Chapter Text
Danny, wearing a purple cloak much like Clockwork’s, took a deep breath and held out the black-and-white Time Staff that the Ghost of Time had given him upon making him his apprentice. Said ghost floated a short distance away, watching as Danny kept the staff in his white-gloved hand steadily pointing at the small portal a short distance away.
“You can lower the staff, you know,” Clockwork said with amusement. The two were in Clockwork’s lair, the clocktower known as Long Now, where Danny was training his newly-discovered ability to make portals.
“I’ll lose concentration,” Danny pointed out, struggling to keep the portal open.
“Well, just remember, the eventual goal is to go through the portals you make, which you cannot do if frozen,” Clockwork reminded Danny as he floated over to inspect the portal.
Danny cautiously lowered his arm in stiff choppy motions as he tried to keep the portal open, hoping it remained stable. If so, this would be the third stable one he’d been able to make after nearly a week of practice; no wonder Clockwork hadn’t told him he could make portals sooner! Technically portal creation was a ‘death ability’, meaning an ability gained due to the nature of Danny’s death much like his Ghostly Wail was; however, it could be dangerous and difficult, so Clockwork had insisted on training him, giving Danny strict instructions not to try on his own yet.
Clockwork sighed. “It’s stable, but Benjamin Franklin’s home in the 18th-century is not where you planned to go, is it?”
Danny wilted slightly, the portal fizzling out as he lost concentration. “No… I was trying to go to present day Philadelphia.”
“Remember, you must keep thinking of exactly where you wish to go, being sure to filter out any thoughts of other places. What caused this?”
Danny shrugged. “I dunno. I guess last second I remembered the Ben Franklin Museum that I visited last time I was there?” He sighed. “Stupid time abilities… that museum is in Philadelphia, so it wouldn’t have been a big deal if those would just stop interfering!” Going between different points in the Human Realms and the Infinite Realms was difficult enough without time being added in too.
“True; however, you cannot change your core’s nature,” Clockwork gently reminded Danny. Then he handed Danny a vial of concentrated ectoplasm.
Danny accepted the glass and quickly downed it. The taste was… not super great at first, honestly, reminding Danny like an odd mix of grass, lime, and mint, but it was growing on him. Portal creation used a tremendous amount of energy, just like his Wail, and without what was essentially a ghostly energy drink he’d need a while to recharge in-between attempts. “Are you sure it’s okay that I’m drinking so much of this?” Danny double-checked.
Clockwork nodded as he took the empty vial from Danny. “Under my supervision, yes. It is ultimately ectoplasm in concentrated form, same as what you naturally absorb through the air or convert from emotions.” Danny scrunched his nose as Clockwork said those words, not liking the reminder that he, like all ghosts, could feed on emotions—thankfully that wasn’t needed when living in a place with high ambient ectoplasm like Amity Park.
“Then why won’t you let me take any to use at home?”
“Two reasons,” Clockwork said. “First, I do not wish you to become reckless because of it, thinking it’s okay to constantly deplete your ecto-energy and restore it in such a way. Secondly, taken in excess it can act similarly to a cross between a stimulant and euphoriant, essentially over-charging you, so to say, and that state can quickly become as addicting as it is dangerous.”
“How can it be dangerous if it’s something I need to exist?”
“The same way humans need dopamine in their brains yet it is dangerous for them to artificially increase it to excess. When it’s too low they lack energy, so with a pharmacologist's guidance they can take things to increase it, but if their levels are already normal then taking those same drugs will cause intense euphoria—make them ‘high’ as you humans say—and yet at the same time potentially cause severe neurological damage.”
“So concentrated ectoplasm is like a drug, you’re saying?”
“I suppose you could call it that, yes. Your core won’t naturally take in more ectoplasm than it can handle if simply absorbing the ambient kind, and drinking the regular kind would provide a full sensation before consuming enough to cause issues, but taking just one vial of the concentrated kind when already at sufficient levels will over-saturate your core. Constantly over-consuming ectoplasm beyond your core’s general capacity, though it may feel good at first, can strain it to the point of causing damage—and if it’s too high can even cause hallucinations, paranoia, and similar intense and unwelcome side effects.”
“What if I promise to only use it when I know my levels are low enough that I won’t go over capacity?” Danny asked. “I still think it could be good to have some on hand for emergencies.”
“No,” Clockwork simply said.
“You don’t trust me,” Danny realized.
“With this? No,” Clockwork said bluntly, to Danny’s surprise, then explained, “You are a teenage ghost. If given access, your curiosity will eventually get the better of you; I will not enable that.”
“Oh come on. I wouldn’t—”
“You would,” Clockwork confidently interjected. “Or rather, the likelihood you would is high, based on other timelines. Now, why don’t you try making a portal one more time today—perhaps to your bedroom, as it’s getting late?”
Danny sighed. “Okay, fine, I get it. Sure you can’t just give me some extra time to sleep? Or teach me to do it?”
“That would be an irresponsible use of time energy,” Clockwork chided. “And you are far from ready to learn such skills—it would make you tired enough that the extra time gained would be worthless.”
“Right,” Danny acknowledged, then held his staff out and concentrated on forming a portal to his bedroom. It came much more easily, likely due to Danny’s strong connection with the place.
Clockwork inspected the new portal. “Very good; it is safe to go through,” he confirmed, to Danny’s delight—this would be the first proper one he made! Clockwork smiled at Danny. “You’ve made wonderful progress. I will see you tomorrow, same time.”
Danny grinned and nodded. “Sure thing, Sensei!”
Clockwork sighed. “I told you, there’s no need to—”
Danny laughed as he hopped through the portal, after which it immediately closed, before hearing the rest of Clockwork’s sentence, snickering to himself. He loved teasing the Ghost of Time like that. But, hey, he was Clockwork’s apprentice! He had to call the guy something, and the guy refused to let Danny use the term ‘Master’ (likely because the Ghost of Time came from a race of long-extinct artificially-created beings that had been used as effectively slaves before the war that led to his mishap with a time machine that turned him into a ghost). Tucker had jokingly suggested ‘sensei’, a term he’d seen used in anime because apparently a kid being apprenticed to what was basically a god was a trope, although Danny was a bit skeptical of that claim.
Danny dismissed his apprentice robe and Time Staff as he shifted back to his more human form with a bright flash, kicked off his shoes, and flopped onto his bed. Danny stared at his star-stickered ceiling with his hands behind his head. He probably should change out of his jeans and t-shirt into proper pajamas, but he was a strange mix of both exhausted and energized, mind racing yet his body telling him that he definitely needed rest; not uncommon for him, yet a real issue given his frequent sleep-deprivation.
Despite having technically done no more exercise than floating around could be counted as, Danny felt like he’d run a marathon. Even the portal to his bedroom took so much out of him, already feeling as though he’d never had that vial of ectoplasm…
Still, Danny couldn’t help but grin. He’d finally made a portal that went to the time and place he wanted it to! And that lasted long enough for him to go through! Of course, he had no false pretense that now that he did it once he had the ability down perfectly; just because the last one had worked didn’t mean they all would. He definitely still had to keep practicing, under Clockwork’s guidance, until the ghost deemed Danny skilled enough to do it on his own.
That was the deal for everything Clockwork taught Danny: no using any ability without supervision until explicitly told he was ready to. But, Danny had no complaints about that; after all, manipulating time and space was a dangerous endeavor that could go very wrong very quickly, as Danny had firsthand experience with. He’d rather take it slow and be sure he mastered an ability rather than use it before he was ready and end up trapped in a whole different timeline or something!
Danny did have to learn it though; honestly, he was lucky that Clockwork informed him that he had a freaking time core, or rather half one, and decided to make him his apprentice as a result, because not using abilities related to a core’s element often meant the energy would build up and then come out explosively, like had nearly happened with his ice powers (apparently freezing over was the precursor; if Frostbite hadn’t helped, the power would have burst out, thawing him while creating a blizzard or encasing his location in ice). Danny didn’t want to know what time powers exploding would look like.
Time powers… Danny was still in mild shock he had them, even after a week. So far the only skill he’d solidly learned was how to rewind an object back a few seconds, like if it got broken, but even just being able to do that was astounding to him. He didn’t even need to use the staff for that! Or for anything technically, but it helped focus the time energy and helped with concentration, hence why he needed it for portals.
Frostbite hadn’t known; how could he, when the only other ghost with a time-element core, as far as anyone knew, was Clockwork himself? Frostbite’s machinery detected just the ice energy, therefore he assumed the core was fully ice—after all, dual-type cores were incredibly rare, and there was no reason to look for time energy in a core, as no core naturally was a time one; Clockwork only had one because he became a ghost during an accident with an experimental prototype time machine (which also caused the downfall of Mars; the ghost still felt immensely guilty about that despite objectively it not really being his fault—just like Danny still felt guilty about accidentally opening the portal in his basement).
Danny’s development of a time-element core had been an unnatural accident too: before a ghost core fully develops, which takes about a year, it can be influenced by the energies around it, so when his dark alternate-future self fused the time medallion into him, Danny’s core absorbed some of the object’s potent time energy, causing its development to shift into the dual-type core it now was instead of purely ice.
Danny vaguely wondered what his dark alternate-future self would have thought about Danny developing what some might consider god-like abilities due to his meddling. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, there was no longer a way to know; a few days prior, while Clockwork was trying to teach Danny how to reverse living things to a previous life stage (specifically, a chicken to a chick), that guy had escaped the thermos only to run smack into the spell, causing him to somehow change into two kindergarten-age halfas, one resembling Danny and the other Vlad, both which had no memories of their existence prior (other than, somehow, basics like language). Vlad had adopted them, naming them James and Andrew respectively; in exchange Vlad promised to stop trying to clone Danny or make him his apprentice, as well as would stop trying to split up his parents. Danny had been a bit leery to leave them with Vlad, but there really had been no other option that didn’t involve an identity reveal.
A gentle knock on Danny’s door was followed by his sister entering the room.
Danny groaned. “How many times do I have to tell you to wait for a response before coming in?”
“You weren’t doing anything incriminating,” Jazz said simply. She closed the door and moved to sit on the edge of Danny’s bed. “So, how was your training session?”
Danny grinned and abruptly sat up. “I finally made stable portals!”
“Really? That’s wonderful!” Jazz said with excitement.
“Yeah! Four of them! Only one actually led where I wanted it to, and they still drain a lot of my energy, but with practice I’ll get better!”
“You definitely will,” Jazz said confidently. “Look at your other abilities; at first, you’d be drained just after phasing Sam and Tucker through things with you, but now it’s second nature. Soon this will be too!”
Danny chuckled. “Not soon, no. But someday, yeah. Besides, it’s not like I don’t have the time.”
“Ah, yes. On that note, have you told them yet?”
“Told who what?”
“Sam and Tucker. You still haven’t told them that Clockwork confirmed you’re unaging, right?”
Danny winced. “I will. I’m just trying to figure out how. It kinda puts a wrench in all my future career plans.”
“But, you’re Clockwork’s apprentice; won’t he have tasks for you eventually?”
“Well, yeah; that’s my plan now. That, and continuing to protect Amity Park. But it’s so different—Sam, Tucker, and I used to discuss what colleges we’d go to, how we’d stick together in the future. It’s not just with careers, either. We always would joke about how we’d be in each others’ wedding parties and our future families would do things together and our future kids would basically be calling each other cousins and stuff. We were never that serious, I mean we’re teenagers, but now that I know that’s impossible…”
“Why’s it so impossible?” Jazz wondered.
“Well for one, Vlad confirmed a few days ago that halfas are infertile, so I can’t even have kids if I wanted to,” Danny reminded Jazz. “But even if I could, it doesn’t matter since I’m still gonna be a teen forever. I can’t be a teenage dad! Plus, how would that even work? They’d age I guess if they had more human genetics, probably they’d be closer to Vlad in percent ghost, but I won’t, so their dad would eventually be basically younger than them!
“And Sam and Tucker will age but I won’t. I won’t be an uncle to their kids, I’d basically be a brother. People are gonna think I’m their kid, and then eventually their grandkid! And will they even want to be friends at that point? Eighty-year-olds generally aren’t friends with fourteen-year-olds! I’ll have no friends my age… And then they’ll be gone entirely…”
“Which is why you really need to make more ghost friends,” Jazz told Danny.
“I told you before, I have ghost friends,” Danny argued. This was not the first time Jazz had brought this up; even before Danny had learned about his immortality his sister had been encouraging him to make more ghost friends.
“Frostbite and Clockwork are mentors. Wulf vanishes for long stretches of time. Sidney refuses to leave the school. Dora is constantly busy running her kingdom. You need more.”
“I’m kinda friends with Johnny.”
“You two use each other to blow off steam via violence.”
“It’s a type of friendship.”
“Mhm, if you say so. Now, one more thing: explain why this fell out of your backpack when I grabbed the thermos out of it,” Jazz said, holding up a small bottle of pills.
“The painkillers? I told you, they’re if I get hurt ghost fighting. I barely use them. There’s no danger of abuse.” Most injuries healed almost immediately, but anti-ghost weapons didn’t and could be painful. Thankfully he rarely got hit badly enough to need them. These were in Jazz’s name, not Danny’s, from her wisdom teeth removal a month prior, which she had powered through using ibuprofen so she could give Danny those as he’d run out of his previous reserves (gotten first for him from when he had the ‘shock’ from the portal accident, which he never used because it didn’t actually hurt but the doctor gave him automatically when he saw the scar; then some leftovers his parents had in the medicine cabinet from various surgeries that technically had been expired; he’d been worried he’s have to stick with over-the-counter stuff until by a stroke of luck Jazz needed the surgery).
“Yeah, I know. You’re thankfully safe about them. Regardless, they’re prescription strength and not in your name, so they absolutely should not be in your backpack! Do you want more detention for bringing drugs into school? Keep them in your lair, not backpack.”
“Okay, sure,” Danny agreed, grabbing the bottle from Jazz and tossing it in his lair. Ghosts could transport things to and from their lair, as long as the thing wasn’t sentient; Danny hadn’t ever been to his lair (something about going felt too final), but would bet it currently looked much like a disorganized warehouse with how much he tossed in there.
“Good. Now, get some sleep, okay?” Jazz patted Danny’s leg and then stood up. “You’ve got a test tomorrow, and I don’t want you failing because you fell asleep on top of it again!”
“Don’t worry, I won’t. Goodnight, Jazz,” Danny told his sister.
“Goodnight, little brother,” Jazz said, then quickly kissed his forehead before he could dodge.
Danny made a grossed-out sound and expression, and Jazz just rolled her eyes and smiled at Danny’s antics as she left the room. Danny bet she knew he secretly liked it, but hey, he was a teenage boy—he couldn’t show that he liked affection from his family!
The next day at school, a quiet chill escaped Danny’s lips as he, Sam, and Tucker reached his locker, causing him to sigh in frustration.
“Again?” Tucker asked, trying to hide amusement.
“It’s not funny, it’s annoying!” Danny growled. He used intangibility to take the lock off, as usual, and slowly pulled the locker open to peek inside. The smaller-than-usual ectopus blinked at him. Danny pulled a thermos from his ‘pocket’ (summoned it from his lair, more accurately) and pressed it to the crack, then activated it, sucking the ectopus in. Then he opened his locker to gather his books for class.
“They’re still doing that, huh?” Sam asked, hiding her desire to laugh better than Tucker had.
Danny groaned. “Yes! And it’s so obnoxious! Yeah, I get it already, they’re pissed that I’m Clockwork’s apprentice, but come on, these are pranks than a five-year-old would come up with.”
“Well, the Observants know that they can’t do anything major to you without inciting his wrath,” Sam pointed out.
“Sure, but they could be more creative at least. Maybe use something other than a blob or ectopus. A human ghost would definitely surprise me.”
“What, like Box Lunch or Youngblood?” Tucker snickered. “No other human ghosts would fit.”
Danny groaned. “They better not put Youngblood in my locker.”
“And Box Lunch is still a baby ghost, that would be mean,” Sam said. Aforementioned ghost had been created a few days prior, when the GIW had attempted to use a ‘core energy siphoning’ device which ended up hitting both the Lunch Lady and the Box Ghost while they were on a date; then in an entirely unexpected move it exploded and the small amount of core energy it pulled out decided to fuse together instead of returning, creating Box Lunch (in her full child state, not a true ‘baby’ as Sam had called her). The two parent ghosts were now recovering at Frostbite’s hospital, because even small core damage could be dangerous, although they claimed it was worth it to get a daughter. Thankfully, the GIW decommissioned the weapon upon realizing it could create new ghosts—or rather, after other ghosts who wanted kids realized it and tried to steal it, claiming the core damage would be worth it against all the ghost doctors’ advice.
“Yo! Fenturd!” Dash shouted, stomping over, rage dancing across his face.
Danny sighed. “What do you want, Dash? Did you fail a test again?”
“Mikey won’t fit in the locker anymore, so you get Fridays now!” Dash grabbed Danny by his collar and easily lifted him up before shoving him into the locker; Danny winced as his head thudded against the back of it. Dash laughed. “Perfect size. You better stay that way; it would suck if you took after your dad.” He then slammed the door before stomping away.
Tucker hurriedly opened the locker and said, “I correct my earlier statement: there is another ghost who would fit.” He grinned at Danny.
Danny hopped out with practiced ease and sighed. “Pretty soon I’m gonna be the only one of Dash’s ‘favorites’ able to fit in there.” He rubbed the back of his head; it’d heal soon, but still hurt.
Tucker patted Danny on the shoulder. “Hey, you’ll have your growth spurt soon, I’m sure,” he said. Tucker meant it consolingly, Danny logically knew that, but he couldn’t help but interpret it as mocking.
“Ignore Dash,” Sam said. “You won’t take after your Dad in that department,” she assured him, aware Danny used to be terrified of gaining weight to that point.
“Yeah, I know. I’m sure I’ll look my age eventually,” Danny assured the two—a complete lie.
Technically Danny already looked his age. Neither Tucker nor Sam were aware yet that Danny was unaging. Danny had gotten confirmation a week ago, when Clockwork flat-out non-cryptically told him upon realizing that somehow Danny hadn’t realized after over two years. Yet Danny was having trouble figuring out how exactly to tell the two that their best friend was going to be 14 forever. Not 16, like the calendar currently claimed—14.
Danny felt like he should have noticed sooner. He hadn’t even needed a haircut since he died! In fact, even cutting his hair failed, as it returned to its usual style by the next morning. He hadn’t even gained a pound of weight, or a fraction of an inch in height. Most people notice those things, Danny felt; why hadn’t he? Had it been denial? Or was he just that completely oblivious?
“Hey! Earth to Danny,” Sam said, waving her hand in front of Danny, and he gave a start. Sam chucked. “You were spacing out a bit there, space cadet.”
“Sorry,” Danny said, then realized, “I think my head hit the locker harder than expected, it kinda feels like a headache’s coming on.”
“Do you need to go to the nurse for an ibuprofen?” Sam asked.
“Nah, I’ll just use one of these,” Danny said, summoning the bottle of prescription painkillers.
Sam raised an eyebrow. “Sure you want to take one of those just for a headache?”
Danny shrugged. “It’s just one; it’s not like I regularly use it for this.” Instead of uncapping the bottle, he used intangibility to remove a pill to be less conspicuous, then sent the bottle back to his lair and tossed the pill down his throat.
“Well, okay; just be careful,” Sam warned.
“Don’t worry, I’m plenty careful,” Danny promised. Then, he grinned. “So, how’d your date go last night?” Sam had gone to a poetry slam with a goth girl named Abby, who she’d met at the Skulk and Lurk Bookstore. The girl was their age, but went to the high school on the other side of their small city, Clyde High.
Sam blushed. “Danny! Don’t say that so loudly in public!”
Danny raised an eyebrow. “What, that you had a date? I didn’t say who it was with.”
“Yeah, but people speculate,” Sam said in a hushed voice. “If my parents find out I’m dating… you know, they’ll send me to therapy for it, and not the beneficial kind of therapy!”
Danny winced. “Right. Sorry. We’ll talk about it at lunch—it’s nice enough to eat outside today, we’ll have privacy there.”
“Thanks,” Sam said, relaxing. “It was good, though. Definitely good…” A dreamy looked passed her eyes.
The warning bell rang, and the trio headed to their respective classes: Sam and Tucker to their honors-level history class, and Danny to his general-level history class. It was somewhat frustrating; Danny knew he was smart enough to do honors-level, but he just didn’t have the grades due to his massive issues with missed homework, attendance, and falling asleep on top of tests.
Danny slid into his seat beside Valerie, who had found herself in a similar situation with grades not matching her true intelligence. The two had grown friendly again over the few weeks they’d been in junior year, and if it weren’t for the fact that Danny had vowed off dating humans due to his perpetual teenage status he definitely would be trying to court her again.
Of course, Valerie had her own reasons for swearing off dating, that reason being ghost hunting… Danny still hadn’t told her his identity. He planned to soon, but he could never figure out when a good time was. Since saving Danielle, now going by Ellie, a few weeks prior, the two had engaged in a truce, and even went on patrol a few times, during which Danny finally got to explain the entire Cujo incident to Valerie; she was still a bit angry about it, but reluctantly admitted that maybe she had been using him more as a target for her anger rather than truly believed he was at fault for all of that. So it wasn’t like there was anything keeping Danny from telling Valerie—and she probably would figure it out anyway, now that she knew about halfas, so it’d be better to tell her before that.
“Hey, Danny,” Valerie greeted with a smile.
“Hey, Val!” Danny greeted back. “Did you get the homework done? I definitely didn’t.” He’d planned to do it before bed, but he’d been too tired after his training so just went right to bed instead.
“Nah. I was too tired after work,” Valerie told him. By work, Danny knew she didn’t mean Nasty Burger, rather the fierce ghost fight she had against a pair of wooly mammoth ghosts while Danny was having his lesson with Clockwork. Honestly, he was a little bummed about missing that one; mammoth ghosts sounded so cool! Rare, too; the Ice Age species tended to stay in their own area of the Infinite Realms, far from the Western Wastes which was where the Fenton portal was, so they only could have come through a natural portal.
“Yeah, I could never work in fast food; that night filling in for you was plenty!” Danny said, playing ignorant as Valerie didn’t know he knew she was the Red Huntress.
“Fast foo—oh, right. Yeah, coworker called out, and a kid’s sports team decided to all get food at once, it was not pretty,” Valerie said with a haunted look; she must have been through that before, just not that night.
Then, the conversation ended as the teacher called the class to order.
Later that day, Danny found himself flying back to the school after a successful ghost capture—nothing major, just an abnormally large beaver—when a loud BOOM rocked the air as he approached the school and part of the east wing began to crumble. Students began to shout and flee the building.
Danny froze for only a moment before he was flying into the building faster than he ever flew before, zipping in through a window as he searched for people to help. Not much had collapsed yet, the explosion being a relatively small one (Danny hated that he was so used to explosions that he knew that), but it must have taken out something load-bearing as floors were sagging and shaking—what had caused this? Danny didn’t sense any unusual ghosts. What—
BOOM!
Danny wobbled in his flight in surprise of the loud noise as the building began rumbling more, the two humans he was holding screaming in terror. He hurriedly brought them through the window before returning to grab more people; when the third floor was cleared he moved to the second. Thankfully people seemed to be getting out pretty fast. He saw Valerie flying around too, helping.
BOOM! BOOM! CRRRRRACK!
Danny sharply inhaled as he zipped through the window into the first floor, a piece of roof falling and blocking that escape just after he did so. He flew around the debris, looking for people; most had evacuated, but Wes (with a camera, likely having stayed behind to photograph ghosts, of which there still seemed to be none) and Lancer (likely having tried to help the remaining students out) seemed to be attempting to climb over some rubble from the floor above caving in.
The building, unstable, began rumbling, just as Valerie, in her capacity of the Red Huntress, turned the corner; she saw the problem at the same time, and they both flew over to try to grab Wes and Lancer, both screaming, as they stumbled off the pile onto the floor, which had started caving in.
Crumbles dropped from the ceiling, and then large chunks; Danny realized there was no time to fly them out before the entire corridor came down. Intangibility it was—wait. No, that wouldn’t work; over the summer the school had been painting with phase-proof paint. He could only go through windows, which the hallway didn’t have, and doors, which were now blocked or too far.
“Shield!” Valerie shouted at Danny, and he hurriedly erected a spherical dome around them while she grabbed the two humans. The rubble pressed down on them, shooting them into the basement as three floors of material fell on top of them.
Danny strained to keep the shield up until the building seemed to settle. “Is it safe to drop the shield?” he asked. “Red, your suit can do fancy tech stuff, can it check for stability?”
“Um. Yeah, it has that function,” Valerie said, then stared at the debris for a moment before concluding, “It’s a few pretty big chunks, it might move slightly but should be safe to drop the shield.”
Danny took a deep breath as he dropped the shield, though warily watched the rubble for a moment as it creaked some.
“Okay,” Danny said. “Okay. We’re all alive—well, relatively. That’s good though. Good call with the shield, Red.”
“Thanks, now can you hurry and phase us out already?!” Valerie demanded. “Or do we not have a truce?”
“I can’t, Red!” Danny told her with a flare of agitation. “Literally! Do you not see the glow on these bricks?”
“Glow? What glow?”
“The—oh. Humans can’t see it,” Danny realized. “There’s a slight UV glow, meaning they’re painted with that new ‘clear’ anti-phase paint, unless there’s some other paint that comes in UV color. The entire school was painted in it over the summer, minus the doors and windows.”
Valerie groaned. “Seriously? Anti-phase paint? Ugh. Guess we gotta dig ourselves out.”
“No; we ought to wait for the rescue crew,” Lancer said.
“How many days will that take?” Wes asked. “There’s three stories above us! And we don’t have food or water!”
BOOM!
The humans stumbled slightly as the ground shook; Danny was unaffected due to floating.
“And no one’s going to try to rescue us while there’s still bombs going off!” Valerie spat.
“Why are there bombs?! Is this some new bomb ghost!?” Wes wondered.
“No, if it were a bomb ghost my ghost radar would have detected it.”
“Then if it isn’t a ghost, what is it!?”
“Why do you think I would know?!”
“You’re the superhero!”
“No, I’m a ghost hunter, I deal with ghosts.”
“There… is one other escape option,” Danny said nervously, and all three heads swerved to face him. It definitely risked his identity with how much power it took, and Clockwork was going to kill him more for doing it without supervision, but, “There’s a new ability I’ve been working on. I can create temporary portals between locations. It takes a ton of energy, only is open for a very short window, and I’m more likely to get the location wrong than right, but it’ll get us out of here.”
“How much ‘more likely’?” Valerie asked with suspicion.
“Uh. Well, when I say it’s new, I mean really new. Like, I’ve been practicing for a week, with the help of another ghost, and yesterday was the first day I started making ones stable enough to go through.”
“How many did you make?”
“...Four,” Danny admitted. “Only one which was accurate… And, I don’t have any supplemental ectoplasm to drink so I can probably only make one portal now so if it’s not accurate we might be stuck wherever it leads for a while…”
“Well, then, it’ll just have to be accurate then, won’t it?” Wes said stubbornly.
“And if it isn’t, we will at least be safe, which is more than we can say right now,” Lancer said diplomatically, glancing up as another rumble shook the building and some dust trickled down onto them.
Valerie looked up too as the rubble started shaking. “I don’t think we have a choice; the stability isn’t gonna last, and if there’s another explosion...”
“Okay,” Danny said. He held his arm up and summoned his staff. “This helps me focus the energy,” he told them at the curious looks. “Where should I try to go?”
“How about the edge of the woods by the school?” Lancer suggested. “That’s an open space far enough from the school to be safe yet still close enough to see what the damage is and where everyone’s regrouped.”
Danny nodded. “Sounds good.” He held up the staff. “Okay, edge of woods, current time,” he muttered to himself as the building began rumbling some more.
“Current time?” Wes asked. “What, can it go through time?”
“Yes,” Danny said tersely. “So let me concentrate so that doesn’t happen.”
“Wait, if different times can happen, can it go to different worlds? Like alternate realities or something?”
“Wes, quiet. And no, pretty sure it can only go between the Human Realms and Infinite Realms—what you call The Ghost Zone. Now let me concentrate… Edge of woods, present time…” Current reality? No, concentrate… Danny focused on gathering the time energy in the top of his staff, then pushed it forward as he drew a large circle with the staff, flickering away a worry about getting the wrong reality or time, focusing just on what he wanted… Safety, getting them to safety, by the woods… Definitely not a different reality’s woods… But what if it was a different reality? No, focus!
The three humans gasped as a portal of swirling color appeared as the building began rumbling even more, a few chunks of concrete nearly hitting them.
“You did it!” Lancer proclaimed, and then as if to emphasize their danger another large chunk of concrete dislodged, barely missing the teacher’s head, and the area around them groaned menacingly.
“Great; now run through, it’ll close in a few seconds!” Danny told them. They’d be crushed if they didn’t make it!
The three rushed forward, and Danny quickly followed, the portal closing behind him. He stumbled onto the ground, panting. “Th-that took a bit more out of me than expected,” he muttered, realizing the drain had been strangely substantially higher than when he’d been practicing with Clockwork. Then Danny felt himself falling, barely noting a flash of light and shouting of his name as his consciousness left him.