Chapter Text
Danny led the charge out of the school. "FREEDOM!" He shouted, sprinting out of the building. Sam and Tucker were close behind as he slid on the grass outside of the school and planted himself on the lawn. He pressed his forehead into the ground. "I'll never take you for granted again."
Sam scoffed. "Yeah, and how's that going to go when you go on your cross country trip in a few days?"
Danny groaned, and the tension holding him together deflated. He laid bonelessly on the ground. "You had to remind me. I couldn't have five minutes without that hanging over my head?"
Sam smiled and pulled Danny up. "Sorry, Danny," she said, brushing some of the grass off of him. "But we should figure out what we're going to do about that."
Danny frowned and looked between her and Tucker. "What do you mean?"
Tucker held out his arms as if presenting a project. "Think about it, man, what do you think is going to happen if Daniel Fenton disappears for a few weeks and Danny Phantom doesn't show up?"
"Uh... nothing? Because why would that matter?"
Tucker elbowed Danny. "Well... considering Danny Phantom shows up pretty much daily to stop some ghost problem or another. Any day he doesn't is something that people notice, but if the Fenton's who hate him are gone, shouldn’t Phantom have free reign? And if he suddenly doesn't show up..."
A horn honked, and everyone, not just the isolated trio, looked up. Jazz waved from inside her car. The three of them casually walked over. Five feet from the car, Tucker shouted, "Shotgun!" before taking the front seat.
Danny waited for Sam to open the trunk to put their backpacks in it before they slid into the backseats. The two of them were buckled in before Tucker managed to get situated with his bag underneath his feet.
Tucker tried to give himself more room by sliding the chair back, but Sam pushed back on the chair. "Oh no, you don't," she stated, refusing to let herself get squished in the backseat. "You had your chance."
Tucker pouted and folded his arms. "Should have known better."
Jazz started the car and began backing out of the parking space. "So..." she began slowly. "What were you three talking about?"
"Nosy, aren't you?" Danny scoffed.
Jazz chuckled and responded, "Tucker and Sam had their Clueless Danny face on."
Danny frowned and let out a noise that was definitely not a whine no matter what anyone said. "What is that supposed to mean?"
Sam picked up on it immediately. "Danny didn't realize that Phantom being gone for several weeks the same time the Fentons are gone might raise questions."
"Oooh..." Jazz said, wincing. "Yeah, that's a fair point."
"No one expects Fenton to be Phantom, though!" Danny said, crossing his arms.
Jazz hummed. "That's also true. Correlation doesn't mean causation, but humans are hard-wired to look for patterns. It's why no one has really made the connection between you and Phantom yet. That and the uncanny valley."
"The what?"
"Uncanny valley?" Jazz repeated. "Didn't you listen to Dad's speech on it a few weeks ago?"
"Uh... was that the one I fell asleep after the third use of the word spook?"
Sam waved her arms in the back seat. "Uh... can you translate for those of us who, one, weren't forced to listen to a lecture from Jack Fenton, and two, can't understand him when we are forced to listen?"
Jazz flicked on her turn signal as she left the school. "Well, ghosts who come back don't really look like how they looked in life. Even the ones who still look mostly human - Ember, Kitty, and Johnny, for example - would be extremely difficult to identify if we put them side by side with their living counterparts. They don't look quite human."
"Yet, you still dated Johnny." Danny pointed out.
"Shush," Jazz responded with a pointed glare in the rear-view mirror. She looked back at the street and continued. "Anyways, even Phantom has a list of things that aren't quite right when you look at him."
"Like what?"
"Well, his pupils don't dilate for one. It's very minor, but it's something humans notice. His skin, and his suit actually, don't reflect light the way they should, beyond the glow I mean. Just minor things that you'd be hard-pressed to actually point out looking at him, but you subconsciously notice. Plus, the whole, you know, you have to be dead in order to become a ghost, and Danny is definitely living."
Tucker shifted and then pulled out his phone. "So you're saying that we don't need to be worried if Fenton and Phantom are gone for a few weeks?"
"Oh! Definitely not!" Jazz said, waving her hand back and forth. "If Danny is gone for a few weeks, and Phantom is missing, well, once might not be too bad, but it's a data point, and given enough data points... eventually people will draw the correct conclusion. Like I said, people look for patterns."
Sam leaned against the side of the car. "Well, I guess we're all on the same page, except Danny."
Danny folded his arms and huffed. "I still want to know about the Clueless Danny face."
Sam looked at Danny with a smirk. She folded her arms mirroring him and asked, "So what do we do about it?" Intentionally ignoring Danny’s comment.
"That's a good question," Jazz said, tapping her finger on the steering wheel. "It might work just fine if Danny flies back for a night while we're in Wisconsin? Menomonie isn't too far from Amity, so if Danny just does a patrol here, maybe that would be good enough?" Her voice lowered to a mumble as she thought about it.
"Maybe," Tucker offered. "But the phandom knows his top speed is 143 miles per hour."
Danny sputtered. "One, phandom? What? Why can I hear the ‘ph’ in that? Two, I thought my top speed was 112?"
Tucker handed Danny his phone. "You've gotten faster, and you have a fan page, dude."
"Oh my god..."
Sam grabbed the phone and looked at it. "Wow, the design is actually kind of nice. Who's in charge of it?"
"You're never gonna guess."
"Dash and Paulina?"
"How did you guess?" Tucker shouted.
The fifth passenger took the phone out of Sam's hands, "The hell is this? A fan site?"
Everyone jumped. The sudden intruder made Tucker scream, and Sam reached for a weapon, before her eyes widened in recognition. She reached past the newcomer and smacked Danny in his stomach. "Danny! What the hell? You have a literal ghost sense for this sort of thing! Warn someone!"
Danny groaned and rubbed his head, which he had hurt jumping and hitting his head on the roof of the car. "Sorry! Wait, Ember, how did you get past my ghost sense?"
Ember smirked. "I don't know, but as soon as I can do it consistently, you better watch out." She scrolled through the web site. "Huh, you can bench 30,000 pounds? Damn, never would have guessed."
"Oh, you got to the bus article, huh?" Tucker commented.
"Wait, I can bench a bus?"
"With kids in it. Does it count if we just make it ignore the laws of physics?" Ember mused. "Why are you guys looking at this anyways?"
"Uh... well-" Jazz began uncertainly.
Sam snapped her fingers. "Hey, Ember, how do you feel about doing a cross-country music tour?"
Ember's head immediately focused on Sam, focusing on her with no movement, like frames dropped from an animation. "What's the catch?"
"No catch, just no mind control." Sam began. "And you get to beat up Phantom."
"Where have you been my whole afterlife?"
"Wait, wait, wait." Danny began waving a hand between Ember and Sam.
Ember put a hand up and pushed Danny away without taking her eyes off Sam. "Shhh, cool people are talking, Baby Pop."
Sam smirked. "In two days, you should go to Menomonie Wisconsin and do a concert there. Be flashy, get yourself on the news. Phantom can show up a few hours after you start. The Fenton's will see that two of Amity's ghosts are over in Wisconsin, and now we have an excuse for Danny being gone while Phantom is gone."
"Oohhh..." Jazz said, pointing at Sam in the mirror. "Brilliant! The correlation isn't that Phantom is gone while Fenton is gone. It's that Fenton is gone while Phantom is gone!"
Sam smirked. "Exactly!” She frowned. “Though, will you be okay with that? I mean, this is you checking out colleges right?”
Jazz shrugged. “It’s fine. Keeping Danny’s secret is more important anyways.”
"Just to be clear, I get to beat up Phantom, right?" Ember asked.
"If everything goes right?" Tucker grinned. "On national TV."
Ember looked at Danny and smirked. "Oh, Baby Pop, if I had known being friends with you got me these kinds of nice perks, I would have done this ages ago!"
Danny groaned and put his face in his hands. "What even is my life?"
"Over," Tucker said with a shrug. "I mean, if you think about it."
Danny groaned, which resulted in Jazz snapping at him, "Hey, no existential crises when I don't have my notebook!"
Danny groaned harder.
Ember hummed a song to herself as she floated through the ghost zone. It’d been a while since she had visited this section. Twisting islands of sand stretched through the air in the zone. Waves were billowing across their surface as if a wind blew across their shifting shapes.
It took her a few minutes, but she found what she was looking for by following the winds to their source. A bed of sand, nearly five hundred feet across, floated above a lamp, sand flowing up where the fire would be. A giant pile of sand sat in the center, slowly falling apart and sending trails of sand toward the edges of the platform. A giant Moorish castle was built on the mountain of sand, whose walls were slowly crumbling due to the sand falling.
Ember flew up to the door of the castle and looked at the sculpted sand. She raised her hand to knock, but movement above her had her dodge on instinct. A pile of sand fell to the ground, narrowly missing her. “Yeah, no,” she said, taking a step back.
“Desiree! You there? I need a favor!” Ember shouted at the top of her lungs.
In response to Ember’s shout, the door collapsed. The sand fell away, joining the millions of grains that were slowly slipping away from the castle. Ember quickly walked through the door and made her way toward the center of the castle. She found Desiree curled up in a bed of real-world pillows. “Ember, what brings you to my lair?”
“Like I said out there, I need a favor.”
Desiree narrowed her eyes at Ember. “My lair is soft sand and is falling apart without me seeking more power to put into it. Sound does not carry here…”
Ember looked behind her, “Uh… so you didn’t open the door for me?”
“No.”
“Huh, awkward,” Ember mused. She shook her head. “Anyways, I need a favor, but I think you’ll like this. Need a wish granted.”
She scowled. “And just WHY should I grant you a wish? I’m not some pet that does tricks for accolades.”
Ember growled and ignored Desiree trying to insult her. “Oh, trust me, you’ll want to grant this one. It’s very much a case of you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
Desiree flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Fine then, just what is this you wish to pay me with?”
Ember waggled her finger and tisked. “Nuh-uh-uh. The wish itself will do it. Some nice information that’ll make your week.”
Desiree stretched out over her bed of pillows, much like a cat. She looked down at her nails before sighing. “Fine, let’s hear this wish of yours.”
“I wish that while Phantom is out of town for the next two weeks, no one figures out his human identity,” Ember stated, throwing her hair over her shoulders.
“As you wish it, so it shall be,” Desiree intoned, snapping her fingers, causing a cloud to appear and dissipate. She looked down her nose at Ember. “You may go now.”
“Thanks, babe,” Ember said, turning around and waving over her shoulder. “Have fun with that!”
Desiree watched Ember leave. “So… Phantom will be out of town for a week,” She purred to herself, “How interesting…”