Portals

Concerned

The black-haired teen glanced at Danny over his shoulder. "You don't mind if I take him home first, do you?"

Danny shook his head. "Not at all. Seriously."

***

Danny had never liked bunk beds.

It wasn't an unfounded fear. When he was seven he was forced to share a bunk with Jazz, and she had insisted on taking the lower one. Now, as cheap as his father was, he went and rented the cheapest log cabin he could find for that camping trip. The place looked like a giant splinter waiting to happen, and the bunk was no different. The first night he tried to scale that thing the fifth rung of the ladder gave out as he put his foot on it.

He had taken on Vlad countless times, been tossed through walls by Technus, survived being shot out of the sky by a very upset Valerie Grey, taken on Pariah Dark to become king of the ghosts, and been kicked into the oblivion of a Ghost Zone by his future self (or the closest thing to a future self he had, because if it was up to him, he would never consider an amalgamation of Vlad Plasmius and Danny Phantom to be what remained of his existence in ten years. He'd rather just have a gravestone instead.). But of all that combat, those fights, those times he had been slammed through walls when he could have easily phased through them, the one time he had ever broken a bone was when he fell those four feet to the moldy cabin floor.

His ankle ached in phantom protest as he stared up at the bunk in front of him. "Are you sure you want the bottom bunk?"

Randy tapped his foot impatiently. "Don't be a shoob. It's my bed. Do you want it or not?"

"Yeah, yeah!" Danny chuckled, but his eyes were still locked on the wooden ladder. It looked much more stable, but it was still a bunk bed ladder. Any other time, any other place, he would have just floated up the side of the bed and dropped his equipment on the rumpled bedspread. But here, with Randy....

He planted one bare foot on the scratched and dented pale wood of the ladder. It creaked gently, but made no other real protest. Taking it as a tentative approval of his action on the bed's part, Danny clawed his way up the side of the bunk and lay, panting frantically, a few feet from the ceiling.

"You okay up there?" Randy called.

"Yeah," the half-ghost croaked in response. "Not dead, at least."

The boy glanced up at him, then sat down heavily on the bed. The whole piece of furniture shook, making Danny clutch the sides of the mattress in terror. "Well, then come on down. We need to talk."

Honestly, the ghost boy let out a soft snicker. He had expected to hear that sentence out of Sam's mouth at some point, but hearing it from this kid was more than a little ridiculous. But then the bed creaked and he froze again. He could not deal with this thing. So he pressed one fingertip to the pillow top and risked turning a part of it invisible. Randy had his head in his hands, so Danny let out a relieved sigh and let himself drift a few inches upwards. The bed let out a sigh as well, but Danny still mimed climbing the ladder down as he drifted back to the floor. Randy looked up as his feet smacked the hardwood floor.

The slight teen would never admit it, but the words of the Nomicon were running around his head. Particularly, the ones from that afternoon and the ones written messily on a scrap of paper shoved into a box alongside the Ninjanomicon and the Ninja mask that he had found in his room that summer.

You can't tell anyone.

Howard had figured it out on his own, and Debbie Khan had been a hair shy of his secret as well. But this boy didn't seem to have a clue what the Ninja even was, yet he acted like the Nomicon was the scariest thing in the world. And he could open the book. Only the Ninja could open the book.

Randy mulled over the possibilities. There weren't too many. Maybe the kid was a past ninja who didn't undergo the Ultimate Lesson? No, he was far too young. Or another one of McFist's droids? No. He had spent three hours with this kid and he hadn't seen a single rivet anywhere. Viceroy wasn't that good. The only other thing he could come up with was a passed-over candidate for Ninjahood, out for revenge. But he looked absolutely destitute, with dirt smudges on his white shirt around the red logo and torn jeans. So instead, he asked the most pressing question on his mind.

"Are you a runaway?"

Danny glanced up at him and blinked. "A runaway? No. I'm just extremely lost."

Randy frowned at this. "What happened?"

Danny couldn't exactly say "I got sucked into a mysterious portal in the Ghost Zone," and expect this kid to understand. So instead: "I fell asleep on a bus while trying to visit my uncle. The driver must have reached the end of the line, dropped me on the curb, and taken all of my stuff."

Randy winced at this. He wouldn't put it past bus drivers from Norrisville to be that underhanded. "Do you know where the route started at?" He drifted to the desktop computer that crouched on his desk. "What's your hometown?"

Danny felt a jolt of hope. "Amity Park."

Randy typed in something, then shook his head. "Sorry, McFist Maps isn't picking it up. Are you sure that's what the town's called?"

Danny tried to ignore the insult to his intelligence. "Who is this McFist guy? His name's on everything."

Randy's eyes widened. "Do you not have McFist Industries where you're from?" Danny shrugged. "Man, you must be missing out on so much... Here look at this." He typed in another command, and a image of a blond mustached man with a green prosthetic hand appeared on the screen.

Danny jabbed a finger at the picture. "I've seen him! He's married to the blonde woman who got turned into a monster today, isn't he?"

Randy frowned. "Yeah, that was Bash's mother-- wait, how would you know that? I didn't see you anywhere near the stank attack."

"You weren't near the monster attack, either. There was a ninja, though." Danny retorted. He watched Randy fidget. Oh yeah. He was onto something, and the Nomicon/Ghost 抖阴社区r book had the answer.