As Danny proved multiple times per month, you'd be wrong.
It wasn't like he meant to be late as often as he was. He'd gotten good at waking up with his alarm clock even without his parents around to burst in on him if he hadn't shown any signs of responding after the first few beeps, he never (well, almost never, and when he did that's what duplicating himself was for) made plans to do more than one thing at the same time, and he tried to keep an eye on the clock.
Unfortunately, 'trying' and 'succeeding' were two very different things, and before he knew it he'd get caught up in hanging out with his friends, or playing a fun new game, or even in doing homework which was kind of pathetic but living the life of a superhero meant that he needed to grab time to study wherever he could find it, and the next thing he knew he'd look up and realize that he had less than five minutes to get to class.
One day he was going to get around to copying his schedule into his cellphone and having it give him alerts when he still had plenty of time, but that day had not yet come.
It was a lucky thing that his shortcut of the day involved cutting across the park, he thought when an ecto-blast suddenly cut him off on his latest rush to class. Nice wide-open spaces, no chance that whoever was attacking him would blast a hole in a building in pursuit of him, very little chance of anyone calling him up to yell at him (or, more likely, talk at him with frosty politeness) about property damage to the city.
Having his secret identity revealed to the world might have made his life easier in most ways, but boy did it get annoying that people knew just who to call up when a fight got too destructive. It didn't even matter that he was the one doing his best to minimize the damage, his enemies didn't get phone service in the ghost zone so he was the one that had to deal with all the complaints.
"Okay, any chance we can reschedule this?" he asked, stopping in mid-air and turning around to try and spot who it was that had attacked. "Because, seriously, I think Professor Robbins is gonna chew my head off if I show up in the middle of his lecture one more time."
"You need have no fear of that," a female voice said in a tone that was completely flat and inflectionless. "You shall never be tardy again."
"Oh, you have got to put more work into your threats," he said, smirking in the general direction the voice had come from though he still couldn't see its source. "Seriously, I've been doing this for so long that it takes a lot more than that to make me start worrying. That's less a threat and more something I wish for. Tell you what, I'll point you towards this guy I know, Skulker, you can try and get him to give you a few lines to bellow at me, and you can come find me again at, like, five? Six? Six would be good." Another blast shot at him from a different angle than the one he was looking in, and he sighed and muttered to himself, "Guess not."
He didn't really like sending a duplicate off to do something else when he was in the middle of a fight, especially not something else that took as much of his concentration as school. It was too likely that he'd end up wincing at nothing like an idiot when the him who was off fighting took an especially nasty hit, or, even worse, shouting out loud. He'd just never gotten to be as good as Vlad had seemed to be at keeping his separate minds, well, separate. Maybe it was just because Vlad had been so good at duplicity, while Danny had kind of sucked at it back when it was necessary to hide his ghost form and then happily given up on even trying as soon as he could.
But he didn't have much of a choice if he didn't want, well, the whole head-biting-off thing to happen. Some of his teachers were very understanding about how the ghost side of his life could get in the way of the human half just as long as they heard about a fight that took place during the class period. Robbins was as far from being one of them as it was possible to get. Worse, he was one of the few professors Danny'd had since starting college who was really serious about attendance. The guy actually took attendance every day.
"Fine, let's get this over with," he said, splitting himself in two and sending the other on its way to school.
That was the plan, at least, but before his duplicate had flown more than a few yards a net of energy suddenly appeared before him, tangling around him before he even had a chance to think of dodging.
"No part of you shall escape this place, Abomination," another voice said, this one male and just as monotonous as the first.
"Okay, the threats are getting a little better," he allowed, starting to actually take this a little more seriously. His duplicate struggled to free himself from the net while he warily turned in a circle, looking hard for any trace of the enemy. "Well, two-on-two. We'll make this a fair fight."
"Two? No," yet another hollow voice said, and they finally began to show themselves, ten of them, fifteen, more, floating all around him in a rough sphere. The main impression that he got from them was gray; gray skin, gray robes, gray hooded cloaks pulled low enough to hide their entire faces save their gray mouths and chins. If he looked he could see the differences between them-heights, weights, gender, lips that were full or thin, strong chins and weak-but if he wasn't deliberately searching those differences out they all just blended together into a faceless crowd.
"This is not a fight, Abomination," one of them said just behind him, her voice as high and clear as a little girl's but entirely empty. When he whirled around to face her she seemed even younger than he'd guessed from the voice, a tiny form almost lost in her cloak. "This is a mission."
The ghost beside her took up right where her words left off. "We've planned long, and patiently, and now the time has finally come."
The tiniest twitch of that ghost's head as he finished speaking, as if he had gone from looking at Danny to gazing past him even though the hood should have kept him from seeing anything, was all the warning that Danny had before he suddenly felt a presence directly behind him and felt something being clamped around his waist. But he didn't realize just how much trouble he was in until a sudden burst of pain flared all through his body and he suddenly began to plummet like a stone as his ghost form became impossible to sustain.
He would have guessed that they'd just let him smash into the ground, but instead he was quickly caught and lowered to the ground with surprising gentleness. Once his head was clear of the initial panic of the fall he finally really noticed that is was a Fenton Specter Deflector wrapped around his waist and stared at it in shock. "This is my parents'! How did you- If you've done anything to hurt them I swear you'll wish you'd let me fall!"
"We've planned long, and patiently," the ghost who had caught him repeated, and he recognized her voice as that of the first ghost who'd spoken to him.
The little girl chipped in again and for the first time he heard a trace of inflection in one of their voices, the barest hint of the sing-song tone children used when telling a story, "Once upon a time there was a foolish young abomination who let a weapon he should never have forgotten about be lost in the woods where anyone could find it, if they had the will to search."
"The woods?" Danny searched his mind for what they could be talking about, and was suddenly smacked by a memory that he hadn't thought about in years. Mostly to protect himself from remembering the bit where his mom played the seductress. "Wait, this is the one I stuck on Vlad? That's not possible, there's no way he'd have just left it in the woods!" But even as he spoke he became less sure of that. Yeah, Vlad was usually more careful than that, but if he was pissed off and in pain and just wanted to slink home to patch up his wounds and sulk over losing Maddie, Danny, and his ghostly attack animals in one fell swoop? Yeah, maybe he would have just torn it off and thrown it as far from him as he could the minute he had a chance.
But they didn't seem at all interested in letting him know if he'd gotten it right or not. Instead of answering him the first ghost woman, apparently their leader or spokesperson or something, kneeled down before him so they would have been at eye-level if he could actually see her eyes. "Fear not, Abomination, we mean you no harm. Entirely the opposite; we shall cleanse the sins of your existence from your soul and you shall be an abomination no longer."
Danny had just enough time to see her lips curving into the faintest smile, and then the ghost surrounded him attacked from all sides and everything fell into darkness.
He hardly even stirred when one lifted him and carried him away, while around the edges of the park citizens of Amity Park stared in horror at the sight of the hero being so thoroughly defeated.