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Phantom Origins

Chapter 1

The Colour Green

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Danny Fenton did not hate the colour green until that day. In fact, he had no strong opinions whatsoever about it. It was the colour of the ocean, of his best friend's eyes, but it was also the colour of his parent's experiments. He had both good and bad memories attached to it. If nothing had happened, he might have ended up liking green very much one day. But something did happen. All because of one stupid loose wire.

His parents were inventors. They had many projects, some of which were centered on great world needs—like a clean efficient energy source with minimal cons—but most of them had to do with ghosts. Specifically hunting them. Jack and Maddie Fenton had devoted their lives to the paranormal long before they met in college. Jack even boasted that he came from a long line of ghost hunters.

Danny, and his sister Jazz, were of the more popular opinion: their parents were crazy, and ghosts didn't exist. But the Fentons were stubborn and set in their ways. To both sibling's chagrin, their skepticism did nothing to stop the elder Fenton's from building a machine they claimed would create a gateway into another dimension where spectral bodies resided.

It was aptly named the Fenton Portal, and during the first week of September in Danny's freshman year, it became the source of his hatred for the colour green. It wasn't the only thing the portal made him hate, but green was really what started it all.

"So, what's supposed to happen?"

Danny was walking home from school with his two best, and only, friends. Tucker Foley was a massive techno geek, and a little bit of a genius in his own right. Dark-skinned with turquoise eyes, he was never seen without his trademark red beanie snug against his head. He was the first friend Danny ever made, and they shared almost everything.

Sam Manson was less dreary than the stereotypical goth, but definitely had the right dark interests and colour scheme. She wore a varying combination of shirts, crop tops, and leggings ranging from black to darker black, with some purple thrown in for flare. She constantly dyed her hair to keep it the same dark shade and had impossibly brilliant amethyst eyes.

"I don't know, Tuck." Danny shrugged, shifting his backpack. His shoulders were sore after being crammed into a locker by the school bully. "They plug it in and there's a door."

"Ghosts are way to mainstream now," Sam said. The legs of her purple spider backpack bounced as she walked. "If they are real, I guess that's pretty cool, and great for your parents. But as it is I think there are better things to obsess over."

"Yeah, like what?" Tucker asked.

"The environment, for one thing. Stopping animal cruelty, focusing on what's real." Sam spun around so she was walking backwards, narrowing her eyes at Tucker. "We're in high school now, we have to start thinking about what's important."

"You're only saying that because ghosts aren't goth anymore." Tucker scoffed, waving off Sam's statement. "Besides, we're freshman. We have another two years before we need to think about what's important."

Danny rolled his eyes as his two best friends kept bickering. They argued over many things, though usually it was about food. Danny's role ranged from mediator to silent observer depending on his mood. That day he chose to fall back a step and just watch.

When his parents completed their invention, they'd made a very public announcement to the whole town and the rest of the ghost hunting community. Besides the fact that Danny was surprised there even was a ghost hunting community, he would have preferred if his parents stayed silent about their most recent ambition. The idea of a ghost portal had been floating around the Fenton house for years; the product of some college experiment, but it wasn't until a few months ago that his parents had truly thrown themselves into the project. In the past two weeks, Danny could only recall seeing his parents once or twice outside their basement lab.

Danny didn't mind, for the most part. His parents were frequently occupied with their inventions, and his older sister often took on a parental role in his life. As much as he hated her nagging, he and his sister were fairly close and it was nice having someone to turn to for advice. Danny knew he could always go to his parents, but one way or another the conversation always turned to ghosts. He tried not to hold it against his parents, but sometimes their work consumed them, and it seemed like it was just Danny and Jazz against a Fenton-hating world.

"I'm just saying, high school is when we need to start learning about responsibility," Sam said, drawing Danny back into the conversation. She looked Tucker up and down and grimaced pointedly. "Some more than others."

"Hey!" Tucker shouted in protest, looking affronted despite saying nothing else to defend himself.

All three of them stopped walking when they reached the front stoop of a red brick building on the corner of the block. On top of the building was a large contraption that most likely violated a number of building codes. Not to mention the obnoxiously bright neon green and orange sign boasting "Fenton Works." At midnight, it could light up the block like daytime. A number of complaints had been filed against the Fenton household over the years, but none of them were acted on.

Danny's family wasn't rich, but his parents did have some government connections.

"Dude, you sure you don't want us to come with you?" Tucker asked.

Danny could see Tucker was excited, and was too ashamed to admit he was saving himself the embarrassment of another of his parents' inventions failing miserably. "Nah, that's okay. I'll tell you guys how it goes."

"If you say so. See you tomorrow." Sam waved, and she and Tucker headed off alone, their spat resuming as they rounded the corner.

Danny stared after them a moment before sighing and trudging up the front steps. He slipped inside, trying to be as quiet as possible.

"Dann-O!"

He didn't succeed.

"Hey, Dad." Danny had been so close, one foot already on the stairs. He backed up and looked at his father in the kitchen. Jack Fenton was an impressively large man. While that would be enough to draw anyone's attention, the dayglow orange jumpsuit held it.

Danny's mother had a similar suit, but in a light shade of blue. He only saw his parents without them a couple times a year.

"Today's the day! Once we do the final touches, you and your sister get to see paranormal history in the making!" Despite being only a few feet away from his son, Jack was practically shouting. A wide and exuberant grin was plastered across his face as he bounced on his heels, unable to contain his excitement.

"Uh, I can't wait?" Danny said, the statement coming out more like a question. Nonetheless, his father's smile grew. He grabbed a container—probably fudge—from the fridge and scampered down to the lab.

Danny groaned and trudged upstairs. He tossed his backpack on his computer chair and flopped onto his bed. He didn't want to go to another weapon unveiling—there was a long history of security footage on the lab computer detailing why it wasn't a good idea. But his parents wanted this portal to work more than anything. Sighing, Danny rolled onto his back and stared at the NASA poster taped to his ceiling, surrounded by glow in the dark stars making sloppy constellations.

Danny's 'more than anything' was to be an astronaut, and his parents had always supported him on it. He couldn't say no to this.

"Damn it."

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Two hours later, Danny left his room in search of his parents. He shoved his hands into his deep pockets and loped into the basement. The lab somehow succeeded in simultaneously being both sparkly clean and a cluttered mess. Half-made inventions and finished ones crowded the countertops, hanging out of open cabinets. But the surface underneath that clutter shone.

On the lab's far wall, there was what could only be described as a hole. It was deep, with a large octagonal frame. There were wires snaking out of the opening, and bright stripes of blue light inside, converging on a silver disk at the back of the portal, with another light in the centre. Danny had to admit, it looked sort of cool. Like something from a high-budget sci-fi movie.

"Sweetie, you're just in time!" Maddie, who had been doing some last minute welding on the frame, stood up and beamed at her son. She pulled down the hood of her jumpsuit, revealing short reddish-brown hair and lilac eyes.

"I don't think this is healthy."

Danny's eyes were drawn to the corner of the room, where his sister was leaning against the wall. Jazz was two years older than Danny, a junior at Casper High though she could've graduated this year if she'd wanted to. She looked a lot like their mother, though her waist length hair was a much lighter red, and her eyes were more of a teal.

Danny, in comparison, was somewhere in between. He had his father's black hair, but much clearer blue eyes. Other than that, his face shape and his slightly shorter than average stature were all his own.

"Oh, sweetie, you don't mean that." Maddie tutted, putting the welder back in its case.

"Yeah, I do. Danny's in high school now, it's a very harsh environment. He can be judged for any little thing. He doesn't need to pick up any ghost talk and make it worse," Jazz said.

"Thanks," Danny muttered sarcastically.

"That won't be a problem once this baby gets going!" Jack said, waving his arms "Over twenty years of work, and it's finally finished! The Fenton Portal is going to change the world of ghost hunting as we know it."

Jazz rolled her eyes, but walked forwards to stand next to Danny anyways.

"Are you ready, kids?" Maddie asked. Both elder Fentons looked like they were going to burst with excitement, all fidgeting limbs and tapping feet.

"I guess so," Danny said, speaking for both of them.

"Ready, honey?" Maddie turned to her husband.

"You got it, baby!" Jack grabbed one of the extension cords from the floor, holding up the two unplugged ends and slamming them together "Banzai!"

For one glorious moment, the portal started to spark. Then there was a pop, a fizzle, and the lights flickered out.

For a moment, Jack and Maddie were frozen. Their expressions slowly morphed from excited to dejected.

"Oh." Jack said, shoulders slumping as he dropped the cable. Maddie, equally as disappointed but not as willing to show it, put her hand on his shoulder.

"Come on, Jack. I'll make you a bowl of ice cream. I need to make dinner for the kids." Slowly, she lead him towards the stairs, pulling him like a deflated balloon. They trudged out of the lab, leaving Jazz and Danny behind.

"I knew it wouldn't work," Jazz said, shrugging her shoulders and heading back upstairs.

Danny walked forwards, slowly approaching the gaping hole in the lab wall. He glanced at the closest table, which was covered in a number of detailed blueprints and pages of calculations. "Why didn't it work?"

That night was both strangely quiet and infuriatingly normal, and it took a while for him to fall asleep.

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"So, what happened?" was the first thing Tucker asked the next day at school.

"It didn't work," Danny said.

"Dude, that sucks. What are your parents doing now?"

He shrugged. "Not really anything." It had been a disturbing sight. When Danny woke up, he'd gone down to the kitchen to find his mother making breakfast in an abnormally clean kitchen sans her jumpsuit, and his father slumped at the table with his head in his hands, completely ignoring the food placed in front of him

"Hey, Fenturd. I heard another of your parents stupid inventions failed! No wonder you're so bad at math, you get your brains from them!"

The first day of school, Dash Baxter had established himself as Casper High's resident bully. He had been an okay guy in middle school, but over the summer he filled out, shot up a number of inches, and grew an arrogant attitude to go with it. He was a shoe-in for the football team, and already he was using that to his advantage. Football tryouts weren't for another week but several teachers had let Dash's bullying slide.

Dash shoved Danny's shoulder as he walked by, sneering at the smaller teen.

Danny ducked his head to hide his burning cheeks, ashamed at himself for feeling ashamed at his parents. They were geniuses, but they just had to choose a living based around something that didn't exist.

"That's not how genetics work, Dash. Maybe you should open a textbook sometime," Sam snapped. Dash glared at her, but he didn't say anything back. It was his own form of twisted chivalry, he never bullied girls.

Plus Sam could be scary as hell if she wanted, something that'd been established back in kindergarten.

Tucker grabbed Danny's arm and pulled him back so Sam wouldn't hear what they were saying. "Dude, maybe you should actually try this year."

Danny glared at him. "No. I'm not going through that again."

"But Danny, you do take after your parents."

"I don't care, just lay off, Tuck." Danny shook Tucker's hand off, his glare melting away as Sam turned to face them.

The goth girl paused, looking between her two best friends. "What did I miss?"

"Danny being an idiot," Tucker said.

"Oh. But that always happens."

"Hey!"

Sam and Tucker laughed at Danny's expense, but even he cracked a smile. He pretended he couldn't feel Tucker watching him.

"So the portal didn't work," Sam said, crossing her arms. "But these are your parents we're talking about. They'll just go back to the drawing board and start again."

Danny certainly hoped so.

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His parents did not go back to the drawing board. In fact, for the rest of the school week, they didn't go down to the lab once. Instead they spent their time sulking in the kitchen, Jack over a pan of fudge, and Maddie just mumbling about "twenty years of hard work" and cleaning obsessively.

Danny hated seeing them like that.

Jazz must have felt the same way despite her dislike for their profession, because she forced them out of the house on Saturday as she left for the library.

Knowing he only had a few hours alone, Danny quickly turned down Sam and Tucker's offer to hang out, and headed into the lab. It wasn't often that the Fenton household could be found empty. They weren't a large family, but Fenton Works was operated out of their basement, so Maddie and Jack rarely needed to leave the house for work.

Danny stood in the middle of the lab, focusing on the eerie silence. Even without the temptation of the portal, he probably would have found himself down there. What better way to occupy a teenage mind than go the one place they shouldn't?

Sure, he had homework he could be doing, but this was much more important. Danny grinned at the octagonal hole in the wall. His parents may have given up on it, but he didn't want to. There were any number of things Jack and Maddie could have gotten wrong. Jack wasn't as stupid as most people were led to believe, but he tended to miss the big picture and make simple mistakes in his calculations, especially when he was excited.

Danny checked over the console and gauges first, making sure all the numbers and energy levels matched blueprints. Everything seemed to be in order. He did one last review of the layout, and decided the problem must have been inside the machine.

He grabbed the jumpsuit his parents had made for him a few years back, just in case he decided to pursue a ghost hunting career. He caught his reflection on the portal's metal frame and scowled. There was a large sticker of his father's face slapped across his chest. Peeling the offending appendage off, he stepped into the portal

It was deeper than he expected it to be, and the blue lights provided little illumination. There was a strict line between light and shadow, and Danny shivered as he crossed it. Clear rods filled with wires lined the portal walls, and more wires were littered about on the floor. They were in tangled heaps, and it wasn't so hard to imagine them as a writhing mass.

Danny was taking care to avoid them, since the boots accompanying his jumpsuit were rather large, when something above caught his attention.

There were some loose wires dangling from the ceiling, begging for his eyes. The protective sealing had been stripped away on the last inch. Danny was staring at them, wondering if they could be the problem, when he took a step forwards and tripped. He quickly looked down to see a bright green wire caught around his ankle as he started to fall. In a moment of panic, Danny's arm lashed out against the wall, searching for support. He found it, for a moment. Then something beneath his palm gave with a sharp click, and he tumbled to the floor.

Danny's attention was caught by the green button—the same colour as the wire—he had just pressed. On the panel beside it was an identical red one.

A low whirring started up, and Danny ripped his gaze from the buttons. Green electricity crackled along the wire in the clear tubes, and the glow it produced grew.

Run. That was the only thing Danny could think. Just run. He scrambled to his feet, but he was moving too slowly. His hands had gotten tangled in the mess of wires on the floor, and stray ends were snagging his suit. The glow was building, the whirring getting louder, and he wasn't moving fast enough.

In reality it all happened in an instant, but to Danny it felt like an eternity. The dangling wires above his head crackled, then his world became nothing but green light and pain.

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And here it is, the first chapter of the reconstruction of the Phantom Secrets universe! For anyone new stumbling across this, it's not necessary to read the original story, and it would spoiler later events, but you are welcome to.

I was going to wait a little longer, but since the chapter was finished I thought I would go ahead and post it. I won't be promising any kind of solid update schedule, since I'm hardly able to stick to that, so some updates will be fast and others much slower (for the time being, expect more slow ones)

To anyone waiting on an update of TheSurvivalists: I am currently reading through the fic to re-immerse myself in the story. Once I finish that, I will continue writing, so hold tight!

Sorry for the long A/N, just one more thing. This story will end up being more episodic at some points because it addresses the content of the show, so just bear with me if it seems a bit jumpy at times.

'See' you next time!

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Edited July 5th: Minor adjustments to prose, extending scenes, general and typo fixes