Danny Phantom flew casually through the night sky, everything around him was dark and quiet, and he was very, very bored. Never in his entire life of ghost hunting had he gone through such a dull, uneventful night. Not even the box ghost was around to keep him company.

It wasn't that there weren't any ghosts, no there were a few resident ghosts doing the usual haunting, but they were registered ghosts. Benevolent spirits clinging to what scraps of humanity they had left, he never bothered them. They didn't do any harm.

He dropped down near an old warehouse by the harbor, resting up against a rotten crate and just watching as a familiar apparition drifted by. A child, eight, probably nine, who had played hide and seek with his friends there last year, hiding in a single crate stacked with dozens.

Danny knew his story, like he knew most of the drifting ghost's stories. He knew that the boy had fallen asleep, that his friends thought he ditched them and left, that teenagers from his own high school had come to this same spot, kicking in old crates and tagging up the warehouse. They had pushed the stack of crates that held the boys hiding place over and some fell into the water. He knew that the boy had woken, water pooling into his crate, frightened. Screaming for help, but the teenagers couldn't hear him. Danny knew that his parents, the poor heartbroken family, still believed their son had been kidnapped, not knowing that it was all some unfortunate accident.

The boy drifted over to him, his face that of a wanderer who had lost his way and his mind.

"Have you seen my friends, they're supposed to find me." The boy asked, it was the same question he had asked when the first met.

Danny smiled. "You were too good, they couldn't."

The boy smiled. "I'm the best at hiding, no ones found me in a long time."

"That's right, but they're still looking. Maybe one day someone will find you." Danny looked out at the harbor, wishing, like he always did, that the boy remembered where his body was so he could arrange for his human self to 'stumble across it.'

"I hope so; I'm getting bored of this game." With that the boy drifted off again. Danny knew that he was searching not for his friends, but for the place he had hidden, so he could find his body and move on.

Sometimes the ties to this world were as simple as that. He didn't want anyone else to find him, didn't want his friends or his family to see the body and burry him, didn't vow vengeance against the friends who's left him or the teenagers who'd killed him. He just wanted to find himself. That was all, and Danny couldn't help in the least. Some ghostly hero…

He felt so fake.

With a heavy sigh he rose back up into the air, he would go check on his human self and make sure nothings gone wrong on his end.

It was turning out to be a really dull night.

-

Yeah, I figured Danny's a good kid with a good heart, he doesn't just go off beating up every ghost he sees, there had to be a few apparitions he'd know and let stay. After all, he couldn't just tell them "no you can't work through your unfinished business and move on, you have to stay in the ghost zone forever. ( " So he lets some of them hand around until they finish things, so long as they don't plan of hurting anyone or destroying anything.

And I made the example ghost a kid because; well Danny would feel more tenderly towards a kid and it would be a bit more believable.

See you tomorrow.