A bright white flash temporarily blinded Danny as he was standing in front of his parents' eerie invention they called "the Ghost Portal". He quickly blinked the dark spots away and proceeded to glare at his best friend, Sam, saying,

"OK, you took your picture, can we please get out of here? My parents could come back any minute now."

Danny slightly winced when he heard his voice crack; Sam, however, took no notice to the embarrassing squeak as she walked up next to him to continue staring at the empty portal.

"Aren't you at least a bit curious? I mean, it's a portal to another realm! You have to check it out, Danny!"

If Danny was his older sister, Jazz, he could have pointed out the flaws in Sam's argument. But Danny was not Jazz: he was a 14-year-old American teenager just starting his days in high school (that might have a tiny crush on his female best friend). His mind churned over Sam's logic. True, his parents always told Danny to be careful in the lab (well, mostly his mother), and the portal was broken anyway. He had a HAZMAT suit, it would be easy to slip into one for protection from any radiation that might be in the portal. Besides, if it did work, the worst that could happen was Danny sticking his head through the portal and seeing a whole different world! The astronaut within Danny (he had always wanted to explore space, this was just a type of man-made wormhole, right?) screamed, "DO IT DO IT DOITDOITDOIT!" That, and the fact that Sam was there…

"You know what? You're right! Who knows what kind of awesome things could be behind that portal!" Danny quickly stepped into the HAZMAT and zipped the one-piece up to his neck.

"Hang on…"

Danny turned to look at Sam, who stepped up to him and touched his chest…

"You can't go walking around with THAT on your chest!" She had ripped a sticker of his dad's face off the front of the suit and pointed at the offending piece of material in her hand with her other hand. Danny sheepishly smiled at Sam (and Tucker, who was snickering 'lovebirds' right behind her), a little embarrassed, then turned to the portal once again. Stepping into the invention carefully, Danny looked around, hoping for a sign of some sort of unearthly… thing. How did this portal work again?

It was at that moment that Danny's unfortunate clumsiness decided to act up. Tripping on his own foot, of all things! Thankfully, his hand met the wall, which kept Danny from falling to the ground.

A low whirring came from the wall and Danny's eyes widened. The portal was supposed to not work! AT ALL! What was happening?

An otherworldly acid green glow slowly slid from the left side of the portal, to the top, to the right, and finally the bottom. The whirring went from a low rumble to an almighty roar, when Danny's vision went from green and black to pure white, the same way Sam's camera temporarily blinded Danny. Instead of only lasting less than a second, it seemed to last for an eternity.

Then Danny felt a prickling across his skin. The prickling lasted for a second, only because it went from a prickling to a full out frying. Danny couldn't think, he only knew the pure agony coming up from his arms and legs. He was frozen; he couldn't move, even if he tried.

Was he screaming? The pain suddenly lapsed enough for Danny to hear something, but it seemed so far away. His hands quickly shot up to his scalp and gripped the roots of his hair in an attempt to block the migraine in his head. Was it a migraine? When had he fallen to his knees?

Then the true pain began. The bright light and the pain that followed that light was nothing compared to this… torture.

Danny could feel every cell of his body rip apart, no, torn to pieces! His eyes were burning, melting, combusting? He couldn't feel his eyes anymore. His bones withered, his heart imploded, the muscles in his body were stretching like rubber. The last thing Danny could remember was thinking, 'Shouldn't I be dead already?'

When Sam saw the blinding light, she couldn't move. When Danny started screaming, she began to weep and fell to her knees. Tucker screamed for help, but it was no use. Even if there was somebody else in the house, the Fentons had soundproofed the basement-lab because their neighbors had complained about the couple making loud noises into the dead of night while inventing. The Fentons, of course, resisted their neighbors demands until the police were brought in and they were forced by law to soundproof the walls of their lab.

No one heard Danny's agonized scream, Tucker's frantic shouts for help, or Sam's guilty weeping.

What literally happened in a few seconds felt like hours for the two teens. Finally, a poison green slowly replaced the bright white light, turning in a slow, counter-clockwise spiral. Sam and Tucker's tears slid freely when they realized that Danny had stopped screaming.

"No… No… Please, dear God, please no…" Sam whispered. Tucker could only stare at the portal where he had last seen his best friend. It was as if time had frozen, but Sam and Tucker were not. They could only helplessly stare at the portal where their best friend had once been.

Suddenly, the portal seemed to collapse inwards, as if it was about to implode. Sam and Tucker scrambled away, eyes never leaving the portal, when a black figure was thrown from the portal, almost as if it had been sneezed out. Once the figure flew out of the green spirals, the portal went back to its slow churning.

Sam and Tucker's eyes were fixed on the figure that had been so unceremoniously tossed away from the portal. It was humanoid, with icy white hair and was wearing a black skintight suit that seemed oddly familiar. The figure had landed on its stomach, so the two teens could only see the suit and the hair, which covered up whatever part of the face was exposed to the air.

The two fourteen-year-olds had no clue what to do. This… whatever this was, it had just been tossed out of what their best friend's parents called "Ghost Portal". This creature… person… had to be a ghost! Right?

Sam eventually stepped to the ghost's side and poked it. Well, tried to poke it. Where the being's shoulder should have stopped her finger, it had simply passed through and disappeared into the shoulder. Sam gasped and brought her hand back as if she'd been burned. Tucker had seen Sam's finger go into the thing's shoulder, too, and whispered, "Ghost!" Both of their eyes were wide open at the creature that lay before them.

Sam shrieked when the being in front of her groaned. Tucker had noticed that the creature wasn't breathing, so it was definitely dead, but also shouldn't have been able to make sounds without something to travel through its windpipe. Unless the creature's anatomy was different than humans.

'Duh, of course it's different!' Tucker mentally berated himself. 'It's a ghost!'

Sam, however, noticed something else when the thing had groaned. It sounded so much like Danny… except for that weird echoing noise that happened along with the groan, but it was still like Danny.

She gasped and quickly tried touching it again. This time, her hand was able to touch the being, so she wasted no time in trying to turn the body over. Tucker, realizing what she was doing, quickly knelt next to her and helped shove the being on to his back. Recognizing the face, both of their eyes widened even more to see that the ghost was Danny. There was no denying it. The facial structure and body type were the same, but everything else was so different. Even the suit had changed.

The colors had inverted themselves, but Danny's entire body had a sort of unnatural glow to it. The skin that they could see was tanned, and somehow, Sam knew that Danny's eyes were no longer blue, even though she couldn't see them. They glowed underneath his eyelid, and whatever that color was, it was not the beautiful bright sky blue they were before. His hair was so white, it was almost impossible to look at for too long. It was blinding.

"Danny?" Sam tried to shake Danny, but her hand passed through him again. It was then that she truly realized what had happened. "Danny…" tears sprung into the girl's eyes once again when the hard truth hit her.

Tucker was staring at Danny's chest, almost trying to will it to rise and fall, but when Sam's hand passed through Danny again, he couldn't help it. He started weeping at the fact that his best friend for over a decade was lying in front of him as a ghost.

The two friends reached for and clung to each other in a heart-shattering hug, both trying to find comfort in the other, when Danny groaned again and scrunched his eyes. The two teens with quickening heartbeats quietly gasped, but didn't know what to do. They both wanted to help Danny, but Danny was a ghost, and might hurt them. Finally, Danny's eyelids shot open and revealed glowing, toxic green eyes.