First Impressions

"Get back here and get in the thermos, you ridiculous ham!"

"How dare you! I, TECHNUS, the master of silicon and code, am not a ham!"

"Ah yes, how could I forget – you can cure a ham!"

Danny smirked at the bellow of rage he received in reply and dodged the retaliatory traffic light sent at him. He was sure he'd stolen that line from somewhere, but Technus was being especially annoying this time. He didn't deserve original material.

Technus' overall goal was world domination for the sake of his ego, Danny knew, and with his control over technology, he had any number of avenues available to him to attempt it. Some he really hoped and prayed the tech ghost would never cotton on to – some problems he couldn't simply punch or blast into submission. Technus tended to gravitate to the newest of the new in terms of tech, but it would only take a little prompting to shunt him towards, say, inhabiting the internet and ruling it like a god.

Why the self-proclaimed Master of Technology had decided that attacking the launch of a new robot toy at the toy store and screaming how they would be his 'tiny minions of global conquest', Danny would never understand, but he was certainly not complaining. And now there they were, another chase underway above the city of Amity Park as Technus fled from the ashes of his latest and frankly weakest attempt at world domination, with a swirling shield of randomly snatched up bits of technology between the megalomaniac ghost and the city hero.

"Gotta say, mullet man," Danny taunted, weaving through the air to avoid the various technological bric-a-brac that came at him from below. "I'd keep this one out of the scrapbook. The day the mighty Technus forgot that 'toy' does not equal 'military grade'."

"Shut up! It was a highly effective commercial!"

"I don't think they even needed me for this one! I saw Sam's grandmother smashing apart your glorious army with her mobility scooter! They really don't build them like they used to."

"When I rule the world, they shall build them like they used to! The Technus Empire will have a thriving market in solidly constructed toys! And furthermore- "

Danny suddenly reached out a hand, acid green engulfing it as he spotted a hole in Technus' wall of junk that gave him a clear shot. The ectoblast burned through the night sky, striking Technus in his face as he turned to argue with his pursuer some more, sending him tumbling from the sky to the ground below, his summoned objects falling with him as his concentration broke.

Technus crashed hard onto his front, complaining about his ectopancreas as he wriggled weakly on the pavement. Danny landed next to him, his legs bent as he slammed into the ground and pulled the thermos from his belt. "No, seriously," he asked. "What were you thinking? 'Cause I know you're a laser focused obsessive maniac- "

"Genius…" Came the mumbled reply as Technus flopped onto his back and propped himself up slightly.

"Obsessive maniac, but even I don't think you're stupid enough to mistake a toy for an opportunity to conquer the world."

"Because there's nothing left here!" Technus shrieked in frustration, glaring at Danny from behind his… were those glasses or where those his actual eyes? It suddenly occurred to Danny that he didn't know. "There's nothing for me to use in my plans for glorious conquest! No experiments, no prototypes, nothing new! All of the glorious potential of technology has fled this miserable backwards Luddite town! What else am I to use to enact my magnificent Empire, with its robust and futuristic public transport systems and absolute subservience to I, TECHNUS?! Tawdry, childish gadgets are all I'm left with!"

"And who do you think is responsible for tech companies with dangerous projects deciding to leave Amity, 'genius'?"

"Obviously, you!"

Danny rolled his eyes, and pointed the thermos, pushing the button and sucking Technus up in a burst of blue-white light. He slapped the cap on the end and breathed a sigh of relief. All clear. An easy night, for once. He hoped, anyway. Danny had three essays and a project due within the week, he could do with the extra time.

After shooting a brief text to his friends, still tied up at the mall where Technus had… less attacked and more bothered, to tell them all was well, he took off for home, the cool night air enwrapping him as he made for home.

The sight that greeted Danny as he invisibly phased through the roof of the Fenton household did not bode especially well for a quiet study environment. He was used to more unusual activity at home, but this was odd even by their standards. Given that he was a half ghost and wasn't the strangest member of the family, the standards for that were high and yet-

"Pile up more in front!" Jack Fenton roared, as he emptied the contents of a cabinet onto the slowly growing barricade of household goods in front of the lock and barred entrance to the laboratory, before the large man hurled the cabinet itself atop the heap.

"Mom! Dad!" Jazz shrieked, running down the stairs as fast as she could manage. "What are you doing?!"

"We've got to block off the lab, sweetie!" Replied Maddie, dragging one of the couches from the living room. "There's a huge, unprecedented electrical storm about to pass through the area of the Ghost Zone our portal is located in! Our projections show it's going to cause widespread ectoplasmic disruption at unheard-of frequencies!"

"What does that even mean?!"

"It's going to do spooky nonsense to the portal!" Jack elaborated, stomping off to find more.

"That doesn't sound bad enough for you to destroy the house!"

"I'm not letting our dimension be sucked into that hellish green wasteland!" Jack declared, chucking plates like frisbee's to add to the ever-growing blockade.

Danny rolled his eyes at his parents' antics as they kept arguing with his sister, dropping through the floor, and landing in the lab. After all his experiences in the Ghost Zone, most of which contradicted their theories, and dealing with their, at times, dangerously malfunctioning inventions and weird notions of what ghosts were and how they operated, he wasn't really willing to take their ideas seriously. Especially when they were so focused on their bad ideas, they never noticed their kid was half dead.

He sighed. That was maybe a little unfair. In broad strokes they did tend to be right about a lot of things, it was just significant details eluded them. Like, say, that ghosts weren't universally evil monsters hellbent on destroying the living. If they could just wrap their heads around that one, he'd probably start working on telling them about his powers like Jazz kept nagging him to do. Still, he doubted the storm would do anything too bad on this side of the portal, anyway.

They clearly believed otherwise, though, it must be said. The portal doors were shut solid, the faint sounds of whirling ectoplasm just audible over the crashing and arguing going on above. Everything loose in the lab had been nailed down, equipment properly stowed for the first time in Danny didn't know how long. No, wait, there was one thing they'd missed – there was tray with several sets of metallic bracers on them.

Oh, yeah, they'd mentioned these – liquid metal armour, they'd called it. Meant for emergencies or surprise attacks. You clang them together and they coat whatever you're wearing with a thin layer of metal for some enhanced protection against ghost attacks. There were six sets, though. Why would they-

Ah. The other two were for Sam and Tucker. Like he'd asked for.

His guilt over dismissing his parents increased exponentially. They did care, it was just… filtered through their way of looking at the world. How did Jazz put it? The situation wasn't their fault any more than it was Danny's, no matter how tempting it was to blame someone – they built the portal, true, but Danny knew better than to wander into the thing. Much as Danny could, and indeed did, retaliate with their frequent threats to dissect him, Jazz did have a point. And maybe that ambition would get dropped if they knew who he was?

Danny let his mind wander for a moment. What would it be like if his parents knew about his ghost half? Would he be able to sleep throughout a night for once, because they'd be able to take on some of the load? Would they be able to help him train, back him up in a fight? Or would they be every embodiment of his worst fears, pulling him apart while mourning the son they were killing? He wished he could know.

Gah. The whole thing was a mess. So, he did what he always did when his living (heh) situation reared its head and he had nothing new to stew over – make it a problem for future Danny.

He pocketed the two bracers intended for his friends and locked the rest in a nearby cupboard (No need to let dad get in trouble, because there's no way it wasn't him that left them out) and turned to the closed portal.

He hesitated, looking down at the thermos containing Technus. These things never had a particularly lengthy battery life no matter how often his parents iterated on them. So he couldn't just leave it for when the storm was over, that'd just let Technus loose again. Equally though, as much of a jerk as Technus was, he didn't want to just dump him in the middle of freak… 'weather', he supposed. Knowing the Ghost Zone, storms would be a little worse than just getting soaked – that much was certain.

Danny put the thermos on a nearby table and palmed the activation console for the portal doors. Take a quick peek, see how things are, then figure out what to do. Seemed sensible, right?

As the doors opened, the familiar swirling green revealed itself, humming as the green substance made lazy spirals. Unusually for the gateway to the realm of the dead (note to self, stop listening to Sam's descriptions of things), though, he could kind of see through it. Maybe? It looked different at least, but… flat. Like a projection of the other side. It looked like a lightning storm was going on, alright, all roiling clouds and bursts of light with no sound. Strangely beautiful, in a way.

As Danny watched, a streak of green electricity arced out from one of the clouds and struck the centre of the aperture. He had a split second to notice that the portal was no longer its usual green, morphing and swirling in the opposite direction, becoming a bright, almost shining blue before he heard a resounding crack and a thunderous rushing of air as he felt himself yanked from his feet violently by some unknown force, dragging him towards the hole in reality.

The portal roared like a hungry animal as Danny hurtled. He transformed mid-flight in a panic, planting his white-clad hands and feet on the edges of the portal, straining to keep himself out of whatever this was now. The brief glimpses he got as he tried to push himself out of the invisible grasp of the portal looked… were those buildings? Oh, whatever! Just don't get sucked in!

Just as he appeared to be winning the fight against the portal, he felt something collide with the back of his head. It wasn't a hard hit, but it was enough to break his concentration. With a yelp of surprise, his arm slipped and that was all the portal needed. In the blink of an eye, Danny was sucked into the swirling blue, tumbling, and falling as he was dragged at speed through an eye-achingly bright corridor of blue ectoplasm, screaming all the while.

A series of sounds like explosions heralded Danny's exit from the monochrome tunnel and he slammed into… concrete? Probably concrete. Brick or earth didn't feel like this when his face got personally acquainted with it. And how depressing was it that, at only recently fifteen, he could discern exactly what each felt like when he hit it.

Danny raised his head blearily, noticing as he did both that he was still in Phantom mode and that he was somehow at the bottom of a large crater. Oh, great, that was just what he needed, more bad publicity. 'Phantom tears up public area in reckless attack!' Because he was also well versed enough in 'surfaces he gets smacked into a lot' to recognize that he'd landed in a road somewhere.

Well at least this was still the human world. That was a relief. The Ghost Zone, besides the obvious differences you could see, felt different, saturated in ectoplasm as it was. Hopefully, he wasn't too far from home. It was getting close to curfew time as it was anyway, and he had homework to… why was the sun out?

Fear bubbled to the surface above lethargy. If that malfunctioning portal had dumped in another time zone, he was in way bigger trouble than he thought!

Danny got to his feet and shook himself off, whatever weariness from his unique method of travel falling from him as adrenaline flooded his system. He levitated up out of the crater, and what he saw past the edge was not encouraging.

He didn't recognise any landmarks whatsoever. Heck, he couldn't even say he recognised the architecture. Something about these buildings was weird, they looked advanced but… old. Like how people of the nineteen twenties might have thought the future looked like. Danny was on some kind of main street, and everything there looked like high tech art deco, shops, ads, cars, even the fashion.

Fashion. People! He was surrounded by people! People staring at him in… fear. Wonderful.

"Um. Hi?" Danny said, waving at the crowd.

For a moment there was nothing but silence.

Then the crowd of retro-futuristically dressed citizens shrieked in unison and scattered, fleeing from the ghost boy in random directions like disorganised ants.

"No, please, wait! I just wanna know… and they're gone," Danny deadpanned, before sighing and landing just on the outside of the crater.

He wasn't all that surprised, really – a glowing, flying kid drops out of a portal and puts a sizable hole in the road, he'd run too if he didn't have a hero complex. And that's if they didn't recognise him. There was still skepticism about ghosts the further out of Amity you got despite constant reports, but if they did know him, he could add 'ghost' to that list of reasons to run.

Still, though, they'd screamed in English, with American accents, so he at least wasn't that far out from Amity. Although why they were shouting 'XJ-9' he had no idea. Whatever.

Whilst Danny's mind was racing, wrestling to keep his own bubbling worry from spiralling out of control, wondering where he could find a map, and trying to come up with decent excuses for why he would be out all night, because bare minimum that's how long it was going to take, he barely noticed the ambient noise around him. A few distant screams as people ran, a gentle breeze melting past his ears, the increasing whine of a jet engine…

Wait. What?

"Hey! Creep!"

Before Danny could register the vaguely electronic tint to that voice, the back of his head exploded in pain, and he was hurled forward. He bounced off the concrete with unceasing momentum before slamming to a stop in the wall of a diner and collapsing to the ground.

"Who let Pariah out…" He mumbled weakly as he propped himself up his elbows. Not even the fruitloop hit that hard! Danny growled, his worry over his displacement boiling over and turning swiftly to anger. Why couldn't he go anywhere without some serious attempt to beat him up or kill him?! Well, whoever this is, they're about to get a face full of misplaced aggression!

The anger persisted until he looked up at the sound of a heavy landing, where his jaw dropped open, and any rage was replaced by shock.

The first thing he noticed, and it really shouldn't have been the first thing, was the pigtails. Blue, in the midst of swivelling around on rivets to point upwards, cute and perky despite jet engines retracting into them. Wide, electronic eyes glaring at him and lips that seemingly were not attached to a mouth, set in a face of solid white metal topped with blue plating that resembled hair. A pair of incongruous pieces of blue armour that resembled a tank top and a mini-skirt, on a heavy metal body that Danny was only just now realising was both at minimum six and a half feet tall and shaped like a teenage girl.

"Hi!" The oddly human looking robot chirped, its (her?) lips curling upwards into a dangerous smile as her (its?) right arm flexed and separated, parts moving around rapidly until it formed what Danny could only call a cannon pointed directly at him. "I'm Jenny! And if you want to wreck Tremorton, you've got to go through me!"

… Where the heck am I?!

A/N: God, I'm terrible at summaries. Hate them.

I hit bad writers block on Fire And Ice and, well, I'd been thinking of doing this for a while, sooooo...

Honestly, the impetus of this particular ship was at least partially a joke. I've mentioned in notes in Fire And Ice that I have a Danny Phantom game more or less plotted and designed. Well, one of the jokes I had planned for it was, no matter what route you take, Danny has the option of insisting he already has a girlfriend from out of town. Naturally, nobody believes him until a portal tears open at the end and Jenny pops out as his way out of town girlfriend. I chuckled, but the more I thought about it, the more it kind of worked? So let's see if I can properly convey that.

Structurally this is going to be pretty similar to my other major fic - the ongoing narrative is more character and relationship development focused than strictly plot heavy, but frankly that kind of approach is more in line with MLAATR anyway and I'm going to be trying to emulate that tone as best I can. Otherwise it's going to be me taking a finished series and giving it an unofficial season 4 by focusing on the development of a particular relationship and some worldbuilding again.

Do drop a review, let me know what you'd like to see or what you think, and let's have fun!