As far as Maddie had been told when speaking to the principal of Casper High a couple days before, there had been an assembly at some point where Ishiyama and Lancer personally explained to the student body what ecto-entities were, why she and her husband would be scouting the school in a few days' time, and what they should expect to possibly see during that period. It shouldn't have been hard to understand, even for teenagers.

The reason Maddie and Jack had chosen Amity Park to live in so many years ago was specifically because the region it was in was a hotspot for ecto-activity. Surely some of them had at least heard of ectology before, even as just a joke. Then again…people could be phenomenally ignorant. Maddie knew this personally. Still. Now they knew. There was even eyewitness evidence to support it! Maddie valued that most of all. So far, however, their detectors hadn't picked up a single thing. They traversed the school campus multiple times, more thoroughly than the last few instances they'd been allowed to.

She stopped dead in her tracks as a distinct beeping sounded from the device in her hand. She adjusted the controls on it immediately to focus on the small blip. Jack stood beside her and didn't comment as she did this, effortlessly reading the telltales like it was second nature. It made sense, she had built the thing herself. The western side of the school was where the ecto-signature, a term she and Jack had coined themselves, was coming from—the inside. They had been using a scanner in the outside lunch commons until this alerted them.

Not needing to verify, the machine was all they required, they hurried to the nearest door.

Across the school, things were going awry.

Lab equipment exploded, pencils snapped for no reason, and the rattling…

Danny raised his voice as best he could over the noise, "Stop!"

"I understand a bully when I see one!" Poindexter's nasally tones reached Danny's ears. Lockers snapped open, books and papers flying everywhere. Kids were running away, but Dash Baxter still stood there, watching with his jaw threatening to hit the floor. Danny might not have liked the guy, but he found himself wishing the douchebag would just run, escape to safety.

Green eye beams shot from Poindexter's eyes and blasted Danny full-on, sending him flying backwards, first through the library, then landing on his backside in another hallway. Danny lay there for a breath, before he felt the anger.

How dare…

He flew back through the way he came and—

Mom? Dad?!

They were standing in the hall he'd been kicked out of, staring straight at Poindexter, who looked rather surprised to see them as well. Baxter was still there, pale and shocked.

Poindexter seemed to fidget, as if deciding what he should do next—Danny made that decision for him.

He charged at the ghost, barreling into him and far, far away from his parents, down, down somewhere, under the school. They finally hit ground where there were various pipes sticking out of the wall and going in every which direction.

He'd spent so much energy, he couldn't hold his form. He transformed back to his human self. The cold fire within still burnt. He glowered at Poindexter.

Poindexter, for his part, appeared—completely astounded.

"Holy smokes!"

Danny's lip curled in annoyance. Of all the things he could think to say, it couldn't have been something stronger?

"You're the halfa!"

Danny's expression was quizzical. Hal-fuh? The humming in his chest, ever-present, translated the ghost word for him. It didn't need to, because Sidney gave its definition when he spoke next.

"Everyone in the Ghost Zone talks about you!" Poindexter was more or less talking to himself, even if he was looking right at Danny, "You're half-a-boy, half-a-ghost! You have all our powers on the human plane! And—and…" His eyes went round in some sort of realization, "You were using your powers for evil?!"

Something in Danny was affronted at the idea. He couldn't get a word in edgewise, as it would happen.

Poindexter was contemplative for a beat before he said, "You might use your powers for picking on innocent kids, but I—sure as sugar—won't!"

What?

What was he—

No. No. Nononono—

"Get—OUT—"

The response rang out through his brain, "No chance, Lance!"

Poindexter was possessing him—

His body was contorting in ways it wasn't supposed to—

Danny squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them next, they were gray, and foreign.

Danny was being yanked out of himself.

He reached out in vain because he could see Poindexter staring up at him, watching him be sucked to god-knew-where, with a triumphant smile that simultaneously made Danny's blood boil and chill in despair.

He couldn't help it. He yelled incoherently.

An unseen force was pulling up, up, up...

Until finally he found himself back in the hallway, catching a glimpse of his parents, Dash and some other people before he couldn't see them anymore, buried inside locker seven hundred twenty four. He was crushed unnaturally inside a small space, flinching violently when a light spilled in the darkness. A monochrome face peered in at him mockingly.

"Hey, Poindexter!"

His breath hitched in his throat. In the mirror, an exact replica of the mirror in his own locker, was not his face, but Sidney's.

His eyes, though. They were still green.

"Get outta there, what are ya, stupid?"

A meaty hand grabbed him and set him roughly on the ground. What Danny saw was...Casper High. From decades past.

He wrenched backwards when a taller, black-haired pseudo-teen who reminded him vaguely of Dash placed both hands on his shoulders and forcibly pushed him onto his backside, "I'm talkin' to you, pencil-pusher!"

Danny hadn't heard anyone say anything. "I—"

A right hook caught him in the cheek, "Shaddup!"

Danny stumbled and was tripped by slender legs. A truly attractive girl in a ponytail smirked down at him, so cuttingly he irrationally felt ashamed just for existing. "Have a nice trip, see you next fall."

He gaped at them all, his white, black and gray torturers, then turned around and bolted for it. To his surprise, no one stopped him. He rushed for the nearest door—the door to the lunch commons—and flung them open—

He couldn't describe what doing this unveiled. Everything was so green. Which way was left, had the direction of right always been...so skewed? Yet it seemed—familiar...

"Close that thing," rumbled the same jock from before, "I'm gettin' a draft!"

I've got to get out of here.

Sam knew something was wrong about two seconds in to seeing Danny walk past herself and Tucker as if nothing had happened. She had heard the commotion—who hadn't?—and...those weren't Danny's eyes.

"Danny?" She asked quietly.

He didn't respond, as if he didn't recognize his own name.

"Danny!" She said, a little louder this time. He did stop then, the instinctual sense that someone was referring to you while at the same time not knowing what they called you seeming to take hold. He turned to her.

"Do I know you?"

His voice was odd, still Danny's, but with a different inflection.

She was confused. "Are you messing with me?"

He paused, then brightened, "You must be one of my friends!"

This was all strange.

"Of...of course I am?"

He was grinning, but not the way she'd ever seen him grin in the past. It didn't look like him, "Neat! So this is what it's like! Anyone else I need to know about?"

"Danny, what is up with you?"

His expression faltered, "Nothing's 'up,'" he chortled, "Except the sky!"

She was getting a bit freaked.

"Dude," Tucker seemed to find his voice, "First of all, that's a lame joke, you can do better than that, and secondly, what's up with your eyes?"

Danny frowned, looking considerably pouty; it was just so unlike him, "I don't know what you mean."

"They just look—weird." Tucker elaborated.

"Aw, it'll wear off," Danny shrugged exaggeratedly, "Now, c'mon, pals! Let's have some fun!"

As it happened, Danny's new idea of 'fun' was making an absolute fool of himself.

He had used his intangibility powers, to Sam's shock, to dig around in one of the school's soft drink vending machines and pass around free sodas to everyone who'd take one. He'd say things like, "No problem-o, compadre," and, "For the coolest cats I know!" and it was in general extremely embarrassing to watch.

What could they do, though? Apparently their part-ghost friend had lost his mind.

School hadn't been called off despite the craziness, which Sam supposed she could understand. Enough days had already been called off in response to the ghostly activity. Besides, Mr. and Mrs. Fenton were there, although she had no idea precisely where they were.

She was glad Dash and his cronies were nowhere to be found while Danny was doing this, because she shuddered to think how they'd take advantage of the opportunity to bash him around some more.

Maddie and Jack rushed to the lower levels of the school as far as they could get—it wasn't very far, to their frustration, it was all plumbing basements which required maintenance keys to enter.

Both of their hearts were racing. They'd finally found a ghost, not one, but two, humanoid and, unfortunately, violent.

"Capturing one of those things would be the highlight of our careers," Jack said.

She agreed, "The first of many."

Maddie remembered in vivid detail how time had slowed down for her as she watched the hooded, goggled ecto-entity—or, well, it appeared to have a hood and goggles, but ecto-entities didn't wear clothes or anything like such, it was all part of their single being—tackle the grayer one and disappear into the floor below. The gray one resembled a boy to the point it made Maddie's stomach queasy.

Her handheld device was directing her to...a row of lockers?

She stopped at one in particular which was giving off the highest ecto-residual signal. She pulled out another machine from a bag slung over her shoulder and set it to work doing its designated task: bringing out whatever was in there, akin to a vacuum. It was a prototype, but it would have to work.

Danny tried fighting back. He really did. He fought back with such ferocity that his tormentors quieted and stood back, amazed. He took the chance and resorted to hiding inside Poindexter's locker.

It didn't feel right to be in...this place, Poindexter's place. He felt like an outsider.

He startled as a new noise came from the mirror. It began to warp preternaturally and his proximity to it meant he wasn't immune. He cried out as he was drawn from the locker and—

Squished inside somewhere smaller and more compact.

He struggled, kicked and clawed, but it was no use, at least until his mind was so distraught that something in him responded, blazing and tightening his muscles with strength he didn't normally have. He lashed out and his container exploded. He heard a feminine shriek and a man's gasp and he floated there in relief for all of one second before he soaked in the sight of his mother and father. He stared at them and the broken piece of machinery he'd been held in.

Was this...the same device he'd put Technus in the first time around?

It was.

Well, hell.

He was still in Poindexter's body. He needed to find his own body and—

He remembered his parents were there.

"Uh..."

There eyes were very wide. To his nervousness, his dad looked about ready to beat the hell out of him if he had to.

Danny was glad he could still go invisible. He fled to an empty classroom where he could recollect himself.

Poindexter. Gotta find Poindexter.

Was the school day still going on? Or had it ended? He searched the hallways until he found a cluster of students.

"That was insane..."

"I'm tired of this bullshit..."

"...I keep seeing Fenton's parents everywhere I go. Freaks..."

He felt a touch of ire, but left them alone.

He found a clock. It was nearly the end of the day. If Poindexter hadn't just ran off campus, wouldn't he be following Danny's class schedule? He hoped his hunch was correct. What were those students doing out of class early, anyway? Well, then again, things kind of were a mess...going to class must be the last thing on their minds.

After an agonizing ten minutes of searching he spotted a familiar head of thick black hair. Poindexter!

Out of class? Whatever, it didn't matter.

Danny made a beeline for him and snarled in his face, the fierceness sounding incongruous with Sidney's voice, "Get out of my body!"

Poindexter froze, eyes shooting up from the soda cans in his hands to ogle Danny. "You! But, it's impossible!"

Danny smiled grimly, "Never say that around me. Now. Get. Out. Of. My. Body."

Poindexter grimaced, "No!"

Danny scrounged in his memory for what he recalled Poindexter had done when he'd taken over him, and decided to go with what seemed simplest. He lunged for Poindexter and fumbled his hands through his body before catching onto something, Poindexter squirmed (it was unsettling to witness) and shouted, "Help!"

That only made Danny angrier, for some reason.

He tugged until the ghostly apparition of Sidney Poindexter was being split from the body of Daniel Fenton, at once Sidney started melding with Danny, it was a bad feeling, but Danny also could've sworn he was being hauled back into his own form as well. They were switching places.

"Danny!" Sam yelled from the other end of the hallway. Tucker almost echoed her, but at the sight of Danny looking so fatigued, he couldn't think of what he would say after.

The process was complete. Danny, spent, flopped onto the ground listlessly, unconscious. The sodas clinked as they hit the floor.

"Nooo!" Poindexter squawked.

Sam was scared, "What did you do to him?!"

"What did I do to him?" Sidney demanded, indignant, "You should be asking what he did to me!"

"Go away!"

Sidney fumed.

Maddie and Jack barged onto the scene.

Class had been in session, but now kids were starting to poke their heads out of the classroom doors, most likely without their teachers' permissions.

"Danny!" Jack bellowed once he realized who the limp form was, he ran forward, forgetting the ghost's presence hovering over his son, if anything that only made him go faster.

The power which bound Poindexter to his domain inside locker seven hundred twenty four came to life. He twisted and wailed pitifully as he was brought back to his personal hell. Through the hallways he went, and then the locker slammed itself shut.

What Poindexter didn't expect was the warm welcome he received from his peers once he'd finished pounding his fists on the locker.

"Hey, Sidney," said one figure. They never called him 'Sidney,' "That was some pretty impressive fighting you did back there."

"What...I did what?"

"Wanna come hang out with us?"

"S-sure!"