--IN MY MIND--

CHAPTER 3

Danny groaned. For some reason, he felt smothered.

Then he realised that his blanket was on top of him.

This was the first weird sign. Danny never, ever put the blanket over his head. He always felt like he was drowning, so usually his mom (to his continual embarrassment whenever he had Tucker over for a sleepover) tucked it under his chin. The second weird sign was on the back of his neck. It felt rough, and sore. Inching over to the mirror above his desk, (which was basically a large hand mirror, bought at the CheapPlace for looking to see if he was growing a moustache yet. Yeah. Not so much) he turned his head slightly.

And saw what appeared to be a long, patchy scar. He touched it. It felt familiar, and Danny realised how. This was how all his scars from ghost-fighting and Dash ducking felt after he had put the rubbing alcohol on them.

But I don't remember this scar… I don't even remember getting into bed! Danny felt really scared now. He usually had a crystal clear memory.

What happened last night? Remember… Remember... It was then that he noticed the next weird thing.

His shoulder felt very... neat. Looking down, almost frightened at what he might see, he noticed that his and Tucker's botched job of bandaging his shoulder during the fight with Skulker the previous day had been, miraculously, fixed. Instead of making him look like he was trying to start a new trend with shoulder pads, it was almost invisible.

Ok... this is it! I'm going crazy! No. Something weird is definitely happening, now... something totally crazy, not me... Danny stopped, and considered. Ghosts may try to kill me when I'm sleeping... cowardly, but not improbable... they may know I hate a blanket over my head, so maybe that was to try and give whatever they might have put in me via the scar thing a kick... but they don't fix the scars made by them from bleeding, or fix bandages that are their fault... no... If it is a ghost...

Pleased with his deducting, but still suspicious and, having got nowhere in solving this mystery yet, confused, Danny sat on the bed with a thump.

Something wasn't right, other than the first weird things... Something...

Thinking hard, and listening to the bacon his mother was making downstairs spit on the pan, he looked down.

The first-aid kit was sticking out from under his bed.

Jumping to his feet and blinking in surprise, Danny could only stare for a moment. Then he pulled out the kit, whacked it onto the bed, and opened it.

At first glance, nothing seemed amiss. Then he saw that the antiseptic bottle lid had been roughly pushed back on, and some gauze had been torn off. The bits were, he soon found, in the bin by the door. There was some sickening green dried stuff on it. Ecto-blood. His ecto-blood.

His blood ran a little cooler. In fact, ten degrees lower and his body would force the change into ghost, to keep his human form from freezing to death. Even now, he was shaking slightly.

It was more than being scared when fighting ghosts. Somebody had been prying into his stuff. Someone could have killed him when he slept... why had he never thought of that before? He felt like an idiot...

That ghost might've just wanted to help me, though, he found himself thinking. After all, there were a few nice ghosts. The Dairy King, for one.

But what if it wasn't a ghost?

Man, I'm being paranoid, Danny thought to himself. Of course it was a ghost. Who else could have got up to my room? As he thought of the trellis he so often used to escape punishment by climbing down, just outside his window, way before he got his powers, his heart sank a little. But he didn't admit anything to himself just yet.

Danny barrelled out of his room as though he was six years old again, and slid down the banister. He glanced at his sister's bedroom, empty and forlorn, and noticed something unusual, which blew away the Weird Things thoughts of the morning. The sign in the window had been taken down. Of course, his mom might've done that. There were creepy characters in Amity Park, and he wouldn't be surprised if a few had swaggered up to their front door, demanding the room.

Of course, maybe they wouldn't have. His mom was a black belt in various forms of martial arts. The guys would run off crying like babies.

Then again, not too many people would come to the house. It had a strange reputation of being... strange.

Maybe his dad had grown tired of publicising the house. After all, 'DOLLAR A DAY' rent hadn't been seen in Amity since the Depression, and even then it was more for those willing to pay. It had appeared in a joke column in the Amity Chat, an online newspaper focusing on the tales going around. It featured a whole section dedicated to 'Inviso-Bill'... the GHOSTLY CHAT.

But there was also the obvious reason, Danny pondered, biting his lip as he scaled the rest of the stairs, four at a time, jumping into the air at the end and staying there for five seconds like some sort of no-armed no-anything no-chin-up, and falling to the ground ever-so-slightly winded afterwards. Maybe somebody had rented the room. It had never actually been put in the best care... uh, no. Well. Not since Jazz had moved out, at the beginning of the school year, when she had- entrusted it to his care. Her goldfish he had seen when he went through the portal a few weeks later, floating forlornly and glaring at him as he glided past and, basically, her room was going to seed. Half the plants she had bought in the hope of brightening things up had died.

Danny wondered what kid would possibly want a room in his house. I mean, he thought, shaking his head, crinkling his eyes and biting the inside of his cheeks as he smiled, no-one who knows the place would come here. Not after the stories... and the cold, hard facts.

Something tingled in the back of his memory. Danny ignored it. As he passed the basement door, he was reminded of when he first, over two years ago, got his powers.

Tucker was bugging him. "Get off, Tuck," Danny whispered, as his best friend tried to take a picture of him, pushing his shoulder down to get a close-up of his face. "Stop it."

"Whatever." Tucker turned off the camera, though. Danny could get mad, and even though he wasn't anyone really special, Tucker had always thought he had the guts and the muscle to beat him- beat anyone- up... even though Danny could barely lift his computer. Although that had never happened, Tucker liked to stay on his gut feeling side.

It sounded like a rainstorm outside, and it was battering against the aluminium walls of the basement- even though they weren't exposed to the storm. The basement was weird like that.

Funny thing- Danny thought wonderingly, I didn't see any signs of rain outside. It seems like the noise is coming from in here... well, not IN here, but from somewhere that only one in here can hear... Puzzled by his own choice of words, and feeling kind of stupid, Danny jumped the last few steps to the basement, Tucker following behind, immersed now in his PDA. He looked up.

"Hey, Danny, did they really build that?" Tucker's gaze was drawn to the octagonal rim of metal surrounding the cave of technology. The thing was at least more than eight feet high, and towered over the tables and work areas next to it like some crazy gargantuan bolt. Danny's parents had tried a few times to get their 'Ghost-Portal' working, but to no avail. It wouldn't start, and that- was that, it seemed. But Danny had been given strict instructions NOT to go near, in, or let anyone else in or near. The darkness of what was inside seemed to pull at his thoughts.

But whatever was pulling his thoughts was definitely bending Danny's will. His best friend had started rushing hurriedly towards the jumpsuits, pulling one out of the open cupboard and ripping off his long-sleeved sweatshirt so he could stick his arms and legs into it. All the while Danny looked fixedly at the wide-open portal entrance. As Tucker would say to Clockwork many, many years later, something other than just hard luck pulled Danny to the portal that day.

Tucker stared for a long moment, a few long moments, his brain skipping a few whirrs as he tried to register what was happening. It was only when Danny had stared for a long while at the picture of Jack Fenton on his black hazmat, and ripped off the picture, grabbed a marker and doodled a black 'D' onto his chest that Tucker spoke up.

"What the hell are you doing, you idiot? You're not thinking of going in there! Are you? What the heck, you'll get fried if it shocks you or something! Danny, don't!"

Danny looked up, and cracked a smile. "Jeez, Tuck," he said, smiling. "You're talking to the son of two ghost-hunters. The guy who's grown up around this stuff, heard warnings tons of times- no sweat! I'll be fine, Tuck—" Danny paused and then smiled. "God, it sounds like you're never seeing me again. Well, take a good look, Tucker! Um... I guess..." He smiled faintly, and waltzed into the chamber, looking for an off/on switch. "See, Mom said that it was always turned off, so it should be perfectly safe. Well. Somewhat."

Danny wandered into the darker areas, and suddenly became immersed in the blackness. Something, something was calling to him- and, indeed, as he listened he heard, nothing in English, no... A language that he knew, soon, he would know. Not a spoken language, anyway...

Suddenly Danny felt a strange, tingling sensation. His mouth felt hot, hotter than ever before. A shudder crept up his spine. It felt like it was awakening all of his separate ribs, joints, bones... flowing through all his veins, the heat- then, as if by magic, all dropped to the same intensity- but in the negative. His hands and feet grew colder as the rest of the temperature dropped. He began to feel scared, and put up a hand to his throat as though something was stuck there. He couldn't get it out- he pushed... harder... then he tried to swallow, but nothing happened... then, all of a sudden, he couldn't breathe at all, and sat there silently choking, convinced he would die because of an unknown presence in his own throat-

Then he coughed. And out of his mouth, trailing cold dregs off the tips of his teeth, a stream of blue smoke curled lazily out of his mouth, curling slowly at the end into a soft, frozen spiral.

He cried out in shock and backed up into the wall, barely feeing it because of the numbness that had accompanied his sudden cold spell.

But he felt the sharp edge of a handle as it cut into his back, and the hard floor as he slid down the wall with a thump, and heard the squeak of the handle as it moved down along with him, felt the warning sign to GET OUT in his brain, heard a last, strangled cry from Tucker before he was blinded- "DANNY?"

Light, pure light shot out from everywhere. The noise was unbearable; the pain was around him, on him, entering him, in him. Too much to handle, too much to bear. He felt the searing pain, the agonizing burn as thousands upon thousands of bursts of electricity shot themselves into his body, right into his heart, his vital organs.

Somehow, though he felt like he should be dead long before, although the shocks had been coming on for less than three seconds, Danny had the sickening, heart-wrenching realization that he... could not die. He felt as though he was being stretched to the limits, his heart was popping, his eyes were bulging out but nothing was COMING out, and all of a sudden he was lifted into the air, green and white light surrounding him as he tried to get a firm grip on reality, on air- he actually felt the power run into his blood, merge, bursting, into his very own DNA.

His senses were on overdrive, he was seeing, hearing, smelling things he shouldn't have before. The creak of each separate bolt in the door of his bedroom, two floors up, the sight of two beautiful dragons flying over a strange, green, floating thing in god knows where and the strange smell of popcorn from a bowl upstairs, which he had knocked to the floor when coming down with Tucker. And, Tucker. He could feel the sweat running down his friend's face, feel Tucker's eyes grow wide and heard him screaming his name, over and over and over, but if he concentrated, Danny could hear nothing while in the air. Something was, definitely, changing.

An eternity later, Danny fell to the ground. He was light-headed, could remember nothing- tried thinking, but his brain was too sore. He felt strange feelings bubbling up in his hands, in his body, in his soul.

He felt odd in another way, too. As though there was a part of him gone that he could never replace. As though that part would never come back- was taken out to make room, too much room for more than what he wanted, more than what he needed.

He felt as though a responsibility had been heaped upon him.

He felt, strangely, as though he were not alive.

The last thing he saw was Tucker, his anxious, strangely wet face in front of him, shouting words in slow-motion that he could not hear, could not read... his head was drowsy, his eyes were closing, his voice felt liked he never needed to use it again-

The next thing he saw was when he woke up.

Danny shuddered, bare flickers of the horrid waves of pain emanating from his memory taunting him. He knew that he would remember more later, as his train of thought had been cut off when he smelt the wonderful smell coming from the kitchen. He ran to the kitchen, almost expecting to see that same bowl of popcorn knocked to the ground. A hazy thought was tickling him, nudging his brain a little. I don't even know her name... she's like a... Kristy? Nah, too show-off, like the girl in one of his classes... something unique... Jayni? Rihany? Danny blinked. He wasn't even sure if that was a real name. He wondered why everything had a 'y' in it.

"Morning, sweetie!" his mother said cheerfully, planting a kiss on his nose. Danny didn't try to rub it off. He wanted to savour every last minute of being the little boy before he had to move out. He still couldn't believe it was his seventeenth birthday in less than a month, and felt like he was moving out of the couch he had been lazing around in for the past decade and a half, and being forced to get up and find a life.

He knew his parents would be happy to let him stay... for a while. Till he got his priorities in order. Then, he'd have to get a job and a house and a wife and kids...
His mind screamed at him. He was growing up too fast... better be the kid he still could be now, while he could still be him.

Maddie Fenton set down a steaming plate of eggs and bacon in fron of him, complete with rich toast. He devoured it, wiped his mouth, then got up to change and go to school.

"Oh, Danny, honey?" his mom asked.

"Yeah, mom?"

"The room's been rented, sweetie. Better clean it up now while you can... the tenant's moving in on Friday!"

"Uh... really? Someone came to this house? And rented a room? To stay in?" Danny felt slightly bewildered.

"Yes, dear. I'll expect it to be vaccuumed and clean as anything by the time I get back from Amroe."

Amroe was a small town about an hour away, and Jack and Maddie sometimes went there because of ghostly happenings.

"Um... ok." Danny turned to leave, but something stopped him. "Who is it? C-coming here?"

"She is from your school, Danny, and a Junior... yes, sixteen, seventeen-ish."

Danny's mouth was hanging open, and caused his next words to mumble a bit: "M-m-my school? A girl? HERE?"

"I can't hear you properly, Danny, please stop letting your chin hang open so wide. Yes, Casper High, she said."

"D-do you know her name?" For some reason, Danny couldn't help stuttering.

"Um... ye-eah. Samantha. Sam, I think she prefers..."

Sam... not Samantha... that's it...

Shaking the thoughts away viciously, he asked, "When is she... er... coming?"

"Friday, Danny, weren't you listening? I said. Now, go on, the bell rings soon and you'll miss school."

Sam felt like she was in a dream. After the night at Danny's (already, her mind was getting sicker... she thought that that phrase didn't sound so bad), she had locked herself in her room, and wouldn't come out for the maid, who wanted to clean in there. "Go away," she'd shouted numerous times. Only at about 6 in the morning had Sam gotten up and showered, eaten and set off an hour early for school.

She felt so... betrayed. And stupid, because she knew that Danny probably hadn't been staring at her in wonder, or anything... but, most likely, in a sort of who the heck is she? attitude. And, also, because of course it wasn't like they'd been going out AT ALL. She felt pushy, and pushed away, not understood yet like the world understood her perfectly and just wanted to use the knowledge to punish her.

Walking to school at half past six made the journey five minutes longer (because of the cold wind, as well as the people who thought they were smart by getting up really early to go to work in the city and avoid traffic- like everyone else- blocking the crossings) than the usual... five minutes. She shivered in her camo khakis, and felt glad that she had decided to wear one article of warm clothing- a thin yet long-sleeved hoodie.

When she came in sight of the school she looked at her watch, and frowned. Still an hour before the even the teachers would be there. Sighing forlornly, she wandered over to the park, and sat on a bench, wiggling her toes in the chill. As soon as she had sat down, the thoughts that she had tried to block by walking in cold wind, bustling traffic, and the destination of school, rushed at her.

Of course he would have a girl, he's pretty cute, after all.

But I wish he would be MINE, no one else's!

I'm being stupid. I don't even KNOW him, I've seen him, that's all. And, yeah, I'm gonna live with him soon. But still. That's even more of a reason not to get to know him better- his parents are right there!Ugh! Now I know I'm being sick, thinking of doing stuff with him that the rents'd find out... and be embarrassed. GOD, I DON'T EVEN KNOW HIS NAME! I feel SO embarrassed, yet no-one is around to see it... so I can complain...

"But," Sam realised suddenly. "I have no friends to complain to."

Before she could wonder about this realisation that she always knew was there, a sudden blast shocked her off the bench, and she landed on her stomach onto the dew-drenched grass.

She looked up, trying to shout, exclaim something... but all that came out was a strangled gasp. Behind her, towering fifty feet and surrounded by electric blue radiation, was a huge... thing!

She didn't know what it was. But, looking through slitted eyes (the combination of bright sunlight and blue light was too much), she saw that it was composed of everyday objects. All... metallic, and electronic, she realised. Toasters, computer moniters, TVs, microwaves, in fact almost every electronic thing that somebody could find in her own house was on this... this monster.

Looking closer, and squinting more, she was sure she saw that connecting each and every electronic object were vibrating cords, plugged into each of the objects. As she stared, she noticed that they were all glowing, brighter and brighter, a great neon green. The cords seemed to have a life of their own: as she watched the great monster take a step, a couple of them pulled themselves out, then immediately rejoined to the spaces they had come from. Hmm, she thought, tilting her head. They aren't very stable…

She didn't have time more to think. The thing took a huge, monstrous step forwards, and almost fell over. It would have been comical to see the beast steps onto one foot and crush everything, only to have them rebuild again, but this wasn't the Sunday section of the Amity Local. This was real, and she could see flames leap up from the grass, singed, then die down a little. But the smell of scorched grass made her jump up and start running, with a newfound energy.

She had barely started when she heard a thunderous crash as the robot stepped again, and again-

A yell made her turn around. She saw, with wide, scared eyes, a boy dressed in black standing next to the thing, screaming at several mothers to run. His hair was white and rippling in the stiff breeze, and he was clearly not feeling the cold.

"What are you doing?" Sam screamed back at him. "You're gonna get killed!" She felt several curious gazes of flustered, but not altogether scared mothers upon her. They seemed to take the thing for granted- as though it happened a lot.

The boy turned and looked at her. For a moment she had a shock of recognition. Those eyes...

Like ice.

Sam's eyes opened wider. No, that's not right... The boy had white hair, and a black suit on. She couldn't imagine him wearing a black- anything with his skin tone vs. hair colour.

Maybe this kid was an albino? With blue eyes?

She didn't have more time to dwell on it, though, for in that second she was knocked to the ground, her ribs protesting violently as they were almost bent with the pressure. One of the limbs- Sam didn't even know if the thing was spider-shaped or what- of the monstrous mechanical thing had whacked her in the stomach, and thrown her to the ground. But, she realised, the pressure was not as great as it should have been. Daring to look up, she was almost blinded by continuous flashes of bright green light.

Coming from the boy.

"Wha-"

Sam didn't have time to even think anything else. A sudden plunge into her claustrophobia made her head spin, for the last thing she saw- before she blacked out- was a wall of green, slowly rising over her head, completing an orb of neon green light that surrounded her.

And the form of something black, with glowing green fists, falling down from the sky.

So... how'd y'all like it? This, I think, a better chap so far... I think... even if it did take me eons to upload. Sorry bout that!! Anyway, like always...

Was it...

1)Flowing well? No choppiness, or, if any, in the wrong places?
2)Continuing from the end of the last chapter? No uncalled-for surprises that have detours from the plot?
3)Good mention of characters? The right amount? (Speech for each, appearances of each)
4)Bad spelling or grammar? If so, tell me where.
5)Too much mention of some characters? Well, the story does revolve around Danny and Sam...
6)Anything else? (Too tired to think of other questions... see last chp.)

Well, Thanks for reading!!

Hope you liked it...

Nyita7