Alarm
@uwuplasmiusuwu
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Getting shoved into a locker was routine for Danny at this point. More than, even. Perks of being the only junior in the school who could still be folded into one. Subs still mistook him for a freshman. It sucked.
But back to the lockers. He was used to them. Eighty percent of the time, he could get out of them without even using his ghost powers. That last twenty percent came from when whoever shoved him in (usually Dash or Dale) decided to use an external lock (the built-in ones weren't worth what the school had paid for them).
He was working on it. The problem was reach.
So, anyway, he wasn't exactly bothered by getting shut in a locker today. It was normal. Pedestrian, even.
On the other hand, he was feeling petty today. Dash and his crew had talked over the documentary in science and Mr. Lancer had given him detention yesterday, so if he missed English and Dash got in trouble for it?
Plus, he thought, as he set the timer on his phone for five minutes before the end of the period, it was a good opportunity to test out the new power he'd discovered a couple days ago. Astral projection, as Sam had dubbed it after a brief description from Danny, was cool. Not exactly a combat-ready power, sure, but it was fun and risk-free.
He leaned back against the back of the locker, trying to get comfortable. He didn’t want to come back and have to spend ten minutes massaging pins and needles out of his legs. Dealing with ghosts gave him enough pain.
A minute later, he was sliding smoothly out of his body, then out of the locker altogether.
The hallway looked ever-so-slightly different than what Danny was used to, the colors all shifted to the cooler end of the spectrum. There were tiny, glimmering, motes of something in the air. Not dust. They didn’t move right. They didn’t move at all, actually.
He’d noticed something similar the last time he’d done this. He swiped his hand through one of the sparks. Like everything else when he was astrally projected, however, his hand went right through it, not affecting it at all.
He hummed thoughtfully to himself and continued down the hallway. Sounds from ongoing classes filtered through the doors, slightly muted. All the sounds were a little… floaty. Sort of disconnected, like how things sounded when he was intangible.
It sort of made sense. Sound and light were, after all, physical things. Without a body to interpret them, Danny shouldn’t be hearing or seeing at all. So, he must be detecting things with a different mechanism, and then interpreting the signals as what he was used to.
He wondered if another person who was astrally projecting would be able to see him.
Not that he’d ever heard of any other ghosts being able to do this. But Danny’s powerset wasn’t that weird, once he took out the whole ‘actually alive’ part, so there probably were others.
He drifted through a few random classes, passing through people on purpose to see if they felt anything. They didn’t. He did, however, notice that there were more sparkles and a sort of… unpleasant feeling near Poindexter’s locker. Maybe the sparkles had something to do with ectoplasm? He’d have to test that more. He hadn’t gone to the lab the last two times he’d tried this power out.
He eventually made his way outside. The sky was weird and sort of staticky, and the grass and plants looked oddly shiny, like they were coated in plastic or water. It added to the general air of unreality.
The waning gibbous moon hung on the horizon, pale and ghostly against the sky, edges faded but sharp. Danny licked his lips. There was always the temptation, when looking up, to just go. With this new power, that temptation was multiplied. Not only did he not have any physical needs like this, he also wouldn’t be missed, since, physically, he was still there.
But the moon was, on average, two hundred and thirty-eight thousand, eight hundred and fifty-five from the Earth. Danny could travel at one hundred and twelve miles an hour, max. Being extremely generous and saying that he could keep that up constantly when astrally projecting, that distance would take him almost eighty-nine days to cover.
Half ghost or not, Danny was pretty sure that spending that long in the black silence of space would give him about a million mental illnesses. So. No moon journeys for him until he knew he could sustain a more efficient speed. Like four thousand miles per hour. That was about what the Apollo missions did, and it still took them days.
He sighed. Some day. Some day, he’d get there.
Just not today. He did have common sense. Sort of.
Now, to test this power out a little more. Should he go see how different the Fentonworks’ lab was, or should he go spy on Vlad?
Or maybe he’d do both. It wasn’t like he didn’t have time.
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Lancer wouldn’t have heard it, except that he had given his class a pop quiz for the last fifteen minutes of the period. It wasn’t loud. A quiet little jungle, accompanied by a soft buzz. A phone ringtone. Or an alarm.
He frowned and circled the room even as the students giggled and whispered about who was about to ‘get in trouble.’
The sound wasn’t coming from the classroom. He leaned out, past the door, into the hallway. No students were out, that he could see. The ringtone had a bit of an echo to it. Had a student put their phone in their locker and forgotten to turn it off?
The hairs on the back of Lancer’s neck stood up. Something told him that this wasn’t a normal situation. Something was wrong.
He stepped out into the hallway and followed the sound, ignoring the way his students gathered at the door behind him, abandoning their quizzes. The alarm was ringing from inside a locker Mr. Lancer knew was unassigned, even if there was a shiny new lock hanging from it.
There was muttering behind him, and Lancer looked back over his shoulder to see that some of his students had spilled past the door. “Back in the classroom,” he said, motioning them to go back.
They did, but not before he saw how… uneasy? Guilty? Dash Baxter looked.
Lancer stepped up to the locker and peered in through the slats. It was, obviously, dim in the locker, but Lancer knew his students. “Mr. Fenton?”
There was no response from the boy. Lancer knocked on the locker door.
“Mr. Fenton?” he tried again. Was he breathing? He banged a little harder on the door. “Mr. Fenton!” Mr. Lancer whirled to face his classroom. “Mr. Baxter!”
“Yeah?”
“Is this your lock?”
Something of Lancer’s inner panic must have come through in his demeanor, because Mr. Baxter hurried over and spun the dial, quickly.
At this point, other classes had heard the… Well, Lancer wasn’t sure he’d call it a commotion, but he rarely raised his voice like that in the middle of the hall during class, so…
“Mr. Lancer, is everything alright?” asked Mr. Falluca, shuffling around his own student.
Lancer opened his mouth to say yes, then reconsidered. “Get the AED,” he said, “just in case.”
With a clatter, Mr. Baxter pulled the lock off the door. Lancer wasted no time in opening it and reaching in, seeking out Mr. Fenton’s hand and wrist.
It felt like ice.
He couldn’t find a pulse.
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Danny flew lazily back to the school. Had he spent too much time spying on Vlad’s stuff? Probably. But now he had a leg up on not one, but three of the creep’s evil plans. Plus, he hadn’t heard his alarm go off yet, so even if it felt like it had been over an hour, it hadn’t. So there.
Man, this power was so useful. After school, he’d have to talk to Sam and Tuck about the best way to mess with Vlad with the information he’d gotten.
The school came into sight…
… along with an ambulance. And police cars.
Had someone gotten hurt? While he was messing around?
He dove toward the ambulance, arriving just as a pair of people went in with a stretcher and a… Was that a body bag? Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no. Someone couldn’t have died, right? He hadn’t even been gone an hour.
Who was it? Who got hurt? Not one of his friends, surely, and Ancients, but he felt guilty even thinking that, as if anyone else was somehow worth less just because–
He came to a screeching halt in the middle of the hallway.
Oh.
Well.
That was him laid out on the floor in the middle of the hall.
On one hand, no one was dead! At least, no one who hadn’t been dead before, but it was going to be really hard to explain why he had basically no vital signs to these nice paramedics and policemen.
He floated closer, ramming down the panic he was feeling. How long had it been? How much did they know? How much had they examined? What would they insist on doing if he miraculously ‘recovered’ right now?
One thing was for sure, the long he waited, the more suspicious this would be.
He dove into his body.
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Mr. Lancer was repeating his story for what already felt like the hundredth time, this time to an officer with a handheld recorder, when one of the paramedics behind him gasped, and threw themselves away from Danny.
Danny, who was half sitting up in the body bag that hadn’t yet been zipped up.
“H-hi?” said Danny, rather hoarsely.
Lancer’s legs decided that he had to sit down. Immediately.
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Danny tried to smile at the doctors and nurses gathered at the door to his hospital room. They, weakly, smiled back, then went back to talking.
“With these readings, he shouldn’t be alive,” one whispered.
Danny’s smile turned into more of a grimace. Yeah. This wasn’t going away any time soon. But maybe he could blackmail Vlad to bury it? He did know about a bunch of the guy’s evil plans…
