Written for Phic Phight '20! Ectopal/Bodingly's prompt was: After the accident, Danny is stuck on the wrong side of the now broken portal. What does he do to try to get home? Naturally, I had a blast with it. As this is a Phic Phight fic it's 100% first draft, so please excuse any egregious typos and other mistakes. I'll sneak through here in a month or two and clean it up later. I hope you all enjoy Danny falling down for half an hour! Title comes from The Presets' "A New Sky."

Danny wakes up.

Considering just how hard he got pitched out of consciousness before this, it's kind of a relief.

The first thing he's aware of is being sore, more sore than he can ever remember being in his life. Breathing hurts. The instinctive curling up in wordless protest to this whole 'being awake' thing hurts more. He doesn't know what he's laying on but at least it doesn't feel like the cold tile floor of the lab. He stills, takes shallow breaths, reluctantly cracks his eyes open.

All he sees is broad, smeary strokes of greens, unnaturally bright on a gloaming backdrop deepening to blacks and violets. He blinks to clear his vision. His vision remains uselessly blurred. He swallows, grimacing at the dry click of his throat and the way his chapped lips stick when he opens his mouth. "Sam...? Tucker?"

His voice comes out in a low croak; weird to his ears in a way he doesn't know what to think of, so he doesn't. He's more concerned about how there's no answer anyway.

He tries to brace himself despite his soreness, to sit up and rub the bleariness out of his eyes, but he sort of—wobbles, instead. There's nothing under him to brace against.

There's... nothing under him...?

He squints around harder, trying to make sense of all this too-bright green and backlit black. Perspective is virtually non-existent. All he can tell for sure is that he's floating in empty space.

"Uh," he says intelligently.

"Uh," he repeats with more appropriate panic.

"What—augh—AAA—!" And other similarly useful comments sputter out of him while he flails around like a drowning man for a while, clawing around in a blind panic and catching purchase on a big heaping pile of zilch. Where is he, where is this, what is this, he's falling, is he falling, he can't tell if he's falling—

Something catches his eye, weird enough to slow his scrambling. His glove, to be exact. He's still wearing his embarrassingly tacky jumpsuit, but... its colors have inverted? Black gloves are now a white so bright to make his eyes hurt if he looks too closely; the white of his upper arm is now a black so dark it seems to suck the diffuse white light coming from—his gloves? Are his gloves glowing?

He peers closer at the hem of his glove to the body of the suit, compares it to collar, belt, and boots, all of which are the same eye-wateringly bright white. Yup. That is a noticeable, low-level glow. Aura. Something. Why the fuck is he glowing?

He notices something beyond his immediate focus, something that wasn't there before. Or he got turned around while panicking about this whole 'is he falling or isn't he' insanity. Who cares. There's something a lot closer than all this freaky, acrylic paint-like smears of color all around him. There's the Portal. He's never been happier to see it in his life, and starts dog-paddling towards it even as he belatedly registers something's different about it. He can't make it out at this distance; he's maybe... 20 yards from it? 30? Perspective is still out the window even with something solid to focus on. It's farther away than it looks from the foot of the stairs down to the lab, anyway.

It takes roughly an eternity to paddle to it, though really it's probably only a couple minutes. Everything around him—and above, and below—remains terrifyingly empty and impossible the whole way over. It's so quiet. Dead of night quiet. He pushes that observation away to deal with later as his gloved hands make a satisfying smack against the Portal's riveted steel frame. He's—floating, ugh—near the top of it, giving him a bizarre top-down angle that makes it seem alien simply for having never seen it this way before. It's still the most normal thing around by a country mile.

Maybe literally.

Maybe he shouldn't think about that.

He hooks his fingers on the edge of the frame to keep from drifting beyond it, only noticing then that there's nothing past it. Empty swirling void continuing ad nauseum, sure, okay, that's still obviously, weirdly, a thing. But the Portal itself isn't just a big frame slapped up against the lab's wall, it's got a tunnel going back about 12 feet. It's what he was standing in when the whole world went electric-white and vanished on him.

And the tunnel's not here now.

There's just the octagonal frame with the red alarm light flickering weakly a few feet from him, its black-and-yellow striped doors half shut on empty space. There's only the frame.

Carefully—and with no small amount of growing dread—he leverages himself down along the frame for a closer look. Confirmation that this really is all there is. A big, useless hunk of steel to cling to in an otherwise empty stretch of who-knows-what. He swallows, fighting panic. There's an on/off switch next to the Portal back home—is this that Portal? A copy? Where's the rest of it?—but there's nothing next to this one. He pulls himself back up to tap his fingers on the alarm light; it flickers a little more urgently, but nothing else. Nothing useful.

"Okay," he whispers shakily. "Okay. This. Don't freak out. There's gotta be a way back—"

His voice fails him as he realizes the extent of what's happened to him. He's not in his parents' lab. He's not in his house, not in Amity Park, not on Earth. Nowhere real looks this—this weird. This impossible. This is impossible, but here he is all the same.

His parents were right. Their Portal worked. It tore a hole right in reality and dumped him out...

He has to focus very, very hard on keeping his breath even, his heart hammering in his chest in a way that feels—of way he wouldn't know how to explain if there were anyone else here to ask. He scans his surroundings with fresh eyes, taking in again the smearing, dripping neon colors splashed across a swallowing darkness as far as he can see in every direction. Far, far away, impossible to even hazard a guess how far, he can make out vague green lumps clustered together. In another direction he can see dots of purple in a sort of uneven stripe. In a third there's something blocky colored a bone-white; at this distance it seems to twinkle like a star.

This is the Ghost Zone. The Portal turned on somehow while he was standing inside it, and it shunted him into the Ghost Zone.

He's in a parallel dimension where ghosts are real.

"Okay," he chatters. "It's fine. I'm okay. There's nothing around me—literally! Ha ha, ha, hngh. Nobody around. There's no—no ghosts. No Sam or Tucker either. They must've been too far away to get—zapped, or whatever. So. Just me here! Alone!" He smacks the Portal again for reassurance. The gesture fails spectacularly. "Just me and this busted Portal. No way to get home—"

No way home.

He has no way to get home. No way to tell Sam and Tucker he's here. No way to tell his parents they were right after all, but can they save the celebration for after they've rescued him?

They're not even going to know he needs rescuing. How could they? From Sam and Tucker's view he just vanished. Blinked out of existence. Literally, ha ha ha.

...Right?

He lets go of the Portal to look at his too-bright white gloves again. Definitely glowing. Definitely not the same color configuration as when he put the stupid jumpsuit on.

...is he dead?

Did he die?

He can't help the deflating balloon squeak that slips out him, immediately backtracking. No way. No no no no, ha ha, absolutely not. He's not dead, he can't be dead. He can't. There's got to be a more logical explanation for ending up in the world's biggest lava lamp. Right?

Okay, okay.

So.

He huddles in on himself, floating in a tense knot as he goes back over—whatever it was, exactly, that happened to land him here in the fucking Ghost Zone.

Sam wanted to sneak into his parents' lab while they were out to take a bunch of pictures, because her grandmother had somehow gotten her hooked on scrapbooking. Danny figured, whatever, they always took a million years grocery shopping, so what was the harm of going down to the lab for ten minutes? Then Tucker'd found the jumpsuit rack and made fun of Danny for having a custom ghost hunting jumpsuit, which was fair. For all that Danny'd never asked his parents to make him one, he still had one. Jazz did too, for that matter, but she wasn't home for Tucker to make fun of her too, and if she had been she would've blown a gasket at Danny for going in the lab without their parents. Then Sam got the bright idea to get Danny to put the stupid thing on and pose around the lab. Tucker salvaged his best friend cred by agreeing with Danny that that was stupid, but there's never been any talking Sam out of an idea once her eyes light up that eagerly. So, into the suit he got, zipping it up over his clothes and fidgeting when it bunched his jeans up uncomfortably—

He's not uncomfortable now.

Well, aside from the whole-body soreness and near-overwhelming panic, that is. Point is, the jumpsuit feels fine now. He fumbles for the zipper at his throat and tugs it down enough to see if—

Yyyyup, he can unhappily confirm he's not wearing a shirt under this stupid jumpsuit anymore, which likely means the rest of his clothes are... gone. Apparently.

Where the fuck would his clothes go if he's still wearing the stupid jumpsuit?

He takes a shaky breath. Right. Getting off track. So. He put the jumpsuit on, posed around the lab feeling like an idiot and increasingly worried his parents would come back home in time to see him looking like he cared about whatever craziness they did down here. Then they ended up in front of the Portal, and they talked about it. His parents have been trying to make a functioning hole in reality since they were in college, something like 20 years ago now, with no luck. The three of them talked about what it would be like if his parents did get this thing working one day, how cool it would be to have a portal to another world full of creatures straight out of horror movies. Sam had taken a shot of him alone outside the Portal, then goaded him into the tunnel itself. He'd reluctantly gone in and, mindful of all the thick cables tangled up on the ground, kept one hand on the tunnel wall for balance.

But.

But he'd heard something click, felt something shift under his fingers, right before the world dissolved in white-hot blast of pain.

Well.

Okay.

That explains the soreness. And also the maybe-deadness.

Fuck.

"I really hope I'm not dead," he half-jokes to himself, intending to make a self-deprecating crack that he'd make a really boring ghost, but at that exact moment there's a harsh flash! of white light that leaves him blinking green afterimages at his suddenly bare hands.

Then he's falling.

Like, for sure this time.

He doesn't scream so much as make a tortured shriek like an abused dog toy as everything around him becomes a dizzying and flashing stream of bright and dark, bright and dark. Mostly shades of neon green and too-dark black, interspersed with purples and blues and one startlingly huge red thing that makes a sound like a jet engine as he plummets by it. He sees chunks of earth that look like they'd been scooped up from somewhere Earth-adjacent and dumped here to float in empty space, stained deep blues and maroons and almost-normal shades of green. He glimpses a few crumbling ruins, big wandering shapes of stone blocks and wood and polished metals. He chokes out a mangled cry for help once, twice, three times, and still he's falling. Still he's alone.

He hits a chunk of earth about the size of his mattress and it falls apart to smoke, only slowing his momentum for the moment of painful impact. He can't tell if he broke anything, but it sure did knock the wind out of him. He spends a terrible eternity gasping for air, clawing at the green patches of mist and praying to grab something solid.

No such luck.

He falls.

He falls.

He falls.

It occurs to him, once he's gotten his breath back, that he wasn't falling before. In fact, he was doing a bang up job of floating just fine. So what changed?

Doing his best—admittedly an all-time low, but his current circumstances are, to put it frankly, pretty fucking sub-optimal—to ignore his horrible situation, he looks at his hands. Definitely not wearing gloves anymore, somehow, and also definitely not glowing for that matter. He looks down at the rest of himself nervously—then sighs with relief. Oh good, not naked. He's back in his jeans and T-shirt, and not a scrap of him is glowing.

So he needs to be glowing to float here? Maybe? Sure. Why not. Okay, so how does he start glowing again? Why did he stop glowing?

"I really hope I'm not dead," he repeats, though he's falling so fast his words are torn away before he can hear them. "Okay, sure, why not. I hope I am dead?"

Nope.

"Jumpsuit. Jumpsuit. I want my stupid jumpsuit!"

Nope.

"I'D LIKE TO STOP FALLING PLEASE!"

Nope.

"FLYING! FLOATING! I'M DEAD! GHOSTS FLY! STOP FALLING! CHANGE BACK! CHANGE CHANGE CHA—"

Another harsh flash!

Now he's falling, but in a stupid glowing jumpsuit.

For fuck's sake.

He scrunches his eyes closed and imagines as hard as he can that he's no longer falling, feeling like a complete idiot but well on his way of trying the Peter Pan route of scrounging up as many happy thoughts as he can if that's what it'll take to save his probably-dead idiot ass from double-dying on any of the chunks of land hurtling up at him at what feels like Mach 7.

Come on.

Come on.

There's a hard, choking yank that whips him around like the farthest a bungee rope can strain before snapping. His limbs go flailing, his neck pops painfully, but the horrible whistle of wind in his ears stops abruptly. When he dares to open his eyes he's gratified to find himself looking at a patch of ground thick with overgrowth he'd barely managed to hit not ten feet below him. "Ha! Haha! Yes! I did it! I—whoa—!"

His recovered floating ability bails on him again, and he goes crashing face first into a very thorny bush. Hot lines ignite all over his exposed head and scalp. Even while yelping and trying to shake himself free he's grateful for the stupid jumpsuit. It's thick enough to keep the three-inch long brambles safely away from his skin, and dead or not he's apparently something enough to still feel pain.

Eventually he pulls free of the death-bush, falling on his ass with an undignified but thoroughly relieved, "Oof!"

He decides sitting there for a while is an excellent idea. At least until the world, or zone, or whatever, stops spinning so dramatically. It sure feels like his heart's going all out in his chest, which is an important tally in the Not Dead column. He drags one shaking hand across his face and ends up with neon green smeared all across his palm instead of blood from where the brambles scratched him, which is an unhappy tally in the Fuck I AM Dead column. Glowing and floating probably belongs in that column too. Things look grim.

It's at that moment the death-bush snarls.

He looks at it, already leaning away in case of—something, and yelps when a skeletal arm shoots out and grabs his ankle.

"No," he tells it firmly. "Absolutely not. Off."

"Graaakhhhhugh," says the death-bush, or the ambulatory skeleton lurking inside, or maybe it's some sort of horrible plant-skeleton-ghost combination. Who cares, Danny wants nothing to do with it.

"I—said—get—off!" He punctuates each word with a wild kick of his leg, then yelps again in disgust as the arm falls apart at its green-limned joints. Bits of bone float to the reddish earth too slowly, like they're underwater, or on the moon, or in a dimension where gravity's some kind of optional. That little middle finger to physics is maybe the most upsetting thing Danny's seen so far.

A pair of red lights flash deeper in the depths of the bush, which all in all seems like fair warning of things wanting to go from bad to worse. He's back in his jumpsuit so floating's an option again. No way he's staying on this hunk of rock with whatever's growling at him. He throws a mock-salute in farewell at the death-bush, firmly stomps all over the instinctual 'don't jump you absolute moron' his brain-stomach-heart all pitch at him, and jumps off the little island.

Naturally, he goes plummeting.

He's torn between screaming and sighing, and ends up making another prolonged deflating balloon squeak all the way down a few hundred feet before he figures out floating again. God, but he's lucky he's dead or dead-enough that whiplash isn't something he needs to worry about, apparently. He definitely would've broken his neck by now otherwise.

Ha ha, look at him, trying to find a positive spin on 'death by lab accident.' And Jazz always says he's got a negative outlook on life. Joke's on her!

Ugh.

Splayed out like a cat being held by an idiot and just as certain he's going to fall to his impending death, he very carefully cranes his head to look back the way he came. He can't even see the Portal anymore. It's a lava lamp hellscape as far as the eye can see. Great.

Okay.

Okay.

Hovering, he's figuring out. Falling, he's already an old pro at. Maybe flying's on the table? Some semblance of control, some way of going any direction other than 'straight down.' He'd be happy with some good old-fashioned 'falling with style' at this rate. Buzz Lightyear, don't fail him now.

He moves at a snail's pace, eventually angling himself vertical again. Up, he thinks as an experiment.

Incredibly, it works.

Of course, he's so surprised by this unexpected achievement he stops thinking in a vaguely upward momentum and so of course goes hurtling downward another hundred or so feet—right into another earthen island.

He lays there awhile, blinking stars out of his eyes.

"Ow," he says eventually.

"HHHHHHHRRRRRRGRAAAAAAAAUGH," something very, very big says.

Danny would very much like to wake up from this bullshit nightmare now. Alas.

This island is a lot larger than the previous one, so it's something like thirty seconds before he finds an edge to throw himself off of. All the while the very, very big something knocks trees the size of redwoods aside like they're so many dominoes, the purple-ish ground shaking like an Etch-a-Sketch. It's all Danny can do to keep his feet under him. He manages one look over his shoulder and immediately wishes he hadn't; those were some teeth.

He jumps. He falls. He keeps falling until the horrible garbage disposal-esque roaring of whatever-that-was fades, then catches himself again. It's less painful this time, so maybe he's getting the hang of it? Sure, why not.

He takes a minute to catch his breath again and get a look at his new surroundings. Neon green on a black backdrop. Cool, cool, loving the variety. Details, details, anything unusual, anything that might try to eat him, apparently—

There's another stretch of island beneath him, maybe about fifty feet below. This one's big enough that its edges disappear into the distant green fog in a way that feels just a touch too Silent Hill for comfort. Not that he's had an abundance of comfort since he woke up here, but still. If anything remotely like the four-legged mannequin monster starts wriggling around down there he is out.

He eases himself down at a far slower pace than he's failed to manage before this, pleased even as he tenses in case of whatever might charge out at him to defend its territory or whatever.

When he touches down something crunches underfoot. He can't help the full-body flinch, bracing for a blow even as all his aching muscles protest.

Nothing happens.

No growling, no snarling, no earth-shaking stomping. Nothing.

Warily he looks out between his forearms, raised to protect his head. No sign of movement. This island's a lot darker than the others he landed on, as well as all the others he hurtled past. Unlike the others this island is entirely barren, just rolling hills of jutting dark green stones in every direction he looks as he lands in a narrow clearing.

A narrow clearing which happens to be full of bones.

He swallows, wincing when his other foot crunches on something despite his care as he steps down fully. Nothing reacts. It's just him in what is, essentially, some kind of ghost ossuary. So that's fun.

Oh. Oh that is definitely a human skull. Time to go.

He takes one step and hears a growl directly behind him. Before he can panic and bolt up the nearest rocky hillside, a woman's voice says, "Hold."

He stays put, shaking. He looks around, seeing nothing but green rocks, green rocks, green rocks, red—

A sphinx roughly the size of a school bus looms over the hillside he fully intended to flee toward, never mind that its—her?—voice sounded like it had come from behind him. It—she? yup, she is definitely a she because those are definitely breasts he definitely shouldn't be staring at. He hastily focuses on her face and instantly wishes he could look elsewhere, because everything about her face screams uncanny valley. Every inch of her is shades of neon red, garish to the point where it hurts his eyes to look at her directly. She has a human face stretched terribly across a lion's skull; her mouth far too wide, her almond-shaped eyes unblinking, her nose a flat arrowhead shape, her cheekbones and jaw jutting harshly. She's bald, or at least doesn't have any more hair—fur—on her head compared to the rest of her. Her shoulders have a distinctive human hunch to them, at war with her lion body and overlong neck. Her wings are the darkest shade of red on her, and even folded Danny can tell her wingspan is ludicrous. All of her is, really, but he's too busy reeling at the toothsome smile she's baring at him to think of the rest of her details.

"Little ghost," she says. He knows she's speaking, but her mouth doesn't move a centimeter. Her voice is low, slow, like the unhurried rumble of a thunderstorm in summer. "Little ghost, you are trespassing."

He breathes.

He breathes.

His heart—or something like it—hammers in his chest.

"I'm sorry," he stammers out. "I—I'm new—here. In this place, I mean. I'm still trying to figure out—everything, really. I keep falling. I fell here. I wasn't trying to come here. I swear."

She considers him with eyes the size of dinner plates. Her irises are the same bright green as the not-blood drying on his palm. Her round pupils are the same shade of red as a human's in a badly timed photograph. "Even so," she says. "You have trespassed on my domain, and so you must answer my riddle."

Oh, great. Danny's never been any great shake with Classical mythology, but he does remember the gist of this one. If ghost sphinxes work anything like the mythological ones, then he's got three options: answer correctly and proceed (to where is a big ol' question mark, but whatever), answer incorrectly and be eaten alive (which explains all the bones), or walk away. Considering he's not trying to go anywhere on this island, and in fact has zero interest in exploring it further, he is A-OK taking the coward's route.

But considering how easy it must be for ghosts—or, ghosts that know what the hell they're doing, unlike him—it must be incredibly easy to skip her riddle entirely and just fly off. And considering just how many bones there are here, he's missing something. He's missing something very, very important.

"I don't get to walk away without answering you, do I?" He asks quietly.

The sphinx makes an even deeper rumbling sound that settles in Danny's diaphragm. It takes him a moment to realize she's purring. "You are wiser than you look."

Considering the size of her fangs, he bites down the snarky retort on the tip of his tongue and shrugs sheepishly instead. "Any chance you'll give a new guy an easy riddle?"

The purring stops.

Fuck.

Her head cocks, birdlike, as she leans forward to appraise him. He tries not to shake, really, but she's enormous. She could swallow him whole if she were so inclined. Considered the cracked heap of bones he's standing ankle-deep in, she is. And he kind of doubt shell make quick work of him. She'll kill him slow.

Double-kill him. Whatever. Who cares. He really doesn't want to be eaten by a giant monster lady.

He exhales slowly, dropping his gaze to her huge paws. Though she has something roughly akin to thumbs, her nails are feline enough to retract wholly. He can only stand there and imagine what they look like, how they'd feel tearing him open. "Okay," he says.

Her exhale another bassy purr. Then she asks him, "What disappears as soon as you say its name?"

Well, shit. And here he was hoping she'd ask him the riddle from the myth. So much for blurting out, "Man!" then bailing as fast as humanly—ghostly?—possible. He rocks back on his heels—wincing when more bones crunch—racking his brain. Math is honestly his strong point. English is something he gets, sure, but all the wacky linguistic tricks that can accompany it are just... not something that comes up in his day-to-day, so he can easily ignore it. Riddles and word problems are things he's always been able to wave off as not worth his time.

Well, today's just chalk full of firsts, isn't it? Make or break time. Or, more accurately, answer correctly or be eaten time.

Nngh.

"Is there a time limit to answering?" He asks nervously.

The sphinx shakes her great head, and takes his question as cue to sit. Her stretched face doesn't twitch an inch from its beatific grin, but her lion's tail does lash irritably. So that's technically a 'no,' sure, but definitely not one he should try to take advantage of.

So. Crunch time.

Maybe don't think of that too literally.

Disappears as soon as you say its name...

Disappears if you speak it.

Disappears if you say it?

Disappears if you speak?

He swallows, looking back up at her large, large eyes. "Um. Is it silence?"

There are three terrible seconds where she only looks at him, as unreadable as a marble statue. Then her eyes wink shut, and she purrs, and Danny just about goes to jelly with relief.

Scratch that. He does go to jelly, at least under the belt. His legs have fucking melted to a twitching black streak of semi-transparent smoke. He makes a very undignified shriek and flails around, only succeeding in losing whatever subconscious grasp on hovering he'd had and landing in a painful heap of well-chewed bones.

The sphinx leans far, far over to peer at him curiously. The grin on her freaky face has shrunk to something that Danny's sure is amusement at his expense. "You are new."

His traitorous legs reappear with a small pop! He glowers at them rather than meet her eyes. She's still sitting on the edge of the bone clearing, and sure she's big, but not big enough to explain how she's stretched out so far that her face is only two scant feet from his.

"What gave it away?" He grumbles, shaking his arm out of a rib cage that is, thankfully, not human-shaped. It's also a lovely shade of pale purple, or his eyes are playing tricks on him.

"How long since your arrival?"

"Uh. Hard to say." He gets to feet, patting he doesn't-wanna-know off his stupid jumpsuit. "Twenty minutes? Half hour, tops."

Her stretched-out mouth gains an unmistakable pitying curl. Great. That's his cue to leave before she decides to put him out of his misery. With her enormous teeth. He clears his throat, drums up a happy thought—not being here, oh, if only—and manages a wobbly hover. "Right. Um. Thank you. For not eating me."

She sits back and this time Danny's looking to see that yup, she was stretched out like a length of taffy. She stretches again, this time more like a normal cat-shaped thing should. Her hooked claws drag deep white furrows in the rock; her yawning mouth—also neon green—is lined with at least twice as many teeth as any cat-shaped thing should have.

Well. That was only mildly horrifying.

She settles back into a stiff sitting position, lion's tail curling over her paws as she looks down her nose at him. "You would be wise to take greater care than this," she cautions. "I am not so terrible as what slumbers in the deep places."

Danny shivers, more than a little dismayed to be fed a line straight out of a cheesy fantasy novel. By a sphinx, no less. But mostly he feels like he's in dire need of a magic sword or something to deal with whatever other horrible monster he comes across that might not be as chill as this one. Or Gandalf. If sphinxes are real here maybe he'll get lucky and come across a ghost wizard on the next island he crash-lands on. Hopefully it won't want to kill him too, though with how things are going so far his hopes are pretty low.

He musters up a weak smile. "Right. I'll try my best. Um, actually, now that you mention it? I'm kinda having a hard time going any direction but down. Any advice?"

As answer she unfolds her wings, confirming that her wingspan is, in fact, ludicrous. It's not especially helpful though.

"Uh, that's... they're very nice. Very pretty. But I don't have wings, so—"

The rest of his stammering is mercifully cut short when he's sent ass over tea kettle by the heavy downwash of her wings as she takes off, so much faster than something her size should be capable of. By the time Danny's figured out which way is up again—a feat in itself, considering how everything everywhere looks like technicolor vomit—she's a red blip in the distance.

Well, damn. If she expects him to follow her she better not hold her breath—

The heretofore now perfectly solid ground chooses at that moment to flicker out of existence. Once again, Danny falls. This time he has the delightful variety of several hundred bone bits falling along with him.

"Grrrngh," one of the skulls complains, a single pale light bouncing around its crunched-in sockets.

Danny sighs and musters up the effort to halt himself again. After wincing through a small deluge of dubiously sentient people and animal bones, he's entirely alone again. There's another floating island not too far from, maybe fifty yards above him and a full football field's length off. It'd be a great test of figuring how this flying without wings work, if not for the waterfall of something that's definitely not water careening off one edge. It's a dark red, and thick, and Danny's not sure if he wants to get close enough to confirm whether or not that island is bleeding.

Well. Nowhere to go but up, right?

Well, no. There's still a lot of down under his feet—nope, back to a creepy ghost tail again. Cool. Great. Excellent. Whatever. He peers down into the dark below him, swallowing nervously. It gets a lot darker down than in any other direction. There are streaks and dots of light down there sure, but a lot fewer, and clustered together like they're nervous of what might be down there with them—

And a long, long gray tentacle is swimming up out of the mist. Coming straight for him, no less.

Flash!

Aaaand check it out, there goes his magic glowing jumpsuit and his ability to float with it. Great.