ACT ONE

INT. CASPER HIGH HALLWAY - MON. MORNING

Forward 8. Back 44. Forward 43. The lock gave way with a snap, and a bleary-eyed Danny Fenton opened his locker, retrieving his books for the first period. He had been up late the previous day; after the swap meet had concluded more or less successfully even in his absence, he had to serve the second part of his sentence, which was comprised largely of helping his dad with the final preparations for the elder Fenton's Ghost Zone expedition. The bags were packed. 14 days of rations (although it was meant to be a 2 day trip) had been secured away. An overhauled suite of communications and telemetry equipment had been checked and rechecked. Everything was ready for Tuesday, and Danny had had the distinct honor of carrying most of it.

For their part, his parents had been giddy with excitement, which he had just found thoroughly draining. So far as Danny was concerned, the 'Zone was nothing but trouble, and he'd sooner seal the doors forever before he had to make good on his promises; promises he was increasingly regretting as the contents of his locker swam ever so slightly as his tired brain cried out for rest.

The knock on the door snapped him out of his stupor. Peeking around the side of his locker door, he saw Tucker leaning against the wall, with an expectant look on his face. "Hey, Tuck, what's up?"

Tucker frowned and knocked again. With a sigh, Danny leaned behind the door again, before asking "Who's there?"

"It's Tucker!"

He shut the door, facing his friend, who now had a ridiculous smile on his face for 8:30 am. "Hi, Tuck. What's up?"

"Dude, you've got to check this out!" He waved around the newsprint he held in one hand, before shoving it toward Danny.

The other teen took a moment, looking over the paper with confusion. "Whoa, that's..."

"It's great, right?"

"I dunno, I can't believe they actually bother to print a school paper. What is this, the 90s?"

"Fair, but not my point. Would you actually read the story?"

"Sure, and then two people will have..." Chuckling at his own joke, he unfolded the first page, and read the headline aloud:

Baxter Challenges Opponents

Wesley Weston, Sports Editor

After new team captain Dash Baxter lead the Casper High Ravens to an 89-74 victory in their October 10th game against the Stark High Sabres, the triumphant basketball star issued an open challenge to any secondary school student in the city who thought they could beat him at his own game.

"Because I rock so hard at basketball, I'm gonna go head to head with anybody stupid enough to challenge me to a shootout," Baxter was quoted as saying, "Seven shots on net from the three-point line, Casper High gym, any day of the week. Go ahead and try it, chumps. I could use a laugh!"

When asked by this reporter why he picked those rules, Baxter, visibly angry, replied, "'cause I said so, Less-ton(sic)! Now get out of my way. I've got a hot date(sic) tonight!"

Danny folded up the paper and looked back at Tucker. "You aren't serious."

"I'm totally serious! Come on dude, like a month ago you had ghost pow—mmph!"

Danny had covered Tucker's mouth with both hands, before leaning in and hissing in his ear, "Not so loud, will you? I don't want the whole school to know!"

Tucker pulled back, continuing at a lower volume. "Right, sorry. I'm just saying, you kinda did the whole ghost hunting thing. That's got to have improved your aim at least a little, right? I'm sure you could... Hit some hoops. Score some baskets. Whatever it is you do in basketball."

"I'm... Wow, it really means a lot to me that you think I could win a game of the sports-ball."

"Hey, I never said I was good at it! I reserve my competitive energies for calculating optimal Doomed character builds and honing my pin-point reflexes. But I'm also not the one who wanted to... What'd you say again? 'Beat Dash at his own game'? Well," Tucker grabbed the paper and shook it at Danny for emphasis, "here's your chance to do literally that! It's worth a shot anyway, right?"

At Tucker's insistence, Danny spent the lunch hour in the gym practicing.

And then he spent an hour or two after school in the gym, practicing.

And after supper, he snuck into the school, alone, for a further hour of practice.

Danny heard the thunk of the door's mechanism and looked with some alarm over at the corner of the half-lit gym, his latest shot going slightly wider than the rest of them had. He still couldn't hit the net with any regularity, and he wasn't sure if he was more worried about being found in the school after hours or being found failing.

But it was just Sam.

"You're still here, huh?"

Danny did an awkward half-jog to catch the basketball bouncing to a stop near the wall. "...yeah. Did Tucker tell you-?"

"I noticed you were still offline on MSN. I figured you must still be here."

"Oh? Yeah. I haven't really had a chance to check in today. What did you want to tell me?"

"I just wanted to let you know my cousin was going to be in town on the 24th," Sam replied without looking at him, making her way over to the bleachers. Danny stood watching her from near the wall, basketball still propped under one arm. "I thought you'd want to know. He offered to drive us to Pittsburgh for the Stand and Deliver concert, I guess he's going there anyway, for some kind of film festival."

"Cool. Sounds good." Danny shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

Sam sighed and leaned back. "What's this actually about, Danny?"

"What do you mean? The basketball thing?"

"So it's just about beating Dash? One-upping 'the competition'?"

"I... I guess so, yeah. Isn't that enough?"

"It doesn't seem like you, that's all I'm saying. Are you sure this isn't maybe about her?"

Her voice dripped with venom. They both knew who she meant.

"So what if it is, a little bit? Maybe I'd like to see a girl show some interest in me. You know, to have some value in somebody's eyes."

"Danny, that's— You do have... Ugh! How do you manage to be so infuriatingly dense and tragic at once?"

"What's that supposed to mean, huh?"

She met his narrowed gaze, frustration written on her brow. "I just don't understand what you want. And I don't think you do, either."

Danny leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes. He didn't really want to have this conversation. It was stupid. He had every right to try to better himself, to try to get to the top of the freshman food-chain. It was natural, every teenager wanted it. Just because Sam was... Being so Sam about it.

He was exhausted. He just wanted to go home and sleep and worry about all this the next morning.

Sam's eyes bored into his, scrutinizing every motion, every blink. She was searching for something, even though she knew the answer. He supposed it was the confirmation she was looking for. Tucker just smiled and shook his head, looking down; it was obvious what he was thinking, but afraid to say for fear of being punched in the shoulder by Sam or Danny.

Danny just sighed and slumped down on the bleachers between his friends. He wanted to express this feeling of... Defeat. That was the word he was looking for. It seemed like every time he wanted to make a name for himself, he had lost before he even started. He would always be Dorky Ol' Danny Fenton, unable to compete with his betters. Seeming to sense this, Sam leaned into his side and grabbed his hand before he could object. ...Not that he necessarily would have. She took his hand in one of hers, tracing out the lines on his palm with a finger.

They sat there like that for a moment until Tucker, presumably, started turning off the lights, one by one.

When the room was plunged into complete darkness, true silence reigned, as the subtle buzz of the fluorescent ballasts died out. It was a bit worrisome, especially when the warmth at his side vanished.

Danny stood, alarmed, trying to feel his way around in the darkness, but finding nothing. After wandering around in the dark, a soft green glow began growing above, shortly followed by the rushing of wind past his ears. The teen spun around, looking for the source; he couldn't find anything. The howling of the breeze seemed directional though, so he tried his best to follow it back to its source.

The glow intensified, seeming to creep through the cracks in the ceiling of the narrow hallway, but it provided enough illumination to see where he was going. How he was going to get there was another matter entirely, however. It was hard to tell if he was ultimately going in circles or not because the whole place seemed to be made up entirely of bare wooden floors and featureless gray walls. The only way to be sure was the doors. Every door was slightly different. Some were open just a crack, others were fully ajar to the unknown space beyond, and just about everything in between. The hallway itself frequently twisted around corners and came to strange dead-end T junctions, where sometimes he would turn left and end up right, or he'd turn right and end up wrong. He also had a sneaking suspicion that some of the time the path would go up or down when it thought he wouldn't notice.

But the worst was the diverging hallways, where he always had to carry on straight ahead because turning down the diverging path would have meant death.

Danny only wished the people down those diverging paths would stop crying so much. The sound grated on his nerves. He had died before, and he got over it. Why couldn't they?

Eventually, he came to a closed door. With a smile, he pulled it open and stepped through.

He fell into the sky above him, flying in easy sweeping motions, laughing as he pulled off the occasional somersault or flip just for the sheer exhilaration of being back. The puffy, blue clouds parted as he flew higher and higher, giving way to the inky black void of space. With one last flip to right himself, Danny looked out over Amity Park. The source of the green glow suffusing the town was now clear; a brilliant, green comet was streaking across the sky, looping back and forth, circling over the downtown core far away from his vantage point.

He would have flown over to get a better view, but something told him to stay far away from the people. Instinct, perhaps, as the glow only got brighter, the sound of wind in his ears only growing louder.

And in an instant, he lost sight of the meteor behind some of the towering, silhouetted skyscrapers.

The shockwave was felt as much as heard. It nearly knocked him clear out of the sky, gloved hands flailing for purchase they wouldn't find falling through the air. A moment later, the downtown scenery exploded into a light brighter than he had ever seen before, brighter than a thousand suns, scorching his eyes and singing his jumpsuit. He toppled in mute pain and horror, eventually landing on the ground in a heap.

The bodies were writhing in pain, screaming for death—

—screams of the damned, newly dead although they didn't seem to know it yet—

—no strength in their limbs, wriggling around helplessly, like maggots—

Danny gripped his head tighter, willing the ruins around him to silence themselves. The din of begging and screaming and wanting and death and—

Suddenly, it was quiet. Danny was in an attic, looking out over a ruined city street. He took a long drag on his cigarette; big mistake. The sniper across the way took a shot that nearly hit him square in the head.

He ducked down and swept the fresh splinters out of his hair, cursing his bad luck. Danny readied his rifle, but before he raised it to fire he had an idea. He picked up the cigarette, still smoldering on the floorboards, and threw it over the ledge.

His opponent hastily fired again, and in that instant, Danny popped over the ruined wall, aimed down the scope, and fired.

Fired right into the shocked face of Danny Fenton.

Danny tumbled down dead into the street as Danny looked on in horror, until he was the one falling, falling, falling,

He never felt his body hit the bottom.

"Hmm. You again."

Danny opened his eyes. It was the first voice he'd heard for eons, familiar and cruel.

When it flitted from one side to the other, he just barely caught a glimpse of a hazy shape of a teenager in the corner of his eye.

"I didn't think you'd be back. I'd hoped you wouldn't be. But you always manage to disappoint."

Danny tried to turn away from the figure, but it stayed anchored, always just out of view, always just barely visible.

"And quite a nightmare you're having, too. Not half as bad as some others, but that's the story of your life, isn't it? Just a half. You can't even be fully bad."

Ran and ran and ran, but it followed him. Or perhaps it just moved with him, because Danny couldn't run away from what was a part of him.

But then it pounced on him. He found himself knocked to the ground, hands failing to gain any purchase in the shifting yellow sands beneath him. The figure was a cloud of smoke in the shape of a teenager, with two chunks of blackness where eyes might have been. It's hazy form shifted constantly, eventually revealing a white gash in the shape of a smile on its head.

"Let's fix you so you look the part."

It grabbed at the top of Danny's head and pulled, unzipping him from top to bottom. Danny tried to scream and scream but he couldn't make a sound. The half that fell away turned to dust as it separated away from him, blowing away with the winds in this desolate place.

"Perfect. Now you're ready for our company, aren't you?"

The sickly sweet words were the last thing he heard as he lay there, unable to die.

There was no way to know how long he lay there before another voice—more of a "sound" than a real voice—broke through the mist.

"?Ytooun wuiosyh otdo ,bree tbteetbt eerb, odto hysoiuw nuootY?"

Better? Of course he wished he was better! The truth was, he was a failure. He couldn't defend the people he loved most. He couldn't beat Dash. He couldn't... He wouldn't ever get Paulina's attention like this. Danny didn't know which one he cared about more, but if they were both equally impossible, did it really matter?

Nobody would ever care about him.

"?Agnndi hytoyun aw ooudl dd lduoo wa nuyotyh idnngA?"

Yes. He would do or give or try anything to be better.

He felt a distant entity smile, and then cold, cold fingers grasped his chin and tilted his head upward to face them. When he opened his eyes, he was in a bright, barren expanse under a pale, milky-white sky. As far as the eye could see, it was like a cracked lake bed, just him and the woman.

Or at least, she must have been a woman, at some point. As it stood, her gleaming black hair fell down around a green, grinning face, a single visible eye appraising him.

"Tomorrow, I will give you seven perfect shots. No more, no less. And tomorrow, my payment will come due. Do you agree to this?"

Danny nodded enthusiastically.

Her smile grew, and grew, and grew until it was all he could see. And then it disappeared.

By the time he awoke to his blaring alarm clock, he had forgotten all about it.

Author's Note:

Well, that was a weird one.

I think some of you have probably guessed who the ghost is by now, though I have yet to see it in the comments.