.
.
.
Tail
.
Danny cautiously checked each room in the house. He should be the only one home right now, Jazz should be out with a study group, his parents should be out setting up ghost detectors at the warehouses the Box Ghost liked so much, but considering what he was about to do, it was a good idea to check. With each empty room, his confidence grew. Having double checked the lab, Danny was satisfied.
He was home alone.
Not wanting to waste any more time, Danny transformed and flew straight to the bathroom. He did not return to human form, but instead, briefly, examined his reflection. It was, at the moment, the reflection of a ghost. White hair, green eyes, glow, an almost indiscernible blue-green cast to his skin, despite its tan. A faint scar licked up the side of his face, the only visible sign of his death. It was a reflection he had grown used to over the past few months, though he had yet to figure out how it all worked.
Well. He wasn't going to gain any sudden insights by staring into his own eyes.
He lifted his chin, and searched for the zipper of his hazmat suit. Finding it, he pulled it down, decisively. He stripped out of the suit then, gloves, boots and all, leaving him in his underwear, a pair of briefs and a singlet. He took off those as well, leaving all of his ghostly clothes to sublimate into ectoplasmic mist on the floor.
The full extent of his death scar was revealed now, a winding, splitting, lightning vine that connected the palm of his left hand to the sole of his right foot. He had seen it before. It wasn't what he was interested in right now.
Right now, he was staring at his legs. They were there, fully articulated. He had all his toes, all his toenails. He checked his fingers, his hands. They had all the bits he had come to expect. He even had fingerprints. He lifted one foot, relying on his natural, ghostly buoyancy to keep him in the air. He had toe-prints, too. Interestingly, both his fingernails and toenails were quite a bit neater than they were when he was human. They were very even, very regular, short and smooth. He didn't have any hanging cuticles, either, which was odd. He almost always had a cuticle or a chipped nail. Still, there wasn't really anything missing. Visually, he had all of the important bits, including, yeah, the important bits. Even the faint bruise he'd gotten on his knee from Dash shoving him into his locker and slamming the door was there.
He planted his hands on either side of his ribs, and dragged them down, noting the placement of bone, of muscle, of skin, down to his knees. He straightened again, and, with a sense of slight foreboding, formed his legs into his ghostly tail. It was a good deal more disturbing to watch skin, muscle, bone, and other... anatomy merge into a single mass than it was to watch his jumpsuit do the same thing.
His scar, rather than vanishing, or being broken up into segments, wrapped entirely around his tail, tapering off at the end.
He watched his tail flick back and forth for a couple of minutes. He could feel it, of course. It looked very strange like this. Everything south of his bellybutton had sort of... gone away. At the beginning, after his bellybutton, it was quite solid, but as it got closer to its end, it became steadily more misty, more transparent. He ran his hands down his sides again. He could detect the remnants of hip bones, and associated muscles, and the skin there felt mostly like skin, but past that, things became... Soft. Velvety. Almost plush. By the time he got to the end of his tail, it felt like he was running his hands over a cross between the tail of a very fluffy, very soft cat, and a cloud of mist.
The very end of his tail wrapped reflexively around his curious fingers, which he could see clearly through the transparent limb.
"Weird," he said, finally.
