Sorry about the long wait, procrastinating is adictive. This is the last part of episode one. The next two episodes are going to be mushed together into the next three or four chapters. I've been on a writing streak lately so hopefully it'll be up a lot faster than this one. I'd also like to know if anyone out there would be interested in a Gravity Falls crossover with Dani. My brain has been obsessing over it lately.
Anyway, enjoy! =)
Mystery Meat
(Part II)
The office of one Mr. Lancer was surprisingly big for a vice principal's/teacher's office. It had all the basic workings of an office - big desk, spinning chair for him, two hard chairs for his victims, metal file cabinets, computer, pictures of his hairy sister - but the fact that he had an array of T.V. screens broadcasting the security camera feeds from all over the school set up on one wall was a little unsettling. Over all the entire room felt entirely too cramped for the situation. Danny, Tucker, Mr. Lancer, and Dash, who was standing by the door, were the only people there, but somewhere in the building a meat monster was doing who-knows-what to one of his best friends. He should be off saving her, but instead he was metaphorically tied to his chair by the terrifying power that is his school file being read out loud.
Lancer was sifting through a file cabinet behind his desk before he found the ones he wanted and turned back to face Danny and Tucker, who were sitting in the 'victim' chairs. "Tucker Foley," he read in his patented 'nice guy' voice, "chronic tardiness, talking in class, repeated 'loitering' by the girls locker room." Tucker, sitting on Danny's right, openly smiled.
"Danny Fenton," Lancer went on and Danny blinked. "Thirty-four dropped beakers in the last month, banned for life from handling all fragile school property," Dash smirked at that one and Danny knew he wanted to make some sort of comment about Danny handling himself but kept quiet in front of the teacher, "but no severe mischief before today. So, gentlemen, tell me." Lancer slammed their files on the table and leaned forward, shouting in his 'no more Mr. Nice Guy voice', "Why did the two of you conspire to destroy the school cafeteria!"
First of all, Danny knew why he was being blamed for it, but why Tucker was too was completely out of his reach.
"Dash started it," Danny tried to defend himself. "He threw -"
"Not a single mud pie, according to a room full of eye-witness students," Mr. Lancer cut him off. "It is because of that fact that he is thereby exempted from scorn. You two, however, are not." Lancer stood up straight and began walking towards the door. "I have a cafeteria of students that I need to release for the day while the janitors clean up what is left of the cafeteria and the hallways you two destroyed, so I'll map out your punishment when I return. Mr. Baxter," he turned to Dash, who had already changed into his football warm ups and scrubbed (most of) the mud off of his face, "watch the door."
Dash threw one last smirk in their direction before pulling the door shut behind himself to keep watch from outside.
"...me into a table." Danny finished with a heavy sigh and sagged into his chair. The adrenaline rush from the fight with the Lunch Lady was slipping and his new head ache was ramping it up a notch. The 'milk' from the cafeteria floor had also soaked his pants was starting to smell.
"'Eye-witness students', yeah right," Tucker crossed his arms. "More like every kid the football team could threaten into not spilling the pre-chaos details. How can he get by like that on everything?"
"Because what he did throw," Danny said, resting his elbows on his knees and rubbing his temples, "were four touchdown passes in the last football game, and this school hasn't had a good football team in years. How else did a freshman like him get quarterback?"
"Dude," Tucker looked at Danny in confusion. "You pay attention to our football team?"
"No," Danny spat at the floor. "But reruns of the game on local T.V. are great to fall asleep to at one a.m. down in my parents lab, while I'm guarding that dumb portal." At the thought of night watch Danny let out a huge yawn. "How am I supposed to be able to do anything tonight? How am I supposed to do anything ever? Just five minutes of trying to use my powers like that and I'm starting to run on empty. Even if we don't get suspended for the rest of the day, I don't think I could stay awake for two seconds in class. Then I'll just wind up here again..."
But Tucker wasn't entirely listening. "There's no way being good at football would keep him from getting in trouble, though. The school system's not that corrupt...right?"
Danny pointed to the wall of security feeds without looking at it. "Lancer spends all of his free time in here, Tuck." Which meant that Lancer had managed to see, even if he couldn't hear, most, if not all, of what happened before the garbage fight broke out and was unwilling to discipline his star player for fear of losing a game of football. Of course there was always the chance that he hadn't actually looked at the video footage yet and they could show him, but Danny wasn't putting his hopes on it.
"Anyway, we got to find Sam," Tucker protested, standing up. "For some reason, I feel like I got her kidnapped."
"Maybe because you told the ghost she changed the menu?" Danny looked up at him, unable to hide how irritated he was. "How about that?" Danny rubbed his eyes one last time and stood up. "You're right though, we've got to find her. Any idea where to start?"
Tucker sniffed the air several times. "That steak is still in the building. Two hundred yards, tops."
Danny thought for a moment before spotting the wall of monitors and walking over to it. From here he could see every hallway and the trails of mud that the kids were tracking through it as they worked their way around the decimated hallway toward the front exit. None of the halls looked remotely haunted, but then again, what did a haunting look like? Danny had never run into a ghost outside his parents lab before now.
Danny's attention was drawn to a screen when the shot fuzzed for a moment. It seemed to be a camera in a storage room since boxes were stacked in rows and it wasn't a part of the building he recognized. Danny's suspicions about his eye sight improving were only further boosted when he spotted a trail on the ground that was only a slightly lighter shade of gray than the rest of the floor. "Check it out," Danny pointed to the screen and Tucker peered at it through his thick-rimmed glasses. "Meat trail."
Tucker ruffled through some of the papers on the table below the wall of monitors. "Well, according to this key," Tucker lifted a sheet that Danny suspected listed the camera locations by the number on the screen, "and this map," Tucker whipped out his PDA from the thigh pocket on his pants and pulled up a map of the school, "that room is on the first floor, right below us."
"Perfect," Danny fisted his hands. If he was going to save Sam, he would need to be fast. If he was going to be fast, he would need to use his ghost powers.
If he was going to use his ghost powers, he would need to learn how not to pass out.
Grabbing Tucker's arm, Danny forced his body to change into his ghost half. When his clothes changed, he could feel the milk from his pants disappear only to be replaced by sticky meat juice and steak sauce from the earlier fight. Danny didn't even want to know what was dripping out of his hair. Note to self, ghost body and human body need separate showers. That'll do wonders for the hot water bill.
Mentally filing that problem away for later, Danny put as much focus as he could into turning him and his friend intangible. Just like that, they started slipping through the floor and Danny had to use some of that super strength to keep Tucker from falling straight through the ceiling of the next room and dropping onto the ground.
Danny could just barely hear the door opening above them when the inside of the floor filled his vision. Lancer is going tokillus, he thought. Can't worry about that now, Danny shook his head. Have to save Sam.
"Sweet mother of mutton!" Tucker's gasp brought Danny's attention back enough to drop them the last few inches onto the floor.
They had landed just outside the back door to the basement storage room. The doorway was wide open and Danny could see by the meat trail across the ground lead straight through it. Walking inside, the room was dark - shards of light bulbs were scattered across the floor every few feet - and cold, but the first thing to hit Danny's senses was the overwhelming scent of raw, refrigerated, meat. This must be the giant freezer where the school stores the food. Looking around at the isles, Danny realized the room had to at least be the length of the gym. We don't eatthatmuch do we?Danny raised and eyebrow and shook his head to no one in particular. "So much for the government trying to keep kids from getting fat."
"I dreamed of it, but I never thought I'd live to see it!" Meanwhile, Tucker had run over to a stack of meat boxes and did his very best to give it a hug. He spread both his arms wide across the face of the box and gave an inhale through his nose that would have made a professional tuba player proud.
"How is it that I have the ghost powers and you're the weird kid?"
"AHAHAHAHA," Danny and Tucker both snapped to attention at the sudden maniacal laughter that boomed just around the corner. Danny put a finger in front of his lips in the universal 'shh' symbol before turning and floating down the isle of boxes, inwardly wincing with every echo Tucker's boots made on the tile floor. Danny could recognize the Lunch Lady's 'sweet grandma' voice. "My dear child, meat is good for kids! It helps them grow and makes them smile! Why won't you eat it?"
"We don't need meat, that's fact." Sam.
Danny peered around the corner of the next isle and spotted Sam through, literally, through, the Lunch Lady who had apparently dumped her entire meat monster costume on top of Sam. Danny could just make out Sam's head sticking out from a pile of meat. She seemed more of less OK, if not absolutely disgusted, but she was obviously struggling to get out and the Lunch Lady didn't look like she was about to go anywhere.
"Silence!" The ghost yelled and Danny caught sight of her teeth sharpening. "You need discipline, manners, respect!" The indoor wind suddenly kicked up again and started blowing in Sam's face. "You know where that comes from? MEAT!" Just like that she calmed again and held up two options: "Chicken or fish?"
"OK," Danny whispered and Turned to Tucker, "I'll take care of the ghost, you just find a way to get Sam out of that pile of meat."
Tucker held up a fork and a knife. "Way ahead of you."
Danny raised an eyebrow. "Tucker..."
Tucker laughed, "No, seriously, I'll get her out."
Danny nodded warily, "Good."
Swallowing the lump in his throat, Danny pushed his feet off the ground and turned himself toward the Lunch Lady before shooting himself towards her, super hero style. She turned around just in time to watch Danny pull back a fist and throw it towards her face, knocking her all the way down the isle and into the wall. Danny wasn't sure what punching an actual old lady felt like, but he was pretty sure it didn't feel like that. It almost felt like punching that corn starch mixture they made in science class back in middle school. Well, maybe a little harder than that on the surface, but frankly Danny was just happy he had gloves on. He was also a little surprised at how far she flew. Sure, the other ghosts he'd fought didn't pay much attention to physics behind the transfer of force either, but for some reason he thought she'd be different.
The Lunch Lady fell to the ground with a thud and when Danny landed in front of her he did his best took threatening in the face of her red glare. Sadly, Spiderman poses were harder than they looked.
"I'll have you free in no time, Sam!"
"You've got to be kidding me."
Danny didn't need to turn around to know Tucker was about to eat Sam's way out of the meat pile. He sighed inwardly, I'll take care of him later.
The mean time, Danny decided to try pulling of some of those moves he saw in kung-fu movies that gravity would never let him do before. Jumping into the air, trying to match what he remembered, he did a somersault mid-air and came out of it with his foot thrust forward, ready to land a solid kick to the face. He actually felt pretty accomplished that he managed to pull that off until the Lunch Lady grabbed his ankle not two inches from it's target. Danny barely suppressed a shiver at the feeling of her hand. She was suddenly a lot more solid than she was when he had punched her, but the goopy feeling was still there.
She pushed herself back into the air and held a surprised Danny upside down by his foot. "Don't you see?" She began. Danny just blinked. "This is why you need meat! You're skin and bones!" With that she a mighty swing, the Lunch Lady proved that Danny also had no more need for physics any more either by chucking him down the outer isle head first. Danny tried to turn himself intangible but somehow only succeeded in lightly bouncing off the floor a few times before everything from the waist down fell through the wall, leaving his torso, arms, and head to stick out awkwardly.
Danny considered himself lucky he got out that just a little dizzy. He managed to pull himself out of the wall and up to his feet in time to see half a dozen shish-ke-babs flying towards his face. In pure panic, Danny tried to dodge up and to his right and let out a breath of relief when each kebab stuck themselves in the wall instead of his face, his chest, or his...legs.
Which he had somehow left on the floor. Apparently his waist had stretched out weaved itself between the projectiles, leaving his legs two feet to the left of the rest of him. It felt weird but...this is kinda cool! Danny smiled to himself.
But talk about an awkward growth spurt.
"ROOAHHH!" Danny's attention was turned back to his opponent as she let out another roar. The boxes of meat around her started shaking and glowing green before bursting open and hurling pounds and pounds of meat into the air. Danny reattached himself at watched curiously as all the meat, including the pile that had trapped Sam, gravitated toward the Lunch Lady and reformed an even bigger meat monster than the last.
An opening beneath it's glowing green eyes almost seemed to smile at him before it threw an arm forward...and forward, and forward. The arm extend all the way towards Danny too fast for him to dodge and it scooped him up in its giant, meaty hand. Danny pushed against the fingers - which he was having trouble defining from one another - but his costume was apparently doomed to be sticky today.
The Lunch Lady retracted her arm again so she could stare Danny in the face. Having her face right there, Danny felt his thumping heart jump into his throat and he tried not to hurl. Not like he had eaten anything since breakfast, but he was certain that Fruit Loops did not taste better the second time.
"Help's on the way, buddy!" The Lunch Lady turned and Danny caught sight of Tucker standing next to Sam and holding his fork like a weapon. Before Danny could process it, he was being thrown again, this time towards his friends.
"Aargh!" Danny yelled. He closed his eyes and forced himself to turn intangible. He barely processed that the Lunch Lady had missed his friends and sent him, upside down, straight through another wall.
This time, however, Danny wasn't lucky enough to land half way through.
Just as Danny passed the bricks, he felt the tingle of intangibility disappear in time for his shoulder blades to smack directly across something metal and hard. He felt his feet start to tip forward and the rest of him slip down, but his toes hit a something in front of him and he crumbled into an awkward huddle on top of his head between a wall and a hard place. Which turned out to be another brick wall.
When Danny opened his eyes, he was greeted by a face full of wall and a nose full of kneecap. Normally if a person was crammed with the pipes - which must have been what his shoulders ran into - between two halves of a wall would be in pitch darkness, but Danny was finding the fact that his eyes were glowing green and the rest of him was letting off a white glow very convenient. He was just able to see the barbeque sauce stains on his normally white gloves.
Danny slowly managed to turn himself sideways until he was in more of a sitting position before reached his arm up, partially through the wall, to rub his shoulder. He daintily tapped where he knew a bruise would show up by tomorrow and tried to sort his thoughts out though the fog his tired brain was giving off. Why am I still awake again?
"Aaaah!" Danny's head jerked up at the sound of what he was now sure was his friends screaming.
Ghost. Right.
A few yards down the wall to his right, Danny heard a noise that sounded like a pile of meat slamming into the double doors that led into the hallway that he was pretty sure was just beyond the wall behind him. It was then that he realized that he knew what falling piles of meat sounded like. Danny turned intangible again and pulled himself back through the wall. Once his head was through, though, the room started spinning he put a hand to his head to steady himself. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. You got this, Fenton.
Danny looked up at another scream just as Sam and Tucker ran by his wall, away from the Lunch Lady/meat monster and the pile of steak that, sure enough, was blocking the doorway. At some point while he was in the wall, the Lunch Lady had traded her legs for a snake tail made out of sausage links.
Digging inside himself for the last reserves of strength he had, Danny pushed himself out of the wall and shot himself like a bullet down the isle between collapsing rows of boxes and after the Lunch Lady. Abandoning his own legs for tail, Danny was just barely able to over take her in time to come up between Sam and Tucker, hook his arms around their waists. Danny barely processed Tucker's hand latching onto the back of his shirt and Sam's surprised gasp as he lifted them off the floor and forced himself to phase them all through the wall just before they face planted into it. On the other side, Danny opened his eyes to the empty field behind the school. Letting out the breath he was holding, Danny staggered in mid-air, turning off the intangibility but still holding him and is friends several feet off the ground as they drifted forward, much slower now.
Danny turned his head toward the building. She can't turn the meat intangible can she? He wondered this only for a few moments before deciding she couldn't and turning forward again. He felt his eye lids droop as his heart beat finally started slowing again. Was it a heart beat? They hadn't actually tried to find out if he actually had internal organs as a ghost. Maybe they should. Why was it important again?
"Gee, Danny," Danny jerked at the sudden noise of Sam talking. "Fighting meat monsters, flying through walls, you must be exhausted."
"What?" Danny shook his head, trying to focus on anything but the dark shadows around the edge of his vision. Should he be worried about that? "Of course not! What would..." Suddenly those black clouds looked really comfy. "Give you that idea..."
Danny was only vaguely aware of hitting the ground.
Somewhere along the line (hewasn't sure when), Danny had become obsessed with outer space. Even if his dad never listened, he wasn't lying when he said he wanted to be an astronaut. Jazz told him over and over that only the best were selected to go into space, and those people were always smart and knew what they were doing. To get into the space program, Danny would have to get really good grades, get into a good college, and be a model student.
That was before he got ghost powers though.
He still wasn't entirely sure how they worked, but until he figured it out, he would need to spend as much time getting reacquainted with the body he was already in the middle of getting reacquainted with during this mystic process called 'puberty'. What if his powers got in the way of puberty? What if something went wrong and his ghost form started growing tentacles that carried over into his human side in the form of extra arms and legs or some other new appendage that the government would confiscate in the form of arresting him and taking him to some sort of ghost version of the Men in Black? Then he would never go to space, he may never see the light of day again, and they may never let him have another run on sentence in his head because they'd zap him with their crazy little needle things that would prod him like a useless pile of meat-
Meat.
Danny snapped his eyes open.
It took all of two seconds to recognize the glow in the dark stars of his bedroom ceiling and spot Tucker, who was sitting in his spinning desk chair."Wh-what's going on?"
Tucker stopped spinning when Danny spoke. "You passed out," he said, somehow rolling the chair across the carpet to his bedside. "We took you home." Danny noticed Sam walk over from where she had been leaning against the wall. "You've been asleep for four days."
Danny shot up to a sitting position and jerked his attention back to Tucker. "Four days?"
"Haha, nah," Tucker smiled and leaned back in the chair. "It's only been a couple hours."
"Knock it off, Tucker," Sam thumped him over the back of the head. "This is the second time today your carelessness almost got him killed."
"Me?" Tucker stood up. "I almost got him killed?" Danny laid back down. He felt like he woke up in the middle of something. "The only reason this happened was because you had to be unique! You had to take the meat away, and I'm going to get it back!" Tucker took the opportunity to storm out of the door and down the hallway.
"You want to change that menu back," Sam stormed after him, "you're going to have to go though me to do it!" Sam grabbed the door and slammed it shut behind her.
Danny just laid there awkwardly for a moment, still rather confused. "Ah, well," he muttered to himself. "I'm sure everything'll be back to normal by tomorrow."
"Ouch - dang it...crud!" Danny sat up at the sound of Jazz's voice from across the hall. "Stupid-! Argh!"
Danny swung himself off his bed and followed the sound of muttered curses out his door, across the hall, and into his sister's room. "Jazz?"
Jazz was sitting on her bed with the ends of her hair sucked into...a vacuum cleaner? Looking at it again, Danny noticed the green gauges and knobs on the body of the machine that marked his parents experimental handiwork with 'ectoplasmic energies that will one day revolutionize technology'...should they actually get it working.
Jazz dropped her hands into her lap with a frustrated huff and looked up at her brother. "Hey, Danny. Think you could help me out here?"
"What happened?" Danny cautiously stepped closer to Jazz, still not certain the vacuum thing wouldn't explode.
"Mom and Dad jumped me when I walked in the door." Danny raised his eyebrows. He was a little shocked but not quite surprised. "Yeah, I know. Smoke screen and everything, too," Jazz returned to making gentler attempts to pull her hair back to freedom, all the while talking as if it had been unusually windy today, not that the man and women who gave birth to her and tackled her for walking in the doorway. "Apparently Dad is convinced we have a ghost in the family." Danny felt his stomach drop into his feet and found he was suddenly incapable of coherent thought under 113 thoughts per second, most of which included something along the lines of 'Did they find out?', 'What gave it away?', 'This is not how it was supposed to happen,' and 'I am so dead.'
All thought actually stopped when he reached that last one, though, as it was the moment he realized such metaphors were no longer useable.
Play dumb, Fenton. "W-what?" Danny tried to smile but he could feel his face being unwilling to cooperate. "That's ridiculous!" He was pretty sure his voice just cracked but there was something thumping in his ears that was making it very hard to hear.
Luckily, Jazz was still looking down at her hair and she just scoffed. "I know, right? I mean, ghosts are supposed to be dead people, aren't they? Last I checked we were all alive and breathing and it's not like someone could be...I don't know, half dead?" Jazz shook her head, still smiling. "I'd like to know how that would work."
Join the club, Danny thought bitterly to himself. From what he could tell, his parents didn't actually know anything and Jazz was still as disbelieving as ever on the existence of anything paranormal. Danny let his shoulders relax and he tried to hide a huge sigh of relief by kneeling down next to the vacuum cleaner. "So how's this thing supposed to work, anyway?"
"Well supposedly, it's power source is charged by 'ectoplasmic energy' that they suck out of the portal downstairs."
"I thought that didn't actually work?" Danny asked, scanning the bottomed-out energy gauges. "Something about it losing charge after it passes through?"
Jazz gave an irritated sigh and shook her head. "Of course it doesn't work! I don't know what that monstrosity is, but a portal to another dimension? I'll believe it when I see it but until the day our parents reach that level of stupidity to actually try walking through that thing, who am I to ruin their delusions?"
Danny just smiled and started playing with the knobs and switches while Jazz kept talking, trying to see if something would start. He was flicking the 'suck/reverse' switch back and forth when something occurred to him. If Jazz's hair was stuck in the vacuum, then it was turned to 'suck'...and it had turned on. Danny flicked it to 'reverse' again and started running his finger over the gauges. All of them read as empty. Another thing was strange, he'd never seen the thing before but it somehow seemed familiar. Something about the pattern the dials were laid out in reminded him of Cheerios...
Then it hit him. Danny had been staring at the blueprints just a few days ago during breakfast. It was the day he'd spilled the box of Cheerios all over the table after his dad hit a bad bruise on his shoulder that hadn't quite healed yet. He'd had to clean up every Cheerio and ended up not having time to finish his breakfast was hungry the rest of the morning. His stomach growled through the entire math test...
Danny shook his head, focusing back on the problem. He nodded a few times for Jazz's benefit and made a noise like he was agreeing with her before she could call him out on not listening. Danny tried to remember as much of the blue prints as he could and eventually found his way inside a panel on the left side. In the middle of a cluster of wires on the inside was an circuit board that was a toxic shade of green. Maybe that was the power source?
Danny poked it with one finger, not expecting it to do anything but wondering how to get it working. When he touched it though, it started glowing. Danny retracted his finger and shut the panel as quickly as possible when the whole machine started making an ominous whirring noise.
Danny's eyes went wide when the energy gauges suddenly shot up to full. "Danny, what did you-" Jazz's question was cut off when her hair was suddenly blown into her face. She shrieked in surprise and Danny scrambled to press the off button. There was a moment of silence where the two of them just looked at each others wide eyed expressions. "What did you...?" Danny just shrugged.
Danny sat back on his heels for a moment before standing up. "Well I'd better...um...go do my homework for school tomorrow." Danny cleared his throat awkwardly before walking out of the room, back across the hall and shutting his door behind him. Leaning his back against the door, Danny looked down at his hand. The moment he touched that chip, the vacuum started working.
DidIdo that?He guessed that would make some sense. If it was supposed to run off of energy from the Ghost Zone, and Danny's powers used the same energy then maybe...
Danny's alarm clock across the room beeped as it changed to six o'clock. Great, time to endure another dinner conversation with his family about ghosts. If he was lucky they would talk about the new lethal weapon designs today instead of dissection plans. Danny looked back at his hand, very happy it was still attached to the rest of him.
Maybe he'd ask Tucker tomorrow.
Or maybe his friends would be busy on the front lawn of the school protesting eating habits. That could happen too.
Danny had spent his walk to school wondering where exactly his dysfunctional friends had gotten too, but after arriving on the street in front of what was supposed to be a calm, happy, establishment of learning, Danny decided 'dysfunctional friends' didn't quite capture it.
To his left was what one might describe as a Meat Convention. There was a huge crowd full of what Danny was pretty sure were meat enthusiasts all either carrying signs reading things like 'EAT MEAT', 'MEAT is NEAT', 'WE 3 MEAT', or 'MEAT GIVES YOU A BUTT' , holding balloons shaped like t-bone steaks and turkey legs, or dressed up in steak and hotdog costumes. Some stood in line at a barbeque or waited around a fire for a pig to finish cooking under a 'UNITED WE EAT MEAT!' banner while others bought meat on a stick and took pictures with the giant dairy cow balloon or the six foot big mac. Danny spotted what he assumed to be most of his classmates by a stage set up near the back where the National Meat Society's 'The Weinerettes' (four girls in wiener costumes) were waving and dancing off stage. Danny wasn't totally surprised when Tucker walked on stage with a microphone and started giving a speech about out constitutional right to eat meat. Danny was more than a little shell shocked at this point though, so all he really remembered about it was Tucker yelling, "What do we want?" and the crowd actually responding.
"MEAT!"
"When do we want it?" he asked.
"NOW!"
Danny looked from the chaos on his right to his left where he found...hippies. There was a group of hippies sitting around an brightly painted Volkswagen bus that was parked under an apple tree. They were all dancing to a tambourine, hugging each other, and selling fruit to little girls while not ten feet away was a group of hippie and goth protesters holding signs reading things like 'IT'S EASY BEING GREEN!', and some that seemed to be in the wrong place because they read things like 'GIVE PEACE A CHANCE'. But Danny figured the hippies were probably all stoned so he could let that go.
The protesters were all crowded around a Casper High school bus where Danny spotted Sam standing on the roof over an 'Ultra Recyclo Vegetarian' banner and leading the chant of "Veggies now! Veggies forever!"
Danny just stood on the sidewalk in defeat when Sam spotted him. He watched as she leaped from the bus and the crowd caught her while continuing the chant. Danny's gaze wandered to the empty school building. He knew the entire building must be empty. He found most of the students among the meat crowd, but he did spot Nathan Lester standing next to a hippie. As he stood there he counted at least four teachers trying to round kids up and usher them into the building with threats of detention. Danny shifted his backpack onto both shoulders and wondered if maybe they'd cancel school today.
Danny snapped out of his daze when both Sam and Tucker entered his line of sight. They were both only feet from Danny before noticing each other and now they resorted to glaring at each other, as if daring the other to come any closer.
Danny took a moment to realize that for once he was not the only one wearing the exact same clothes as yesterday. "You guys put together two protests in one night?"
"Meat eaters, Danny. Always ready to fight, and our high protein diets give us the energy we need to do it quickly." Tucker said this as it was the most and only true statement the world ever really cared about. "Not to mention half the school is on my side."
"Ultra Recyclo Vegetarians are always ready to protest, and because we don't have to waste time cooking our food, we can move even faster." Sam smirked. "A killer twitter following does come in handy, though."
Danny looked back and forth between them. "Don't you guys think this is a little extreme?"
"No choice, buddy." Danny turned to Tucker. "Either you're with me-"
"Or you're against him!"
"So who's side are you on?"
Danny didn't even have to think up a response before a gale force wind came out of nowhere. When he looked up, there were papers, signs, and meat balloons flying all over the place. What sounded like the cackle of an old witch filled the air and a chill ran straight up Danny's spine and out his mouth in a puff of cold air that flew right into his face in the wind. Danny, Sam, and Tucker glanced at each other. "We forgot about the ghost, didn't we?" Danny shouted over the wind and the growing screams of the other kids.
The cackle shifted in a roar and next thing Danny knew, a truck by the meat convention burst at the seams. Apparently the protest was ready to last all week if it had to because the amount of meat that flew out of that truck could have fed a small militia for days.
Danny and the other kids watched as several thousand pounds of dead animal formed together into yesterday's meat monster. Glowing eyes glaring and arms crossed, this new beast was easily four times the size of the old one.
When the wind stopped, the beast leaned over and roared, "IT'S LUNCH TIME!"
The yard fell into chaos.
People ran tossed their signs and abandoned their stands to run screaming in the other direction. Sam and Tucker stood by Danny in the middle of it all. "Meat!" Tucker actually looked close to tears. "Why have you betrayed me?"
Danny knew exactly what the monster was looking for. Yesterday it was angry at Sam, but today it wanted a fight with the guy who beat her up and got away with it. Danny was more than happy to oblige, but he needed cover, fast.
"Guys, time to make up," Danny looked from the crowd of people to his friends. "Now!"
When they didn't quite seem to be getting it at first, Danny rolled his eyes and mumbled, "Good grief," under his breath before pulling his friends around him into a group hug. When they still didn't get it he looked them both straight in the face with glowing green eyes, jerked his head in the direction of the crowd and told them, "Cover me."
That made it click. Sam and Tucker both wrapped their arms around him, blocking him from view, then closed their eyes against the light of Danny transforming. Once they let go and backed away, Danny Phantom gave himself a running start and shot into the air.
After the fight was over and everyone went home for the second cancelled school day in a row, Jazz told Danny an interesting story.
Apparently, during the chaos that was happening on the front lawn, Jazz was having a 'session' with a goth-punk called Spike. Right when Spike "was about to make his breakthrough," their parents had heroically leaped out of the bushes "howling like the crazed maniacs they are" and proceeded to catch Jazz in a glowing green net. Jazz didn't quite catch the name, but the name of the contraption they were reeling her in with something with the word Fenton in front of it.
Not surprisingly, to Danny anyway, Jack was still quite convinced that Jazz was somehow a ghost. However after an obvious display of not-ghost-ness, and a good long speech that Jazz quoted word for word to Danny but he wasn't really listening, their Dad had proceeded to try to suck her into the Fenton Thermos. Of course it didn't work because all of their inventions that actually required power always ended in either hair loss or pathetic whining noises and sparks, but it was the action itself that did all the talking.
The following conversation wasn't so much of a conversation as it was a "heartfelt stare down" in which Jazz basically channeled every negative feeling she had ever felt about their parents into her eyes and shot them at her father like laser beams. According to Jazz there was some sort of psychological reason why this actually managed to work, but Danny was really getting bored with the entire conversation by this point so all he really heard was the part where Jazz told him that Jack had metaphorically "turned his back on ghosts." He even turned around for dramatic effect.
This was something Danny had been shocked to hear and apparently Jazz and Maddie had felt the same way. Danny had tried to ask how their dad was fairing now but Jazz just shushed him and said to let her finish. Anyway, Jack had felt so disheartened about the whole ghost thing, he chucked the thermos over his shoulder, but he turned out to have more muscle than they thought because the thing must have flown forty feet in the air. Just as Jazz was about to feel so proud that her dad was embracing the world of things that actually exist, something that looked akin to a white haired kid had fallen past them at break-neck speeds shouting, "Thanks for the thermos!" before disappearing into the ground.
Danny didn't even need to keep listening at this point. He would have had trouble even trying to listen anyway because he was trying to hide his face behind his dinner. Everything beyond that he either knew or could guess anyway. Their dad was back into ghosts and both his parents had been devastated when they ran to find the actual ghost only to discover they'd missed it by barely three minutes.
Danny almost wished he could tell his side of the story.
So the newest meat monster wasn't just four times the size of the old one, it was also four times and freak-out worthy. Sure, a monster made out of steaks may sound funny and delicious, but Danny was sure he'd have nightmares about this one for weeks.
When he'd initially pushed off the ground, Danny was feeling pretty confident. He'd made it out yesterday, right? How much harder could this be? Size isn't everything. Of course this time getting away wasn't going to be good enough. Should they find no other way, they were probably going to have to find out how to kill a ghost. Though Danny wasn't even entirely convinced that these things were really 'ghosts' in the traditional sense. None of them, up till now anyway, had even remotely resembled someone who had died then kept on truckin', just goo-y, green, ectoplasm monsters from another dimension. One of which, Danny was getting ready to fight head on with, even though it must have been ten times taller than him.
Needless to say, once he reached eye-level, that confidence meant pretty much nothing.
The monster pulled back a fist and swung it straight toward Danny, but, with ease he didn't know he had, Danny flew himself over it and the fist swung straight past him with several yards of lee-way. It swung again and again but Danny just bounced around it's head like a fly. It may be bigger, but the speed it had yesterday was gone. Maybe it was the size, maybe a ghost being out of the Ghost Zone this long had unexpected side effects, but either way Danny was finding his own speed to be quite a source of confidence. Zipping around the back, Danny landed a kick to the back of it's head, knocking sloppy joes and shish-kebabs down to the ground.
Surprisingly enough, Danny had somehow managed to land a hit to the ghost inside the suit because he managed to off-balance the entire thing and it face planted into the dirt. He flinched at the thud that seemed to echo in his ears as it hit the ground. Then he heard Tucker's voice from the ground, "He really is getting better." Danny jerked his head around to where Tucker was standing next to Sam in the otherwise-empty yard. Had he really just heard that? Wait...he said I was getting better. Danny smiled. Ha. I knew I didn't really suck. That, and apparently ghost powers included hawk-like hearing.
That had him feeling good until he turned right into a meet fist to the face. Danny was pretty disoriented at the time, but he was pretty sure he flew right through and airplane and back. On the way down, though he managed to straighten out enough to let gravity help him land a direct hit, sending meat flying everywhere. He was pretty sure he actually blacked out for a minute because next thing he knew he was in the middle of a crater with his face on a pillow of sausage and feeling sore everywhere.
Danny tried to get up but felt something pull painfully in his left shoulder. With a groan and more than a few stumbles he managed to wade through the meat pool and pull himself up out of the crater that turned out to be a good six feet deep.
As he was pulling himself up over the lip of the crater something floated up. "Dear, what a mess," Danny looked up into the face of the Lunch Lady, green and meat free. He briefly wondered if that was a good thing. "Are you okay?" She asked sweetly.
"Yeah," Danny pulled himself to his feet and stretched out his shoulder. Accelerated healing could probably be added to the list. "I think so."
"Tough," The Lunch Lady's face went blood thirsty again and she growled, "because you being okay is not part of my balanced diet of DOOM."
From behind him, meat flew out of the crater and surrounded him. In moments they had formed five smaller meat monsters, each only a bit smaller than him. Danny looked at their stubby legs. I wonder how far those can take them, he wondered to himself, taking a defensive stance. Or how high.
Danny leapt into the air, dismayed only a moment later when all five of them followed. Okay plan B. Danny swung out with the heel of his foot and managed to slice them all in one shot with a 360 kick. They all broke apart surprisingly easy and Danny let himself drop to the ground again but the scattered meat just sprung back together into even angrier mini-meat monsters.
"Wasn't expecting that," Danny felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach – this could take a while – but that feeling somehow quickly escalated into a bright flash of light one of the world's fastest changes of clothes. Danny looked down at his bare hands. "Or that."
The monsters jumped towards him and lifted him, upside down, into the air. In a matter of moments Danny was hanging from his jeans while the little devils flew him to the back side of the building. Then, all of a sudden, something hit him in the face and landed in his hands."
"The Fenton Thermos!" Danny blinked against the bruise forming on his cheek but smiled at his luck. With this he could…wait. "But how am I going to get it to work?"
The monsters above him started cackling before they let him go and suddenly he was falling.
"Chang back," he told himself, digging for that little spark that never quite left him after that day in the lab. It was weak but he finally found it. "Change back!"
There were a few blinking flashes and Danny felt his body temperature drop again before quickly turning himself intangible to pass safely through the ground, right at his parents' feet.
"Thanks for the Thermos!"
Danny had an idea. It was a crazy idea, probably a very stupid one, too, but it could work.
Navigating through the ground was trickier than it looked. In the end, Danny discovered just how convenient his hearing was by finding the sound of peoples footsteps and moving in the opposite direction. Sure enough, Danny flew himself up out of the ground back in the front court yard, less than twenty yards away from the Lunch Lady.
When she spotted him, her eyes went straight to the thermos in his hands. "No! Soup's not on today's menu!" Figures that's what she'd be worried about.
"I'm changing the menu!" he told her, figuring he might as well hit it where it hurts. "Permanently!"
"Please work!" Danny uncapped the thermos, thinking back to the vacuum incident with Jazz. If Danny was right, somehow he was giving off energy as a ghost – the same kind of energy Fenton equipment was designed to function off of. It never worked when pulled directly from the portal, but for some reason it had worked when coming from an actual ghost, i.e. Danny. Maybe if he could channel enough power into the Thermos… I hope I'm right!
Danny focused all of his energy straight into the Thermos and, sure enough, a light kicked on and it started making a high pitched whirring sound. Danny took aim toward the Lunch Lady and fired. A bright beam of light shot from the end of the Thermos and wrapped around the ghost like a net. She tried to pull free but the light wouldn't let her go and soon she was being sucked toward the Thermos. She let out one final screech before being shrunk and sucked inside.
Danny placed the cap back on with gloveless hands. Powering the Thermos had taken the last of his energy out of him and his feet had hit the ground at some point before the Lunch Lady was even gone.
He let out an exhausted sigh. She wasn't gone for good, he reminded himself. They could put her back in the ghost zone or lock her up somewhere, but she'd eventually get out again. Back to wreak havoc on vegetarians everywhere.
Speaking of vegetarians.
"What happened?" Danny turned to find Sam and Tucker crawling their way out from underneath the deflated utter of the giant cow. "Where's the ghost?" She asked.
Danny helped her to her feet and held up the Fenton Thermos, smiling. "My parents have their moments."
"GHOST DIRECTLY AHEAD." Danny and Sam both turned at the monotone voice. "YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE SOME SORT OF MORON TO NOT NOTICE THE GHOST DIRECTLY AHEAD."
Sure enough, Danny's parents, staring at the Fenton Finder that no doubt pointed directly at him. Danny smiled when they looked up at him and pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. "Oh, sorry Dad. You just missed him."
"We got a runner!" Mr. Fenton shouted and both his parents ran off in the direction Danny pointed.
"Great," Danny spotted Jazz walking down the sidewalk, mumbling to herself and no doubt on the way back to her car. "Back to square one."
Tucker was looking after Danny's parents. "So you're not going to tell them?" he asked.
Danny let himself smile. "I think I may have finally figured out what these powers are for," he told them, shrugging. "They make me-"
He was interrupted by a large hand on his shoulder and he looked up into the face of a very angry-looking teacher.
"In a world of trouble."
"Manson! Pick up that t-bone!" Lancer shouted through his megaphone.
"With my hands?" Sam picked it up off the ground between two fingers.
"Foley! Pick up that turf-which!"
"With my hands?" He groaned picking it up daintily before tossing it into his trash bag.
Mr. Lancer took a large bite out of a turkey leg before finally walking away and not coming back.
Mr. Lancer had blamed Sam and Tucker whole heartedly for the entire fiasco. Apparently he was still in the building while the ghost was rampaging and not one person was willing to admit they'd seen a giant meat monster. That left Sam, Tucker, and by association Danny, to clean up the mess. They spent the entire day under the intense watch of Lancer and they had finally made it to the last chunk of school still covered in a meaty mess. Danny was sweeping the concrete with a broom which would probably join the meat in the already packed dumpster once this was over. The bristles were clumped together and there would be no getting the stench off of it.
With Lancer around keeping an eye on them and Dash around to lean against the dumpster and laugh, Danny never got to finish his conversation with Sam and Tucker. He knew what he was going to say, though, and he figured that was the important part.
These powers made him capable. His whole life, Danny hadn't felt truly capable of being or doing anything on his own. Jazz or his parents would always jump 'to the rescue' to help the baby brother of the family. He wasn't the best at school and he didn't really have any talents.
But with these powers he could be somebody. Not because someone was helping him, but because he was doing it himself. If he told his parents, they would take that away; they would defend their 'precious baby boy' and do everything for him, but if he wanted to really figure out how to use his powers and to help people, then he'd have to do this himself.
Well, not completely by himself. Danny let himself smile as Sam threw the t-bone directly into Tucker's face.
He had friends for that.
Danny pushed a smashed lump of what used to be several burger patties into his main pile when he heard Dash laughing. Danny stepped around the corner of the dumpster that Dash was leaning against and laid a hand on the side. He felt his hand tingle and an invisible energy connect him to the dumpster that promptly turned intangible and dumped several tons of meat onto Dash, practically burying him.
"Fenton!" Dash shook some of it off his head. "A little help?"
"Whatever you say Dash," Danny grinned. "Whatever you say."
Until tomorrow. Danny was pretty sure there was a stack of toilet paper back home with Dash's locker number on it.
Date Posted: November 12, 2012
Word Count: 9,052