Edited 4/2020

Real Life
A Danny Phantom FanFiction by Cordria

(Prologue)

In Which Heroes are Not Born, They are Made

In real life, there is no such thing as a superhero.

In real life, the innocent get targeted more often than not.

In real life, people can't be put into nice, little categories of good or evil.

In real life, the line between right and wrong blurs into nonexistence.

In real life…

Danny's basement door - painted Day-Glo orange, the words 'Fenton Laboratory Keep Out' stenciled in black letters - creaked loudly as it opened. Sam's chipped, black-painted fingernail flicked a light switch, a dangling light bulb illuminating a steep stairwell headed into the basement. "The infamous lab," she said, "you're finally going to let us see it?"

"There's nothing to see," Danny muttered as he pushed past her and clumped down the stairs. "It's just a basement."

Sam bit back a tiny smile as Tucker brushed past her. She had seen the tiny flush that had crept onto Danny's face at the mention of his parents' laboratory.

"But it's the basement!" Tucker was almost stepping on Danny's heels by this point, craning his head to try and see around the corner at the bottom. "You've been dropping hints about this place since elementary school – I'm dying to see it!"

Danny shot Sam a glance and rolled his eyes. She carefully made her way down the steps, just as excited as Tucker to see the 'insane' inventions, but not nearly as willing to risk tripping and falling. Danny reached the bottom and flipped a light switch. Brilliant light burst into existence, spilling into the shadowy recesses of the stairs.

"Come on," Tucker continued as he tripped down the last few stairs, "it's got to be interesting; your parents design secret weapons for the government…" he trailed off as he stepped around the corner, his eyes widening.

Sam grinned at his speechlessness for a moment before she glanced around the wall that separated the stairs from the lab. "Whoa," she whispered.

Illuminated by dozens of mismatched lamps and fluorescent bulbs, the walls and ceiling were covered in aluminum foil that had been stapled and duct-tapped and was peeling in places. Rickety garage-style metal shelves lined the walls and formed narrow aisles along the left side of the room. Huge tables took up most of the open space in the middle of the room, and to the right was a large circle of steel built into the wall. And everywhere there were things: blenders, toasters, fans, televisions, radios and computers, boxes of wires, old phones, broken toys, and at least one ancient refrigerator. Everything was piled haphazardly on the shelves or stuffed into overflowing boxes. Cascading from the tables, the wiry corpses of the least-fortunate electronics sat in half-taken-apart chaos.

"We never come down here because it's a death trap," Danny sighed. "Watch out for the black shelves – they tend to collapse if you breathe on them wrong."

"Wow," Tucker whispered, poking at something with wires sticking everywhere.

Sam snorted and folded her arms. "I guess I can't complain about you not recycling anymore. Your parents are doing a wonderful job."

"Let's just find that stupid game and get out of here. We're not supposed to be down here." Danny slipped between two folding tables covered in the remains of at least two vacuum cleaners and made his way over to the shelving units. "Where do you think they put it?" He grabbed a step stool and disappeared down the narrow aisle between two shelving units.

Sam leaned against the end of one of the old shelves, dust accumulating on her black shirt from the long-forgotten boxes. Brushing herself off, her elbow knocked against an old thermos that had been perched on one of the shelves. It wobbled, crashed to the floor, and rolled under a shelf.

Danny's voice echoed from the shelves. "Can you make sure that gets picked up?"

"Why?" Sam raised a skeptical eyebrow. "What's one more thermos on the ground?"

"My parents are on an inventing streak. If you leave it on the floor there's a chance they'll try to make it into some kind of rocket or inter-dimensional container or something and we'll end up drinking radioactive hot chocolate next winter. Anything on the floor is considered fair game."

She stared at the shelving unit that hid the thermos. "It's that bad?"

There was the sound of soft laughter. "Last fall my parents messed with the stove, and do you remember what happened to the turkey we had at Thanksgiving? Same thing."

Tucker sighed happily and nodded, but Sam shivered and grimaced. She remembered that dinner fiasco perfectly. "That's one of the reasons why I chose to become a vegan last year."

"What was wrong with it?" Tucker muttered as he picked up a half-together radio and fiddled with the wires, "It was delicious."

Danny poked his head out of the aisle to stare at him for a second, blinking, before shaking his head. "It was glowing and levitating, Tucker. You and Dad were the only two people that dared to eat it."

Tucker shrugged. "So? It was good."

Danny grabbed a new box to look through, and Sam bent down to pick up the fallen thermos. Crouched on the floor, reaching under the shelf to grab the thermos, a sparkle caught her eye. Squinting through the densely-piled junk that littered the lab, Sam studied the large, round object that was built into a wall on the other side of the lab. It was a hole in the wall, perhaps six feet around and about six feet deep, jumbled with wires and metal bits and surrounded by thick metallic plates and electronics. Sam, retrieving the thermos from under the shelf, stood up. "What's that?"

"What's what?" Danny asked distractedly. "Yes!" He pulled the dusty game out of the battered box and held it up in triumph, he knocking into another box sitting dangerously close to the edge and sending it tumbling to the ground. Old fishing equipment clattered loudly as it fell into a jumbled mess at the base of the stool. "Darn it!"

"That." Sam pointed at the portal.

Danny glanced at the round hole and sighed. "Oh, that. My parents are working on it. It's supposed to be some kind of TV thing where you can see the 'other side'."

"Other side?" Sam asked, curious.

"You know... ghosts and stuff."

Sam knew that Danny's parents were part-time 'ghost hunters' – the thought that this might be one of their paranormal inventions made her smile. She loved spooky ghost stories.

Tucker set a broken radio on the table. "Does it work?"

"No," Danny snorted. "Of course not. It's one of my parent's 'ghost' inventions. You know how well those things work."

Tucker shrugged. "Come on, Danny – your parents are brilliant inventors. They get into all sorts of science magazines and their 'secret' government stuff works really well. Didn't they get that hovercraft thing working?"

"The speeder? I suppose that worked okay, but none of their ghost stuff ever works. Besides the fact that there're no ghosts to find, their ghost inventions all use psychotropic triggers – you know, the idea that if you believe that something will work, it will."

"I'm still surprised you know what psychotropic means," Tucker grinned.

Danny jumped off the step stool, scowling down at the pile of fishing equipment on the floor. "Well, I had to look it up..."

"And then you had to have Jazz tell you what you looked up," Sam added, snickering. Her grin only grew when her best friend switched his glower from the mess on the floor to his friends.

"Still. None of their stupid ghost inventions work."

Sam shook her head and took a few steps towards the portal, unable to take her eyes off it. "Can we go look at it?"

"You know my parents don't want us down here. We'll get 'the speech' if they get home and find us in the lab." He slid out from between the rickety shelves with the newly-found game in his hands and glanced around.

"The speech?" Tucker asked.

"It's dangerous; you'll get electrocuted; you might die; etcetera, etcetera…" Danny muttered in a horrible impression of his father. "It takes about three hours, depending on who gives it."

Sam nodded, still gazing at the portal. "But can we see it?"

"Uh..." Danny sounded dubious, obviously wanting to head back upstairs, but Sam and Tucker both started to beg at the same time.

"Please? Pretty please?"

Sighing, Danny gave in. "Sure, fine. For a minute."

Sam worked her way over to the portal, still absently holding the thermos she had picked up. "It'd be so cool if it really worked, you know. We'd get to see ghosts and dead people and…"

"You are so Goth," Tucker pronounced, following a step behind her.

Sam glared at him and punched him in the shoulder. "Why doesn't it work?"

Shaking his head, Danny said, "You mean other than the fact that you have to believe it'll work in order for it to turn on?" He paused with one eyebrow raised, studying the mess of wires. "Come on, Sam – no amount of belief will make this thing work. You can't make a portal that'll show you the afterlife."

Tucker nodded. "But it'd still be fun if it did work."

"Yeah, totally," Danny said. "To get to see what's on the other side? That'd be fantastic. But it's never going to work."

A small grin flickered across Sam's face. "So it'll never work… but you definitely have to go in so I can get a picture for my scrapbook."

"Me?" Danny asked.

Sam nodded, her smile firmly in place. "It's your basement." She gestured with the thermos.

"It's my parent's lab."

Tucker crossed his arms and joined the argument. "They're your parents."

Danny looked from one to the other. "I'm not going to get to go upstairs and continue pretending my parents are normal until I do this, huh?"

Both shook their heads, identical smiles on their faces. "Picture, picture, picture," Tucker chanted.

Danny scowled and thrust the game at Tucker, making him wince when a corner dug into his chest. "Hold this," he muttered as he turned to dig through a discarded box next to the portal, pull out a set of ugly white clothes, and shake off a layer of dust.

"What's that?" Tucker asked in horror.

Sam winced. "Yeah, it's a fashion disaster – and that's saying something coming from me."

Danny held it up and sighed. "It's called a 'clean suit' or something. If I get any kind of dust or hair or something on their 'precious experiments', I'll never hear the end of it. The 'contaminating the lab' lecture was last timed at over five hours, and they've probably come up with some new stuff since then. So shut it." He yanked the white pants on over his jeans and threw the jacket over his shirt, not bothering with the myriad of buttons.

While Danny snapped a black belt around his waist to hold the baggy pants up, Sam studied the disaster of a lab. There was dust and debris everywhere. "They care about dirt?" she whispered to herself.

"Don't ask," Danny muttered. "Trust me on this one: it's not worth asking."

Tucker snickered. "Well, if you die, at least you'll look stupid."

With a glare, Danny stepped onto the small bit of floor inside the portal that wasn't covered in wires and cords, then turned around to pose for the picture.

Sam set the thermos down on a nearby table and pulled off her backpack to dig for her camera. "You've got your dad's head on your jacket."

Glancing down, Danny wrinkled his nose when he spotted the cartoon-ish face of his father stuck to his jacket pocket. "Ever since he got these stupid stickers, he's been sticking them on everything." He ripped off the Fenton sticker, wadded it into a tiny ball, and threw it in the general direction of the trash can on the other side of the room. "Better?"

She nodded and grinned. "So? Do you think they'll ever get it to actually work?"

Danny shook his head. "I don't think they even know where to start right now. They were really depressed that it wasn't working. I think they gave it their best shot already."

Tucker chuckled. "Maybe you have to believe that it'll work."

Danny laughed. "Yeah, the great Danny Fenton," he posed heroically with his hands at his waist, taking on a dramatic tone, "fated to save the world by turning on his parents' crazy, lame-ass ghost portal!" He grinned, letting his hands drop and shaking his head in disbelief. "Got that picture yet, Sam?"

Tucker snapped a picture with his phone while Sam was fiddling with settings on her camera. "Yeah, and it'll be all over the school by the end of the week. Maybe sooner."

"Hey!" Danny lunged at Tucker just as Sam's camera flashed. His feet caught on the wires and he fell against the portal wall. Pushing himself back upright, his hand hit a small button. There was a distinct 'click' that echoed through the lab.

As he heard the small click of the button, a worried thought jumped up from deep within his mind. Could a ghost portal really work? And, for just a split second, he truly believed that one could.

That was all it took.

The greatest invention Jack and Maddie Fenton would ever build whirred to life amongst the startled screams of the three teenagers. Danny was swallowed in a flash of painful light.

-In real life, heroes are not born, they are made.

(end prologue)