Chapter Text
Danny was missing.
Sam and Tucker had been the last people to see him. They had hung out at the Nasty Burger that day, Danny complaining about his parents’ latest failed invention—supposedly a portal to the Afterlife, Sam remembered clearly. She had been a little too excited about it, asking question after question about the portal until Danny snapped at her to stop. So Sam had bought Danny the Nasty Smoothie Monthly Special as an apology—and when they walked home together, dropping Danny off first because his house was the closest, he had still been sipping that violently red drink.
The police found the smoothie sat on Danny’s kitchen counter during the subsequent investigation. The plastic cup was still half full with cherry smoothie, as if Danny had set the drink down for a moment and forgotten about it. The viscous red liquid reminded Sam of blood. She tried very hard not to think about how this might be the last meal Danny ever ate—the last gift she would ever give him.
About half an hour after Sam and Tucker walked Danny home, every electrical appliance in FentonWorks shorted out at once. The brightly lit house plunged into darkness, the neon sign proudly proclaiming the Fentons’ residence going out for the first time since it was put up. Burnt fuses, the Jack and Maddie later found out, except it didn’t make sense. A fault in the electrical wiring destroying everything connected to the house wiring would be a disaster, but at least logical. But even the appliances that ran on battery—Danny’s phone, Jazz’s laptop, and every last one of the Dr Fentons’ machines (their lives’ work), broke down in an instant. The sudden blackout alerted the neighbors, who called the city police. The police immediately deployed the special task force dedicated to the Fentons, issuing a block-wide evacuation in case this was one of the Dr Fentons’ new inventions threatening to blow up the neighborhood.
Danny wasn’t in the house when Jazz and her parents were allowed to return, despite the clear signs of his arrival. They didn’t think much of it initially, assuming he had evacuated the house alongside his neighbors. But as nightfall made its presence known unaccompanied by Jazz’ wayward brother, they began to worry.
A break-in? There was no sign of such thing, and no Amity Park resident would have so little common sense as to kidnap the youngest Fenton child—if only because Jack and Maddie, despite their paranormal work that was derided by the wider scientific community, were brilliant engineers who excelled in building weapons of dubious legality. And Jazz was known to be very protective of her brother—she knew how to use all of her parents’ inventions, and wasn’t afraid to put that knowledge to use. Even so, the blackout had shorted out the FentonWorks security system, disengaging all the locks in the process. For all they knew, a burglar could have waltzed in during the confusion, been startled by Danny’s presence, and took him as a hostage. If Danny was still alive at all.
There was another thing too—the activation switches in the basement portal had been flipped on. Both the control switch embedded in the wall, and the failsafe Jack and Maddie had included within the portal itself—which they only realised they had previously forgotten to disengage when cataloguing the extensive damage caused by the Blackout.
Not that it seemed to matter in the end. The portal remained as silent and lifeless as ever, with a noticeable lack of green sparks or strange energy. Perhaps the Blackout had destroyed the portal too. Rendered Jack and Maddie’s most ambitious project into nothing more than a hole in the wall. Perhaps the two switches had flipped on due to an irregularity of the circuitry caused by the Blackout, proving the portal was never going to do anything other than be a useless wall decoration. Or perhaps it was the act of both switches flipping on that led to the Blackout in the first place. It didn’t matter. The portal was now nonfunctional, Danny was missing, and Jack and Maddie could only afford to focus on one of these disasters at a time.
They contacted Sam and Tucker, who confirmed Danny had made it home. Then their neighbors, who replied less politely that they hadn’t seen Danny during the evacuation that the Fentons had caused, in case they so conveniently forgot. Finally they called the police, whose Fenton Task Force immediately issued an AMBER Alert, if only so that people would know to avoid a Fenton on a warpath.
Before midnight, the entire Amity Park and most of Elmerton knew the youngest Fenton was missing. A search party was organised—a race against the clock before Jack, Maddie and Jazz began ripping the city apart in search of Danny. A few optimistic souls hoped whatever idiot had kidnapped Danny would release him once they caught wind of this commotion, but several others were of the opinion that Danny had simply wandered off, and silently vowed to make him regret it once they caught the boy.