Important Note! Hello everybody! I have been an avid watcher of Danny Phantom since it first premiered, but I haven't written a fanfic until now. Actually, I wrote this one a while ago, but I never uploaded, and since I wrote this way before Memory Blank even came out the way Danny got his powers is a little different from what actually happened, but I hope you all still read it. So, for sake of this story, we're just going to pretend that, that episode never aired. Kay! Anyways, without further ado, I give you my first Danny Phantom fanfiction. Enjoy!

First Fright

Danny Fenton was just your ordinary, everyday, fourteen-year old boy. He had an older sister named Jasmine, Jazz for short, and a father and a mother who loved him. There was only one thing that wasn't normal about his life—his parents. They were two geniuses obsessed with catching deceased paranormal beings, in other words, ghosts. It's all they had ever thought about. Both of them were always down in their lab, which used to be the basement, all day creating strange devices for hunting and catching ghosts made out of common objects. It had been amusing for the first few years, but now it was just plain weird.

It was a bright, sunny Saturday morning and Danny had just woken up. He was downstairs at the kitchen table eating his cereal. He was about to put another spoonful of cornflakes into his mouth when he heard a loud shout come from below the kitchen, making him drop his spoon onto the floor. He growled in frustration and went underneath the table to retrieve it.

"Aha!" Danny's father, Jack, yelled as he ran up the stairs followed closely by his wife, Maddie. "We've done it! And those people down at PI said it couldn't be done!"

Danny had come up from under the table, but had unfortunately hit his head on it. "PI?" he asked as he rubbed his now throbbing head.

"Paranormal Investigations," Maddie informed him. "Your father and I went down there just last week to talk about the molecular recombination of metaphysical morphology."

An ecstatic Jack threw his pointer finger up into the air even though he had no idea what his wife just said. "Right!" he said enthusiastically.

Jazz had just entered the room, looking like she did every Saturday morning. She was wearing her pink bathrobe and her fuzzy blue slippers that she shuffled around in. On top of that her usually nicely combed hair looked like a rat's nest. She walked over to the table, leaned against a chair, and yawned lazily, "What's going on?"

"Your mother and I just had a breakthrough!" their dad screamed.

Jazz winced at the loud sound. "Don't tell me. You found a way to punch through time and space and created a portal to another world so you can bring ghosts here instead of keeping them as far away from us as possible," she said sarcastically.

Danny, Jack, and Maddie stared at Jazz with dazed expressions. "Actually, yes," Jack responded a little disappointed at not being able to explain his new invention.

"I'm right?" Jazz said with a surprised look. "I mean, of course I'm right. I'm always right."

"Big surprise," Danny muttered into his cereal.

"What was that?" Jazz whipped her head around and hissed at him.

"Nothing," he mumbled.

"Children, no fighting over breakfast," Maddie interrupted.

"Hey, I have an idea! Why don't we all go downstairs to see our new invention," said Jack, his enthusiasm obviously back. Danny and Jazz looked at him and before they were even able to respond he bellowed, "Great!" and dragged the pair downstairs with Maddie bringing up the rear.

The lab was filled with normal lab equipment like beakers and test tubes, but it also had an array of strange objects, including the biggest one stuck right into the middle of the wall.

"Is that the portal?" Danny asked, pointing to the door-like mass in the wall.

"Yep!" his dad responded proudly. "Haven't got a name for it yet, but it's sure to be big once we get it working."

"You mean to tell me you don't even know if it works yet?" Jazz asked with her hands on her hips.

"Of course we know it works. All we have to do is plug her in and this baby will be running like a charm," he answered.

He and Maddie ran over to two large orange cords lying on the ground. Jack picked both of the cords up in either hand.

"Here we go!" Jack said, holding them about an inch apart.

Maddie held her hands together in hope and Danny and Jazz stepped back with their hands over their ears, afraid of what was going to happen. Jack plugged the two cords together and everybody held their breath. They stood there for a few moments, but all they got was a small crackle of electricity.

"But… but… but…" Jack said, looking as if about to cry.

"Oh, honey, it's ok," Maddie said, putting a hand on his shoulder, although she seemed quite disheartened too. "We'll try again another time."

"It should've worked," he cried. "Why didn't it work?"

Jack dropped the cord and the pair of them walked up the stairs in disappointment, Maddie still rubbing his back.

"How 'bout we go out and buy that coffee pot you've been wanting to turn into a ghost liquefier. Will that make you feel better?" Maddie asked. Jack nodded in response and followed her up the stairs. "We'll be back in a few hours!" she called.

Jazz folded her arms and lifted an eyebrow. "Humph, knew that wasn't going to work," she said cynically. "When have mom and dad ever made something that actually worked the way it was supposed to?"

Danny thought for a moment. "How 'bout that flashlight that emits that ectoplasmic goo?"

Jazz shook her head. "Remember? That was a side effect. It was supposed to shoot a beam of light that disintegrated ghosts, but since there's no actual ghost to test it on…" she shrugged her shoulders. "I just wish for once we had normal parents. Then maybe I'd be able to live through life without humiliation and torment."

She turned around and trudged over to the stairs, but she momentarily stopped and flipped her head around towards Danny. "Just so you know, I'm going over to Lila's in a little bit."

Danny nodded slowly, still a bit groggy. "Got it—wait, who?"

Jazz rolled her eyes at her little brother. "You know, my friend that I've known for three years that I drive home every day from school and comes over almost every other weekend?"

Danny just stared back at her with wide quizzical eyes.

"Ugh! Honestly!" she exclaimed vehemently. "It's like none of my family know that I have a life outside of them!"

Jazz turned back around in a huff and rushed up to her room, probably in search of a brush to comb out the knots she kept tugging at. Danny had no idea who she had been talking about. He never once remembered Jazz having a friend named Lila ever come over. He just shrugged to himself and chalked it up to a short attention span.

Danny looked back at the machine. It would really have been something if it had actually worked. He felt so sorry for his parents that he wished he could find out some way to help them.

He tilted his head slightly to the side. "Maybe I could just take a peek inside," he said out loud to himself.

He walked over to a rack where two jumpsuits hung—one for him and one for Jazz. Their parents had gotten each of them one last Christmas, though they had never been used. He grabbed his white suit with a black belt, gloves, and collar off of the hanger. He began to pull the suit on as he hopped over to the doors of the portal on one foot. Danny zipped up the outfit and then pushed a red button to the side of the portal. The doors instantly opened with a buzzing sound and he peered inside. Within the portal it was pretty much just a deep hole in the wall with some sort of ray at the end. He walked over to one of the sides of the walls where there were some exposed wires.

Danny took one look at the wires and shook his head. "I have no idea what I'm doing," he said grabbing hold of a clump of wires and unfortunately, a few of them came loose. "Oh, great!" Danny moaned, trying to place the wires back into their correct spots. "I think that's right."

He stepped back and examined them for a minute. "Yeah," he nodded in an attempt to reassure himself.

Danny sighed. There wasn't really much he could do. He turned around to leave, but his foot snagged on a cord lying on the ground. He would've fell flat on his face if the wall hadn't have been there. He flung his hand onto the wall, which stopped him from falling, but he had accidentally pressed a small red button labeled 'on'. Red and white lights flashed and sirens boomed. The yellow striped doors of the portal began to shut.

"Oh, no!" Danny screamed.

He ran for the doors, but he was a moment too late. They closed shut, sealing him inside. Danny started breathing hard. He didn't know what he was going to do.

"Jazz, help!" he yelled, but no matter how loud he screamed she wouldn't have been able to hear him. "Oh, God," he whispered.

He backed up against the wall, but a second later he would regret doing that. An electric shock ran throughout his entire body. A neon green light flashed before his eyes, and his brain, his skin, his bones, everything felt like it was on fire. Then he seemed to go completely numb. He collapsed on the floor and passed out.

Well, that's the first chapter of my story. I hope everybody enjoyed it, and if you didn't, well, I tried. Please R&R! It's much appreciated!