Dizgirl: FINALLY! So, I could ramble on and on about the variety of completely plausible excuses for why this took so long to update, but I know that isn't why you're reading this. You just want the freaking chapter! SO, suffice it to say a mixture of school and my other responsibilities took over and controlled my life for the past few months (plus a nasty case of being-in-character-phobia that refused to let me write without consulting several DP episodes).
With that said, let us move on to the main event! Thank you for reading and reviewing. Enjoy and Love!
That Ghost Dude
"So now I'm grounded again because I got home late last night," Danny sighed as he joined his two best friends on their way to school. Sam winced.
"I'm sorry, Danny. If it hadn't been for me—"
"—No, it's not your fault that ghost decided you were dinner," he interrupted with a shake of his head, smiling slightly. "I'm just glad that you made it out of there safe. I was sure the ghost would drop you and I wouldn't be able to catch you in time!"
"You would've caught me," Sam reassured with a light blush. Noting Tucker's amused expression, she hastily added, "I mean you did when I fell off the Circus Gothica train."
Tucker just rolled his eyes as Danny nodded absentmindedly, oblivious to his friends' silent conversation. As the trio made it to the edge of the school grounds, he slowed down and turned to Tucker and Sam.
"Well, I guess this means that we can't do tha—" Danny abruptly stopped as the familiar mist drifted from his mouth. "Uh…guys?" Sam looked around quickly as Tucker pointed to the bushes on the side of the school building.
"Over there, dude." Danny disappeared into the vegetation, whispering his familiar battle cry as two rings of light washed over him. He flew up into the air and scanned the horizon for the ghostly problem.
He didn't have to look far. In front of Casper High, students were running for cover as an enormous glowing black skeleton floated above, eyeing the students with a menacing grin.
"Oh great, just what I want to do this early in the morning: fight dead things," Danny moaned, taking off towards the ghost. It raised one hand, green ectoplasm slowly building up, as it prepared to blast one of the school buses in the parking lot. Danny flew up behind the ghost and sent his own ecto-blast into its back.
"I know school transportation sucks, but you should try complaining to office before blasting it to bits!" he quipped with a smirk as the ghost pushed itself out of the crater it had just created. It snarled and flew into the air, smacking Danny into the second story wall of the school. He groaned and shook his head, trying to clear away the dizziness.
"What? No funny bone?" He called to the skeleton ghost, peeling himself off of the brick wall with a wince. It growled as both of its hands burned bright green.
"Guess not." Danny dodged several blasts, flying through the air and throwing some of his own back at the skeleton ghost. He went intangible as the ghost swung one of its blackened bony arms at him, and then flew up and kicked the ghost on the side of the head. It howled as it slammed into the ground again.
"Ha! You can't beat me," Danny taunted, smirk back in place. "You haven't got the guts!" He reached for the Fenton thermos in his backpack when the glowing ghost flew up in front of him.
"Danny! Watch out!" Sam and Tucker yelled. Danny looked up just as the ghost brought both of its fists down, pounding him into the ground.
"That is going to leave a mark."
"Okay, I know that dying is a horrible thing and all but sometimes I would love to be a ghost so I could fly," Raimee commented as Chaos guided the two girls to the ground about a block away from Casper High.
"Hey, don't forget the fact that we can go through walls and disappear too!" her ghostly friend added, turning the two visible. Raimee grinned, her argument with her father slowly fading into the back of her mind.
"And what about your Chaos Sparks or ecto-blasts?" she asked.
"Of course!" Chaos smirked. "I thought they were given!" The two laughed.
"Well, I guess I should be going to school," Raimee began reluctantly. "Are you coming along?" Chaos grimaced, looking off in the direction of the high school.
"And that's another perk to being dead," she said as she disappeared into Raimee. 'You don't have to go to that prison you call school.'
'I'm sorry, but an education is important nowadays,' the human girl thought as she started down the street.
'Tch, whatever. They just tell you that so they can lock you up six or seven hours a day and keep you from causing trouble!'
'Probably, but it also helps you to get into college and then a job!'
'Yeah, I know,' Chaos sighed as the two walked under a line of trees that kept the high school from view. Raimee stopped abruptly, raising a hand to her mouth.
'Chaos, I feel a ghost! A big ghost!' Raimee closed her eyes in concentration. 'No, two ghosts!'
'Where?' The ghost girl asked, instantly interested. Raimee sped up, craning her neck to see past the trees.
'Right...here!'She jumped out into plain view of the school, looking up to see a giant skeleton slam another ghost into the ground.
"Oh my goodness!" Raimee exclaimed as she felt the earth reverberate around her. She stumbled back from the vibration and to get a clearer view of the enormous ghost. "That thing is huge!"
'That thing could cause a lot of damage,' Chaos remarked. 'But what about the other ghost dude? What's he doing?' Raimee looked to the ground where he was slowly rising to his feet.
'He's getting up,' she answered. 'Wow, he looks like he's my age!'
'What's with the black jumpsuit?' Chaos inquired with a smirk. 'He's gotta be from the eighties or some weird time like that.'
'No making judgments,' Raimee reprimanded while edging closer to the battle. 'It's not like a ghost chooses what it's going to wear in the afterlife.'
'What about choosing what they wear in their actual life?' Chaos countered. Her friend remained silent, watching the ghost boy jump into the sky instead. The two fighting ghosts met each other in mid air, colliding with an echoing thud. The few students who were still outside the school screamed in response, and ran for cover from several green ecto-blasts that flew from the two in the sky. Raimee stepped behind a nearby tree and peered around the side to continue watching the battle. Though the white-haired ghost was much smaller than the massive skeleton, he seemed to be pulling most of the punches.
'Man, he's ripping on the guy! This ghost dude knows how to fight,' Chaos thought while watching the boy twist around the other ghost and use both hands to blast it into the side of the school.
'Yeah, but if he continues on like this, I won't have a school to go to!' Raimee added.
'What a shame,' Chaos thought dryly. The human girl rolled her eyes, though she knew her friend couldn't see it. Raimee turned back to the fight just in time to see the 'ghost dude' pull out something from his backpack and used it to blast the skeleton with a blinding blue light. When the light faded away, the large ghost was gone. The ghost boy looked around at the scattered students and then disappeared behind the school.
'Well then,' Raimee thought as she slowly walked out from behind the tree. 'You don't see that every day.'
'Unless you live here,' Chaos commented as the two watched the students file calmly into the brick building with only a few of them glancing around cautiously.
'I guess we know why there's so much ectoplasm around the school,'Raimee thought as she followed a group of chattering seniors towards the double doors. 'If there are fights here like that so often that people just take it for granted, then ectoplasm is the least of our worries. The building itself might fall down on us one day!'
'Yay! No school!' Chaos cheered inside her. Raimee resisted the urge to roll her eyes again.
'You know you can just—' she broke off from their silent conversation as the bell rang. '—Crap!! The warning bell! I'm gonna be late on my second day of school!'
"Oh man! If I'm late again, Tetslaff will kill me!" a voice groaned behind Raimee. She turned around to see Danny running up the steps, brushing his untidy black hair away from his sweaty forehead. She smiled understandingly before taking off behind him.
'At least I'm not the only one!' She thought.
''Cause that makes it okay,' Chaos interjected quietly. Raimee ignored her as she followed Danny around the corner. She glanced up and skidded to a stop.
"Wow, he's quick!" she gasped as she looked around at the empty hallway.
'You better be too if you want to make it on time,' Chaos reminded her
'I know!' Raimee moaned as she turned to her right, raced up a flight of steps, and down another hallway. 'Now I kinda wish that ghost dude had destroyed the school!'
"Here you are! I'm sorry it took me so long to find it, but our computers have been acting funny lately," the woman told Raimee as she handed her a sheet of paper. "This has your locker combination for your regular locker and the one you have in the gym for P.E. Is that all you need?" The dark-haired girl looked down at the paper and then up at the smiling woman.
"Yeah, I think so," she answered distractedly. 'Numbers 329 and 14. Know where they are?' she asked Chaos.
'Uh…no,' her friend responded nonchalantly. 'Am I supposed to?' Raimee grimaced as she turned from the front desk and back into the main hallway.
'Well that's just great,' she thought sarcastically. 'Finding my new lockers in an unfamiliar school is going to be so much fun.'
'Woah, what turned on the heat?' Chaos asked as Raimee moved to the left towards the gym.
'Oh I don't know,' Raimee began in a controlled tone, though it quickly became 'louder' and faster as she continued. 'How about the fact that I was almost late to my first class, didn't understand a thing in my last class, and had to wait a whole freaking half hour to finally get my locker combinations!? How's that for 'turning on the heat'?!' Chaos whistled.
'I say you're doing quite nicely,' she joked as Raimee stomped through the gym doors.
'Thanks,' the human girl replied, gritting her teeth.
'Look, it's over! Now you just have to find your lockers and you can go home!' Raimee sighed.
'I hope it's as easy as that, but with me it's never that simple,'she thought as she walked into the dimly lit girls' locker room.
'Oh come on! How hard can it be to find two lockers?'
'Chaos! You jinxed it! Now it's going to take for-ever!' Raimee griped. Chaos flinched inside of her.
'Oops, sorry.' The two dropped the conversation to look for her first locker. Fortunately, Raimee's prediction did not hold true and they found it within a matter of minutes.
'See? That wasn't so bad. Now just one more and we can say goodbye to this nasty place!' Chaos thought enthusiastically. A small smile slipped onto Raimee's face as she left the musty smelling locker room.
'Alright, but if it takes me more than fifteen minutes I'm blaming you,' she replied, moving aside for a group of uniformed cheerleaders who were chattering away as they entered the gym. Chaos hissed as one glared in Raimee's direction.
'Hyper, peppy, lying, evil cheerleaders!' she snarled. Raimee rubbed her temples, though she couldn't help but smirk at the sudden vicious tone in her friend's 'voice'.
'Leave them alone,' she warned her friend. 'And please don't talk so loud; you're giving me a headache.'
'Oh come on! They're just like the ones in Wisconsin and you know it!' the ghost girl growled. Raimee sighed as she felt another one of Chaos's rants coming on. 'You said let's give them a chance, but I knew they were bad news, sitting there with…'
Raimee blocked her friend out with practiced ease and focused on her surroundings. The nearest locker had a faded 117 painted on it while the next one read 118.
'So if I go this way that should lead to 329, right?' Chaos didn't respond, still wrapped up in her own world. Raimee looked down at her paper resignedly and started down the deserted hallway. 'Worth a try.'
Twenty five minutes later Raimee was still wandering the halls of Casper High, wondering what kind of crazy people had designed the locker system. She had followed the row of lockers all the way up to 250 when it suddenly ended, with no clues about where it continued. After searching several corridors, she had finally decided it had to be on an upper floor and had trudged up the nearest stairwell. Meanwhile, Chaos had finally calmed down enough to notice her friend's increasing agitation and had started throwing out random pieces of advice whenever she could.
'Okay, I'll admit I've always been a skeptic when it comes to superstitions, but maybe you're on to something with that whole jinx thing,' Chaos thought as Raimee turned down a new hallway.
'For once I really hate being right,' she replied tiredly. Chaos smiled inside her sympathetically.
'You know, the school is pretty much empty now. I could come out and help,' she offered. Raimee shook her head.
'I don't know. I still feel we need to keep a low profile,' she thought worriedly.
'Come on! I'm so tired of staying inside you all the time!' Chaos whined.
'What are you talking about? You left for half the day!' her friend snapped back. 'Something about meeting up with 'that ghost dude'?'
'But I stayed for the last two classes! Plus, I never found him,' she muttered the last part, clearly disappointed.
'So? I was here—' Raimee abruptly stopped and whipped her head around as she felt something fly down the hallway to her right. It was invisible—whatever it was—but she could feel it move past her at full speed. '—Ghost!'
'A ghost?' Chaos asked in excitement. 'Where?!'
'Just passed us down that hallway,' Raimee thought, slightly surprised by its sudden appearance.
'Oooh…I'm so going after it!' Chaos crowed.
'No you're not!' Raimee retorted. 'We've barely escaped ghost trouble, like, two weeks ago and you want to go after another ghost!? And what about that ghost dude flying around fighting other ghosts? What happens if he meets up with you?'
'I don't know. Beat him up?' Chaos answered in a half-joking, half-serious manner. 'It's what I've been trying to do all day!' She moved inside Raimee impatiently. The human girl sighed in exasperation, sensing one of her friend's stubborn spells coming on.
'You're never going to leave me alone till I let you go are you?' she asked, looking at the fresh wall of lockers in front of her. 'And I'm never going to find this stupid locker!' she added in frustration.
'No and no,' Chaos thought smugly. 'Look. What happened to the let's-go-find-the-ghost-Ray I knew back in Wisconsin? You used to be the one convincing me to go after ghosts!'
'Yeah and then Plasmius happened.'
'Yeah, Plasmius: one ghost out of a million! I thought we had gone through this already!' Chaos countered. Raimee sighed again, turning down another unfamiliar hallway.
'Look. I was naïve and didn't know what I was doing—we both didn't—and I just think we should be more careful now that we know what some ghosts are capable of,' she thought evenly.
'Yeah, some ghosts. Like a ghost flying around invisible at a high school is going to be this maniacal ghost bent on world destruction or whatever. It's just some minor ghost causing a little mayhem…or chaos. Mmmm, now I can understand wanting to do that! Besides, didn't you tell your father off for being too negative about ghosts this morning? Well, now's your chance to prove him wrong!'
'Fine, whatever. Have fun getting yourself into trouble. I'm going to try to find my locker that I couldn't find because someone didn't remember where it was!' Raimee responded with a growl.
'Hey! I found some pretty interesting stuff that distracted me, kay? How was I supposed to remember where number 329 is? I didn't even know it when I went exploring the school!'
'Yeah…just get out of here and go find your victim,' Raimee thought. Chaos pulled herself out of the girl, turning invisible.
"Oh, and Chaos? Be careful, alright?" Raimee muttered under her breath, eyeing the air next to her where she knew Chaos floated. She heard her ghost friend laugh quietly.
"I'll be back before you know it, Ray. Have a little faith!" Chaos turned to the right, but suddenly stopped. "Oh, hey! Speaking of yesterday, don't go near locker 724."
"Why?" Raimee asked in surprise.
"Trust me; it has bad news written all over it."
Chaos floated down another empty hallway, invisible, intangible, and very irritated. Where's the stupid ghost? I should've found it by now! she thought impatiently, peeking her head through the door of the nearest classroom. How many places can one ghost hide?
A door up ahead opened abruptly and a group of students poured out, followed by a rather surly looking teacher she didn't recognize from any of Raimee's classes.
"That's it for detention today," the teacher began, eyeing the backs of the students. "And I better not see any of you in here tomorrow. Got it? This isn't a place to fool around; it's punishment!" Chaos smirked as the students continued walking down the hall, obviously ignoring him. She quickly flew over the group and down another hallway to their right.
A few moments later it seemed she had finally found the ghost. She floated in front of a door that read 'Storage Room' on it in plain black letters. Inside, there were several scuffling noises and the sound of someone chuckling quietly. That and the fact that the air coming out from the cracks in the door was at least five degrees cooler than the hallway pretty much proved it was her ghost.
What ghost decides to haunt a janitorial closet or whatever this is? Chaos wondered to herself. She phased through the door and let herself turn visible, looking around for the ghost. It only took her a second to spot the short overall-clad ghost floating a few inches off the floor in front of a stack of cardboard boxes.
"Aha! At last I have found you!" The blue ghost exclaimed loudly as he hovered over several boxes full of window and bathroom cleaners.
"And once I, the Box Ghost, release you from the burdens of…uh…" He hesitated as he peered down at the black writing scrawled on the side of the box. "…Oh yeah, janitorial cleaning supplies of Casper High, I can finally take you for my own devices!" Chaos shook her head slowly.
"Oh this is sad…" she said with a sigh. The ghost spun around in surprise.
"Ah! Who dares disturb me and my—"
"—I'm disturbing you. Dude, what is it with ghosts and long-winded speeches? And how 'bout you? Boxes? Out of all the things in the world, you pick boxes? That is just plain sad. And here I thought I might get some amusement out of this…" Chaos rolled her eyes dramatically, floating closer to the Box Ghost.
"Who are you?" The ghost inquired with a look of surprise. Chaos crossed her arms and quirked an eyebrow.
"Chaos is the name and…well, Chaos is the game too I suppose…" she answered, a grin slowly spreading across her features. Okay, I might have a little fun with this…
"I doubt you've heard about me, but that doesn't matter 'cause you won't forget me now!" She grabbed him by the front of his overalls and pulled him close. Her hand was glowing a bright ruby red and she drew it back, preparing to blast him, when another voice interrupted her.
"Maybe I'm slow, but the point of remembering someone kinda doesn't work if you get blasted into oblivion first," it said arrogantly. Chaos whirled around, dragging the now nervous looking Box Ghost with her. The ghost boy she had seen earlier looked down at the two of them from close to the ceiling, a cocky smile securely in place. She looked at him cautiously before giving him a tight smile.
"Well I said he would never forget me. I'm just giving that threat some insurance," she replied, a hint of playfulness in her voice. He uncrossed his arms and floated down so he was level with her.
"Look, I just want to go home. I've been here long enough as it is. Just let me have him so I can send him back to the Ghost Zone," he said, holding out a hand.
No way! This is my catch! Get your own!" Chaos spat out, glaring at him.
"I am no one's catch!" The Box Ghost announced dramatically. "For I am the Bo—"
"Oh, shut up!" she interrupted him, sending him a glare as well.
"No one can tell me to shut up!" The ghost continued, waving his arms over his head. The 'ghost dude' smirked as she let out a growl of aggravation.
Looking slightly disgruntled (and very annoyed) Chaos tossed the pudgy ghost at the boy and said, "Fine. He's all yours. Enjoy." She turned invisible and flew through the side wall of the storage room.
"Wait!" she heard the ghost boy call out. There was also a muffled "beware!" which probably came from the Box Ghost. Chaos smirked as she sped through the empty hallways, searching for the familiar form of her human friend. Catch me if you can, ghost dude!
Jazz stepped out of the teacher's lounge having just finished discussing her developing college thesis with her English teacher.
"Thank you Mrs. Graden," she called back before the door closed behind her. "That was really productive. Hopefully I can have it finished by the end of winter break!"
Practically glowing with anticipation, Jazz almost missed the red and black blur that sped past her down the hallway. She gasped as the blur came to a halt at the end of the hall.
A ghost!? she though in alarm. The floating girl had long, wild black hair that framed her pale face and glowing red eyes. She wore black baggy pants and a long-sleeve gray shirt with a blood red blouse over it. If she hadn't been floating, and obviously dead, Jazz would probably pass her off as any other teenager in the school.
Quickly the ghost looked around the corner of the hallway before disappearing down it in a flash. Jazz stood there in shock, blinking several times as she checked to make sure she was seeing properly.
"I have to tell Danny!"
