The Return of the Phantom

Pilot Part 2

What was it? The suspense is like a choking gas in it's wrathful grip... Too dramatic? Okay, well I guess I could have said the suspense was killing me. But to be honest it isn't because I already know what's going to happen. And I'm rambling again...

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A... what?" The entire class was silent, all gathered around Nick in the dark just as they had been surrounding Tony when the power was still on. Noticing this, Nick took a deep breath, and calmed down. Mustering a shaky smile, he sat up and shook his head.

"It, it was so stupid." he muttered, blushing. "It was all a big prank." Now he stared directly at Tony, who shrank beneath his stare. "First my girlfriend, now you and your stupid friends played some ghost prank on me."

Tony and his friends all looked at each other. Tony shook his head. "No, no one would go that far. Not even me," he reassured Nick.

Danny sat back. "So you just thought you saw something in the bathroom?" he clarified. I'm going to ignore that you said the  G-word...

Nick nodded his head, his blond hair falling over his eyes. "Yeah. It really freaked me out." He went on to explain the looks of the creature to the wonderment of the class. "It was glowing green, with bright eyes," he described, "and it had super long green tentacles, and it was trying to grab me with one..."

Danny, for the second time that day, felt the cold feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. Surely this was some elaborate prank.

For years he had shoved the days of ghost-fighting deep into his memory, where they lay forgotten in his subconscious. That it was coming back, in a place with no history of ghosts...Was there really no escape? It had been twelve years. Why now?

Shaking the fog of his thoughts from his mind, he rebuked the fears creeping into his mind. No. He had moved on. There were no more ghost portals---except for the naturally occurring ones---but he rebuked that thought, too. It was over.

Danny froze. Streaming from his mouth, and icy cold, was a serpentine tendril of blue mist, unfurling and floating up toward the ceiling before slowly fading to nothingness.

And then he knew without a doubt, no matter how much he didn't want to admit it, it was far from over.

Luckily, none of his students noticed his brief chill, all too busy listening, wide-eyed, to Nick's tale. Danny slowly turned around and watched a bright green glowing ectopus materialize through the wall.

The room was now lit up with an eerie green glow. All of the students gazed up open-mouthed, eyes wide in terror. The ectopus, with everyone's full attention, narrowed its blood red eyes and let out a high-pitched wail, waving its tentacles threateningly.

On instinct, Danny stood in front of his students, his mind racing. What should he do?

He wished it was like Choose Your Own Adventure, where someone else could decide what happens next. Turn to page 9 if you decide to go ghost for the first time in twelve years in front of your students and beat the ectoplasm out of this ectopus, or Turn to page 41 if you pretend that you never had ghost powers and just cower helplessly with your students when you know you're more than capable of defending them?

But the problem with Choose Your Own Adventure books was that sometimes you had an "in between" kind of idea of what you'd really do (Stand there and gape stupidly) but the book assumes that you're the kind of person who makes smart and concrete decisions pretty quickly.

As a kid he'd spend minutes pondering a single choice. Jazz was smarter, and she wrote down every outcome she got so she knew how to get to every single one. And here he was again, overthinking this.