Hello!

So, uh, it should be pretty obvious by now that I've fallen hard for Danny Phantom. I did watch it when I was younger, but I never got too emotionally invested in it, and I'm amazed at how many bad puns and sayings I picked up from this show without realizing it.

Thanks to two of my good friends, I've also become a Pompous Pep shipper. I'm almost positive that Jesus doesn't love me anymore.

Instead of planning this out chapters in advance, I'm just going with my gut and incorporating in the ideas I have wherever they seem to fit. Right now, I'm planning on it being 24 chapters just to stick with the theme. I have no idea how fast it will move, but be aware that the rating may go up (it will) from T later.

Welp, that's all I got.

- Chapter 1 -

It started off like any other misfortunate encounter between us - he found me, interrupted my concentration with absurd, childish trash talk, and attempted to shoot me with blasts of energy before I could retaliate. I could've elected to fight him off, but he surely would've noticed the small, glimmering urn I was attempting to unearth from where it was lodged in the ground, and the last thing I need is for him and his friends to come poking around it only to end up in another dimension where one's thoughts manifest instantly. Instead, I fled, delighted when the boy thoughtlessly gave chase.

"Not gonna fight back, Plasmius?" Daniel's voice echoed through the caverns, amplified by the layers of ghostly, intertwining stone. "You must be smarter than I thought."

I leapt from the sheer cliff the mouth of the cave opened into and took flight toward another suspended mass of weathered rock, not needing to glance behind me to know that he was following close behind. "Whatever helps you sleep at night, Daniel." He hurled another blast at me, narrowly missing. He uttered something under his breath when two of my doppelgangers and I emerged from our hiding place, scattering in several directions, all leading away from the treasure I'd have to return to at a later date. Noble as ever, the boy followed.

Watching him fight off both of my clones betrayed the fact that he was still improving, becoming quicker and more clever when dodging both close-ranged tactics and distanced ones. The greenish murk of the ghost zone swirled around him, and I made sure to hover in plain sight just as the second of my doppelgangers vanished while he was grappling with it.

"Are you done hiding behind your clones?" His eyes flashed brilliantly with righteous anger.

"Are you ready to let me teach you how to distinguish between obvious fakes and your real enemy?"

Baring his teeth, he lunged at me, and with a gleeful grin I led him further.

I had barely begun to decide where to take our battle when a profound feeling hit me. I froze, my cape billowing around me, and I had a moment to listen closely before Phantom shouted something close behind.

"Daniel, wait! Something isn't-"

The teenager made impact, hitting me squarely between my shoulder blades with his fist and sending me toppling forward in the air. The tight feeling in my throat intensified a thousand fold, and as I pitched forward, a blinding forcefield electrified before me. I hit it on my hands and knees, and then he hit me. I shouted indignantly beneath him, and Daniel let out an undignified puff of air, stunned by the unexpected landing.

"-right," I finished lamely.

Danny scrambled to his feet, the sound of his boots resembling that of walking on a thick piece of glass. I gazed at the energy beneath my palms as it fluctuated and glowed. The boy fell backward, and he landed flat on his backside with a grunt. He blinked up at the sizzling wall of energy as it snapped, his gaze resting on something overhead.

"What's - is this another one of your lousy traps?"

"Do you think I would be foolish enough to be caught in an invention of my own design?" The walls surrounding us were curved, and I settled for leaning back on my hands, sparing a glare at the teenager before following his stare to the device at the top of the globe. It was a peculiar little disc, and from a tiny lens on the underside it seemed to be releasing its energy. I ignored Daniel's snarky "yes," scrutinizing the thing, trying to decipher how it was producing the forcefield and how to deactivate it-

"HELLO!"

The booming voice knocked both of us back, echoing off the walls and making my teeth vibrate in my skull. I snarled in disgust and Danny yelped in dismay, and a hologram flickered to life between us, giving a face to the obnoxious voice that we both immediately recognized.

"Oh no," Daniel moaned, pressing his palm to his head and blinking at the flickering image of his father's smiling face.

"If you're watching this, you've been captured by my one-of-a-kind Fenton Ghost Globe! Congratulations!"

Maddie's bright orange goggles appeared at the edge of the frame and Jack glanced at her.

"Er, uh - it would be one-of-a-kind if we hadn't made a whole bunch of them … anyway, there's no point in trying to escape, because the shield is foolproof! We think."

Jack wheezed, clearly having been elbowed off-camera by Maddie.

"You may be wondering why you've been captured in one of my brilliant inventions. And the answer is because you're a ghost. A bad, bad, ghost. And if we can stop you from being bad, then, by gosh, we will! The only problem is that we haven't figured out how to power the globes for more than twenty four hours at a time, so as long as you've got a magazine or some playing cards with you, you should be able to stay occupied."

"Jack." Maddie's voice was quieter. The man flinched at her tone. "Don't tell them that!"

Jack blinked. "Oh. Sorry, honey." He cleared his throat, returning his attention to the camera with a severe expression. "We threw a whole bunch of these things into the ghost portal, so attempting to enter our world through it could quite possibly spring yet another trap! Your best bet is to go away and be bad somewhere else. Trust me: you don't want to tangle with Jack Fenton." The camera went askew and shifted around, catching a second of Maddie scolding her husband and her husband protesting quietly. The image refocused on Jack's face, and he grinned. "Bye!"

The hologram disappeared.

"Please tell me he didn't say what I think he said," uttered Danny under his breath.

Torn between my irritation with Jack and my amusement at Daniel's distress, I merely blinked at him. He knocked his head back against the forcefield and threw his arms out, managing to lie down somewhat despite the cage's shape.

"Stuck in a fishbowl made by your father with your arch enemy. You have the worst of luck, don't you?"

The look he gave me was venomous. "Shut up."

The silence lasted for a good thirty seconds.

"He didn't really say twenty four hours, did he? Please tell me I'm losing my mind."

"You're losing your mind." He frowned at me again and I shrugged innocently.

"What's gonna happen when I don't show up for dinner? Or bed? Mom and Dad are gonna flip."

"Quite the conundrum, I agree. At least you're not trapped in another dimension because of the incompetence of your own father! That's about the only way I can imagine this day getting any worse for you."

This was enough to have him scrambling to sit up. "For once can you - you know what? Forget it. Can we just … call a truce until this thing powers down? I'll just try to sleep and you just sit there and be creepy. Then tomorrow, we go our separate ways and forget this ever happened."

My jaw dropped in disbelief. Daniel watched me warily. "What?"

"Do you not … you don't know, do you?"

He looked to be on the verge of tears. "What don't I know?"

It took a moment to figure out where to even begin. "How far into the ghost zone have you travelled?"

"None of your business," he replied immediately.

"How far have you gone save for the plane on which the Fenton Portal exists?"

"Even if I knew what you were talking about, I wouldn't tell you."

"Daniel - have you ever been out this way before? Where you ran into me today."

"Well, no." He crossed his arms, brilliant gaze flashing. "What does that have to do with anything?"

Oh.

This was good.

I pressed my fingers together, crossing my legs at the ankle. The corner of his mouth twitched in what appeared to be a fleeting look of disgust. "Not all areas outside of the human world are governed by the same kind of time."

"And?" He sounded entirely uninterested.

Pleased at the opportunity to teach the boy something of use, I looked at the offending piece of technology above our heads in thought. "Think of time as a measure of the rate at which things decay. Things subjected to a gravitational pull break down faster than things in space. Things on planets with more gravity decay faster than they would on other planets. There's even a teeny difference in how quickly humans age based on how far from the Earth's center they live, and that's all within the laws of a single dimension, not even accounting for the way light and temperature dictate a person's idea of time passing."

Despite saying nothing, it was clear that under his expression of skepticism he was fascinated.

"The reason humans don't all migrate in droves to live on mountaintops is that the lower level of gravity at high altitudes only adds a few days onto a person's life. Most people would rather live among the hurricanes and giant pythons in Florida and risk dying young than be up in the cold." Now I was just rambling.

"What does any of this have to do with us?"

How to put this gently… hmmm.

"Since the ghost zone and its various dimensions within is governed by completely different rules of time and physics, a day in the human world feels like far longer here. Every hour that passes at home without you returning will be more like an entire day to us here!"

I ended with a flourish, grinning expectantly at Daniel. Not sharing my excitement, the teen's face became the color of his hair.

After a long moment, his lips cracked open. "I really hope you're lying."

"I'm not."

I wasn't.