This is NOT up for adoption. I plan to continue this in full after finishing the full version of 'The Door' also known as 'Doorway to Darkness'

Vlad Plasmius and Danny Phantom were currently engaged in a high-speed battle through the Ghost Zone. The fight had started over Amity Park, but Danny blasted his arch-enemy through his house, down into the basement-turned-lab, and through the ghost portal. They had chased each other across the Ghost Zone, fighting for control over the Fenton's latest invention, the relatively harmless power-level indicator, dubbed the Fenton Specter Measurer. It had, of course, registered when pointed inadvertently at Danny.

"'Levels too high to indicate'?" his parents had commented as they looked between the screen and their son. "What's that--!" The device was immediately abandoned on the kitchen table when a blast echoed from the basement, which his parents both took off running for.

Danny had taken the device and left for school to show it to Sam and Tucker, his two trusted friends.

"Well, Danny, it appears to measure the energy a ghost has," Tucker explained as he looked over the device. He then pointed it at Danny, only to get the same message his parents had. "'Levels too high' huh? That must mean you have so much power, this thing can't properly read you."

"Maybe it's just malfunctioning," Danny commented as he took the device to look at it himself again.

"Well, when a ghost shows up, like Skulker or the Box Ghost or something, we can test it on them."

"Yeah, that will work."

Skulker and the Box Ghost, almost as if they had been summoned, appeared later that day.

"So, Skulker was a 5 and the Box Ghost was a 3. This does work..."

"But how does it work?"

Tucker jacked in his PDA and poked at the screen for a minute before coming up with an answer. "This works on an exponential scale and goes up to level 15."

"Exponential?"

Sam, who had always been better at math and payed attention more than Tucker did in class, answered. "It means that every time there's an increase in level, the actual power will double, or triple, or maybe even times ten; it depends on the scale your parents used when programming the thing."

"Oh. What scale did they use?"

"I'm not sure..." Tap tap tap click. "Oh, here it is. They used..um...a scale of 4...ish."

"Ish?"

"It isn't exactly four, it's a little bigger than that, but it's around four."

"So Skulker is 16 times more powerful than the Box Ghost?"

"That's what this says."

"And I'm not even on the scale?"

"Apparently not."

Plasmius appeared after they were walking home with the thing and battle ensued. Sam and Tucker were quickly left behind.

In the middle of the fight, just as Danny let loose an ecto-blast that threw Plasmius into a ghostly barrier, he noticed that the barrier itself was highly unusual; and that's saying something considering they were fighting in the Ghost Zone.

The wall looked like a curtain, and it seemed to go infinitely into the distance like the Ghost Zone itself did. The curtain was an opaque whitish color, faint and Danny could almost see through it. Anyway, he could tell that the Ghost Zone looked almost exactly the same on the other side, but no other details were discernible.

"What could that--!"

Danny, distracted by the wall, failed to notice Vlad in time. The older halfa had recovered from being thrown into the wall and had come around to shoot Danny again. A single clone appeared behind Danny to fire again with a stronger blast and Danny was thrown into the wall just as Vlad had been.

Expecting to meet resistance--Vlad had certainly seemed to hit the wall pretty hard--Danny pulled himself together tightly, holding the measuring device close to his chest so it wouldn't be damaged when he hit. Much to his surprise, he seemed to suddenly slow down, and soft wisps of fabric seemed to brush across his back and shoulders as he went through the wall.

Danny opened his eyes in time to see Vlad's stunned expression. The halfa had even been frozen in surprise upon seeing that Danny did not hit the strange wall as Vlad had.

The curtain closed over Danny Phantom and Vlad rushed to the wall to pursue him, but hit the wall, which was just as solid to him as it was the first time.

Danny, once all the way through the curtain, resumed the speed he'd been traveling at before running through it. He brought himself to a halt and then looked for Vlad, but couldn't find any sign of the older halfa. Danny realized that Vlad couldn't cross the wall; he'd hit it really hard the first time, and didn't go through it then. Phantom flew back up to the wall and tried to pass back through it, but nothing he tried worked. He was now stuck in a different part of the Ghost Zone.

Looking around told him it was almost exactly the same as the one he was used to, except more barren. A few pale specters floated around and, as Danny traveled, glanced at the halfa but did not make any effort to disturb him.

A great many of the ghosts wore odd-looking robes, and several of the brighter ones--probably younger, but Danny wasn't sure--showed signs of having died while fighting.

Since they didn't seem bent on his destruction, Danny decided to talk to one.

"Excuse me, but where is this?"

"This is the realm of dead," the other ghost answered.

"So I am still in the Ghost Zone..."

"If that is what you wish to call it."

"What is that wall?"

"It is the barrier between ghosts of magic and those without."

"Magic?"

The ghost gave Danny an odd look, as if he expected Danny to know this information already. "Yes," he said with a raised eyebrow, "we were wizards and witches, people who could use magic, before we died." Then he asked a question of his own. "You were a wizard yourself; otherwise you wouldn't be here." His expression turned sad. "You are young. Perhaps you did not know before you died."

"Know what?"

"About wizards and magic, of course."

Danny shook his head of confusion. He was a halfa, not a wizard.

"Is there a way out of here?"

"You wish to return to the world?"

"Yes."

"There is a portal near here for ghosts who wish to stay. It will take you back to where you desire." Danny thought that was a rather odd way to say that, but he was half ghost. Odd didn't faze him as much as it used to. "I will not go there myself, but it is in that direction. Ask any others if you lose your way again."

The ghost floated away and Danny shot off in the direction he had pointed. After about ten minutes, Danny saw a large floating land mass, void of any features other than a stone archway with another curtain-type-thing hanging inside it. Like the other wall, Danny felt he could almost see what was on the other side, but not really. The curtain seemed to ripple faintly in a breeze, though not one Danny could feel.

Taking the plunge to get out of this strange area of the Ghost Zone and back to reality, Danny stood firmly upon the stone and then walked through the archway and the hanging curtain.

He shut his eyes, but the same sensation as when he'd passed through the first wall happened again. Faint wisps of the curtain seemed to touch his face, arms, and chest and everything seemed to slow down.

Then he was through it, and he appeared in a large arena-like room with rising stands surrounding the lowest floor, the pit, where the archway stood upon a raised dais in the center.

Some force seemed to grab Danny behind his navel, one of the centers of his ghostly energy. (Sam called it chi and had made Danny read about it; apparently there were multiple focuses of the energy within a body, and if Danny concentrated he could use the focus points to better-utilize his energy. He didn't do it very often, but the reason he did it at all was because of Sam.) The force seemed to grab him, and Danny went invisible and intangible on reflex; good for him, because otherwise he would have been pulled straight into a wall, and that would have been painful.

He was dragged up through a large, complicated building, where he caught glimpses of people, all wearing robes, most of them black. Sometimes he'd see them holding sticks and even shooting colored energy from them, but he was gone before he could try to watch and figure out what was happening.

Once out of the building, he was not released, and the invisible force pulled him across the landscape so quickly it started to blur together in his eyes.

What Phantom did manage to focus on didn't look familiar, so while Danny was back in the real world, he wasn't anywhere near Amity Park.

Buildings gave way to open countryside, and Danny was soon following a set of train tracks, empty of traffic.

In the distance, a lake, forest line, and massive structure came into view.

Once Danny was near enough to see that the forest was far more expansive that he'd first thought, that the lake was really big, and that the massive building was actually an old, extensive castle, the force let him go and he stopped moving as if he'd hit a wall. Again. (Plasmius had thrown him into a few during their fight.)

Danny Phantom, suddenly exhausted, fell from the air and transformed back into Danny Fenton. Too bad he was over the lake when it happened. Danny thus discovered that the lake was very cold, and he swam back to the shore as fast as he could manage. Unable to concentrate enough to even turn intangible to let the water fall from his form, he was stuck shivering on the lake shore. Looking around, he could see that, while it was midday in Amity Park--it had been when he entered the Ghost Zone--it was dark here. The nearly-full moon was bright and lit the landscape faintly, and several windows of the castle were lit from within with a warm-looking yellow light.

People obviously lived there, so Danny started his long trek towards the castle with the hope that people would be able to help him; tell him where he was, maybe give him some food, at least a place to dry off and warm up. (Danny, due to being half ghost and having gained control of his ice powers, did not react to the cold as readily as a normal human, but there was only so much he could stand as a human himself, and being dunked in an icy lake at night was more that he could handle.

'I wonder if this is a boarding school or something,' Danny thought. 'Or a weird European college; don't some of the really old ones look like castles? Wait, am I in Europe? No, I can't be.' Danny laughed to himself at the thought of going all the way to Europe via the Ghost Zone and kept walking.