Portals

Revealed

"Ninja? Oh, you mean the Norrisville Ninja?" Randy let out a nervous chuckle. He watched Danny's eyes narrow at him. Cheese, this shoob was even worse than Debbie. And much quicker, too. "He's the town hero. Always there to smoke bomb and stab a robot with a ninja sword."

Danny sat down on the bottom bunk, wincing slightly as the wood creaked. He tucked his feet under the bed, but jumped when his foot touched something plushy. He pulled it free; it was a stuffed bear, or more accurately, the head of one. It looked like it had been violently ripped off. "Town hero, huh? Amity Park's got one of those too."

"Really? Then how come McFist Maps can't find it?"

"The Internet doesn't have the answers to everything." Danny thought back to Sampson, the female purple something-or-other gorilla that the Internet said was a guy.

Randy glared at the screen. "What? Since when?"

"Since forever," Danny chuckled. The whole town was just like Tucker, only with shinier, more expensive looking machines. He just had to play the same notes with Randy that he played with his technogeek friend. "Look, it doesn't matter if you've never heard of Amity Park. To be honest, I didn't know this 'Ninja' guy existed until about two hours ago."

"Never heard of the Ninja?" Randy gaped. "How?"

Danny couldn't help the maniacal grin that had spread across his face. "Same way you've never heard of Danny Phantom."

His brow contorted. "Who?"

The grin got a hair wider. "Exactly. Oh, man, this is awesome!" He clenched his free hand and weighed the stuffed bear head in his other one. "I've always wanted to do this when the fate of the world isn't at stake. Or have my older sister tell my parents behind my back to explain to them that I'm dead."

Randy was giving him a look that was a mix of incredulity and shock. "What the juice are you talking about?"

"You believe in ghosts, man?"

"Ghosts? Like those things that little kids are scared of?" Randy scoffed. He forced the Halloween suit incident to the back of his mind. "'Course not."

Danny chuckled. "Well, you might wanna start."

"What are you-- holy cheese!" The squeal that erupted from Randy's mouth was uncharacteristic, but that was understandable, given that the half-ghost had tossed up the stuffed bear head and brought up a finger gun. Randy had thought nothing of it until a neon green ray shot out of it and destroyed what was left of his first experiment in Ninja-ing. The charred fabric fluttered to the ground before erupting into a small flickering flame, which Danny snuffed out with the sole of one untied shoe. The grin on his face had warped into something demonic, and Randy scooted back as far as the walls of his room would let him. "What the cheese was that?"

"Do you believe in ghosts now?" Danny let his 'scary eyes' flash, as Vlad Masters had so aptly dubbed them. Then he realized that it may have been overkill for someone who had just been introduced to the concept of ghosts.

But Randy didn't seem all that freaked out. He was crouched on the floor, letting one shred of brown fur dangle between his fingers. "Dude. That. Was. So. Honkin'. Bruce!" His head shot up to lock eyes with Danny's as the half-ghost blew off a trail of ectoplasmic fumes from the tip of his finger. "How'd you do that?"

Danny shrugged. "Lab accident. My parents were looking into parallel dimensions and decided to build a portal to one. It's called the Ghost Zone." He leaned back onto the bed, tucking his arms behind his head and putting up his feet. "Problem was, they could never get it to work." He let out a low chuckle. "Should've realized that they would put the on/off switch inside of it. But a, uh, good friend of mine convinced me to try and explore it. I put my hand on the wall, and next thing I know, Tuck and Sam are staring at me like I was a ghost." He laughed half-heartedly at that. "Turns out, me being inside of that thing when it turned on tacked ectoplasm onto my DNA. And now I can do this." The white ring blinked around his waist, then flickered over his whole body. The black bodysuit covered his form, his eyes turned green and stayed that way, and his hair was washed an eerie bleach white.

Randy looked shellshocked. "Wait. That was you in the square today. You destanked Mrs. McFist."

He shrugged. "Call it what you want, all I did was shoot a roll of toilet paper out of a monster's hands. It didn't look right."

Randy took a cautious step closer. "So you don't know about stank or the monsters here. You were just trying to be a hero like you normally are in Amity Park. Wait, you can touch things, right?"

"Of course I can," he smiled. He let himself float upwards, then reached through the bedpost to grab a model rocket off of Randy's shelf. He winked out of existence for a moment, rocket and all, then floated the rocket over Randy's head as the black haired teen stared at it in awe. A moment later, he touched the model down in its place, then turned visible again and changed back into Danny Fenton.

"Let me think," Randy muttered. "You can walk through walls, disappear, and fly?"

"What can I say?" Danny grinned. "I'm much more unique than the other guys."

"This is so bruce. You have actual superpowers. You're a ghost!"

"Half-ghost, but yeah." Danny walked over to where Randy had dropped his black backpack and pulled out the Ninjanomicon. "Right. I've told you my big secret. What about you?" He ran his fingers over the insignia and showed it to Randy as it glowed green. "Why do you have a Ghost-- er, a book like this? How do you know so much about your Norrisville Ninja, and how that stank stuff works? What does Howard know about you?"

Randy had frozen. "I-- uh--"

"This town hero of Norrisville's, his voice sounds an awful lot like yours. Sometimes it takes more than a mask to hide an identity." Danny drifted up to the top bunk and let himself hang upside down from the mattress. "Tell me, Randy Cunningham: are you the Norrisville Ninja?"