The first thing Danny felt was the wrongness of the gravity.
It was too heavy, like the entire world was pressing down on his chest, but simultaneously, it felt unsteady, as if the ground beneath him was vibrating at a frequency that made his teeth ache.
His eyes snapped open, but his vision was blurred. He was lying on a cold, grated metal floor. A dull, rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum echoed through the plating, and the air tasted flat and recycled, with a metallic tang that was entirely unlike the stale smell of the Nasty Burger or the ozone-and-dust odor of his parents’ lab.
"Tucker? Sam?" Danny’s voice was raspy. He tried to sit up, but a sharp, burning sensation spread across his wrists. They were locked in oversized, bulky cuffs that glowed with a worrying, acidic purple light.
When he tried to reach his ghost powers, nothing happened. There was only a hollow, draining sensation where the cold core of his energy should have been. The cuffs weren’t only restraining him, they were actively dampening his ectoplasm and preventing him from going ghost.
The attack! He remembered with a jolt.
Strange but heavily armed weirdos had busted into the high school gym during some thing mr. Lancer was setting up, Danny remembers that he wasn't paying attention to him at all, instead watching the cat videos Tuck had been sneakily trying to show him on his PDA. And then he'd been caught completely off guard like everyone else because the attackers weren't ghosts and his sense hadn't gone off.
"Good to see you up, sleeping beauty."
Danny flinched at the sound of Valerie’s voice. She was sitting propped against the opposite wall, her eyes narrowed and sharp, but she wasn't wearing her red-and-black armor. She was wearing only her civilian clothes, and her wrists were bound in cuffs just like his. Next to her, Tucker was moaning, his beret missing, his PDA conspicuously absent and he's also cuffed.
Sam was already pacing the room, looking more annoyed than terrified, staring daggers at a large, blast-proof viewscreen that dominated the far wall and would you know it, big bulky cuffs on her wrists too.
"Where are we?" Tucker whimpered, blinking. "My glasses… I can’t see."
"We’re on a ship, Tucker," Valerie said, her voice tight with contained fury. "The space kind to be precise. They took everything."
Danny scrambled to his feet, fighting the nausea. The cuffs made him feel like he was hollowed out. He moved to the glass. When his eyes finally adjusted, his heart froze.
It let him look out into the void. Behind them, retreating at an impossible speed, was what he could only assume to be the planets of their solar system. And that meant that ahead of them was only infinite, terrifying blackness, speckled with a billion distant stars.
"We aren't on Earth," Danny breathed.
"I know," Sam said, her voice deadly calm. "I heard them announce the warp while you three were still knocked out. I think that loud noise was us breaking the light barrier."
"Warp?" Tucker’s voice squeaked. "You mean… space? We’re actually in space? We can't be! I have an appointment with my podiatrist on Tuesday! And what about my streak on Monsters Go? The data roaming charges alone will kill me!"
"Forget the roaming charges, Foley!" Valerie hissed. With Danny muttering in the background, "I think we're a little out of reach of our Earth satellites by now Tuck..."
"They took my gear. They knew exactly how to deactivate it." She glared at Danny. "And they asked about you, Fenton. 'The Intangible One,' they called you. What did you do to get on these guys' radar?"
Before Danny could stammer out a shitty excuse, a large section of the wall slid open with a hiss. Three figures stepped into the containment hold. They clearly weren't human.
They were clad in bulky, black armor that gleamed with faint, and definitely alien, energy patterns. The leader having a scarred face and a sneer.
"Ah, good," He growled, his voice distorted by his helmet's speaker. "Our precious merchandise is awake. Good, strong stock. The Khundian slaver will pay a premium for a bio-tech enhancer, a matter manipulator, a cyber-empath, and..." He gestured toward Sam, "...whatever that one is."
"Cyber-empath?" Tucker said, pointing a shaking finger at himself. "Is that good?"
The leader ignored him, checking a bulky energy scanner on his wrist. "The scans don't lie. Four peak-level metagene signatures. The Intangible One will fetch the highest price. We were lucky to snag them before they fully came into their abilities."
Valerie growls. "We aren't 'merchandise.' And we aren't metas."
The leader laughed, a cold, grating sound. "They all say that. But Intergang always knows what it's selling. We are well out of your planet’s system. In three cycles, you will be sold to the highest bidder on the Citadel station. From there, you will learn to use your gifts for our clients, or you will die."
The door slammed shut behind them, the heavy thunk of the magnetic seal sounding like a gavel on their fate.
"This is it..." Tucker whispered, curled into a ball. "I'm going to be sold to a species with three mouths. or maybe some kind of slime monster!"
"They're using suppressors... these feel kind of like the Fenton Deflector, and also not." Danny said, looking at the glowing cuffs on his wrists. He looked back at the vast expanse of space, he'd always dreamed of being out there, but not like this.
He was powerless, trapped in a steel box in the void, surrounded by alien technology, and his vigilante rival, who also happened to be the one person in the group who is usually armed to the teeth, was staring at him with great suspicion.
But the hollow feeling in his chest was beginning to tingle. He could feel it. These cuffs were made for metas, not ghosts.
And ghosts are notorious for affecting electronics, he could feel his powers working into the cuffs, these would absolutely not hold him forever.
"They're right about one thing," Sam said, her voice dangerously quiet as she looked from Danny to Valerie. Good, strong stock indeed.
"They shouldn't have taken us." She looked around the dimly lit room, her gaze focusing on a complex console near the door. "Tucker, how much alien language did you do pick up when you were trying to get into the Watchtower for fun?"
Tucker blinked, processing this. "Not much… but' If I could just get my hands on..." he scrambled further upright.
"Valerie," Sam continued, "When the door opens next time, you can probably take the leader if we distract the guards."
Valerie managed a weak, wolfish grin. "Without my suit? Sure, I'm still better than any three of you."
Danny looked at his cuffs, the faint tingle in his core becoming a steady, pulsing familiar feeling. "We've dealt with crazier stuff back in Amity," he murmured, his eyes glowing a faint green for just a microsecond, the first sign of his powers breaking free. "At the engine room we'll be able to make a big and important enough a distraction and then we escape."
The journey back to Earth was going to be long, but for the first time since waking up, Danny Fenton stopped feeling like cargo and started feeling like a hero again.
