Portals

Attacked

Danny Fenton sat on the roof, scribbling a half-planned attack on the Sorcerer with a piece of chalk he had stolen from a classroom. With a sigh he scrubbed the drawing out. It would never work. The only way he could think of getting back home was defeating the Sorcerer in combat and forcing him to open a portal into the Ghost Zone. And from what Randy had told him, that hadn't happened in eight hundred years.

His ghost sense went off and he sighed. The world always seemed to get a bit darker after the blue mist left his lips. "Congrats, Randy, you found me, now would you—"

"Oh, I'm not Randy," a female voice chuckled.

He spun in panic to see a girl with long fluttering hair that half stood on end, pure white with black chewing at the ends. Her white, silver zipper covered jacket stretched down her arms to where black fingerless gloves coveted her hands. Black pants covered her legs up to white knee-high boots, which were floating a good six inches off the ground. Black smoke spun around her body and seemed to spiral off her silver eyelashes, ones that framed pale green, glowing eyes.

"Y-you're a ghost!" Danny fumbled to unhook the thermos from around his waist, but a well-placed plasma bean launched it out of his hands and over the edge of the roof. It landed with a thud on the school lawn, rolling a few times before stopping in the middle of the grass.

"Oh, we can't have any of that," the girl giggled, floating a bit closer. Danny jumped onto the edge of the roof, then his arms pinwheeled to stop him from falling off backwards. What was he doing? He was half-ghost!

The white ring flickered up his body and he snarled. "How do you like me now, you nut case?"

"Well done, Danny. Now let's see if that little parlor trick can save your life." The mist curled into a massive ball and shot into Danny's chest, sending him tumbling off the roof. It smelled worse than the bathrooms at Greg's Game Hole, which thirty seconds before the ghost boy didn't think was possible. It was like the smoke that came off of Pariah Dark's Crown of Fire had somehow gone bad. And it was stopping him from using his powers.

Crap! His powers!

He struggled to free himself as the three story fall seemed to take an age. Then fabric wrapped around his middle and he was jerked back up again, the breath forced from his lungs.

The Norrisville Ninja held the half-ghost up by the red scarf that he had caught him with, frowning under the mask. "Danny? This is no time to play dress up! What is this?" He peeled the black gunk off of the logo on Danny's chest and sniffed it. "Is this black stank?"

"I don't care what you call it." Free of the mist, Danny flickered intangible so that the scarf fell limp next to him. "It stops me from using my powers. And we have a major problem."

"What?"

"There's a ghost. On the roof. That shoots that crap." He pointed at the black syrup that now dripped off the Ninja's gloved fingers onto the tan tile floor inside the school. "I really, really need your help."

"I don't know how much I can do. Me fighting ghosts?" He nodded at the fluttering scarf. "I'm kind of out of my league."

"But you don't get affected by the black stuff. Which is why I need you."

"For what?"

"Would you get offended if I said 'human shield'?"

"Of course I would." The Ninja puffed up his chest. "I'm not a human, I'm a Ninja!"

Danny rolled his eyes. "Of course you are, ninja shield. Now let's go."

"So how do we get the-eeheeree!" The Ninja squealed as Danny grabbed him under his arms and hauled him out the second story window.

"Stop squirming! Don't make me drop you," the half-ghost warned as he tugged him up, legs disappearing into a tail.

"Drop me?" The Ninja's fingers curled painfully around Danny's arms. "Please don't."

Slowly Phantom lugged him over the edge of the roof, then went for the Fenton thermos that was supposed to be hanging from his shoulders. It wasn't there. He spun and saw the glint of metal from the thermos in the yard. "Crap!"

"So you made a new friend." The girl ghost appraised the Ninja with a curious eye. "Hmm. This might be more difficult than I thought."

"You have that right." Danny blasted a pair of plasma beams at her that she twirled away from, giggling.

"Ah ah ah, look but don't touch." She spun back around like a dancer. "Danny Phantom and the Ninja, biffers. Guess that's someone else I have to kill. Pity there's no Nasty Burger around here."

"Dan?" The plasma glow in Danny's hands got brighter. "Is that you? I swear, if you're overshadowing some poor girl—"

"Nope. It's all me." She shot more black mist at them, but Danny dived behind the Ninja, who got the brunt of it in the face. As Danny peered out from behind the blinded hero, the girl winked. "Call me Phankasm."

Danny made a face. "Phankasm? That's even worse than Invis-o-Bill."

"Oh, shut up, Phantom. It wasn't like you were all that creative when you came up with your alter ego, hmm? The only thing different is a tiny, itty bitty change in your last name." Phankasm winked as she fazed through the roof of the school, smiling at the dumbfounded expression on Danny's face.

"Holy cheese," the Ninja blinked, wiping black stank out of his eyes. "She knows who you are."

"Yeah," Danny muttered. "Add that to the long, long, long list of mortal enemies who know my secret identity. The only question is: why did she only attack me when there was a school full of innocents below us? It's a much easier target, especially since I would have never known if she appeared in, say, the cafeteria. But she came up here knowing  she was picking a fight with another half-ghost."

The Ninja chuckled. "I would have known if she attacked the cafeteria. Maybe she was so scared of me that she came up here and attacked the weak link instead."

"Oh, I'm so not the weak link here. I doubt the Sorcerer's pet rat would be scared of you and that huge scarf of yours."

"Hey! No one insults my scarf. It's helped me out of a lot of tricky situations. You just insult it the next time it saves your life."

Danny groaned, rubbing his forehead. "This is such a stupid argument. Let's just agree that the weak link is Howard and move on."

"Hey, I— oh. Actually, I wholly agree with that. The weak link is Howard."

"Okay." Danny nodded as he held the door open for the Norrisville Ninja, flinching away as Randy unmasked himself. "Howard it is. Now I need to go and get my thermos back."