Danny enters the Ghost Zone through his parents’ portal. He shuts it behind him with a convenient little remote from his pocket before anything can escape. Familiar channels in the infinite green expanse lay open in every direction. Yet, he hesitates. His white hair waves like mist as he hovers.
He’s about 19 now and nearly as tall as his dad, though not as stocky. His frame is lean and muscular, stretched taut with constant exercise. A little overstretched, even. Looming and harshly angular. Luckily, his black jumpsuit has grown with him over the years. The insignia on his chest has even smeared a little. He wound up with the sharpest of his parents’ facial features, completing the image of a predator ready to spring at a moment’s notice. At least, that’s what the public seems to think. The electric green eyes probably don’t help.
Nope, there’s no time to think about that. He knows he has to make a decision before it’s too late.
The easiest thing to get his hands on would probably be Dora’s spare amulet. He wouldn’t mind owing her a favor. But then, a giant dragon might just stir up more trouble than it would solve. And there’s no telling if he could keep his head on straight for long enough without going on some kind of primal rampage.
There are plenty of cursed weapons, but the “curse” part tends to get ugly and fast.
Pandora’s box is also definitely out.
Danny rubs his chin and thumbs through several other options in his mind. Too risky to get. Not powerful enough. Boobytrapped. Too cursed. Way too cursed.
He repeatedly brushes past a candidate that refuses to stay away. He can’t believe he’d even consider it. He wishes he’d never looked it up.
But… An undead army sworn to the Ghost King’s Crown could be a pretty sure bet. It would be dangerous to get. It would change everything. The others would never forgive him. But it would be enough. Could he really take down the King just to get his stupid hat–and get saddled with wearing it for the rest of his life? The forums were kind of vague about that part. Maybe there’s a way to borrow it? As if that’s never come back to bite him before.
What is he thinking? It’d be overkill.
Then again, it might not be enough if he waits. What’ll he do then?
He winces, pushes his hair back, and lets out a deep sigh. He needs to get a hold of himself–and away from everything.
Danny dives down into the green, heading away from floating doors and islands, toward vast cavities of amorphous space.
Tangled bodies of semi-formed ectoplasmic matter dance and collide to draw the landscape into being. Plumes of shimmering fog in dark shades of green, purple, and red conceal the origin points of what little inherent structure the Ghost Zone has, far far below in humid chasms. Terrifying wormholes suck in their surroundings and take them who-knows-where as who-knows-what.
The budding scientist in Danny wonders what could be learned about the universe if this phenomena were studied in depth–or even how they’re influenced by the mingling personalities of eons of passed life. The brainless adventure-seeker in him just wants to see them up close.
Something else is drawing him along. It’s almost prickly, like a current of static electricity. Curiosity takes the lead as he traces it through migrating clouds of soft phthalo mist. By the time he reaches the other side, he can’t tell if he’s lost the trail or acclimated to it.
Everything around him is moving. Enormous shapes travel together in droves–some solid, some less so.
He levels out and glides through the grooves of a brainlike field of reddish rock. The motion of flight pushes the Ghost Zone’s thick chilly not-quite-air into his lungs. He loves it.
As he meanders his way through junction after junction in the canyons, his attention begins to drift.
Even if he doesn’t do it tonight, it’ll have to be soon. The Guys In White have only been getting busier, and he shudders to think what they might be up to next. He may not even be free of prying eyes here in the Ghost Zone.
Self-consciousness prickles at his neck. There’s a lot he can’t see in here. He raises himself in an effort to oversee the entire maze just in time to reach its end. He swings his legs forward and comes to a stop, hanging in mid air. The rock cuts off at a sheer cliff face. The area beyond–a mass of impenetrable shadow–yawns before him. Danny can’t tell if it’s a trench so deep that light can’t reach the bottom or if there’s some kind of obscuring force field shutting it out. The trench is so impossibly wide that it completely fills his view, aside from a puff of white breath from his own mouth.
Wait, what?
Danny turns just in time to see the giant spiny claw of a primeval crustacean inches from his face. Its shell is the same color and texture as the terrain, as if it had just stood up from its place as part of the rock. He can preserve his momentum if he doesn’t try to run, and so dives between the claw and the creature’s body. The serrated pincer digs into the ground beneath where he was. Its smaller claw reacts without hesitation, but Danny’s reflexes are even faster. He grabs the dull side of the shell and freezes it solid to the shoulder on contact. The crab maneuvers back and snaps with its big claw. Danny pushes off of it with his foot to get away from it, bringing him even closer to the creature’s mouth. With a sickening crack, a seam along the center of the exoskeleton opens up, revealing a sea of stinging white tendrils that threaten to envelop their prey. Danny only has a few seconds to think. There’s no way for him to get up enough speed to get away without getting stung, and he doesn’t want to find out what that’s like. He draws his shoulders inward with his hands extended forward. The excess energy in his body is made volatile and forced out through his fingertips. Jagged threads of green lightning leap through the waving tendrils, searing and crackling. Danny sizes up his victory as he shakes out his hands. The crab monster takes uncoordinated steps backward. Its joints make clacking sounds that clash with the degrading tendrils, making an awful chorus. It’s so loud, the boy doesn’t bother with a quip. He also doesn’t notice that some of the noise is out of sync until it’s too late.
There’s a shadow at his feet. He has just enough time to raise a shield before a second crab whips at his head. It’s like getting hit by a rocket.
The world is a blur. Danny tries to counteract his momentum, but he just ends up spinning. In a blink, he’s enveloped in the darkness of the trench below. He can’t see anything. There’s nothing to sense at all apart from the rushing in his head and the pounding of his heart. He keeps trying to slow down and eventually gets the head rush to stop. By then, he can’t see light in any direction. There’s no way to tell up from down.
He produces a bolt of energy from his hand like a torch, but it is almost immediately swallowed by the dark. It takes effort to hold one up for more than a few seconds as he tries to get his bearings. Cold seeps in. Danny’s no stranger to cold, but this is something more. Gnawing. Creeping and oppressive. The air tastes stale.
Something rough drags at his arm, and he wheels at it violently. When he tries to get some light on it, he finds nothing there.
Danny lets instinct take over to keep himself calm as he looks for a way out.
~
Time passes. He has no idea how much. The cell phone in his pocket won’t turn on. It could be hours. It feels like hours. Every once in a while, he brushes something sharp that stokes his adrenaline and paranoia. He’s so tired–not like he would from flying or fighting. He’s drained in a way that feels like he’s being hollowed out. Despite his best efforts, worry leaks in as time gruels on.
He can’t be gone this long. Especially at night. There must be something he’s not doing to break out. He has to try harder. He should have paid more attention before. He could be stuck here forever, and it’s all his fault.
Suddenly, Danny bumps into something solid. He reflexively kicks against it and gets pushed back. He pauses. Nothing so far has been anchored in space like that. He feels it over. It’s flat and smooth with the texture of wood. His fingers bump a metal knob. Hardly thinking, he turns it and pulls. The door swings open, letting warm air and light spill out from inside. He pulls himself through by the doorframe and shuts himself off from the darkness with a heavy click.
He stands in the entryway and breathes, pushing out all the cold dead air. He warms up a little, but the fatigue lingers. He really does feel like he got hit with a rocket. Or maybe a bus. He tries his phone. Still useless.
Danny looks around. The entryway extends to a hallway leading out to some steps that head down. The hall is unlit, but the room beyond glows invitingly. There are hooks with hats and jackets hung on the walls, along with a long thick rope tied in a loop. Pairs of shoes clutter the floor. The door he just came from is purple with a little window at the top that’s been taped over.
Weird.
He has no idea what might lay beyond the steps, but he certainly isn’t going back outside. If he can find another door in here that leads to a different part of the Ghost Zone, he might be able to get back to the portal. If he’s really lucky, the inhabitants might not know him.
He walks cautiously down the hallway. His brain feels like it drags behind him as he goes.
The steps lead to a living room with hardwood floors, pastel orange walls, and rounded wooden doorways leading elsewhere. The furniture is a mix of styles and sizes–all soft, colorful, and well-used. It’s very cottage-y. The disembodied doors Danny’s been through before usually lead to the domains of ghosts. Their homes often manifest as exaggerated shades of places they left or desired in life. This one feels more like a home to be lived in than a distorted memory of one. Even if it does look kind of goofy.
Instinct tells him not to let his guard down. It could be some kind of illusion. And there’s an unfamiliar energy in the air.
Danny pushes off the floor with his toes and silently floats through a corridor further into the house. The pastel walls and wood floors cut abruptly to bright blue walls and cement floors. The architecture’s completely different. Acutely modern, rectilinear, and borderless. It’s like being inside a stone carving of a house. He peeks inside some rooms and finds each a completely different style unto itself. Some are cluttered with drifts of antiques, containers, and brick-a-brack that are just as disparate in style as the house. Many look ancient–tarnished and corroded. Others have bizarre everyday objects that Danny nearly recognizes. If they don’t have some quality that makes them totally nonfunctional, they’re plastered with a poor imitation of a brand name.
He moves on, trying every door he can find. More rooms. More hallways. He loses track of how they wind and connect, pulling tricks of direction on his own mental map. He’s too dizzy to figure it out. With a sinking feeling, Danny realizes that he’s once again lost in a place that seems to go on forever.
Then, he notices a smell. Salty and hearty, like something cooking. It’s subtle at first, beckoning him back the way he came and down a hallway he passed up earlier. Green wood paneling and yellow carpet. The smell of actual food is by far the weirdest thing so far. His apprehension has been completely exhausted by this point, replaced with subdued confusion. And he’s suddenly very hungry. He follows the green hallway to a set of stairs leading upward. Echoes of music bounce down to him from somewhere ahead. He ascends.
The stairs end at a smaller living room with unpainted wood paneling. There’s a brown L-shaped couch and a big TV in the corner, a dining table and chairs next to the far wall, and four tall picture windows that glow with daylight beneath orange curtains. A pop song Danny’s never heard of blares in his ears from a nebulous source.
Danny immediately wonders if he managed to stumble through a natural portal to the real world and has just been wandering around some eccentric collector’s house well into the morning.
The music stops. There’s noise and movement directly to his left, in a kitchen with peach and white tile and counters. Someone is standing at the stove. They were in the middle of cooking a pan full of scrambled eggs, apparently.
“Hi there,” they say.
“Uh, hi,” Danny responds absently. He’s so tired.
An awkward pause settles in as Danny fails to read the person’s face.
“Do you wanna have some eggs?” they ask.
The toaster on the counter pops up.
“And toast.”
Danny blinks.
~
The next thing Danny knows, he’s sitting at the dining table with a plate of eggs and toast in front of him and a glass of orange juice to go with it. Across from him sits the person who made them, stiffly eating and drinking from their own plate and glass.
“So,” they ask, “what brings you here?”
Danny swallows the bite he already took.
“I just got lost, I guess.” The eggs are bland and dry. He has a sip of juice and looks the room over again. “I definitely wasn’t expecting to end up anywhere like this.” The juice doesn’t taste like orange. Maybe it’s tangerine or something.
His host makes a short noise of acknowledgement, but Danny can barely process his own words. It’s like trying to think through tar. He sits up straighter and tries to shake it off.
The person sitting across from Danny has hair nearly the same shade as his. Their shirt is red, almost the same as their skin. They look calm, but they keep squeezing their fingers together.
Danny finally realizes how strange this must look and digs up some manners.
“Uh–I’m sorry for barging in like this. I promise I won’t be long.”
He hopes they won’t even ask about his hair and eyes. Maybe they’re used to having ghosts wander through if they have a portal downstairs.
“Don’t worry about it,” they say evenly. “Do you need to… call anyone?”
“I should. I don’t know how long they’ve–”
Danny stops halfway through digging for his phone. He looks at the host, who sits there with a fork in their mouth. The unnatural feeling is still in the air. Danny had nearly forgotten.
Something’s wrong here, but he isn’t about to show that he knows it.
Danny retracts his hand without being too quick about it and relaxes into the chair.
“Y’know, it can wait. I think it’s dead anyway. So, you live here?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you usually leave the door to the pitch black void unlocked?”
Danny jabs a thumb over his shoulder at the stairs.
“Oh, I didn’t know I had one,” the host answers with a scratch of their head.
Danny just nods. At least they’re a terrible liar. There’s something off about their face, but he can’t focus on it.
“I mean. It’s never really bothered me, so I kinda forget about it. I’ve had this place so long.”
“Then, there’s another door?” Danny asks casually.
“Hm. No. I use the windows.”
“Those windows right there?” he points at the ones behind the table.
“No, bad idea. Rose bushes.”
Danny almost snickers.
“Where is this anyway?”
“Kansas.” They answer nearly the same moment Danny finishes asking. “It’s Topeka, Kansas. I’ve lived here for 20 years. And I’m. Marv. –Y. My name is Marvy.” They clench their jaw as soon as they’re done tripping over their script. “And you are…?”
“Just passing through. Like I said, I got lost. I’ll be out of your hair in a sec.”
Just as soon as he can stand. His head isn’t clearing up much.
“What were you looking for?” they ask innocently, breezing past the fact that Danny didn’t answer the question.
They’re on to him. Think of something fast.
“Someone. A troublemaker.”
“So, you’re like a bounty hunter?”
“More of a sheriff. It’s similar, except the hours are worse.” He pretends to sip some juice.
“Is the person you’re looking for dangerous?”
Don’t sell anyone out, Fenton.
“Just a little guy. No big deal.”
The host is silent for a good ten seconds, then lets out a tiny “oh.”
Crap.
Danny glances at the window, putting together an exit strategy. He’s picturing a rat maze on a soundstage deep in Guys in White HQ with flood lights everywhere.
He feels like an idiot–getting shuffled from one trap to the next and lured in with food like an animal. The toast doesn’t even look real. They must have laid out that trail in the Ghost Zone to draw him close to the trench. Did… did they send the crabs, too?
Odds are good that there’s a knockoff ghost shield around them now. He’s broken through those before. It’s gonna hurt, though.
“I’m sorry,” his host interrupts the silence, probably reading Danny’s masked suspicion. “I’ve never had a thing–person–like you. Here. Before. But I won’t tell. You don’t have to worry.”
Danny was inches from making a run for it before that last sentence.
“You won’t tell what?”
“I won’t tell anyone what you are.”
Danny’s blood runs cold. Have they figured out his secret identity already?
“That’s an awfully nice thing to do for a stranger,” he says, trying not to put the last nail in his own coffin. “Can I ask why?”
“No reason, I just don’t want to make any trouble for you. It’s not like I ever go anywhere or talk to anyone.”
What kind of veiled threat is this?
“What kind of trouble?” Danny asks almost too lightly.
“Having the wrong people find out. That’s the big fear, isn’t it?” They finish their juice in one long sip.
“So, what would I need to do to pay the favor back?”
The host shakes their head and speaks with a smile.
“All you have to do is do nothing to me.”
Danny can’t think of what to say to that. He just stays still.
Satisfied with their answer, the host leans against the backrest and absentmindedly raises their right arm in a vague open gesture. Danny hears a sliding sound from the kitchen, and a pitcher of juice flies with unseen force into the host’s ready hand.
They both stare at the pitcher. The host has a perfectly guilty expression on their face. They try to recover by putting down the pitcher and folding their hands, by which they end up moving everything on the table by about an inch without touching a thing.
“I, uh, er… Oops.”
Danny disappears. By the time the host reacts, he’s already at the exterior wall. His intangible body pushes through the wood–or tries to. For some reason, it won’t let him through. It doesn’t burn like a ghost shield. He just sinks an inch in and stops, as if there’s nothing beyond. He pulls himself out and lifts the curtain of one of the windows. Nothing but white light. It’s hot, like the light source is right up against it. He can’t pass through that, either.
“I can explain.”
The host is standing up and looking at him, though not directly. Danny realizes they’re focused on the raised curtain in his grip. He drops it, and the host’s eyes dart frantically around. Danny tries the ceiling. When it stops him, he ricochets down toward the stairs. As if reading his mind, the host gasps, snaps around, and points at the opening in the opposite wall. And then, it’s just a wall. Danny slams against it head-first. Stars bloom in his vision. His invisibility fails him. The host stares, motionless with their hands splayed at their sides, as if trying to hold something in place. Their captive scrambles up to where the wall meets the ceiling like a cornered rodent.
He summons everything he has left to raise an ecto-bolt.
“Let me go,” he demands.
“I can’t,” the host says shortly. A little panicked, even.
“Wasn’t asking!”
Danny bids the bolt to fire, but it just flickers in his palm. His arm already hurts from holding its own weight. This isn’t working. He lets the bolt dissipate and tries to draw the energy back into his hand. Instead, the threads of green light slither down in a flash and pepper the room with burn marks. The host is alarmed and shrinks into themself without changing stance. It looks… wrong. Like they’re squished. Danny can’t remember their colors being so bright, either.
“What are you? What did you do to me?” Danny practically begs.
“Nothing. I’m just a guy, y’know? A guy,” they beg back.
Danny scans them up and down. The host jolts on their heels when they get a look at themself. Their hair is the shade of their skin which is the shade of their clothes–which are suddenly deep blue. They’re a silhouette in play-doh.
After a little more stammering, the host lets out the rest of their breath and drops their shoulders.
“Fine. You got me.”
The play-doh form blinks away, replaced by a distinctly human figure in its place. They’re about a head and a half shorter than Danny, and a few years younger too. Their face is round and boyish with tiny freckles across their light peachy skin. Their hair is so wild that it probably hasn’t seen a comb in weeks. It’s a different color every time Danny glances at it. He can’t believe he felt any air of menace from someone who looks like a burned out high schooler–down to their faded pink socks, heavy grey sweatpants, grape-purple pullover hoodie, painted nails, and the blue plastic star-shaped studs in their earlobes.
“Happy?” the host asks through uneven teeth. “It wasn’t a good disguise, anyway. I panicked.” Their voice is a little raspy and isn’t through breaking, which makes Danny realize it barely had any character at all before. “Go ahead and wipe me. Throw me in front of your bosses or whatever. Just make it quick.” They raise their hands in surrender.
Danny stares, dumbfounded.
“Look–I’m sorry, okay?” the host continues, insecure in the face of Danny’s silence. He flicks a hand, and the stairs are suddenly back. “I’m not trying to be a bad guy. You’d freak out too if someone was after you.”
Danny can feel his back phase through the wall as he begins to drift.
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
His genuine confusion makes the host’s defeated blue eyes widen.
“You… you’re not here for me? Or, are you even one of them?”
Danny tries to say something, but nothing really comes out. His stomach keeps telling him he’s falling.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Listen, you gotta promise not to tell anyone. It’s important! I mean. Uh.” They run their fingers fraughtly through their technicolor hair and then extend a hand. “We got off on the wrong foot. My name’s Tim.”
Danny catches a break. He passes out after slipping out of the wall. He’s back in human form by the time he hits the floor.
————
Edit: I tweaked the header a little so it’d read better.