect," Jack assured her. He had just finished welding the last piece of cable together (thankfully not exploding this time) and lifted what looked like a glorified, green trimmed, vacuum cleaner from the '50s. "When Jazz gets home we suck the ghost out of her with the Fenton Extractor."

"But what if Jazz isn't a ghost? What if we accidentally hurt her?"

"Maddie the Fenton Extractor doesn't hurt humans..." he gently scoffed at his wife.

Unbeknownst to both, however, a pale, glowing figure drifted through the spiral gateway behind them. She took the form of an old lady, but in no way little. In kinder terms, she was fairly big-boned. Her pink sun dress was covered by a white kitchen apron and her large hands were covered with yellow rubber gloves. Her white hair was kept under a pink net, fully exposing the bags under her eyes and faint purple lipstick could almost be seen on her lips. All in all she could pull off being a fairly kind school lunch lady.

If not for being able to see the wall behind her through her sickly green, translucent, skin.

She stared around the dark, cluttered lab for a moment before fully pulling her way through the Fenton Portal. She almost seemed to be able to tell that something was amiss and she could just feel it. Then a look of dawning realization came to her glowing green eyes and she gave a sweet smile. "Ohhh," she chided to an unknown recipient. "Somebody changed the menu!" With those words she flew up past the hanging lights and straight through the ceiling.

At that moment, Jack was still saying, "...unless it gets in your hair," and the Fenton Extractor seemed to activate all by itself and began sucking violently on Jack short cropped black bangs, leaving the shorter, graying hair in the back. Jack yelled as a chunk of his hair was yanked from his head and into the end and traveled through the tubing and to the containment box at the other end before shutting itself off. "See?" He grinned to assure his wife while she chuckled, shaking her head, and went to get the secret Fenton Hair-Growth Formula.

"Don't you think this is a little extreme, Sam?" Danny held his spoon full of turf-wich apprehensively.

Just then, a hand appeared on Sam's shoulder. "Ah, Ms. Manson." All three looked up at Mr. Lancer. Lancer was vice principal and English teacher at Casper High, and fit well into the overweight teacher stereotype. He was wearing a blue dress shirt rolled to the elbows and a black tie to clash with his plaid slacks. Maybe he was hoping it would distract from his bald head, bushy eye brows, or oddly pointy, box-shaped-chin (that he tried to hide with slightly abstract facial hair), or he simply did not have a taste for anything tasteful. The only redeeming visual quality that he had was that he was taller than most of the students...and maybe the fact that all the fat went straight to his belly instead of everywhere else.

"The school board wanted me to personally thank you for ushering in this welcome experiment to our cafeteria," he told Sam with a smile. She lifted her head proudly.

Tucker suddenly sat up straight and sniffed the air. "Meat," he said, almost like a dog that smelled squirrel. "Near." He glanced around before honing in on Mr. Lancer and sniffing him. Whatever it was it smelled good. Tucker stopped and glared at the teacher.

"No, no," Mr. Lancer raised his hands in defense. "The rumors about the new all-steak buffet in the teachers' lounge are completely untrue." Lancer smiled and turned back to Sam. "Thanks again," he said, and walked off. As he walked away Danny could have sworn he saw him pull a toothpick out of his pocket.

"Yeah," Tucker chuckled sarcastically. "Thanks again for making us eat garbage, Sam."

"It's not garbage," he lifted her turf-witch. "It's recyclable organic matter."

"It's garbage," Danny and Tucker unisoned.

Back in the line, the last student was walking away with her 'lunch'. The old lady behind the counter in her uniform - pink dress, yellow gloves, white apron - glanced around over her pointy nose before pulling a fresh grilled cheese burger out of her apron pocket.

She grinned and turned back to the kitchens to eat her prize just as a pale green figure dropped through the ceiling behind her. The ghost looked over the oblivious lady's shoulder at what she was about to eat before smiling sweetly and saying, "Well that's not good." The lunch lady nearly jumped out of her wrinkling skin and dropped her burger. When she turned around her eyes went wide with horror and her knees started shaking. "It's against lunch lady policy to eat the kid's food, don'cha know? How do you think I went?" She chuckled. "Just one wrong kebab and suddenly there's no one to make sure the children are gettin' fed. But I'm sure you'll be fine." The ghost smiled sweetly but old lady was already running out the exit, scream stuck in her throat.

The ghost's sweetly smiling eyes were brought from the still swinging door down to the table next to her where a book labeled Ultra Recyclo Veggie Lunch Menu was sitting. The smile fell off her face and she picked it up, the corner of the front cover still visible through her hand. The menu never called for recycled vegetables...

Danny was staring mournfully at his spoon full of dirt (dessert) when the air he was breathing suddenly dropped twenty degrees. He had to drop his spoon onto the table as he started coughing at the irritation of the cold in his throat and he could feel the skin on his hand itch when he coughed a cloud of ice crystals into it. "Uuh, guys?" he managed. When he looked up long enough to see that Sam and Tucker had definitely noticed the fact he was practically breathing snow he coughed out, "I have a problem."

As he spoke, Danny could feel is mouth reheating to what he had come to accept as normal. Ever since the accident his average temperature had dropped a good ten degrees. They were all pretty freaked out at first, but after a week of long sleeves and hand-warmers they tabbed it under 'Dead People Side-Effects' and went on to rig the Fenton Thermometer to not freak out if Danny's parents ever insisted to use it on him.

Danny had just enough time to sit up straight again before he felt something cold and sloppy nail him in the back of the head. "FENTON!"

"Make that two problems."

Danny started attempting to scratch the already drying mud off the back of his head as he stood up and turned around to what he already knew was Dash Baxter marching towards him. Dash had started targeting Danny as early as kindergarten and hadn't let up since. For the past nine years or so Danny had gotten used to being the personal punching bag of a large kid with anger issues, but this first month of high school had taught him very early that yes, things can get worse. Some people would say it's a good thing that the American perspective sees men in tights slamming into each other as a career path - Danny, and every other kid who has nightmares about Letterman jackets, disagrees. "I ordered three mud pies," Dash was fuming as Danny stared up at him. Dash was holding a lunch tray in his left hand that looked like it had been stuck under a waterfall of mud. "Do you know what they gave me? Three. Mud. Pies. With mud. From the ground!" Maybe it had. "All because of your girlfriend."

Danny winced at that. Dash may have the potential for a career as a professional hobo, but he somehow always managed to make any bad situation he came to Danny's fault. But there was that last bit…

"She's not my girlfriend!" Sure they had been friends since they met in middle school while hiding in the janitor's closet during parent-teacher conferences, but three years of friendship did not equate dating. Well, Danny didn't think that it did, but he wouldn't know, he wasn't very good at math.

"I'm not his girlfriend!" Doesn't mean that didn't hurt a little.

Dash reached out and grabbed a fist full of Danny's shirt and lifted him a good six inches off the ground so he was level with Dash's square, blonde head. The girls at school swore up and down that Dash's blue eyes were like cool, blue, dreams. Danny thought they looked like soapy toilet water, but he guessed it was a matter of opinion. He wasn't really in the mood for thinking about it too much because he was pretty sure the girl at the next table over was giggling about Danny's lack of ab muscle that was now being displayed to the entire school while Dash spat in his face, still gripping his shirt. "These are the best years of my life!" He was spraying. The Danny from long ago would have made a 'say it, don't spray it' comment but he had since then learned that that was a bad idea. "After high school it's all down-hill for me." Well at least he acknowledges it. "How am I supposed to enjoy my glory days eating mud?"

"Actually, it's top soil." Still not his girlfriend.

"Whatever!" Dash threw Danny onto a lunch table bench and he barely got his hands up in time to keep his head from smacking directly into the table. The girls who had been occupying the table a few moments ago quickly picked up their things and hightailed it to the back of the surrounding crowd.

As he lifted himself into an actual sitting position, Dash slammed the mud tray down in front of him and shoved a spoon full of it in front of Danny's face. "Eat it. All of it."

In just about any other situation, Danny probably would have talked back to that and try to slip his way out of this. The problem this time was that Sam was just a few feet away and behind her was a crowd of people smarter than Dash. Any one of them, if given the time to think about it, would put two and two together and realize that the one at fault was Sam and she should be the one eating the 'top soil' and being assigned a week crammed in her locker.

Before any of that could happen, Danny - heroically as possible - scooped up a spoon full of what he was pretty sure his bio teacher told him was worm crap, and as bravely as he could (so not very) lifted the spoon to his mouth and tried to think about anything other than worms. Anything would do: the itch the dirt was kicking up on the back of his hair, the bruise on his knee from being thrown into the table, the invisible ice pop that seemed to be working his way up his throat -

Crap.

Danny hadn't realized he had closed his eyes till he opened them to watch a green lunch lady float past on the other side of the kitchen window.

Now he was really worrying about his new definition of a weird thought.

"Uhhm," he muttered involuntarily. Dash raised an eye brow at him as if saying, "Well, get on with it, Fenton." "Uhh..." Danny searched for a distraction, green lunch ladies were more important than who ate the mud on his spoon. The mud on his spoon.

The mud on the tray.

"Garbage fight!" Dash had a split second to look surprised before Danny lifted the tray and slammed it into his face. Danny barely heard the rallying cry from the rest of the crowd while he slid under the table, unsurprised to meet Tucker there. They could hear the insane cheering and screaming and the sound of splatting mud was so frequent it almost sounded like rain. Somewhere in a corner one of the skater kids pulled out a stereo and started blasting a Skrillex track loud enough to break some of the teachers' hearing aids.

Tucker had started cracking up at the hilarity of the whole situation - the student body was a crowd of mindless sheep - but a shout from above their table distracted them. Danny looked to his right and found a face full of combat boot.

"It's not mud," Sam was screaming, "it's-!"

Danny reached up and grabbed the hem of her top and pulled her under the table as a milk carton flew by her head. One look and a quick glance towards the kitchens was all it took to get her game face on and Danny peeked out from under the table to find a clear path through the chaos. When he found one (between a junior football player and his girlfriend who had just got pied in the middle of a make out session) he motioned to his friends and started crawling on all fours between legs and busted milk cartons that were already coating the floor.

Only later would Sam explain to him the wonders of the 'milk' people could produce organically without needing to 'enslave' a cow. He showered twice a day for a week.

When he checked over his shoulder to make sure his friends were following, Dash spotted him. Mud was dripping off his nose and his skinny jeans looked permanently grass stained. "You're gonna pay for this, FENTON!" He shouted just in time to get hit in the face and the back of the head at the same time.

Great, I'm still his favorite, Danny thought to himself as he turned and kept crawling.

Somehow Danny, Tucker, and Sam managed to reach the kitchen door, Tucker's hat only slightly worse for wear. Sam turned back to the mob to keep watch while Danny cracked open the door to peak through, Tucker looking over his shoulder. "Huh," Tucker let out a puff of air that ruffled Danny's thick hair. "Shouldn't be so bad, she looks a little like my grandmother."

Danny had met Grandma Foley, and couldn't bring himself to agree. Well, unless Grandma Foley started floating and her chocolate skin turned green, then sure, she looked exactly like his grandmother.

The ghost was looking at a bowl of salad on the opposite side of the kitchen, the look on her face almost confused. Danny still wasn't sure ghosts had real emotions, his parents kept telling him they didn't, but she seemed to feel lost. Well, if she made it this far out of the Ghost Zone, Danny was thinking, she is definitely lost.

But then old people seemed to get lost a lot.

"Shouldn't she be haunting a bingo hall?" Danny muttered to Tucker. Tucker let out a laugh and they both stood up, cautiously stepping inside. A few moments later Sam joined them.

Danny didn't realize until the door shut behind them that the metal door that rolled down in front of the window to the lunch line had been closed and the noise in the cafeteria almost completely cut off. The only thing reminding him that there was a room full of innocent bystanders next door was the heavy dubstep bass that was reverberating through the walls. The whole place seemed surprisingly clean to Danny, save for a lone cheese burger on the floor Tucker was staring hungrily at, but he'd wonder about that later. He had always pictured the place that turned out slop dutifully every day would be a mess but the whole place seemed recently washed. Everything but the pile of dirty dishes by the sink, but pretty much everything else was hung up and in order.

The ghost - that Danny hereby deemed 'The Lunch Lady' until further notice - turned at the sound of their footsteps, having just set the salad back onto the counter. Danny flinched as she turned but she didn't yell at or attack them, she just floated over with a nervous twitch to her eyebrows and asked, "Children, can you help me? Today's lunch is meatloaf, but I don't see the meatloaf." Her voice had a noticeable echo to it, like it was being said across an empty void and she smiled when she asked. "Did someone change the menu?"

This was new. Out of all the ghosts that had crawled out of the portal and into his parents' lab so far, none of them seemed capable of any coherent thought, much less talking.

"Yeah," Tucker waisted no time in pointing at Sam and saying, "She did."

Danny tried to think back on the moment later to justify this, (Tucker was mad a Sam still, he had a slower than normal brain, the ghost really did look like his grandmother) but every path led to the same conclusion: Tucker was an idiot.

Because not one second after processing that statement, The Lunch Lady's hair caught into white fire and her eyes seemed to be having a red spazz attack. The trio let out a collective gasp as she doubled in size and loudly proclaimed, "The menu has been the same for fifty years!" Somewhere in there her dress ignited with green fire that Danny personally thought was overkill, but when she let out the most threatening 'RAWR' an old lady could (which was actually pretty threatening, under the circumstances) the green 'smoke' coming off of her began collecting on the ceiling and swirling like a funnel cloud. Danny covered his head with his arms as the lights blew with loud pops and glass shattered across the floor. The whole room was glowing green, it's only light source being a very upset Lunch Lady.

Without thinking Danny spread out his arms and ordered, not very convincingly, to his friends, "Get behind me!"

Tucker and Sam obeyed, but Danny couldn't help catching Sam's remark of, "Wow, I feel safe."

But he shook it off and put his own game face back on to heroically shout, "I'm goin' ghost!"

Now, according to Tucker, Danny's 'transformation sequence' looked like something between Sailor Moon and a cloning pod from a sci-fi movie opening, but Danny had never looked in a mirror mid-morph before so that was all he had to go off of. It's not that he hadn't tried looking in a mirror, but he couldn't see anything past the blinding white light shooting past his face so he decided to trust Tucker on that one.

From Danny's standpoint, he couldn't quite find a way to fully describe it. Sure, his entire molecular structure was flipping inside out and turning backwards but he didn't feel much more than a tingle. The tingle was everywhere and he shivered after every transformation for about a week but that he could get over. What he would never get over was the feeling of his clothes changing. The clothes thing was still filed under the 'WTF' column (a.k.a. the 'We'll Figure It Out Later' column) since that's the gist of what Danny thought every time his ultra-baggy clothes turned into a skintight, black, hazmat - an inverted copy of the one he wore the day of the accident. Or maybe it was the one he wore, they never did find it. Anyway, it would have been one thing if it started at his wrists or his ankles or something, but that it started at his waist made it feel more like he was being given a hug that kept getting bigger. Basically, there is no other feeling like having a mystical, unknown force change your clothes for you.

But in the mean time, Danny Phantom (Sam thought of the name) was the only thing standing between his friends and a giant, probably people-eating, lunch lady, and he had a super hero gig to catch.

As soon as he remembered how to fly.

Flight; it's just...weightlessness, he thought to himself, and took a deep breath. Steeling his face, he pushed himself off the ground and reminded himself that the laws of physics not kicking in was the new normal. Danny flew up closer to the ghost but still remained a protective distance from his friends.

Unfamiliar with ghosts intelligent enough to make conversation, he tried to look as threatening as possible and shouted the first thing that came to his head. "I command you to...go away!"

Danny's stomach was suddenly far more acquainted with gravity than the rest of him when the Lunch Lady just grinned, showing off, Danny shuddered, pointed white teeth. He flinched as she lifted her hand and Danny looked to his left just in time to see a flock on glowing green dishes start flying towards his face.

'Going intangible', Danny remembered Tucker saying, 'as well as going invisible, seems to be activated more by state of mind than by anything else.'

'So when I think about it, it just happens?'

'Pretty much.'

So Danny clenched his fists, closed his eyes, thought about it really hard and hoped for the best.

Danny's everywhere started tingling and, just when he was thinking it might have worked, he flinched when the first plate slipped through him. The surprise was stuttering, but he managed to hold onto the tingling feeling until the firing stopped and he opened his eyes to find himself solid and no worse for wear. Behind him, the plates had hit the wall and shattered across the floor. He smiled to himself until he noticed the number of plates on the ground.

Wait, weren't there more than-

A shriek cut off his thoughts and he turned to see another stack hurtling towards Sam.

'Ghosts have no real, solid form,' Danny's mom had told him at dinner once. 'They're made of ectoplasm and a core, and can shift their form from their default shape if they wish. It's not that they're all shape shifters, but they can, for example, turn specific body parts into something more akin to a fog or a tail for the sake of speed.'

Danny had never been more glad for listening to his mother.

Letting all feeling in his legs go, Danny shot himself towards Sam, arching his path over the empty dirty dish bin next to the abandoned sink, and, before he could truly process it himself, held the bin in front of him and Sam like a shield. The Lunch Lady let out a roar as the dishes clanked together and miraculously settled in the bottom of the bin. She thrust out her hand again and a new stack of bowls and cooking sheets hurled themselves at Tucker. Grabbing another bin of counter he managed to collect most of the dishes before they shattered across the floor. Tucker looked at the impossibly heavy load of dirty dishes he was holding and smiled a face that read 'I told you so'.

'Super strength', Tucker had told him at lunch one day, 'should be possible. If what your parents said about a ghost's control over their own ectoplasm is right, you should be able to focus it in your arms long enough for a strength boost to rival most pro wrestlers.'

Danny let out a chuckle. "Well, if this superhero thing doesn't work out I could have an exciting career as a bus boy." As he set the bins back on the counters though, a huge thumping kicked up behind him. He whirled around in time to see the oven bouncing up and down, a loud groaning started as they pulled off from whatever piping or wiring it was that was holding them to the walls. The Lunch Lady, even more on fire than before, floated in front of them.

"I control lunch," she growled. "Lunch is sacred! Lunch has rules!"

Then, in the blink of an eye, she was Tucker's grandma again. The fire disappeared, her teeth leveled out, and the smile on her face was sweet again when she held up what appeared to be a slice of a five year old girl's birthday cake and asked, not looking at Danny, "Anyone want cake?"

Danny froze and glanced at Sam and Tucker, who were standing together, backs against the far wall behind a rack on hanging pans with mouths hanging open, eyes almost as wide as his felt. They glanced at each other before turning back to the Lunch Lady and slowly nodded their heads.

"Too bad!" The sharp teeth, fully red eyes, and green fire were back, "Children who change my menu do not get dessert!"

With that she flew through the ceiling and the ovens ignited behind her. First the stoves lit up, then the belly doors flung open and spewed fire like flame throwers across the room. Danny had to float higher to get out of the way, but he still felt the heat singe his face as he just barely dodged in time. Panic gripped him as he swung his head around, looking for Sam and Tucker. He spotted them crouching low in a corner. It looked like they had ducked behind the pan racks in time to get away unsinged, but now the ovens had detached themselves from the wall and hurtled themselves toward the kids like rabbid oven-monsters, the dials almost looking like eyes in the fire-light.

In pretty much any super hero comic he read, or any movie he watched, the hero would have blasted the bad guy to bits and walked out with a few scratches from the shrapnel. Unfortunately for Danny, however, he was fresh out of projectile weapons or anything large enough to smash metal, and one of the ovens seemed to still be attached to a gas line. One wrong hit and the whole place would explode. The easy escape for him was straight through the wall, but Sam and Tucker couldn't go intangible.

Or could they?

Before he could give himself doubts, Danny threw himself behind his friends and grabbed the backs of their shirts. They both flinched at his sudden hold, but Danny barely noticed. Focusing more than he ever had in his life, he forced himself to go intangible and waited for the strange tingle to take over before shoving as much energy he could through his hands, out his fingertips, and into Sam and Tucker. He took his eyes off the Oven of Death long enough to see the surprised expressions on their faces as they looked down at themselves before heaving backwards and throwing all three of them through the wall.

Once he knew they were through he tried to drop his friends but let his concentration slip too far and they all tumbled onto the floor. He only barely registered the thumps he heard behind them as the oven doors colliding with the wall. Lifting his head off the floor, he took in the pale green lockers and yellow walls before letting himself believe he was really in an empty school hallway. He stood up and glanced at his friends where they were crawling to their feet in front of him to make sure they were safe before smiling and letting out the breath he hadn't known he was holding. "Hey, it worked!" He felt like he just ran a lap around the school track and his head was throbbing but worked was worked. "Think I can turn things invisible, too?"

"Sure, Danny," Sam lifted herself to her feet, rubbing a bruised shoulder. "Try it on Dash's pants later, but in the mean time, there's a lunch obsessed ghost running around the school with a grudge on me! This is the thanks I get for thinking like an individual?" She threw her hands in the air.

"Uh," Tucker straightened his hat, "Where exactly did the ghost go?"

As if on cue, Danny got a chill that crawled its way down his spine just before the lights above their heads started spraying sparks across the lockers. Danny shielded his head with his arms until the lights gave one last flicker and died out, leaving hallway dark. The glow Danny was giving off was enough that they weren't left in total darkness, but it was a small comfort when the walls started shaking.

Danny turned around just in time to watch the lockers lining the walls begin to burst open, letting their contents fall into the windstorm that had suddenly picked up and be swept down the hallway. Through the flying papers, books, and occasional t-shirt, Danny could just make out the shape of the Lunch Lady. It took all of two seconds to put together that she was messing with them, trying to scare them.

I've never fought anything this strong before, Danny ducked to avoid a flying math book, punching an ectopus through the portal is one thing, but the Fenton Portal is at least a miles walk away and I don't think she's afraid of water. Danny fisted his hands to keep them from trembling. Pull it together, Fenton.

Then Tucker started sniffing.

"Steak. Rib-eye. Boarder House. Medium Rare." Danny turned and raised an eyebrow at Tucker only to have an actual medium rare steak fly past his face. He turned around in time to duck an incoming rib. "But, where did it come from?" He heard Tucker mumble to himself over the roar of the wind before coming to, "Lancer."

All rumors start somewhere, Danny mused. This one apparently started at a buffet in the teacher's lounge.

"Prepare to learn why meat is the most powerful of the five food groups!" Danny whipped back around to the Lunch Lady only to see what could only be described as a giant, humanoid meat monster with glowing red eyes.

"Did she cover herself in...?" Danny trailed off.

"Yes," Sam looked pale. "Yes, she did."

"Well, I guess if you're going to control food, you might as well pick the best kind," Tucker shrugged. Sam hit him across the head.

The Lunch Lady's eyes faded back to green and she pulled a cookie out of one of her meat-arms. "Cookie?" she asked. Danny and Tucker didn't dare move, but Sam shook her head. "THEN PERISH!"

"Forget it!" Danny slid himself in front of Sam, tae kwon do basics his mom had taught him coming back. Maybe having a ghost-hunting, protective parent could be a good thing. "The only thing that has an expiration date here is you!" Danny knew full well how stupid that sounded, but the stupidity of it all seemed to be calming him down. Maybe it could be just like the cartoons on T.V. Danny lifted his fist and tried to think about what he did with his strength earlier with the dishes. Just...focus to your fists right?

Not right.

Next thing Danny knew, white sparks started and his hands and feet and were shooting up his arms and legs, leaving jeans and gloveless hands behind them. One moment, a potential ghost super hero is finally getting his confidence, and next a wimpy freshman is wondering why his life suddenly sucks. "Whoops. I...didn't mean to do that."

The meat monster let out a roar of triumph and rage and a giant, meaty hand lifted Danny off the ground. Normally the smell of all that fresh-cooked meat would make him hungry, but with his heart pounding in his ears and the no doubt Sam-fueled thought of 'I'm covered in slimy, dead, animal guts', he thought he was going to hurl. It didn't help when she threw him, and his stomach, into Tucker, slamming them both into the lockers and dropping what remained in them on top of their heads.

White spots swam across Danny's vision and he let out a groan. He thought he heard a scream but when he tried to sit up, his hand slipped on someone's failed math quiz (might have been his) and his stomach gave an unhelpful lurch. His head was still pounding from when he pulled Tucker and Sam through the wall (Why did I do that again?) and the bump on the back on his head he found seemed to be making it worse.

"C'mon!" Danny forced his head up and opened his eyes when Tucker started shaking him. At least he's OK. But where was Sam? "The Meat-o-saurous nabbed Sam! Change back! We gotta go!"

"You two aren't 'going' anywhere." Danny's stomach lurched again as a hand grabbed his shirt from behind and hauled him to his feet. He didn't need to turn his head to know what teacher had just walked in a good two seconds late. Or was it a full minute? Why was the world spinning without him? Why didn't he hear Lancer coming? Why was he asking so many questions?

After a moment the floor leveled out again and Danny managed to focus on another pair of angry footsteps coming to join Mr. Lancer in the 'Let's Bust Nerdy Teens' club.

"Told 'ja you'd pay, FEN-TON!"

Danny exchanged a glance with Tucker. Crap.

Date Posted: June 19, 2012

Word Count: 10,017