Tucker shifted between his bed sheets. Returning home after the ghost fight had been hell. Getting there was easy, if shaky from his own aftershocks of adrenaline; it was stepping through the front door and being confronted by his angry parents that was horrible. He would be watched with hawk eyes for the next month or so. He hadn't known what to tell them about his absence. His father demanded an explanation that made any sense at all, Tucker had none that didn't involve giving away his best friend's secret. In sheer frustration his dad banged his fists on the table and said he'd better have an answer by morning. He wouldn't have one.

Sam's parents hadn't even noticed she was gone. They'd been at a party a little ways out of town. They hadn't been affected by what Technus had done. She was lucky. The servants however had taken note of her absence, and while they seemed to assume that she was out of the house being rebellious like she often was, she had a feeling they'd be telling her parents with a different tone of voice than the usual. After all, one of the butler's hands had gone numb because of electrocution via television remote control.

Tiffany Snow, anchor of Amity Park News, said, "At about seven p.m. last night frightened residents called the police station with some extremely bizarre reports; technology coming alive? Now we go to Lance Thunder in the field."

Lance Thunder, action reporter of the Amity Park news crew, began, "I'm on Gaste Street and things are truly bizarre here. This is what we've got so far, Tiffany: we rolled up, jumped out and got ready to film, because the first thing we saw when we turned on to the street was a man running down the street being chased by a lawnmower! Then, the next thing we know, our cameraman lost control of his camera."

"'Lost control'?"

"It started attacking the cameraman! I'm not lying to you, Tiffany! It tried to bite his ear off, the only reason it didn't is because he was wearing his headphones."

Maddie and Jack watched all this with rapt attention on their T.V. screen.

"It happened on our street," Jack said, "How did we not notice?"

"I don't know," Maddie answered honestly, "But it's not going to go unnoticed again." She turned to him, "We need to explain to people what's going on before they panic and jump to conclusions."

"Should we contact the news station?"

"I was thinking that, too." But the question was, would they listen to them? Ectology was barely known by the public. They were professionals. Surely, their opinion and knowledge of the situation would matter.

It was the morning after the fact. Jasmine came home the night before in tears of fear because the party she'd attended had been ruined by aggressive ectoplasm-infused objects. They'd all been afraid for Danny, who appeared on the doorstep last. He said he'd been tricked by Dash, the host of the party, into thinking the dress code was formal. Jazz had been furious. She'd gone in simple yet pretty attire.

If she'd known Dash would do this she'd never would have gone. Maddie was more concerned about where he'd been, though this Dash boy irked her. He said he'd just wandered around on his scooter. Maddie didn't have any reason not to believe him. He obviously hadn't seen any ecto-activity. He'd seemed out of sorts and conked out on the couch for the rest of the evening and early hours. Maddie considered them all fortunate. It could have been worse than it was.

When Danny went back to school again, everyone was abuzz about what had happened at Dash's party and around town. Everything electronic had come alive, and then suddenly dropped as if someone turned off a light switch. A vindictive part of Danny wished he'd been there to see the look on Dash's face. He put Technus back into the ecto-dimension that very same night.

Danny glanced at the slip of paper in his hand. It had the number and combination for his new locker. The entire row of lockers had to be removed so that the plumbing behind them could be worked on. So, all the kids including Danny in that row had to be assigned new lockers. It wasn't a big deal. Danny's new locker number was seven hundred twenty four. His friends followed him there.

"What are your parents doing?" Sam asked to incite conversation.

"They're busy," answered Danny, "Doing their jobs, I guess. Didn't you see the news? They've been trying to talk to the news station since. They know more about what's going on than anyone else." Even us, he thought. The last time he'd seen them they were investigating the masses of junk lying around on their street.

"By the way," Tucker brought up, "Your new locker's haunted." Danny couldn't help but notice Tucker's eyes were shadowed, but the other boy sounded light regardless.

Danny was a little too tired to be playing these games, but he went with it anyway, "What?"

"Locker seven hundred twenty four. It used to be the locker of a kid who killed himself a long time ago. They say it's haunted."

"Who says?"

Tucker shrugged. "People. I'll shut up about it now."

Danny didn't like to hear him talk like that, "You brought it up because of the stuff happening lately. If you think there's a ghost in there, let me tell you, dude, I would have felt it by now," he said.

His friend leaned against the wall of lockers, absorbing that piece of information. "If you say so. Anyway…admit it, dude, you're kind of like a superhero these days. I've seen you fight, and you sure seem like a hero to me."

"Thanks...?" Danny wasn't sure how to respond. His best friend just called him a hero.

Tucker looked away, "You're welcome. And a superhero's gotta have an alias, right? What's yours?"

"I'm not really a superhero, Tuck'. Besides, I'm not creative enough…"

"But I am! And I think your name should be Phantom! It rhymes with Fenton."

Danny blinked, "Danny Phantom? Yeah, right, like people aren't gonna figure out who I am immediately."

"Not Danny Phantom, just Phantom. The first one would be kind of cheesy."

"Okay…I don't really plan on advertising myself, but it works." Danny wanted to believe in something that made more sense than what was actually going on. And, if it would make Tucker a little happier, why not?

"I'm...organizing a campaign," Sam said.

Sometimes when Sam said things like that were other people could hear, she got eye rolls. The hall they were in was rapidly emptying. They really ought to get to class...but communication, in Danny's opinion, was more important, if they were going to keep a secret.

"Another one? You haven't done one of those for awhile." Danny responded.

"Yeah. It's against the frog dissection in our biology classes. I'll be doing a speech on it tomorrow. I got the school's permission through petitions."

Of course it was about animals' rights. Sam was an avid animal lover. The petitions were probably all signed by her fellow Gothics and ultra-recyclo vegetarians. The two appeared to overlap more often than Danny expected. She must have done it some time back; if he recalled, she'd been given a month to prepare, she'd told them last time she mentioned it. A month ago. He felt a little guilty. He was the reason she'd been distracted lately.

"Nice." Danny unlocked his locker and jumped a little too distinctly at the face staring back at him. It was his own. There was a mirror on the inside. Weird. It must have belonged to a girl before. He shuffled through his stuff and found he didn't really have anything to put in the locker right now. To his chagrin, he'd left some of his homework at home in complete forgetfulness. "You got your Goth friends helping you?"

"They aren't really..." Sam paused, "Well, yes. I had to do my best to convince some people to do the right thing, but it worked out."

Right. Tucker had his geek buddies who he sometimes hung out with, but Sam didn't really seem to have anything more than acquaintances outside of Danny. He wondered if he should count Tucker when it came to her. She'd invited him over to her place along with Danny, but they still fought sometimes. They were the only two people who knew about Danny's freakiness. He guessed the only thing he should be concerned about was the fact they were his best friends.

Sam also tended to use phrases like the right thing and talk about morality when, if Danny thought about it, it was really her ideas alone of what those things were. Tucker was the opposite, he let people do as they pleased so long as they weren't hurting anyone (though he didn't do much if they were unless it involved him) but Sam had a lot of triggers. She was quick to correct someone on something she perceived as wrong. Tucker did that when they mispronounced the name of a new PDA or MP3 player, and that was all.

Danny? He wasn't sure. He didn't know himself all that well...he saw a lot of injustice pulled on other kids lower on the food chain in school than most and hadn't done anything about it. Sam always glared holes in the back of the bullies' heads. Tucker looked away with an uncomfortable expression. Danny supposed a constant reaction to witnessing something bad going on was a feeling of burning in his chest. It was a hopeless flame. He was powerless...or, maybe he wasn't. He could walk through walls now, he realized with a jolt. He could...do what? Having unnatural abilities didn't necessarily mean he was automatically inclined to use them.

Except that was exactly what he'd been doing, almost with an animalistic drive, this past month. The absolute need to get rid of all those damned ghosts, the strange near-pleasure he felt when he sucked them into the thermos and back to their dimension, the unreasonable sense of superiority and bemusement at the Box Ghost's persistence. It was like he was a whole other person at times. But that couldn't be right. It was all him...wasn't it? This wasn't some stupid film where the main character guy suddenly found himself with a split personality. The fear of Skulker had been real. The dulled yet definite pain Danny experienced when being beaten down by Technus had been doubtlessly real. What next?

"I AM THE BOX GHOST!"

Oh, great.

"AND I WILL HAVE MY CORRUGATED CARDBOARD VENGEANCE!"

Where did he come from?!