It's been a few days since Danny's accident, and, for the most part, he feels fine. Sure, yeah, he can see how to some other person the accident may have been horrifying or disturbing or something, but for Danny it seemed like just another day in the life of a kid with ghost obsessed parents.
The ghost powers are a little bit weird, but honestly, having superpowers has been pretty fun. Sam and Tucker have been coming over for sleepovers every night since the accident to mess around with his new abilities, throwing wads of paper through Danny's intangible chest and drawing on invisible skin with pen.
It's during one such sleepover that Danny, Sam, and Tucker are hunched over playing Doomed, having gotten tired of watching Danny walk upside-down on the ceiling while tossing a ball back and forth with Tucker. It's approaching one in the morning, and Danny has been sitting in the same position for far too long. His back is starting to ache and he feels like his bones are fusing together, so he reaches his arms above his head with a yawn and leans backwards as far as his chair will allow.
As he stretches, his spine lets out a series of small pops. Danny lets out a sigh of satisfaction as the tension in his body eases slightly.
"Dude, that was a nice one," Tucker remarks, leaning backwards to stretch his back as well.
Sam screws up her face in disgust. "Guys, you know I hate the sound of cracking joints, knock it off."
Danny throws her a shit-eating grin, and without breaking eye contact, he quickly presses down on the fingers of his left hand with the heel of his right, releasing a satisfying snapping sound from each of his knuckles. He braces himself for a punch to the shoulder from Sam, but it never comes. Instead of the trademark gross out expression he was expecting to see on Sam's face, her eyes are widened in wonderment.
"Dude," she whispers, "do that again."
Tucker nudges Danny in the side. "Crack your knuckles again."
"Um...okay?" Slowly, cautiously, Danny moves to pop the joints on his right hand. This time, instead of smugly staring at Sam's face, he looks at his own hands. With the slightest amount of pressure, his knuckles release a small sound. This sound is accompanied by a faint green glow surrounding the knuckle, emanating around the joint before slowly fading, like a light shining through his skin. It seems his body has learned bioluminescence, but only in small doses.
"Do it again!" Sam encourages him.
He is more than happy to oblige. He walks over to the floor length mirror in his room, Sam and Tucker at his heels. He places his hand along his jaw and twists his neck. Once again, his joints crack, and each vertebrae in his neck is outlined in an unearthly green light.
"Dude!" Tucker exclaims. "That is so sick!"
"How does that work?" Sam muses. "I mean, I guess that cracking joints is bubbles popping in the fluid that lubricates your joints, and we know that your blood is some sort of weird ectoplasm blood hybrid now. Maybe all of your bodily fluid has a little bit of ectoplasm in it? And the light is from bubbles popping in the ectoplasm?"
Sam turns to look at her best friends, only to see that they are both staring intensely at Danny's hands. Danny is flexing his fingers with a sort of reverence.
"Tuck," Danny says as he locks eyes with his friend, "are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Absolutely," Tucker says with a nod.
In unison, they both shout at the top of their lungs: "HUMAN GLOWSTICK!"
