Portals

Angered

"What d'you mean, you could cream me? I could knock a shoob like you flat."

Danny arched an eyebrow. "Oh? Then why haven't you done it yet?"

The skin around the Ninja's eyes tinged pink. "Say that again. I dare you." He pulled a throwing star from somewhere. Probably the same place Danny's father pulled ghost hunting weapons from.

Danny drifted to the roof of a house across the street, sitting on a window ledge and crossing his newly-reformed legs. "Look, I know things are getting stark--"

"Another pun?" The sword was out again. Why did he have the sword out again?! Danny shot upwards, darting out of the throwing stars' range.

"Dude, calm down!"

"No honkin' way! Ninja jump!" Randy leapt to the same roof that Danny had been sitting on just a moment before.

"He announces his moves," the half-ghost muttered. A twitching muscle made his left cheek bounce. "Not even Technus does that. Technus!"

"I don't know who that is!"

Danny jetted upwards again. "You heard that?!"

"Enhanced Ninja senses," Randy growled.

"So you have powers, too," Danny retorted.

"Huh?"

"Superpowers! You have superpowers too!" Danny risked floating a bit closer to the disgruntled Ninja. "It may not be intangibility or flight or ghost rays or something like that, but it is something unnatural that that book gave you!"

The Ninja faltered for the first time. The sword drooped to hit the shingles at his feet. "What?"

"Enhanced senses? Really? You just accept that and can't believe that I can fly?"

"Your legs disappear," was the Ninja's weak retort.

Danny's cheek twitched again. "So? And I can do this." He shut his eyes and concentrated, and a moment later there was a copy of himself floating next to him.

Randy's head darted between the two Phantoms. "There are two of you now?"

"Yeah," the two Dannys said together. "What's wrong--"

"Tengu fire ball!"

"Gah!" Danny and his clone spun away from the orb of flame as it shot past them. It felt like the hair on the back of his neck was singed. They crashed together again, the clone fizzling away. "What was that? Another superpower!"

"The-- the Tengu isn't a superpower. It's a Ninja thing." It was a weak defense, and Randy knew it. "And I guess the bird demon isn't human either."

Danny raised a hand. "I'm not going to ask about that. But yeah. This doesn't make me any less of a... me."

"I'm going to pretend that made sense." The Norrisville Ninja slipped off the roof and dropped to the ground, pulling off the mask. Danny flinched away from the red light, but when he looked down again it was just Randy standing there with the hood of his brand-name jacket up. "Sorry about... all of that."

"It wasn't really that big a deal." Danny drifted down to hover just a few feet off the street, then the white ring flickered around his waist again and he dropped the rest of the way to land in a crouch. "I'm telling you, if I was really trying, you'd be a black smear on the asphalt by now."

"Yeah, right. That clone thing was so bruce, though. And the ice thing you did in the Nomicon...?"

"Just me. No ice balls here." Danny raised a hand, letting an ice crystal form in the air above his palm. "There's some other stuff, but it's a bit complicated to explain without showing you. But we're cool, right?"

Randy had dropped his hood, so Danny couldn't miss the way his eyes flickered between the ghost boy's watery smile and the ice crystal in his hand, nor the way his teeth gritted. So the Ninja hated puns. Danny grinned. Note to ghost: make more puns.

"Yeah, sure, we're cool." Randy turned, but then jerked back around again. "You're bleeding! Did I do that?"

"Yeah, but it's okay." A patch of ectoplasm formed in Danny's hand and he slapped it over the wound. "See? I'm fine."

"No, you are not 'fine.' Sorry, that was so wonk of me." He slipped the mask back on, and while Danny was turned to shield his eyes, Randy muttered something and the ghost boy's arm tingled. At first he thought the makeshift bandage had faded into his skin (they would do that from time to time) but when he turned, it had only fallen off. But the cut was gone.

Randy chuckled. "Please don't tell me your arm was once a mad scientist."

"No. And again, not going to ask." Danny flexed his wrist. "That is so cool."

"Not nearly as cool as that invisibility thing. All I can do is bring dead people back to life and burn things."

"Trust me, there have been weirder things. There was this one time I fought a ghost and ended up connecting my emotions to the weather--" he paused when he saw the look on Randy's face. "Forget it. It was weird then and it's weirder now."

"You've got so many powers. Hard to believe I've been around for twice as many episodes as you have."

"Oh, come on. Mine are thirty minutes, and yours are just fifteen. Plus I've had a few TV movies. You haven't."

"Please. You can't forget I've had a couple two-parters. Those are basically movies for me." Randy's phone went off in his pocket, and Danny goggled at it as he answered. "Hey Howard! You'll never believe what just happened. Wait." He covered the speaker with one hand and mouthed something at Dany. The half-ghost guessed at what he meant and shrugged. "Meet you tomorrow at the Game Hole? Great! See ya later!" The line clicked off. "I can tell Howard about you, right?"

Danny shrugged again. "Hey, in my world, everyone knows who I am. Do you mind--" he nodded at Randy's window. The slim boy shoved the mask into his pocket and nodded back. Danny grabbed his arm and flew them back to the boy's semi-destroyed room. It was getting dark, anyway.

"Really? Everyone? How does that work?"

"Trust me, it doesn't." Danny kicked at the cot, making fluff fly through the air. "This thing is toast," he grunted. "You take the top bunk."

"Really?" Randy raised an eyebrow. "What about you?"

Danny let himself fall backwards, only to hover in the air a few feet off the flooring. "This is cool. Half the time I wake up in the middle of the night to find out that I've hit the ceiling."

"I get dreams that I get trapped in the Nomicon," Randy chuckled. "Hero problems, right?"

"Yeah, hero problems." Danny laughed along with him, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Trapped in the Nomicon? It was actually a very real possibility. But he drifted off to sleep anyway; the fight has sapped the strength from him like Skulker draining Tuck's PDA. Dark Danny and the Nomicon haunted his dreams.