I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY! Hopefully this chapter's length will make up for the long wait…
Disclaimer: I don't own Danny Phantom.
Chapter 10: Basic Extensions
Danny choked on his milk, eyes wide open in surprise. "You what?"
Tucker nudged him and discreetly glanced at his left leg, which became visible a second later under the cafeteria table. "You're getting better at that," he murmured to his half-ghost friend. Then the implications of what Sam had said sank in. "You WHAT?"
Sam settled down in her seat with her arms crossed. "Maybe it'll break that disgusting habit you have of eating only meat."
Tucker was absolutely speechless. "Don't you think this is a little extreme, Sam?" Danny asked quickly.
"Of course it is. You have to be, in order to make any kind of statement." Sam, if nothing else, was very good at making statements. "Anyway, I'm free during afternoons again. The past week of wearing down the school board is over now that they agreed to try a vegetarian menu."
The bell signaling the return to fourth period rang, making the trio get up and dump their trays (and in one's case, a brown paper bag) in the-
"Hey! Put that in the recyclables, Tucker!"
"But it's all the way over there," the technogeek whined.
"TUCKER!"
"Okay, okay! I'm going! Can you not see that I am walking over to the recyclable bin, holding the 'recyclables' over it, dropping them, and walking back?"
Sam's eyes narrowed at the exaggeration in Tucker's motions.
"Should I start running?" Tucker asked from the other side of Danny as he gauged Sam's expression.
"Fenton!" They turned around and saw Dash striding purposefully towards them with a murderous look on his face.
"I definitely should!" Danny booked it out of the cafeteria with Dash racing after him.
"I just got an E on my English paper! And I'm taking it out on your hide!"
Drat, Danny thought. Dash had the next lunch shift, so he wouldn't get in trouble for missing class while Danny would – once again – take the heat. He skidded around a corner and kept running, only looking back when he heard a huge crash.
He was too breathless to laugh at the sight of Dash entangled in an enormous pile of schoolbooks that obviously fell from the collapsed shelf that he had run into, unable to turn the corner as quickly as Danny had.
With a smile, Danny agilely leapt around another corner and ran even faster when he heard pounding footsteps behind him. He chanced looking behind him again before gasping with surprise; he hadn't thought he'd reached a staircase yet, but he kept running, stumbling a little before regaining his balance. A wall was quickly approaching and he almost turned left until he realized there was a wall there as well. The only opening was to the right, but that was where Dash was coming from. What do I do? Danny panicked. He began running again, closing his eyes for a moment as he mindlessly tried to regain his breath and tripping yet again. He quickly picked himself back up, only to freeze as the sound of footsteps got even louder, but he couldn't see Dash anywhere.
"Come out, Fentina!" Dash roared as he charged down the hall. Huh. He could have sworn he'd seen Fenton run down this hall…
Danny looked up and promptly forgot how to prevent his powers from randomly showing up.
Dash was running on the ceiling! How was he doing that? Danny struggled to become visible again after Dash was out of sight, completely shocked.
More footsteps resounded through the hall, but once again, Danny couldn't see their owners. Unless…
"Danny?"
"Dude, you down here?"
Sam and Tucker came walking on the ceiling too! What on earth was going on?
Sam paced back and forth. "Danny!" she called.
Danny looked at one of the walls. Where are the lockers? No, wait, there they were, they just weren't connected to the floor. That was stupid. Danny shook his head at the construction workers' obvious foolishness, but stopped when he realized his actual situation.
Sam and Tucker, who were still looking below him, weren't on the ceiling; he was! His hair was hanging away from his head and he felt a downward pull on his body, but his feet remained firmly on the big ceiling tiles and his arms hung loosely by his sides as though he was actually standing on the ground.
Sam turned when she thought she heard a cough, but no one was there. "Tucker?"
The boy glanced up. "Yeah?"
"Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?" He blinked.
Danny stood over them, his hand firmly over his mouth as he considered his position. Sam couldn't know about where he was, so he had to somehow get down without her getting suspicious. Problem was, they were in a dead end. He'd have to walk a good distance to get out of sight. Unless I become invisible. But no, that wouldn't work; he couldn't become visible in front of Sam either. The best thing was to wait for them to leave. Or maybe…
Danny stayed behind Sam, but desperately waved at Tucker, trying to catch his attention silently. When Tucker didn't respond, Danny scowled. There was a reason Tucker had earned the title of "least observant teenager enrolled in Casper High." Why didn't anyone ever look up?
Probably because they didn't expect to see anything interesting happening on the ceiling, that's why.
Danny tried to grab Tucker's attention again and somehow get the message across to the socially-challenged techno-geek that he needed to lead Sam away, but it was in vain. Tucker was completely oblivious to Danny's efforts above them.
The late bell rang and Danny was almost pulling his hair out in frustration.
"See you after school?" Sam asked as she began to turn away, only to see Tucker staring wide-eyed at something above her. "What?" She followed his gaze, but didn't see anything.
"Ummm … nothing, just, I'll, uh, probably get detention. For being late. Again."
Sam snorted. "What else is new? So you'll tell Danny we're on for this afternoon, right?"
Tucker looked quickly up at Danny, who was making wide 'no' gestures above Sam's head. "Uhh, actually Danny and I had something already planned…"
Sam raised an eyebrow, silently demanding more information.
"See, we're doing a tournament tonight … in … Doomed! And, you know … guy stuff." Tucker was floundering.
"Guy stuff," Sam said flatly.
"Yeah! 'Cause girls don't play videogames, and that's what Danny and I'll be doing all afternoon!"
An unreadable expression entered Sam's face as she abruptly walked past him. "I'm going to class."
"Yeah, I'd better get there, too. Hopefully, Danny will already be there, heh…"
Sam was too irritated to notice the fact that Tucker hadn't taken a step away from his initial position as she stomped off to her advanced history class. Neither boy noticed the steam that was coming out of her ears or the furious, determined expression on her face.
Linebreak
"Dude, what the heck are you doing up there?" Tucker called up to his friend.
"I'm a little more concerned on HOW I got up here, Tucker," Danny informed him, annoyance clear in his tone.
"That was going to be my second question."
"Well thanks for asking. I think I just walked up here." Experimentally, Danny lifted a foot and took a step. With more confidence, he walked to the wall, but gulped when he got there.
"What are you doing?" Tucker asked impatiently. "We have to get to class."
"Have you ever tried to walk up a ninety-degree angle?" Danny stared at the obstacle apprehensively.
"It's just another one of your powers," Tucker encouraged him. "You've done pretty well controlling all the others you've come across." Danny still didn't move. "You just put your foot on it and then keep walking, right?"
"I guess," Danny whispered. Eyes tightly closed, he put his right foot on the wall, then his left. He opened them a crack, and grinned widely when he saw that he had successfully transferred planes. "Yes!" He jumped and let loose a small whoop of joy, elated at his success.
Tucker winced when Danny abruptly met the ground.
"Maybe I should have kept at least one foot on the wall," he groaned with his nose buried in the floor.
Tucker saw a few silhouettes moving towards the doors of the classrooms around them. "Either way," he said, grabbing Danny's arm, "we need to get to class. Like, right now."
Both boys ran to math class, barely making it out of sight before Mr. Lancer opened his door and looked around. "I could have sworn I heard someone out here," he muttered. Then again, maybe he had been reading too many mystery books lately…
Linebreak
"Come on, Danny," Tucker said, trying to cheer his friend up. "It wasn't that bad."
"Says the one who doesn't have to put up with the public humiliation," Danny grumbled. "I will never live this down." They had just finished a disastrous fourth period math class during which the teacher had told everyone to choose a spot on the chalkboard to solve the problem she had put up on the overhead.
Danny tried to factor the problem to solve for x, but he wasn't having much luck. It would be quicker to use the quadratic formula which was…unmemorable. It had something to do with b and 4ac and he was pretty sure it had another a in it somewhere…
He banged his head on the chalkboard in frustration, not expecting it to go through the board instead. Everyone in the room turned when they heard Danny's strangled yelp and a huge crash.
Even the teacher burst into laughter at the sight of Danny tangled in the overhead's wires that he had tripped over when he stumbled back. Markers were scattered across the floor around a giant Danny caterpillar with chalk-colored dust all over his hair.
Now, Danny was walking down the hall with yellow hair that shed every time he took a step. Nervously, he tried to dust it out with his hands.
"You're only making it worse," Tucker informed him as a smile tugged on the corners of his mouth.
Danny sighed and let his hands fall, abandoning his attempt to fix his hair. "I'll just use the showers in the boys' locker room." They walked into their next class – gym. Half the class was already out and doing the teacher's torturous stretching.
"Get changed, Fenton, Foley!" Mrs. Teslaff, the rather unfit fitness instructor, yelled at them. Meekly, the boys obeyed, meeting Sam on her way over.
"Whoa. What happened to you?" she asked Danny, glaring at his hair.
"Ummm…math?"
"FENTON! FOLEY!"
"Gotta go, bye!" Danny dragged Tucker to the locker room and hurriedly ran to one of the sinks. As Tucker fought with his locker, Danny splashed water into his hair and scrubbed it furiously, trying to get the yellow dust out, but when he looked up, he gasped.
Now, instead of a large yellow splotch on his hair, he had yellow streaks.
"Danny, we have to go out soon!" Tucker called to him as the last boys left the locker room. "Stupid locker!"
Well, at least the streaks looked more intentional. Danny jumped over a bench and ran over to his locker, barely keeping himself from ramming into it. Before Tucker had finished spinning his dial – again – Danny had his locker open and his gym outfit on. Teslaff's wrath was not something you wanted to fall on you.
"A little help?" Tucker panted as he vainly tried to open the locker. "It's jammed!"
Danny joined him and together, they pulled at the door. "How do you get it so tightly jammed?" With another groan, the locker door suddenly came free and the boys went flying back through the wall behind them that separated the boys' locker room from the girls' locker room.
"Wow. Pink," Tucker said as he blinked at the scene before him before realizing what had just happened. "Danny!"
Still intangible, they both looked up when they heard voices.
"Ugh, we're cheerleaders! We shouldn't have to do gym class with all those losers!"
"I know, right?"
Wordlessly, Danny flew back through the wall as fast as he could, pulling Tucker with him before losing his intangibility and tumbling to the floor.
"That was weird," Tucker stated as he stood up and brushed himself off. His hands were quivering a little. "But hey, at least now we know what the girls' locker room looks like."
Danny snorted absentmindedly as he observed his hands. How had he made Tucker intangible? "It didn't hurt, did it?"
Tucker paused as he remembered the feeling and shivered a little. "Not really. It was just cold. Seriously, that was the only thing it felt like, other than light and weightless."
Danny nodded. "I'll try to not do that anymore." His eyes widened. "Wait!"
"What?" Tucker frowned as he finished tying his shoes.
"I've never even done it before to begin with! I mean, I've turned myself intangible, but I've never turned something else intangible until now! This is bad."
"Dude! Calm down and just don't think about it," Tucker said, trying to soothe him.
"But what if I do it in front of everyone? What if I turn my desk intangible or my backpack or-"
"Danny. Like I said, don't think about it. And besides, you can probably control it the same way you control your own intangibility, right?" Tucker pushed open the door.
"Ri-"
"LATE! START RUNNING, BOYS!"
"What took so long?" Sam asked, coming up to jog beside them. "And Danny, what happened to your hair?" Her critical gaze took in the yellow-blondish highlights. "I didn't notice that you had dyed it this morning."
Danny gave a long-suffering sigh.
Another Linebreak
It could have been worse. Danny clung to that thought as he and Tucker walked to Tucker's house.
On the other hand, it could have been better.
"Okay," Tucker began as he fiddled with his PDA. "So I added 'walking on walls' to your list. I'm not sure about what to do with the intangibility, though. It would seem redundant."
"Let's just leave it at intangibility," Danny said. "Argh, I do not need this!" He suddenly started sinking into the pavement with a yelp. "Tucker!"
"Whoa! I got you, Danny!" Tucker pulled Danny up out of the ground and waited for the intangibility to pass.
Unfortunately, it didn't.
"Danny! Can't you stop it?" Tucker cried as he looked at his hands, which were beginning to turn bluish and intangible like Danny.
"I'm trying! Just let go!"
"What?" asked the now fully-intangible Tucker.
"Try it!"
Eyes closed, Tucker released Danny and immediately felt gravity again. "Phew," he breathed in relief before realizing that Danny was still intangible. "Well, at least you're not stuck in the pavement," Tucker offered.
Danny turned his grumpy expression on his friend while he floated a little above the sidewalk. Tucker swallowed when he saw the tail that had formed from Danny's intangible legs, even though Danny was still human.
"And nobody's here to see this."
"Tucker! Danny?" Danny abruptly disappeared as Sam came up. "Hey, Tucker. Where's Danny?"
"Uhhhhh…he…went ahead…and…yeah."
"Uh-huh." Sam crossed her arms skeptically.
"No, really!" Tucker said hurriedly. "He, uh, had to, uh, go to the bathroom really badly, so he ran to my house."
Sam raised an eyebrow. I don't know what he's hiding, but I don't appreciate it.
Tucker felt a slight tug on his sleeve. "I'd better go. Don't want to miss that Doomed tournament!" he called over his shoulder as he jogged away, Danny flying invisibly a little above him. Sam watched Tucker for a moment until the boys turned a corner. Determined to learn what was going on, she stalked to her own house.
Linebreak
"Wow. That was close," Danny's disembodied voice said.
"And that is creepy. Can you turn visible again?" Tucker asked as he glanced around.
"Sorry." Danny reappeared – still intangible.
"And tangible?"
Danny frowned and closed his eyes for a moment before slowly regaining his usual coloring and dropping to the ground. Literally.
Tucker snickered as Danny peeled himself off the asphalt, earning a glare from Danny.
It was Danny's turn to snicker when they made it to Tucker's house. "What's with the sofa?"
Tucker stared at it for a moment before answering. "That is one big sofa."
"Hey kids!" Tucker's mom greeted them cheerfully. "We're just putting the new furniture in the basement. Remember, sweetie, we ordered it?"
"I thought it wasn't due for another week," Tucker replied as he exchanged glances with Danny.
"Early delivery," the woman grunted as she tried to push the sofa further into the house.
"Hey honey?" Tucker's dad poked his head around the house's corner. "I can't find it."
"Did you look-"
"Yes!"
With an exasperated sigh, his wife left the sofa and walked around the house to help her husband.
Danny and Tucker walked up to the full, red sofa that stuck halfway out the front door. The other half was inside. "So I'm guessing your parents didn't take into consideration how they would get the sofa inside the house when they ordered it?"
"Looks like it," Tucker agreed.
"Why don't we try?" Danny suggested.
"Be my guest."
"Together."
"You're the one with the ghost powers!"
"And it's your sofa!"
"Fine!" Tucker snapped. He walked around to the other side of the sofa and observed it for a moment. "How are we going to move it? It's really heavy."
Danny frowned. "Do you know how heavy?"
"Heavy."
"You just don't want to move it."
"Guilty."
"Can we at least try to push it?"
"…"
"Once?"
"…Okay. But I'm telling you it isn't going to move. We should leave it for my parents." With a sigh, Tucker rolled up his sleeves and joined Danny at the couch's end.
"On the count of three, okay? One, two, three!" The boys leaned all their weight into the couch, pushing and shoving as hard as they could.
It didn't budge.
Tucker leaned back and sighed, wiping his forehead. "Yep. Too heavy."
But Danny didn't seem to have heard him; he kept pushing rigidly on the sofa.
"Danny, we're too…" Tucker stopped talking when he saw Danny's eyes. Even though they were squeezed tightly shut, a glow seemed to emanate from them, and when they snapped open to focus clearly on the stubborn sofa, they were a swirling neon green.
The green from his phantom-form. Tucker quickly looked over his friend. But he isn't in his ghost form; his hair is still black and he isn't wearing the hazmat suit or glowing. The next thing, however, made Tucker quickly lose this train of thought.
His jaw dropped when he saw that slowly, but surely, the couch was moving forward, away from Danny.
Danny felt the sofa move and his confidence began to build, giving him the will to push harder. Panting, he went through the door one step at a time, unaware of anything else, until there was a bump signifying the sofa's meeting with the wall. Danny stood up and smiled at Tucker, who was still outside.
"See? Not so heavy."
Tucker looked at him dubiously for a moment. "Danny, you do realize you just moved a two-hundred pound couch."
Danny just laughed at him. "I could never move a two-hundred pound couch, Tucker."
"Oh?" Tucker's eyebrows went up his forehead. "How heavy do you think it was then?"
"Probably more like forty pounds."
"Forty," Tucker said flatly.
"Yeah."
"Danny, do you really think we would have had that much trouble moving it if it was forty? We were both pushing it at the beginning, and we couldn't move it at all."
"Ummm…" Danny didn't really have anything to say to that. "Maybe it was stuck?"
Tucker gave him a skeptical look as he looked for some evidence to support his theory. He thought back to what Danny had said a few days ago about ghosts. 'They all had the basics, but other common characteristics were extra strength and durability.' "Or maybe you have superstrength!"
"Superstrength? Oh, come on, Tucker, why would-oh." A look of realization spread across Danny's face. Hesitantly, he walked to the front of the couch and started pushing on it, trying to rotate it so that it could go down the steps.
They were very disappointed.
"Try it in your ghost form," Tucker suggested. "If ghosts are more durable and stronger than humans, then maybe it'll be stronger than your human one."
Danny shrugged. "I do usually have better control over my powers when I'm Phantom," he agreed. Checking to make sure no one else was around, he quickly stood up straight. "Goin' ghost!" The white ring appeared and split, running over Fenton and turning him into Phantom.
"Go, Danny!" Tucker cheered as Danny shoved at the couch. Inch by inch, it rotated until it was parallel to the stairs.
"Now to get it into the basement," Danny said, grinning.
"Tucker? Danny?"
Danny looked at Tucker when they heard his mom call, terrified.
"Turn back, quick!" Tucker whispered urgently. The rings appeared again and hurriedly made Fenton return.
"Oh, there you are!" Mrs. Foley gushed as she entered the house through her unblocked front door. "I made cookies this morning before the truck brought the-"
"I think she noticed the sofa," Tucker whispered to Danny, who nodded in agreement.
"What…how did…"
"Ummm…we're stronger than we look?" Danny asked nervously. He fidgeted under Mrs. Foley's stare.
"It doesn't matter how strong you are! You should have left it to us!" she exclaimed, worry coloring her tone. "What if you dropped it on yourself or pulled a muscle or-"
"We're fine, Mom," Tucker interrupted her.
Mrs. Foley took a deep breath. "Well, thank you for helping. But don't do that again! Leave the heavy stuff for Mr. Foley and I, am I clear?" she scolded.
Tucker and Danny nodded.
"Crystal," Danny said. Mrs. Foley could be scary when she got angry. In fact, now that he thought about it, practically all the females he knew were scary when they were angry.
"Good. Now, go have fun, and if you get hungry, Tucker knows where the cookies are. Mr. Foley and I are going to the hardware store to get a few pieces we need!"
They were heading downstairs before she had finished. "Okay, Mom!" Tucker called up over his shoulder. "So Danny," he said as they walked into the room, "how strong do you think you are now?"
Danny shrugged self-consciously and rubbed the back of his neck, feeling the coolness of invisibility begin to spread across his arm. He squashed it with a single thought. "I have no idea."
"Not strong enough," a voice hissed. Danny and Tucker jumped and skimmed the room, looking for the voice's source, but nobody was there. Danny shivered a little; it had to be a ghost, and he was not looking forward to meeting it. Especially since it seemed to know him.
"So, newbie." The voice spat the last word out with more venom than a rattlesnake. "I hear you've been protecting humans."
Danny and Tucker exchanged glances. "Excuse me?" Danny asked, puzzled.
They heard something rustle. "Don't play dumb with me, new ghost. I don't know how you can adopt a human form, but it doesn't fool me. You're the one who hurt my kin! And for that, you WILL PAY!" The last word was a full-throated roar.
Tucker and Danny shrieked as a glowing green, red-eyed, ten-foot-tall rat appeared before them. Tucker almost fainted at the sight of its vast incisors as he stared down a ghost animal's throat large enough to swallow him whole for the second time that week.
Danny immediately went ghost the moment the ghost rat appeared. "Ewww," he moaned.
The rat paused. "What did you say?"
Danny gestured to the thick, gooey saliva that was all over the floor. "Do you have to slobber so much? Seriously, this basement was just cleaned!"
The rat growled and slunk towards them on all fours, red eyes narrowed. "I do not slobber."
Tucker and Danny backed away. "Oh really? Then what do you call that?" Danny pointed at the viscous liquid that was dripping out of the rat's mouth.
"Danny! Don't provoke it!" Tucker hissed. What a time to get a smart mouth!
"VENOM!" the rat roared. "Subjects, attack!"
Danny gulped. This just got a lot more dangerous.
"AHHH!" Tucker screeched as a horde of rats swarmed over him. He stumbled, trying to avoid the puddles of venom all over the floor.
"GET THEM OFF, GET THEM OFF, GET THEM OFF!" Danny screamed. He frantically tried to brush off the hundreds of rats that were running all over him, but no matter what he did, they kept coming back.
"Danny! Look out!" Tucker shouted.
Danny turned, and not a moment too soon. He barely managed to dodge the dripping jaws that snapped an inch away from his hair and instinctively went intangible.
"Oh," he muttered when all the rats that had been clinging to him fell off with nothing left to grab. He rolled out of the way of a swiping paw from the seismic rat.
"I am the King of the Rats! No one dares to hurt my realm, for fear of answering to ME!" With another earsplitting roar, it leapt on Danny and pinned him. "So, new ghost," it hissed. "Any last words?"
Danny wrestled with the Rat King, struggling to keep its heavily muscled arms from throttling him. "Yeah. My name isn't New Ghost; it's PHANTOM!" On the last word, Danny threw the giant rodent off him. "Tucker?"
"Danny!" Danny spotted his best friend under a heap of vermin, trying to fight them off. But every time he swatted at them, they turned intangible, leaving him with nothing to hit.
And speaking of intangible… "Hold on, Tucker!" Danny yelled as he lifted up into the air again. He turned intangible just in time to prevent the Rat King from having part of him for dinner and flew into the fray, dodging as many of the foot-long rats as he could and shuddering at the feeling of going through the ones he missed. "Grab my hand!"
Without any hesitation, Tucker grabbed the bluish hand offered to him and felt the empty feeling of intangibility spread through him. He sighed with relief when the rats fell off him. "Go, go go!" Danny pulled him up and flew through the basement wall. They breathed a sigh of relief when they reached the open backyard, but it was short-lived.
"You can't escape from me!" the Rat King screamed at the new ghost that was flying away with the delicious human.
"You okay?" Danny asked as he turned himself and Tucker tangible again and set his friend on the ground.
"Besides a few scratches, I think I'm fine. I didn't get bitten," Tucker said, checking over himself. "You?"
"I'm fine," Danny assured him, still up in the air with his ghost tail, but he was too distracted for it to bother him. "But that rat won't be for long!" Before Tucker could say anything, Danny had zoomed off into the direction of the rampaging rodents. All he could do was watch as his best friend went up against a battalion of angry ghost critters. I hope he's alright, Tucker thought worriedly as he beheld the fight.
"Hey, fur-face!" Danny yelled. "Miss me?"
The Rat King growled.
"Knew it! You're speechless!"
The Rat King opened his mouth to scream his defiance at the smart-alecky young ghost, but before he could utter a sound, Danny punched him right on the nose.
"OOWWW!" The Rat King slammed into the basement wall.
"OOWWW!" Danny grabbed his hand and began hopping up and down on the ground, holding his hand. "Thick skull," he commented.
Tucker began running towards them, intent on helping Danny.
"THAT HURT!" the Rat King yelled as he sent a metal patio chair flying in Danny's direction.
Danny jumped out of the way. "Tucker, what are you doing?"
"Helping!" Tucker called back. "Or at least, trying to! How do we get rid of it?"
Danny continued dodging the Rat King's makeshift missiles and eventually the Rat King's own paws as he thought. How do we get rid of it? The last few times, the Fenton Portal was close by, but it's too far now. He jumped back to avoid the Rat King's sharp teeth and began to sweat nervously. I may have to do this the old-fashioned way.
Tucker stood in awe as he saw his friend begin to fight back. The Rat King went flying back into his basement wall (which was holding up fairly well despite the many hits it was taking), a shocked expression on his face before a cruel smile took over it. "Well, newbie, you've asked for it now. Originally, I was just going to have you and your little human friend killed, but now, I think I will see to it that you are brought to my lair alive and personally gnawed on by yours truly." The smile became savage.
Tucker turned green at that image.
"Leave us alone!" Danny roared. His green eyes glowed even more brightly, and he nailed the smirking Rat King with a right hook so fast Tucker only saw a blur. The Rat King gasped as he found himself in the same position he had put the new ghost in not ten minutes ago.
Danny leaned in close as he pinned the larger ghost to the wall, his green eyes seething with fury. The Rat King struggled, his rippling muscles pushing and shoving, but Danny didn't budge. "Leave us alone," Danny continued quietly, but his voice was full of authority. "And don't come back." The Rat King gulped as he looked into those eyes and nodded so fast his nose was a blur.
"Well this is a fine mess," Tucker stated as he looked over the glowing green rats that were milling all over the basement and the patio.
Still holding onto the Rat King, Danny straightened up. "I'll get my parents. Come with me," he said firmly to the Rat King, and the two ghosts flew to the Fenton house. Cautiously, Danny turned intangible and flew to the basement with the Rat King, stopping only when they were right in front of the portal.
"Now get in."
With one last look into those eyes, the Rat King was gone.
Danny turned around quickly when he heard footsteps and turned human, landing a bit awkwardly on the floor in his hurry.
"Danny?" his mother asked, coming to a surprised stop. "What are you doing here? I didn't hear you come home."
"Mom!" Danny shouted. "Tucker's house is being invaded!"
"What?" Maddie Fenton immediately set her project down and became attentive.
"His house is infested with hundreds of ghost rats!"
"Did someone mention ghosts?" Jack Fenton came halfway down the stairs.
"Come on, Jack!" Mrs. Fenton cried, grabbing some weapons. "There's a ghost infestation at the Foleys!"
"Yes! I get to test out my new toys! I mean, we're on it!" They adults dashed up the stairs. "To the Fenton RV!"
Danny came up the steps more slowly.
"Danny," Jazz said. Danny turned to see his big sister standing at the bottom of the steps with her arms crossed and an 'I-am-not-amused' expression on her face. "Did you just tell them your friend's house is full of ghosts?"
"Yes?"
"DANNY! You know ghosts don't exist!" she exploded.
Danny shrank back a little. This would be one of those 'angry females are scary' moments. "I saw them!"
"What?"
"I saw them! They were everywhere!"
"You probably just thought they were ghosts," Jazz dismissed, waving a hand for emphasis. "I knew our parents' job was having a bad influence on your mind!"
"I'm fine, Jazz!" Danny took several more steps back from the future psychologist.
"How can you say that? Danny, you just said that you believe in ghosts!"
"And?" Danny challenged.
"What do you mean 'and?'" Jazz spluttered.
Danny sighed. "You know what? I'm going to go do homework," he informed her. "Tucker and I didn't really get to it. Speaking of which, I should probably call him and warn him about our parents," he continued thoughtfully as he walked upstairs. "He's never experienced their cleansing techniques before…"
He left a stupefied Jazz behind him.
Linebreak
Sam sat back in her chair as the sign announcing Chaos' victory over another player flashed on her computer screen. Those boys! she fumed. Despite Tucker's words, they had not been on Doomed. It wasn't bad enough that they had claimed that as a girl, she was incompetent at wiggling her thumbs, no, they had completely lied to her!
They were hiding something. She didn't know what, but she didn't like it.
As Chaos, she took out another player in the computer game, lashing out with all her frustration and anger. Friar Tuck and Naut had been nowhere throughout the entire afternoon.
No, she didn't like it one bit. She didn't like being lied to, she didn't like being kept in the dark.
She didn't like it when her best friends hid things from her. Didn't they know they didn't need to hide from her? Sure, she could be violent and scary, but they were friends, and friends didn't keep secrets. Friends trusted each other.
And the fact that they didn't trust her hurt more deeply than any slap could.
Tomorrow, she vowed as she desperately searched the landscape for her friends, tomorrow, I will find out what Danny and Tucker are hiding. Even if I have to personally walk to their houses and stand watch over them until they tell me.
On the thought of Sam's happy threat, Happy New Year!