Working through some ideas for a Bleach fic and this scene (which should be in the second half of the fic if it goes how I’m planning) hit me while I was trying to fall asleep last night, so I had to write it. Consider it a sneak peek, though who knows. It probably won’t end up in the fic as-is if it ends up in there at all.
The inspiration for this whole AU has been dancing around my head for months. Feel free to hit me up if this short piques your interest and you wanna know more about it (:
Not sure if I’ll post to FFN/AO3 since it’s just a little 1k scene. If I do, I’ll update this with links.
Rukia tightened her grip on Sode no Shirayuki's hilt for reassurance. The arrancar's eyes glittered at her from across the room, looking almost yellow in the dim lights of Las Noches. Those eyes seemed to note her action and his lips parted as a wicked grin slid across his face. The arrancar shifted and the light played across white hair and the black hilt of a sword sticking up over one of his shoulders. Rukia couldn't help but remember another who had carried his zanpakuto that way. She shook her head slightly to dispel the memory; the one who stood before her was no ally.
Noticing this action as well, the arrancar's grin somehow stretched even wider. He raised a hand to grasp the hilt of his zanpakuto. "Admirin' Luna, little shinigami?" He asked, lifting the sword off of his shoulders and bringing it to rest in front of him. Hands white as bone began to idly unwrap the black silk from around the blade. "I'll admit, our Luna is pretty impressive. Most of the other arrancar sealed their power into a borin' ol' katana. We're the only ones whose power didn't quite care for that shape. Well, besides Nnoitora. Fuck that guy. He doesn't count," the arrancar decided, crinkling his nose.
"Nnoitora's dead, anyways," called the other arrancar, sitting on top of a column several meters away. He looked almost bored. Rukia noticed that this arrancar, too, wore his zanpakuto across his back. "His reiatsu kicked up then disappeared an hour ago."
"Oh really? I wasn't payin' attention. Sweet. We win!" The arrancar facing Rukia crowed, punching the hand not holding his sword into the air.
It would have been almost comical had Rukia not noticed the shape of the arrancar's zanpakuto. The oversized triangular blade gleamed, white-bodied and black-edged, in the arrancar's hand. The colors may have been inverted, but there was no way she could ever mistake that blade.
Her voice shook slightly as she whispered, "Zan.. Zangetsu?"
The arrancar cocked his head. The dark stripe down one side of his face seemed to drink in the light. "What was that?"
Rukia took in a breath and spoke again, this time with a voice backed with steel. "Where did you get that zanpakuto."
It wasn't spoken like a question, but the arrancar took it as one all the same. "What did I just tell ya? This is our zanpakuto. I don't know if you've picked this up in all your runnin' around here, but an arrancar's zanpakuto isn't like you shinigamis'. It's the manifestation of our power, nothing more. But it is ours."
Rukia's fingers tightened even more around her zanpakuto's hilt to conceal the trembling of her hands. Let the arrancar notice, she thought. Let him think it fear.
"That sword cannot belong to you. No two zanpakuto take the same form, arrancar or otherwise. That sword belonged to one of the best shinigami- one of the best humans I have ever known. Did you eat any shinigami, Hollow, when you were still in the realm of the living?" Her voice was as frigid as the power she wielded.
The arrancar didn't seem to notice her rage. Moving the tip of his zanpakuto in small circles, he tilted his head up and stared into space as if trying to remember something. Shaking his head, he said, "Nah, I think I'd remember eatin' a shinigami. Tough prey, your kind, but good eatin'." Raising his voice, he called to the other arrancar, "Ay Fresa, we ever eat a shinigami? Little girl here says we stole Luna from one."
The other arrancar stiffened, then ran a hand through bright ginger hair in exasperation. "Please. Please stop with the 'Fresa'. Can we just go back to 'Rojo'? I've never called you anything but what you want to be called, Blanco."
"Che. Fine. But that's just because you don't have the imagination think of anythin' else. Rojo, we ever eat a shinigami?"
"I feel like we'd remember that. Maybe one of the Vasto Lorde we ate had, though," Rojo mused, scratching his chin with a finger.
"Ahh. Could be," replied Blanco. He turned back to Rukia. "Well, there ya have it. Someone we ate probably ate your human friend and some part of us liked the shape of his sword well enough to keep it. Actually that's probably a pretty good compliment the way I see it, eh? Know that your friend's zanpakuto lives on, little shinigami," he concluded in mock-seriousness, lips barely able to contain another grin.
Rukia stood and stared for a moment, wide eyes darting from the arrancar to the sword to the other arrancar and back, remembering a battle that seemed like it'd been moments ago. No, she thought, mind racing. Not another one. Not one more precious person swallowed up by a Hollow. Not one more friend's soul lost in Hueco Mundo.
"I'm sorry, Ichigo," she whispered. "But I saved Kaien. I can save you. Dance, Sode no Shirayuki." Her zanpakuto, ever her partner, seemed to warm a little in her hand even has it turned whiter than the arrancar's hair and the air chilled around her.
"Ya really need to speak up, little girl. Oh, that's how it's goin' ta be, is it?" Blanco lifted his zanpakuto a little.
Some part of Rukia noted absently that the stripe on his face wasn't black, but a deep, dark red. Funny the things you notice, she thought, when you decide to kill someone. Rukia blinked hard to clear the tears that had begun to well up in her eyes and obscure her vision. With a battle cry that tore out of her throat as more of a scream, she launched herself at the arrancar.
One thing she hadn't noticed, however, was the tattoo on the side of his neck, the number that delineated his rank. The arrancar's grin hadn't faltered and he tilted his head from side to side, cracking his neck unconcernedly as Rukia attacked. Someone viewing the soon-to-be battle from another angle would have been able to see that the tattoo was a solitary number one, stark black against the pallor of his skin.
Sam and Tucker deserve best friend awards, Dora is a dragon mom, and absolutely everything is the Box Ghost’s fault.
What else was new?
Or: Danny gets stuck with a dragon amulet. Question is, can he control it or will it control him?
Thanks to @lunagalemaster for suggesting this awesome au. Temper Tantrums is going to be a five-chapter deal (making up about half the words of my 50k goal for this last summer’s Camp Nano) and it’s too long to post here so you can read the first chapter on either FFN or AO3!
Sam and Tucker deserve best friend awards, Dora is a dragon mom, and absolutely everything is the Box Ghost's fault.
What else was new?
Or: Danny gets stuck with a dragon amulet. Question is, can he control it or will it control him?
Thanks to @lunagalemaster for suggesting this awesome au. Temper Tantrums is going to be a five-chapter deal (making up about half the words of my 50k goal for this last summer’s Camp Nano) and it’s too long to post here so you can read the first chapter on either FFN or AO3!
What are friends for if not making you internet famous? Inspired/requested by @lunagalemaster. Thanks so much for all of the ideas!
AO3 link here, FFN link here.
inviso-doodles (4711 words)
Work: amity park at dusk
Creator’s Comments: mechanical pencil on the back of an english worksheet he forgot to turn in. i think he drew this one near the end of the summer? all i remember are the mosquitos, man. we were sitting on a hill in the park and i got eaten alive. -mod t
(23) Comment(s):
lol i like how you can see the printout on the other side
omg!!! this is amazing!!! how could anyone just draw this on the back of some other paper? i would buy this as a postcard or something!!!
I really like how he plays with light and shadow here. The setting sun is reflected nicely off the windows, as well as those of the streetlamps. You can tell they’re just turning on as the sun goes down. I look forward to his next piece.
(click here to read more)
“Holy shit, Danny. That’s awesome,” Sam said, peering over Danny’s shoulder onto the notebook he had balanced in his lap. He jumped, his pencil leaving a line across the paper as he scrambled to hide what he’d been working on. Having nothing to cover it with, he settled for tucking the notebook against his chest. Danny twisted to fix her with a very bright blue-eyed glare.
“What the fuck, Sam?” He asked irritably.
“Why are you trying to hide that?” Sam asked, fingers inching forwards to pull the notebook back where she could see it. “It was really good!”
“No it’s not, and hey!” He smacked away her hand.
Damn. She’d been so close and didn’t think he’d seen. Damn ghost reflexes, Sam thought. “Really, I mean it,” she said a little more softly. “You’ve got a lot of talent. Why hide it?”
(too long for a tumblr post - check out the full version on AO3 or FFN using the links at the top!)
I wasn’t sure if I could, but it turns out if you write fairly consistently every day for a month it is possible to churn out 50,000 words. Some of those words I’ve already posted, some of them still need another look over, but I’ll try to get those up in the next few weeks! After I take a break. Whew.
Snow white hair and glowing green eyes, the ability to walk through walls, disappear, and fly weren't the only powers Danny got after the accident...
Thanks to @lunagalemaster for suggesting a siren AU!
AO3 link here, FFN link here.
The Hazards of Humming (1553 words)
“Is that… Billy Joel?”
Sam and Tucker crept down into the FentonWorks lab, in awe of the sound drifting quietly up the stairs. “Danny’s downstairs doing homework,” Jazz had said offhand when she’d answered the door, as usual. They’d thanked her and had made the usual trek to the basement.
“Danny must have the radio on. Weird. He usually has earphones in,” Tucker said.
Sam shrugged and they continued down the stairs. Once they reached the bottom, they realized that Danny wasn’t listening to the song on the radio. He was singing the song. Sam didn’t think she’d ever heard Danny sing. The two stood at the bottom of the stairs, not wanting to disturb the music.
He was singing Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young.” The more Sam stood and listened to the catchy tune, the more she noticed a fuzzy feeling creepy over her brain, almost as if someone was tucking her brain in with a warm blanket. The music was just so good.
Beside her, Tucker felt the same way. How could anyone’s voice be this soothing? He wondered as his mind grew numb. He relaxed, shoulders slouching and allowing the straps of his backpack to slip down his arms and onto the floor with a heavy thud. Tucker paid the sound no mind. Sure, there were hundreds of dollars worth of drop-sensitive electronics in the bag, but did it really matter? No, he decided. Not while he had this music.
The music didn’t last much longer. Danny started at the sound of Tucker’s dropped backpack, cutting off his singing abruptly. When the music stopped, Sam blinked a few times, feeling like she was waking up from a long nap. Tucker shook his head a little, looking around. “Oh hey, Danny,” he said as Danny leapt up from his seat and ran towards them. “Wait. Why’s my backpack on the floor?”
“I am so, so sorry, guys. I didn’t think you were getting here for another twenty minutes and Jazz never comes downstairs so I thought it was safe and-” Danny babbled nervously, helping Tucker and Sam into a pair of lab chairs.
“I… I don’t feel so great,” Sam said, clutching her head. “What just happened?”
“Yeah, my head feels funny,” Tucker said, his posture mirroring Sam’s. “Do you think there’s a gas leak down here? Well, maybe not. You look fine, Danny, so I dunno what just hit us.”
“That would be, umm, my fault,” Danny said, pulling up a chair to sit in front of them. “Actually, let me run up and get you guys some water or soda or something and I’ll explain.”
He was back before either of the other two had even registered his absence holding two sweaty glasses of bubbly amber liquid, a third glass tucked under his arm carefully. Tucker held his glass in slightly shaky hands and took a sip. Ginger ale, just what his mother always gave him when he felt sick. He rolled the carbonated liquid around his mouth before swallowing, trying to get rid of the slightly stale taste in his mouth.
Beside him, Sam downed half the glass in an attempt to lose the dry feeling in her throat before stopping to sip the rest. She savored the ginger flavor for a moment before speaking. “Danny, what just happened?”
Danny took a deep breath and settled in his chair, rolling his glass between his hands. “I don’t think I’ve ever done this in front of you guys because I really only tend to do it when I’m alone and bored. Humming and singing’s a habit I picked up years ago as a way to pass the time and to try to get rid of whatever song was stuck in my head. I noticed a few months after the accident that flying and invisibility and the others aren’t the only powers I got when I became half-ghost. I also… Have you guys ever heard of sirens? Like in The Odyssey? I think we covered that in Lancer’s class sophomore year.”
“What are you saying?” Tucker asked, confused. The fog hadn’t quite lifted from his brain.
“Are you saying that when you sing, it’s like in the Greek myths?” Sam asked. The ginger ale must’ve helped her head to clear faster, Tucker thought. Definitely not that she paid more attention than me in class.
“Whenever I try to hold even a tiny bit of a tune,” Danny confirmed. “People who listen for more than a few seconds get kind of… well, like you guys just were.”
Tucker felt as if his mind was finally starting to clear. He upended the cup and swallowed the last of his ginger ale. “Why haven’t you told us about this, man? We could’ve, I dunno…”
Danny flashed him a slightly pained smile, shaking his head. “Not much for you guys to do. It’s no big deal, really, it doesn’t hurt me or anything. I just gotta watch where I hum, right? Can’t have people tuning out when they’re driving or something. That’s actually how I started to figure it out. I was singing along with the radio in the back of the GAV with Mom and Dad and Dad started to go off the road. Thankfully it wasn’t during rush hour or something. I panicked and kinda reached through Dad to grab the wheel and get us back on the road. I thought for sure they’d figured out my secret since I was so obvious but they started shaking their heads a few seconds later like they’d just woken up. I snuck back to the back of the GAV and pretended nothing had happened.”
“Jeez, dude,” Tucker remarked.
“Tell me about it,” Danny replied. “I had a suspicion but it wasn’t until one night at dinner Jazz mentioned not being able to focus on her college essays. She said she kept zoning out. Jazz never zones out. She’s like the Terminator when it comes to staying on task. I stopped humming while washing the dishes and she got the essays done the next day.”
“Why haven’t you told us about it? It’s not too much weirder than anything else you’ve been able to do,” Sam said, placing her own glass on the table behind her. “If anything, it seems like it’d be pretty useful when trying to catch ghosts, like using Ember’s powers for good.”
“I’m not going to use this to catch ghosts. Or for anything else,” Danny answered forcefully, surprising his friends with his vehemence. “I really, really try not to use it, ever.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you,” Sam said, verbally taking a step back. She’d realized lately that she’d been pretty overbearing when it came to her friends. “Do you mind if I ask why?”
Danny let out a breath. “It just feels horrible, you know? I don’t wanna have that sort of power over people. Overshadowing is bad enough but at least for that I have to physically possess someone and do things. You guys didn’t see yourselves just now. You would have done anything I asked you to. It’s…” He looked down at his hands. “I try to use my powers to help people. To fight the bad guys. This power just feels too… Vladdish. It’s slimy. Skeevy. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth.” He looked up to see a small smile on Sam’s face. “Why are you smiling?” He asked, suddenly annoyed. “This is some serious heart-to-heart stuff I’m telling you guys.”
“It’s just… you’ve got all this power and you’ve had it for a while, right? It seems like you’re really taking Uncle Ben’s advice: ‘With great power, comes great responsibility’,” Sam quoted. “You have a power that a lot of people would use to do shitty things and instead you’ve decided not to use it at all. That’s something that not a lot of people would be able to do.”
“Come on, I’m a teenage boy. Surely I’m not the one with the best moral compass around here,” Danny scoffed, annoyance forgotten.
“I’m serious. This whole time you could have been refining this power to the point where you could change someone’s mind with a whistle. That’s what Vlad would do. That’s what a lot of people would do, if only to make their life easier,” Sam said.
“She’s got a point,” Tucker said, crossing his arms. “I can’t say I wouldn’t use that to, say, get into the girl’s locker room.”
“Dammit, Tuck,” Danny said, shoulders shaking as he tried not to laugh. Sam elbowed Tucker in the side a little harder than she needed to.
“Ouch! Come on, Sam. It’s not like Danny hasn’t snuck in there before. He’s more than able to,” Tucker continued, dragging Danny down into the metaphorical hole he was digging.
“I’m revoking the Spider-Man quote,” Sam said, massaging her temples with her fingers. “No responsibility here.”
“All this time I just thought your singing voice went to shit after puberty and you were too embarrassed to sing along with stuff,” Tucker said, shaking his head. “Guess ghost puberty is weirder than human puberty?”
Danny finally drank some of his soda, rolling his eyes.
“Yeah, any other weird ghostly changes we should know about?” Sam asked jokingly.
Will o' the wisps have a rich spread of stories and folklore. Why wouldn't some make their home in Amity Park?
Partially inspired by @sarasanddollar's own entry for this year's Folklore prompt.
AO3 link here, FFN link here.
Danny, Blue, and Some Other Wisps, Too (2461 words)
Danny woke up slowly, rising out of the fog of sleep as one only does when truly rested. He cracked an eye, surprised to see that his room was still dark. Strange, he thought. The only times I wake up like this without an alarm are when it’s almost noon and…
A faint blue glow from the window caught his attention along with a series of very soft thuds. And that, he finished his thought, groaning as he sat up in his bed and pushing the covers off of his legs. He swung his legs off of the bed to rest his bare feet on the cool carpet. He stood and stepped to the window, smiling and shaking his head slowly at the source of the glow.
A tiny blue ball of light was bouncing off of of the glass over and over again. Danny reached down and lifted up the bottom pane, sliding it up over the upper section of the window. The tiny spirit zoomed through the plastic screen into the room, emitting soft chirring noises as it whizzed around Danny several times, stopping to tuck itself under his ear.
“Hey, Blue, nice to see you too,” Danny whispered, taking the wisp into his hand and bringing it down to let it float over his open palms. The wisp flashed a few different colors in response, bobbing up and down in the air excitedly.
“Hey, hey, hey, no need to get crazy. Gotta keep a low profile when you come over here, remember?”
The wisp stilled suddenly and stopped flashing, settling on its usual blue and dimming a little. It let out a sulky chirp.
“No, I didn’t say that! You are a wonderful will o’ the wisp and your colors are very alluring. I just can’t have you waking up my folks,” Danny said, gently stroking the wisp with the tip of a finger.
The wisp chirped again and brightened, pleased by the complement.
“Of course, you’re welcome. Now, what did you come over here for?”
A flash of green and a few hoots. “Help? Again? What did the others do this time?”
Blue flashed a veritable kaleidoscope of colors in response, whistling several notes in accompaniment. “Woah, woah, woah, you know I can’t read you that fast yet. I’m still learning!” Danny said. “Can you slow down?”
Blue went yellow for a moment, seeming frustrated. “Too much to explain?” Danny asked, resigned.
Blue whistled. “I getcha. Lead the way,” Danny said, touching the cold spot in his heart and letting the change wash over him. The wisp chirped excitedly as the white rings appeared around his waist and began to move in opposite directions. Blue flew in tight loops around one of the rings as it traveled, weaving figure eights of blue around the white. It hooted disappointedly as the rings disappeared and flew back to float in front of Danny.
“I’m sorry, bud, I don’t know how to keep ‘em around any longer,” Danny said, patting the wisp again in consolation. “I’m working on it, okay? I know you like ‘em.”
The wisp gave a particular whistle that Danny’d learned to mean something along the lines of “Yeah, you’d better!” and was out the window in a second. Used to sudden departures like this (wisps didn’t seem to have any concept of waiting. If they were about to do something, they were doing it already) Danny phased through the screen followed Blue out into the warm summer night.
Blue was playing games like it always did. It liked to keep at a speed just barely faster than Danny could fly so it disappeared from sight every few seconds, forcing Danny to put on a burst of speed to catch back up. Danny didn’t complain; it was a good exercise and he’d actually gotten a lot faster since he’d started tagging along after Blue. It wasn’t difficult to figure out where Blue was going, anyways.
The Amity Park Public Park - known to most locals as simply “The Park” - was a surprisingly large plot of land for a small town like Amity Park. Most locals wisely kept to the grassy hills on the outskirts where picnic tables and small charcoal grills were located and kept out of the central, forested portion of the park. No local could tell you why they didn’t go hiking in the forest, just that it wasn’t done. Danny had been of this mindset for his entire life up until almost a year ago, almost a year after he’d been in the accident with the Ghost Portal.
That was when he’d first met Blue and the rest of Amity Park’s resident will o’ the wisps.
Blue whizzed through the trees, bobbing and weaving in what Danny was sure was an attempt to lose him. He’d been lost in these woods several times before; there was just something about the trees that made humans lose their way beneath their dusky leaves. Luckily, he wasn’t entirely human, so once he’d been around the woods a few times he could usually keep his sense of direction.
Blue always came back to get him whenever he got lost, anyways. It would appear out of nowhere, whistling and chirring like Danny getting lost was the funniest thing in the world. Danny had figured out wisp laughter pretty quickly; laughter seemed to be fairly constant even across species.
He managed to keep up with Blue pretty easily today. Either he was getting faster or Blue was distracted. Probably some of both. Blue came to get him to come play now and then, but it was more agitated tonight than it usually was. That meant someone had gotten themselves into trouble.
They flew passed the grand old maple tree that stood at the center of the forest. Wisps crept out of the branches and leaves to see who had come to visit. Recognizing Danny, they flew out of the tree all at once to surround him in a blinding tornado of color and light, hooting and chirping their greetings. Danny held out his arms away from his body to let the wisps loop around his limbs. Wisps were inherently extremely curious creatures and liked to investigate him head to toe each time he visited.
Blue circled Danny a few feet away from the mob of wisps as if trying to make sure he was okay. It hooted indignantly twice. “Sorry, Blue, you know they do this every time. If you didn’t want to be delayed, you should’ve taken me another way,” Danny laughed, trying to shake the wisps off. Blue circled the crowd again and whistled loudly. The wisps stopped and Danny could tell they were listening to Blue as it hooted several times and flashed through a series of reds and oranges.
It’s scolding them, Danny thought. “Jeez, Blue, what has you tied up in knots?” He said aloud, quietly. At his words, the wisps dispelled in all directions, disappearing into the surrounding trees and leaving Danny and Blue alone under the branches of the maple. Blue gave one bright, short hoot, sounding rather pleased with itself.
“I hope they’re not mad at you later,” Danny said. Blue whistled and brightened defiantly.
“Yeah, but I’m not the one who has to live with them,” Danny replied. “Being friends with me isn’t going to help you if they decide to shun you.”
Blue dimmed a little then brightened again, chirping as it launched off through the woods again.
“‘Oh well’?” Danny repeated. “Things really don’t shake you, do they?” He followed after the wisp. After a few minutes of playing “Where’d Blue go?” Danny started to see the faint glow of other wisps ahead, multicolored balls of light dancing through the trees. Excited chirps and whistles met his ears as he got closer. The wisps were dancing around a fallen tree in a sort of celebration, bobbing up and down and all around.
Blue whistled for their attention and they stopped, pausing in their merriment to start whirling around Danny much like the wisps of the maple tree. It took several stern hoots from Blue before they stopped their spinning, giving Danny a moment to blink and clear the spots from his eyes. Blue circled Danny’s head once to get his attention then flew over to where the roots of the fallen tree stuck up out of the ground. The roots had long been stripped of their coating of dirt by the wind and rain of the summer storms. They stood stark and bare, glowing eerily white in the moonlight.
Danny floated over closer to Blue and realized that the depression where the roots had been had turned into a deep hole; the roots remaining in the ground must have rotted away, allowing the surrounding earth to collapse into the ground. Blue hovered over the hole, bobbing twice and hooting urgently. Danny peered into the gloom of the hole, eyes widening when his ghost-augmented eyes saw what lay at the bottom.
He turned to face the rest of the wisps. “Guys, what is this? Did you do this?”
The wisps jittered around excitedly, chirping in a way Danny read as “Yes, we did! See what we did?”
He put his hands on his hips, settling into what he hoped was a stern gesture. “I thought we worked this out. No more luring humans into dangerous places, right?” He waved an arm back at the hole. “There’s an unconscious guy in there! How’d he get there?”
The wisps stilled suddenly, then swarmed over to look at the hole, all delight thrown out in the favor of concern and sorrow. Their bright yellows, greens, and pinks dimmed into somber purples and blues. Danny sighed. Once he’d gotten to know the wisps, he’d worked through Blue to help them to understand that it wasn’t good to lure humans into the woods to ‘play’ and they agreed not to trick people anymore. Being the ephemeral beings they were, however, they often forgot this promise.
“It’s alright, guys. I can get him out. You guys can help if you want, though,” he said, descending into the hole. The wisps whistled and brightened a little, eager to help to make up for their mistake. They whizzed into the hole after him, surrounding the fallen man carefully. Danny worked his arms under the man’s torso and legs, going slowly enough to allow the wisps to get under the man and give him a little extra lift. Once he got the man in his arms, he slowly rose up and out of the hole and set the man on the ground, leaning him against a tree root.
Blue flew through the man’s pocket, returning to Danny bearing a weathered leather wallet. Danny accepted the wallet, brows furrowed. When had Blue learned what wallets were? He hoped Blue hadn’t turned into a pickpocket. Having Blue unlearn that habit would be tricky. Deciding to worry about that another day, he flipped through the wallet and pulled out the man’s driver’s license, committing the address to memory.
“We’re in luck, Blue,” he said, sliding the license back into its slot and handing the wallet back to Blue. “He’s only a few blocks down from my place. Put that back, would ya?”
Blue hooted in affirmation and replaced the wallet. The man would never know it’d been handled by a tiny forest spirit.
Danny turned back to the wisps and shot them a thumbs up. “Good job, guys. We did it,” he said. The wisps usually needed to have things repeated a few times. They flew around, whistling and transitioning back to tints of pink and green. Blue, of course, remained resolutely blue, though it brightened from a royal blue to more of a teal for the occasion.
“Alright, so what did we remember today?” Danny said,speaking slowly as if he were talking to children. His efforts weren’t too far off; wisps were fairly simple creatures as ghosts went, though they were higher on the intelligence ladder than ectopuses. Blue was an odd one, it seemed, but the other wisps for the most part appeared to respect it for this.
The wisps chirped and flashed a few more somber colors and Danny figured they had learned their lesson for the time being. “Thanks for coming to get me, bud,” Danny said, holding out his fist. The little ball of light bumped into it proudly, whistling.
“‘Someone had to get these fools in line?’ Blue, they can hear you,” Danny mock-whispered, trying not to laugh.
Blue chirruped. “Yeah, like you care,” Danny repeated, chuckling. He raised his voice so the rest of the wisps could hear. “Alright guys, it was great to see all of you but I’ve got to get this guy home, yeah?”
The wisps whistled and whirled around him in a parting gesture before dancing off into the trees. Danny turned back to Blue. “Shall we?”
Blue chirred, tucking itself back under his ear as Danny lifted the man up with a grunt. “Time to get this dude home,” Danny said. “If we have any luck, he won’t remember anything but a weird dream about walking in the woods.”
The wisp hooted in agreement and the two took off, heading back into town to the unconscious man’s house. It turned out he lived in one of the many apartment buildings lining that block. Danny counted the windows from top to bottom and phased through the outer wall and into the hallway. Once he reached the number that had been on the man’s license, he entered and awkwardly set the man down on the bed. He made to leave, then had a second thought and phased the man’s shoes off of his feet. The man might believe that he fell asleep in his day clothes, but maybe not that he’d left his shoes on, which were now caked with mud and pine needles from the forest floor.
He set the shoes down by the front door as quietly as he could and left the building, flying back home. He flew back in through his window and let himself change back into a human with a sigh, flopping down on the bed. Blue whistled irritably when Danny’s sudden horizontality dislodged it from its perch on his shoulder. Danny sat back up, holding out a hand for the wisp to rest on.
“Sorry, Blue,” he said, patting the wisp gently. “It’s late and I’m beat. Come back day after tomorrow? I’ve got a test in two days so I shouldn’t be up late tomorrow night but after that I’m free.”
Blue lept up from his hand, chirring in agreement. The matter decided, it zoomed out the window and back out into the night.
This game has taken over my life and my writing. Someone help me.
I'm very sorry about the title.
#TeamInstinct #NoShelterFromTheStorm
AO3 link here, FFN link here.
Pokemon Go-ing Ghost (3826 words)
“There’s an Arcanine on radar! I think it’s this way!”
“No, it’s probably this way. The forums said there was a spawn point for Arcanines over by the park fountain.”
“Park fountain? That doesn’t make any sense for a fire type.”
“Oh, you’re right. I mean the other fountain. The one made of fire.”
“Oh, come on, Tuck. We’re on the same team here. We both want an Arcanine.”
“Danny, bro, we are in no way on the same team. You picked the loser group, remember?”
“Better than the nerd group!”
“Team Instinct is for casuals.”
“Team Mystic is for… what do they call those types in anime? Tsundere!”
“Oh my god, don’t start with the anime. You only started watching it because of Sam,” Tucker pointed out.
“Okay, okay, fine. Mystic is better than Valor, at least,” Danny admitted with a shudder.
“Too true,” Tucker agreed, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose with a finger.
“Dude, you can’t tell me not to relate you to anime then do shit like that.”
“Shit like what?”
“Ugh, the Arcanine’s gone. It must’ve despawned while we were arguing. Nice job, Mystic scum.”
“Arguing takes at least two people! Just as much your fault as mine, dude.”
“You’re actually using logic to get out of this. You Mystic, you. See, I just go with my instincts for these things.”
“Danny, please.”
Danny cackled in response. “What? Gotta keep up the witty banter practice. Very important for superheroing.”
“You’re impossible. Wanna go take the Casper high gym? It’s red right now. Tag team to take it down, free for all to claim it.”
“You’re on.”
They made their way to the high school, hitting up PokeStops and catching the occasional Pokemon on the way. It wasn’t a good day for catching Pokemon, it seemed. Everything was either a Drowzee or a Zubat and even the low CP Pokemon thought they were justified in escaping the first few Pokeballs.
“Why the fuck would a 10 CP Pidgey think it was allowed to pop out of a ball like that? Pidgey. You are nothing to me. Give me your candy,” Tucker said, angrily swiping at his phone.
Danny laughed. “Got that Pidgey at 210 CP on the first try,” he bragged.
“Like that’s even good. Just like an Instinct to think a 200 CP Pokemon was impressive,” Tucker griped.
“At least I caught it before it ran away,” Danny said, dancing away when Tucker tried to snag his phone. “I’m an Instinct! I believe in the heart of the Pokeballs, man! The heart of the balls!”
“Pfffft,” Tucker sputtered. “It’s the heart of the cards, not the heart of the balls. Wrong anime.”
“Yeah, but this isn’t Yu-Gi-Oh!, it’s Pokemon. You gotta adapt to the situation. You Mystics and your plans can’t predict everything that happens in the heat of battle.”
“In the heat of battle… with a 10 CP Pidgey.”
“Hey, you couldn’t catch it, could you?”
They finally reached the school. Danny was the first to notice that the gym leader had changed since they’d walked over. “Hey, the top Pokemon at this gym has changed. It’s not a Flareon anymore.”
“Oh, a stronger Valor came in and took it?” Tucker still held his phone upside down to keep it in power-saving mode.
“Yeah, and now it’s a… shit.”
“What is it?” Tucker righted his phone and tapped the gym, bringing it into focus. “This shouldn’t be too bad, there’s just four Pokemon in here and we have type advantages for the first three.”
“Look again at the gym leader,” Danny said, looking around nervously.
“It’s just a Gengar, how bad could it...Shit! 2340 CP? How’d someone get a Gengar this early, anyways? I’ve only seen, like, seven Ghastly,” Tucker said, shaking his head.
“The gym leader,” Danny hissed, now checking behind them.
“What does the actual trainer matter? They may be level twenty-seven, but what’s so different about a girl named- Oh. Fuck.” The username read ‘Chaos’.
“FOR VALOR!” Someone behind them yelled before they hit Danny’s back with a thud. Sam wrapped her arms and legs around Danny in a parody of a piggy-back. “Git gud, noobs! This gym’s Valor’s.”
“Sam, get offa me!” Danny turned this way and that, trying to dislodge his girlfriend. She laughed and held on tighter. “Don’t make me make you fall right through me,” Danny threatened, cocking his head back so Sam could hear him better.
“Would you really do that, though?” Sam asked cheekily, leaning forward to give Danny a peck on the cheek before dropping off of his back.
“You bet I would,” Danny said indignantly.
“Just for that, I’m taking the FentonWorks gym,” Sam said with a wicked grin.
As it had turned out, the FentonWorks sign was apparently such a landmark in the suburbs of Amity Park that the locals had immediately submitted it to Niantic to be a location in the game. Danny had woken up one morning to find crowds of people standing outside his house. He had panicked at first. Had someone figured out his secret? The media were always first to the scene of anything like this. Then he looked at the crowd again - they were all looking intently at their phones. A suspicion dawned on him and he grabbed his phone off of his bedside table, unlocking it with a swipe and starting up Pokemon Go. Sure enough, he was living in a gym.
“You wouldn’t!” Danny cried in mock hurt. “It’s bad enough that I have to fight off Dash and his crew. They think it’s their personal mission in life to take control of my house with Pokemon.”
“They did pick Valor, so they must not be wrong about everything,” Sam said.
“Of course Dash picked the ‘strength above all’ team,” Tucker grumbled. “Go ahead, go take over Amity with your Valor buds.”
“Like I’d do anything to help them,” Sam scoffed. “They’re not true Valors. They don’t know the true meaning of strength.” Something glittered dangerously in her eyes. “You’re welcome to take any gyms they hold. I take my gyms myself. Besides, I can always take them back later.”
“If this continues like it is, I’m never going to be able to hold a gym in this town,” Tucker groaned.
“Hey, at least you have other Mystics to help you out. Sometimes I feel like the only Instinct in this whole damn town,” Danny said miserably.
“Aww, it’s alright. I’m sure some middle schoolers who like yellow will get smartphones eventually,” Sam said.
“Sammmmm,” Danny said. “You can’t bash Instinct. Everybody roots for the underdogs. We will rise up! There is no shelter from the storm!” He picked Sam up and slung her over his shoulder before running around the schoolyard, shouting more Team Instinct battle cries as he went.
Sam pounded on his shoulders with her fists in a show of protest but soon collapsed into laughter. She attempted to drown out Danny’s cries with her own Team Valor lines, but bouncing upside-down on Danny’s back made this impossible.
Tucker shot an amused look at his best friends but resolved himself to quickly grind down the gym before either of the other two noticed. Selecting his team to best oppose the gym Pokemon, he leaned against a picnic table and started tapping as fast as he could, occasionally holding a long tap to launch a special attack. He made his way through the first and second Pokemon - a Poliwrath and a Jynx - easily. The third Pokemon was a Snorlax, a veritable tank. It’d be a tough run trying to get all of its HP down before the battle timer ran out.
He had the Snorlax just about defeated when he noted movement out of the corner of his eye. Danny had let Sam down and they were coming back over to the picnic table. Increasing the speed of his tapping, he finally managed to defeat it. Readying the remaining Pokemon in his team, he began battling Sam’s Gengar with a rather strong Golbat he’d caught the other day. It didn’t quite have the type advantage to resist Gengar’s moves, but with Bite and Ominous Wind he hoped it would hit Gengar a little harder and wear it down faster.
His tapping drew Sam’s attention, however. “Tucker?” She asked suspiciously. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Tucker said, backing away slowly while keeping an eye on his screen. “Nothing at all, just… kicking your Gengar’s ass, actually.”
Sam made a sound that could only be construed as a growl and advanced on Tucker. “D-Danny? A little help here?” Tucker said, trying to look both behind him to keep from tripping and look at his phone to keep from losing the battle.
“It’s out of my hands, man.” Danny raised his hands to underscore his statement.
Tucker grimaced nervously as he felt his back meet resistance. He’d run into a tree. Nowhere to go now. Sam continued her approach and Tucker closed his eyes to await the inevitable. He kept tapping, of course, and blindly swiping side to side occasionally in an attempt to dodge incoming attacks.
He felt as if Sam had to be on top of him by now. He opened one eye cautiously. Sam was standing a few feet from him, arms crossed. She had a satisfied look on her face. “What are you up to?” He asked.
“I don’t need to worry. I believe in my Pokemon. They won’t be defeated by the Blue likes of you,” she said.
“You- you believe in your Pokemon?” Danny cried. “That’s Team Instinct talk! Why didn’t you join meeee.”
“I believe in the strength of my Pokemon,” Sam clarified. “You can try all you want, Danny, but I’m Valor through and through.”
“Why have I been cursed with a Valor girlfriend?” Danny asked no one in particular.
“Because no one else would date your Instinct ass,” Sam replied, linking her arm in Danny’s. “Not that you don’t have a cute butt, all things considered.” She leaned back to appreciate.
Danny went bright red and Tucker groaned. “Guys, what did I tell you about talking dirty in front of me? Save it for date night.”
Danny at least had the decency to look repentant. “So… you guys… wanna go look for that Arcanine?” He asked.
Sam whipped out her phone and pulled up the app’s radar. “An Arcanine? I’ve been looking for one of those for ages! It’s so hard to find anything with the radar broken like this. Come on, Niantic.”
“It’s gone, anyways,” Tucker said sadly, checking his phone’s radar. “We’re probably too far away now.”
Sam pushed up her lower lip in an exaggerated frown. “Dammit,” she said.
“Holyshit,” Danny grabbed Sam’s shoulder in surprise, staring at his own phone. “Guys. Lapras.”
Tucker’s mouth dropped open. Sam leaned over Danny’s arm, trying to see his screen. “I haven’t even seen one of those on radar!” She said excitedly. “Let’s go!”
”Go where? We have no idea which direction it’s in and, as you said, radar’s broken. It doesn’t indicate when you’re getting close,” Tucker said.
“Ugh. True,” she said. “Wanna walk around in circles anyways?”
“Of course,” the boys replied.
Eyes glued to their phones, they walked away from Casper High in a spiral pattern, trying to cover the most ground in the least amount of time. It probably would have made more sense for them to split up but the three didn’t trust that whoever did find the Lapras would tell the other two. They were correct in their suspicions.
An hour later, Danny flopped down on a grassy hill with a sigh. Still no Lapras. Sam crouched down next to him, groaning as her knees bent.
“I thought I was in decent shape but man, do Pokemon take out out of you,” she said, leaning backwards to fall back into a sitting position.
“Tell me about it,” Tucker said, collapsing onto the grass on Danny’s other side. “My legs are killing me.”
“Like you were actually in shape to begin with,” Sam teased.
“I’ve been working on it! I at least thought I was in better shape than this. I blame the heat.” Tucker put his head between his knees. “I think I may be sick,” he declared.
Danny scooted away from Tucker in an instant, rolling onto his side. “Dude. Don’t you dare.”
“Just phase it off, okay?” Tucker replied weakly.
Danny opened his mouth to reply, but his breath came out in a puff of mist. He shivered slightly and sat up to look around.
Sam noticed the change in her boyfriend’s demeanor and scanned the surrounding terrain, as well. “Ghost sense?”
“Yep,” Danny replied.
“Coast looks clear if you wanna change.”
“Nah, I’ll wait to see who it is. If it’s Boxy I don’t wanna bother.”
Tucker raised his head from his knees blearily. “Wha’? Ghost?”
“Don’t worry about it, Tuck. Whoever it was must’ve left,” Danny said, patting his friend’s shoulder reassuringly. Just as the words crossed his lips, however, his eyes caught a twinkle of movement in the sky above. Before he could cry a warning, Skulker landed in front of them. The twin jets of flame scorched small spots in the grass and Sam’s nose wrinkled at the burning smell.
Danny lept to his feet, white rings appearing around his waist as he mentally reached inside himself to find the icy cold core within. “Skulker! What do you-”
Skulker held up a hand, interrupting the ghost boy. “Ghost child, rest assured that I am not here to claim your pelt this day.”
The white light flickered out and died. Danny watched Skulker suspiciously. “What are you up to?”
A small screen popped out of Skulker’s wrist and he shoved the screen into Danny’s face, blinding the boy for a few seconds. Danny blinked at the sudden bright light. As his eyes adjusted, a familiar layout started to take shape. His mouth fell open slightly, unsure of what to say.
“Based on this tracking device, it would appear that the beast known as an ‘Arcanine’ is somewhere in the vicinity. I wish to hunt this beast using this… computer application. Have you seen such a beast?”
Behind him, Danny heard Sam burst into laughter. Skulker’s eyes narrowed. “This is no laughing matter, human girl. This is the hunt!”
His statement only made her laugh harder. “Good luck finding that Arcanine, man,” she said in between chortles. “We’ve been looking for that and a Lapras all day!”
“There is a Lapras, as well? The hunt abounds! You, too, hunt this creature?” Skulker said surprisedly. “A fellow hunter! I laud your attempt, young hunter, but you will find yourself no match for me, the Ghost Zone’s Greatest Hunter!”
Danny didn’t need to turn around to understand what Tucker was choking out under his breath. “Ghost Zone’s… Greatest… Pokemon Hunter!” The geek giggled.
Skulker paid the boy no mind. “This hunt has become a competition! Good luck competing with one with as much experience as I. The hunt continues! I will catch them all!” He launched back into the sky with that battle cry and was soon gone from sight.
Danny blinked again. “Should we have told him the radar is broken?”
Later on that day, the sun started to set and dusk settled over Amity Park. The Pokemon-hunting teens enjoyed this relief from the summer heat and stopped by the Nasty Burger for milkshakes. Danny was pretty sure soymilk wasn’t an option on the menu, but Sam somehow got her milkshake made with it anyways.
They took their shakes to go and walked along the sidewalk, each teen sipping noisily through their straw once they reached the bottom of the cup. Danny was the last to finish his milk chocolate chip shake; he’d always been the slowest eater of the three. Once he finished, he chucked the foam cup into one of the trash bins lining the sidewalk and laced his fingers through Sam’s.
“Spot anything good?” He asked Tucker. He had pulled up Pokemon Go to check for stops or Pokemon.
“Nothing really. Someone lured the PokeStops by the fountain. We could go take a break over there. Sit a while, restock on Pokeballs and such.”
“Sounds good to me,” Sam said.
They reached the fountain a few minutes later. Sam tilted her head to allow the fountain’s spray to mist over her face. A slight breeze had picked up on the way to the park and it felt amazing in conjunction with the mist.
“Hey, are either of you guys seeing this?” Danny asked, staring at a strangely shaped gray blob on his app’s radar.
Sam angled her face out of the mist to check his phone. “What, a childhood’s worth of ‘Who’s that Pokemon?’ training not working for you?” She teased. “Wait, what is that?” The shape was unlike any Pokemon she’d ever seen.
“Dammit, my phone died!” Someone from a nearby bench cried.
Tucker sniggered. “Noobs don’t know to bring a backup battery,” he said smugly. His own phone was plugged into the hefty external battery resting in back pocket of his cargo shorts. “The app’s been out for weeks and they still don’t plan for the battery drain. Must not be Mystics. We plan.”
Another cry of disappointment rang out from another bench and soon half the people around the fountain were complaining about dead batteries. “Okay, that’s weird,” Tucker said. “No way everyone came here low on juice.” His phone buzzed twice in his hand and the screen went dark. “Wait. What the fuck?” He pressed the power button on the side of his phone several times. It was deader than dead. Pulling the external battery out of his pocket, he checked the tiny LED readout on the side. The light blinked red.
“Danny, are you doing something ghostly right now?” Tucker asked nervously.
“What? No, why?”
“I charged this battery last night. It should be enough to charge my phone from zero to a hundred four times and it’s dead.”
“Are you sure you charged it?”
“Of course I’m sure! I don’t mess around with keeping powered up.”
“Huh,” Danny said. He coughed suddenly and his hand flew up to cover his mouth. His friends knew what to look for and spotted the faint trail of mist escaping through his fingers.
“Skulker again, you think?” Sam asked. “I guess it’s safe to assume here’s a pretty attractive place to get some good Pokemon.”
“Probably,” Danny said. “Doesn’t explain the blob on the- Oh, my God.” A familiar nasal cackling emitted from the speakers of Danny’s phone and his phone buzzed in the way that it did when a Pokemon appeared on the map.
Well, something appeared on the map, but it sure as hell wasn’t a Pokemon.
From the green skin to the cheesy glasses and coat, it was clear that Technus had somehow made his way into Pokemon Go.
Danny stared at his screen blankly. “I… do not know what to do about this,” he stated.
“What you always do when something pops up on the map. Try to catch it,” Sam said with a grin, reaching over Danny’s arm and tapping on the tiny Technus. The cackling grew louder and somehow more annoying as Technus appeared a little larger when the app switched over to catch mode. The little 3D-rendered Technus waved his arms in what he must have thought was a convincing manner. “It is I, Technus, Master of All Technology! I have infiltrated this popular smartphone application and soon I, Technus, will control every device in the world!”
“Dude, that’s just evil,” Tucker muttered, shaking his head.
“I will admit this transition to smartphones has been difficult for even the Master of All Technology! I am not used to controlling applications with such a following! The puny human servers could not handle my awesome might, nor could the pitiful Pokemon tracking feature! Now, no one will ever be able to find a Pokemon again!” Technus monologued, punctuating each sentence with a snort and another laugh.
“Holy shit. Technus caused the server crashes,” Sam said. “I’m gonna kill him. Do you know how many lucky eggs I wasted?” She yelled at the phone.
“And the radar. He actually broke the radar. I should have guessed,” Tucker said, slapping a hand over his face.
Danny slowly inched a finger towards the screen. “What if I just…” He swiped up with a finger, tossing a normal Pokeball at Technus. ‘Excellent!’ read the tiny text as the Pokeball hit Technus right in the middle of a very green tiny circle.
“Wait, what are you- Arghhh!” Technus cried as the Pokeball opened up, white light enveloping Technus and sucking him in. The trio leaned in intently to watch as the Pokeball rocked once, twice, then stopped.
“Pffft,” Sam sputtered. “The fool hacked himself in the game and still let himself be this easy to catch? What did he even set his CP as?”
“Dunno. The profile hasn’t come up yet- pfffft.” Danny snorted. “10 CP! He literally has the lowest CP in the entire game!”
A grin slowly slid across Tucker’s face. “That’s what you get for draining my batteries, fucker!” He flipped off the phone screen.
Technus’s figure on the Pokemon profile looked like it was trying to get out of the screen, but couldn’t find a gap to escape through. It pounded on the screen, mouth opening and closing in what must have been threats and boasts from the technology ghost.
“What do I even do with him?” Danny asked. “I don’t wanna keep him with my other Pokemon. He might mess them up somehow.”
“Why not just…” Sam scrolled down to the bottom of the profile screen and tapped the green ‘Transfer’ button. “Let Professor Willow worry about him.” She tapped her way through the ‘Are you sure?’ dialog and just like that, Technus was gone.
Danny looked at her incredulously. “Don’t you worry about where he went?”
“Nope.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’m Team Valor. We take risks. Besides, it’s easy enough to catch him again, right?” Sam grinned.
Danny grinned back. “Right you are.”
“Ghost Zone’s Greatest Pokemon Hunter alert,” Tucker said, pointing up at the sky. Danny and Sam squinted up, following Tucker’s finger. Skulker was flying back and forth erratically, screaming something in another language. Danny slowly placed a hand over his mouth. He looked like he was about to lose it.
“Danny?” Sam asked, curious.
“It’s just.. Dora taught me a little bit of the ghost dialect as thanks for helping her out with her queendom. Some of her knights may have taught me some other… choice phrases. Skulker’s up there cursing so much he might make Pariah Dark blush. Something about someone interfering with his hunt.”
Skulker screeched something else that all three had no trouble understanding as he flew off in another direction.
I like space and Danny likes space and we both wanna talk about KSC. Go NASA!
AO3 link here, FFN link here.
Droughts and Space Cadets (1095 words)
It was way. Too. Hot.
August had swept into Amity Park with a vengeance. Tucker didn’t pay too much attention to the weather forecast unless Vortex was in town, but he vaguely remembered Lance Thunder going on about “an unprecedented change in global weather patterns pushing precipitation away from the American Midwest.” In layman’s terms, Danny had explained as they walked to the nearby mall, it meant Amity Park probably wasn’t going to see rain for the foreseeable future.
“Unless we see a change in the way weather is moving across the Lakes, we might not get rain for a month,” Danny continued. “Might even be a minor drought.” He continued talking about weather patterns until he noticed Tucker’s stare. “Dude, what?”
“How do you even know all of this stuff? You got a C in Earth Science freshman year,” Tucker asked.
Danny scratched the back of his head self-consciously. “Well, ghost hunting’s been a little slow lately and school hasn’t started yet, so I’ve been reading about the history of the space program in my spare time. Do you know why they originally started launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida?”
“What does this have to do with the weather?”
“Bear with me, Tuck.”
“Fiiiine,” Tucker said, wiping sweat off of his forehead.
“Okay, so lots of people wonder why NASA would base their launches in Florida when it gets hit with hurricanes all the time. But really, it has a lot of benefits that outweigh the storms. But back to the storms later. Florida’s pretty close to the equator, so when they launch rockets and shuttles, they get a good boost from the Earth’s rotational speed. This saves them a lot of money since they don’t need to spend as much fuel or build as big of rockets, and you know they need to save since their budget keeps getting slashed-”
“Please save me the ‘Penny for NASA’ rant,” Tucker said, exasperated. “I’ve heard it thirteen times.”
“Thirteen? No way. And it’s really important, space travel benefits the economy in so many-”
“Bro.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Danny held up his hands in surrender. “Back to Florida. Well, Russia. Russia actually doesn’t launch from anywhere near the equator since they don’t have any land there and they like to maintain pretty strict control of their stuff. So they just build really big rockets. Kinda wasteful but that’s the Russians for ya. So first reason for Florida is the velocity boost, but the second is that it’s on the East Coast of the US. If they wanna use the Earth’s rotation for that boost, they need to launch east. They could do that from California or something where the weather is more consistent, but then they’d have to fly over most of the Continental US. NASA didn’t want to risk any potential accidents raining debris down on the populace, so they thought launching over an ocean was a safer bet.
“Last reason was that it was just a good location to build a base. Merritt Island, where the space center is, already had a military base on it, but not much else. It was all swamp and orchards. It was a huge plot of land in the middle of nowhere with an existing infrastructure thanks to the military base, Cape Canaveral. It was great for privacy and another failsafe in case of some sort of disaster.
“Anyways, Florida is a great place for launching rockets save for the weather. So, they have to be really careful with their weather predictions or they have to call launches off, which wastes time and money. They have to cancel or delay launches all the time due to tiny changes in the weather. It’s really fascinating what the thresholds are and what’s considered “bad” weather for a launch.”
“Wow, Danny, that’s so interesting. I’m so glad you told me this useful information,” Tucker remarked dryly.
“Hey, if I want to be an astronaut I have to be able to bring something to the table, right? So I’ve been trying to learn a little about how weather works. I do have more first-hand experience than most people, thanks to Vortex. And who knows, maybe this will help me beat him more quickly next time,” Danny added.
“Huh. I guess that’s true. After all this studying, I’d ask who you were and what you did with Danny Fenton, but since it involves space I shouldn’t’ve been surprised,” Tucker teased. “Nerd.”
“Geek. And that’s space nerd, to you.”
“Alright, oh Lord of the Space Nerds,” Tucker replied. He ran a hand across his forehead again, wiping away a layer of sweat. “Jeez, was the walk to the mall always this long?”
“Yep. It just wasn’t as hot last time. Just be thankful it’s this dry. If it was this hot and humid it’d feel a lot hotter thanks to all the water in the air. The fact that it’s dry means you can sweat more efficiently,” Danny explained
Tucker whapped Danny in the face with his very sweaty beret. “Fucking. Weather. Nerd. I’m changing your title.”
“But I wanna be the King of the Space Nerds!”
“Lord of the Space Nerds. I listen to that whole space speech and you can’t even remember the title I dubbed you with?” Tucker glanced over at Danny, then did a double-take. “Ugh, you don’t look nearly as gross and sweaty as I do. Ghosts, I swear.”
“Half dead with ice powers, Tuck. It has benefits.” Danny grinned.
“‘Cept for the last time you went to the doctor. That poor nurse thought you were actually dead.”
“Benefits, not including the fact that I can never go the doctor again.”
“Hey, wanna share a little bit of those benefits with me and fill this with ice?” Tucker held his beret out in front of Danny.
“Eww, dude, this thing stinks!”
Tucker shook the beret under Danny’s nose in reply.
Danny pushed the beret away. “Umm, I can’t.”
“What the flippedy fuck do you mean, you can’t?”
“Remember what I said about a drought?”
“Yeah?” Tucker’s eyes narrowed.
“Dry air means not enough water to pull out of the air and freeze into ice.” Danny pulled a slightly disgusted face. “I guess I could… freeze the sweat in the hat so it’d be kinda cool on your head?”
Tucker blinked. “That… that’s gross.”
“I know, I was just trying to help!”
They walked along a little ways silently. Realizing that they were still a ways from the mall, Tucker held out his beret again to Danny.
I ended up failing to continue Phanniemay but I’m doing several of the prompts for Camp Nano this year!
All props to the creators of this vine: https://vine.co/v/hnvggE7x2l3 and @sarasanddollar for inspiration (:
AO3 link here, FFN link here.
Vacation, or, The Sand Guardian, Guardian of the Sand (1361 words)
It was a beautiful day to be at the beach. The sun was shining. The waves crashed into the shore every few seconds with a dull roar. Seagulls flew overhead, circling and cawing.
Or, as Danny saw it, it was hot as hell, the ocean kept washing up plastic and driftwood, and seagulls kept trying to make moves on his bag of chips.
“Not today, you little shit,” he hissed, snatching his bag up and away from one enterprising bird. His sudden movement kicked up sand into the bag, dusting the corn chips with more than the original nacho cheese flavoring. “Dammit. Look at what you made me do!” He gestured at the bag angrily, waving his arms at the gull. The bird looked back at him, unperturbed.
“Do you think if I told Dad I thought this seagull was possessed by a ghost he’d manage to chase them all away for good?” Danny asked, turning to his sister.
Jazz shifted slightly in her beach chair, thumbing the page of her novel. “Please don’t. Remember the last time he thought an animal was possessed? He scorched our tent and the tents on the neighboring campsites, for one. There is no way that place is letting us back again.”
“That poor raccoon,” Danny said, remembering with a shudder. “Good point.”
Jazz adjusted her wide-brimmed hat and pushed her sunglasses further up her nose. “Why not go in the water? It’d definitely cool you down a bit.”
“The last time I tried getting in Dad tried to wrestle me ‘like a man’ and I almost drowned twice.”
Jazz looked at Danny skeptically over the tops of her glasses. “Danny, we both know you have no trouble getting out of his sleeper hold.”
“Three years ago you’d be running for the nearest phone to call Social Services for child abuse.” Danny grouched, slouching down in his chair. His feet left dark gouges in the sand as he pushed them forward, trying to bury his feet in the cool, damp sand beneath the surface.
“True. But that was when you were a lot less self sufficient. You can handle yourself pretty well now, no matter what Mom and Dad throw at you.”
Danny looked at his sister in surprise. “I’m not sure whether to be insulted or-”
“Take the compliment, Danny. They’re good for self-esteem,” Jazz said, smiling into her book. “Now go get in the ocean before you fry.”
Danny rose from his seat with a sigh, blinking into the bright light reflecting off of the water. His parents were out there somewhere. They liked to swim out to find sandbars to walk on; there was a good chance they’d floated a bit down the shore already.
He started to gingerly tiptoe his way over the hot sand before a very peculiar feeling bubbled up from his chest, cold air freezing his tongue and the roof of his mouth. “Man, does that feel weird when it’s hot out,” he muttered to himself, rubbing his arms absentmindedly. “And of course this happens now. Why wouldn’t a ghost attack when I’m hundreds of miles away from Amity Park on vacation?”
He scanned the surrounding beach warily. The beach was for the most part empty; it was prime sun time and most of the locals preferred to take this part of the afternoon indoors. It was just before tourist season, too. The Fentons were frugal folk and liked to make the most of their time away from work, leading to all sorts of interesting vacations. This one had been surprisingly normal, so far.
The sands beneath his feet trembled slightly and began to slide out from under him like water being sucked into a big wave. He jumped back quickly and with another check for any onlookers, reached into that now-refreshingly cold part of his chest and tugged. Cool white light washed over him, bleaching his dark hair to white and infusing his eyes with green. He let himself ignore gravity for a few moments, floating a few inches above the shifting sands.
He watched as the sands built up into a tall column, nearly a mountain. He was sure the sand was about to crash down on him before a craggy face formed out of the side facing him and began to speak.
“I AM THE SAND GUARDIAN, GUARDIAN OF THE SAND!” The thing rasped, sand pouring from its mouth as it spoke through constantly crumbling lips.
“What the-” Danny began.
The seagull that had been terrorizing him earlier landed on what must have been the sand monster’s shoulder. Danny knew it was the same one - it had the exact same dark wings and white-tipped feathers. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t for the thing to open up its beak and squawk, “Poseidon quivers before them!”
Danny craned his head to look up at the pair. “I’m not Poseidon and I really didn’t need anyone messing with my vacation. Fuck off,” he said irritably.
Both the sand monster and the seagull somehow managed to look taken aback. “YOU… ARE NOT POSEIDON?” The monster boomed.
“Why the hell would you think I’m Poseidon? Last I checked, I didn’t have a flowing beard or a trident,” Danny pointed out.
“...THIS IS TRUE. HOWEVER, YOU TASTE OF COLD, DARK WATER. YOU SMELL OF SALT.” The seagull squawked in agreement.
“What do you mean I- oh. Ice powers. You taste my ice powers, dumbass! And I smell like salt because I was swimming earlier! It’s probably still in my hair,” Danny said, ruffling his hands through his hair to dislodge some of the salt that had crusted at the roots.
“I KNOW OF NO OTHER BEING WHO FEELS SUCH A WAY. YOU ARE A THREAT TO THE SAND AND THUS MUST BE ELIMINATED,” the thing rumbled, leaning forward menacingly.
The seagull took off with what Danny could swore was a cackle, cawing, “Quiver before them!”
Before Danny could flip the bird the bird, sand was suddenly crashing down all around him, filling his nose, ears, and mouth with salty, gritty dirt. He panicked for a few moments before he remembered he was a ghost and therefore immune to physical attacks. He went intangible, ignoring the familiar tingly feeling as sand filled the space that he still technically occupied. He flew in the direction he thought was up and soon emerged out the side of the sand monster, now reforming itself to stand as tall as it had before engulfing him with sand.
Danny coughed several times, trying to resolve some of the dryness still stuck in his throat. He’d have to worry about that later. This thing had attacked him on his vacation, filled his jumpsuit with sand, and now it was going to pay.
“What did I say to you a minute ago, sand guardian?” He yelled, reaching out with both hands and emitting ice, as much ice as he could muster on such a hot day. The monster rumbled in surprise as ice spread up from the bottom of the column of sand to the top, quickly climbing up to its face.
“SAND GUARDIAN, GUARDIAN OF THE SAND-” The ice froze its face solid in a rather dusty look of surprise.
“Yeah, yeah, I know what you are,” Danny said, cutting off the flow of ice. “Not this beach, not today. Not this sand.” He backed up in the air and charged forward, infusing his forward-thrust boot with ecto-energy as he flew. He crashed through the sand guardian, yelling “FUCK OFF!”
Sandy ice flew everywhere as the monster shattered, landing with soft plopping noises into the high tide beyond. The tide slowly carried the blocks of ice out to sea as it went out. Within minutes, the ice was completely gone.
Now tired and covered in tiny bits of sand and ice, Danny let his fatigue tug him back into human form and trudged back over to Jazz, falling into this chair with a groan.
Jazz looked like she was trying not to laugh. “Enjoy yourself?” She asked, turning another page of her book a little too casually.
I thought it interesting to explore how the gods and goddesses of old related with the Ghost Zone. I did what research I could on the Muses from various mythology websites, so if I missed anything or got anything completely wrong I welcome corrections!
AO3 link here, FFN link here.
Κλειω (845 words)
Ember hadn’t always been a rock star. Well, Ember had. But her spirit had been many other things through the ages. Muse, goddess, other titles here and there.
There was a lot more going on in the ghost zone than many would believe. Current scientific thought from leading scientists stipulated that the Ghost Zone was nothing more than a dimension filled with a kind of energy that could absorb post-human consciousness released at the time of death.
However, there was more to the Ghost Zone than ecto-energy and the consciousness of the dead. There were entities that defied measurement, beings that flouted reason that called the Ghost Zone home. These were immortals that humans named deities in a much less secular age. They were remembered now only in stories and tales as the imaginings of more primitive peoples but they were very much alive.
Well, as alive as a consciousness can be. The Greek Muses had been revered millennia ago. Beings of unimaginable creative power, it had amused them when the Romans saw fit to assign them specific attributes. While Kleio was perhaps the most practiced in the art of recording feats of glory and praise – her name itself meant “to make famous” – she was no less powerful than her sister Melpomene when it came to entrancing those who heard her voice or her sister Euterpe when it came to bestowing blessings with her uplifting music.
These things meant little, however, when the Roman Empire fell. Temples sacked, others abandoned, Kleio and her sisters were left to nothing but ruins. Worship and sacrifices petered out over time until they had no choice but to leave the human realm for that of the ghosts. The Ghost Zone was teeming with energy – plenty to feed the hungry gods. Still, with no one to sing their praises some of the old Greek and Roman gods simply faded away into nothingness. Others, like Kleio, remained as ghosts of ghosts, roaming the ethereal plane in search of something – or someone – that caught their interest.
Kronos, one of the few remaining Titans of Greek myth, found solace in a ghost named Clockwork. In Clockwork’s temporal machinations he found a kindred spirit and remained with him as friend and advisor. Kleio had her pursuits over the years, but none caught her real attention. None until nearly two millennia after the fall of the Roman Empire.
The girl was drifting, lost, alone in the Ghost Zone. So soon after her death she’d managed to find a portal in the human realm to slip through into the green, comforting dimension but ever since had had trouble finding a real purpose in her existence. So, she drifted, trapped in an endless cycle of what remained of her human memories.
It was these memories that drew Kleio to her. The girl was a washed-up rock star, one of many who had tried to burn bright in the 1980’s and had fallen into deep depression, drugs, and alcohol. She had died due to an overdose, the numerous needle scars in the crooks of her arms leaving a record of what had led to her demise. Failing to gain any real fame, her one regret was not having made a mark on society as so many others had.
Kleio sympathized more than anyone else could. She longed to be recognized, to be celebrated again. Much like this lost girl, she dreamed of enormous crowds screaming her name. She took some time to consider – though how long this time actually took was hard to tell in the Ghost Zone – but once she made her decision, she acted quickly.
The only manifestation she could manage was that of a voice in the girl’s head. After some explanation – and several reassurances that no, the girl wasn’t going insane after her death – the girl agreed wholeheartedly. Kleio offered her blessing to the girl in the purest sense of the term; the girl would have access to Kleio’s abilities as a Muse so long as she continued to pursue and uphold the ideals they both held dear.
As Kleio’s blessing fell upon the girl, her appearance began to change. Her clothes, as well as the guitar strung across her back, had been ragged and dirty since her death; both of these were cleaned, mended, and polished to an immaculate standard. Her smokey eye makeup painted itself down her face reminiscent of the end of a bass or treble clef. Finally and most striking, her dyed-blue ponytail stoked itself into an inferno, whipping in the changeable currents of the Ghost Zone.
The girl took her guitar off her back and fiddled with the new settings. Kleio realized that after all that travel through the girl’s memories, she hadn’t asked for the girl’s name or offered her own.
My name is Kleio, Muse of History, She Who Extols and She Who Bestows Glory, Bearer of the Scroll. What is your name, young one?
“My name is Ember McLain,” the girl replied, her hair flaring up now in nonexistent winds.
A peek at the journey between Cape Canaveral and Gothapalooza in Reality Trip. Humans suck at long, open-air flights. Danny feels bad.
I know Gothapalooza’s in Nevada but I figured it’d be somewhere near a major city for logistical reasons, so I went with Vegas. Also did a little estimating on how long it’d take them to get there and how fast they’d be able to go. Skydivers experience speeds of roughly 120 mph, so I hoped a little faster would still be manageable for Sam and Tucker without any protective gear.
AO3 link here, FFN link here.
Long Flights (Complementary Drinks Not Provided) (1210 words)
Danny loved the feeling of the wind on his face. He always had in a casual sense, as did many people, but ever since he’d been zapped by that ghost portal there was much more to it than that. Flying through the air, he truly felt alive. Strange that it had taken half-dying to feel that way. He closed his eyes for a few moments and enjoyed the breeze’s caress of his hair. Well, it was less of a breeze and more of a gust. And unfortunately, for his friends the flight wasn’t nearly so enjoyable.
It was dark and it was cold. There was no way around that fact. Luckily, the southern summer air around them was warm, but it did little to keep off the wind whipping by their faces at 140 miles per hour. The skies were blessedly clear, but they were flying just high enough that the heat rising up from the ground below didn’t quite reach. Any lower, and they risked being spotted by anyone from local police to Guys in White.
Danny had shown them the clever little compartments his parents had built underneath the seats of the hovercraft they rode that contained goggles and gloves, but aside from those and the windshields, their human bodies had no real protection from the elements. Tucker’s long-sleeved shirt kept him from being windburned, but Sam’s crop top offered no such protection. A few hours into their journey, seeing that Sam’s lips were turning blue – she would never complain, too much was at stake – Danny signaled to the other two to land. Quickly turning invisible, he changed into his human form, stripped to his boxers, and changed back to a ghost. He offered his t-shirt and jeans to Sam to put on over her crop top and shirt and after a strange look when she realized where they’d come from, she took them gratefully.
Soon after they’d taken back to the air, Danny was lost in his thoughts again. This leg of their journey was a lot quieter than that first mad dash to Cape Canaveral. It was late and they were tired, stressed, and else besides. What small talk any of the three had tried to make hadn’t made it passed the first hour and a half.
Based on a quick Google Maps search on one of Tucker’s tablets – 4G capabilities and an unlimited data plan had very much come in handy the past day or so – Gothapalooza, located several miles outside Las Vegas, was a little over 2,300 miles via major roads. If they used those as their guide, factoring in the hovercraft not being able to follow Danny’s maximum speed, it would take them over sixteen hours to get there. They weren’t travelling at the maximum speed of the hovercraft, either, but after a little bit of experimentation they determined that 140 miles per hour was about as fast as Sam and Tucker could stand without their faces feeling like they were peeling off.
Danny was feeling pretty guilty by hour six. He was maintaining speed behind the two hovercraft, partially to make sure he didn’t accidentally pull away and leave them behind in his haste and partially to keep an eye on Sam and Tucker. They’d had to leave the diner without more than a new mouthfuls each of food and it was early in the morning of the following day. He’d seen several head nods and three times the yawns from both of his human companions and he was trying to figure out a way so that Sam and Tucker could each get at least a few hours of sleep.
He wasn’t tired or hungry at all, really. The longer he stayed in his ghost form, the less human things liked that seemed to concern him. So long as he avoided using powers like his ectoblasts, he could maintain twice this speed easily for days. The cold certainly didn’t bother him given his core temperature, nor the wind. The only things that wore on him were the knowledge that Freakshow had his family hostage and his worry for his friends.
He was torn out of his reverie, worries proving true when he noticed Tucker starting to lean sideways. “Sam,” he said urgently over the Fenton Phones. “Tucker.”
She glanced over at Tucker and, seeing him start to fall, moved her hovercraft over in time for him to fall against her side while Danny slipped in to sit in front of Tucker, setting the controls of the hovercraft to a descent. He glanced over the side of the hovercraft to look for a spot to land. They were in luck – isolated clusters of lights glimmered below them. There wasn’t a major city in sight. Asking Sam to follow his lead, he led them to land just outside one of the smaller clusters of lights on the side of a long strip of lights that disappeared into the distance – a stop off of the highway.
“I’m going to sneak into a convenience store and grab a few snacks,” Danny whispered. “Be right back.”
Sam nodded and pulled her wallet out of the pocket of Danny’s jeans. She flipped through a few bills until she found what she was looking for, then held out a twenty-dollar bill. “For the counter,” she said.
He was back ten minutes later with an armful of jerky for Tucker and a variety of dried vegetable chips for Sam. The teen working the convenience store’s register would find his count to be twenty dollars high the next morning. Hopefully it would be enough to compensate for the missing merchandise that would show up on the next inventory count.
They shook Tucker awake from his position sprawled out on the Texan dirt. Sam held an open package of jerky under his nose with one hand while pinching her own nose shut with her other. Tucker jerked awake with a cry of “Bacon!” and looked up at the other two sheepishly when he realized what had happened. Sam and Danny rolled their eyes and helped him to his feet.
A few minutes later, they were back in the skies racing towards Vegas, Danny riding double on Tucker’s hovercraft. Every two hours for the rest of the trip, Danny switched hovercraft, allowing the other rider to have a few hours of blessed sleep. Thanks to his negligible weight as a ghost, the hovercraft didn’t have to go any slower. Sam and Tucker were so tired that they slept through the morning hours into the afternoon.
By mid-afternoon, they’d crossed the state border into Nevada. After nudging Sam awake behind him, Danny let himself drift above the hovercraft to fly in formation behind the other two.
Reapplying her purple lipstick, Sam smiled. “Get ready for the darkest celebration of all things grim and ghastly,” her voice echoed over the Fenton Phones. Setting her hovercraft to fly straight ahead, she pulled Danny’s shirt over her head and kicked off his jeans and stowed them in the compartment beneath her seat.
“Gentlemen, I present to you…” Her voice trailed off as sunshine and rainbows appeared over the horizon. “You have got to be kidding me,” she sputtered as Danny and Tucker dissolved into giggles behind her.
A day in the life of Lance Thunder, field-reporting meteorologist extraordinaire.
AO3 link here, FFN link here. As always, comments and critiques appreciated (:
Amity Park Action News Special Edition: FentonWorks (2603 words)
Lance Thunder checked his hair for the third time in the compact mirror he always kept in his suit jacket pocket. Snapping the compact shut, he considered going back to the news van and telling his cameraman that the Fentons weren’t home. He didn’t know why he’d been sent out here to report on this anyway. He was a weatherman, not a field reporter, but that didn’t seem to stop the producer from sending him out in every ghost attack imaginable to report at the scene.
When he’d complained about this latest offense to his meteorological dignity, she’d explained, “This isn’t an action report, it’s just a little interview and tour for our viewers of FentonWorks. The Fentons are so tied up in what we regularly report on that this is our most requested story. For something so important, we can only send our best TV personality to do the job.”
He’d been schmoozed. And he’d let it happen. Again. He was vowing to himself never to let this happen again when the door he’d been learning against to stay out of the midafternoon sun – direct sunlight bleached out his hair – opened and he fell face first into a wall of orange jumpsuit.
Backpedaling several steps, Lance drew in a breath to inform the orange jumpsuit that orange frizzed out his hair when-
“Good afternoon, Mr. Thunder! I’m Jack Fenton, and this is my wife, Maddie! We’ve been expecting you,” came a rumbling voice from above the hazmat suit. Lance craned his neck to look up at the man and took the black-gloved hand that was offered, shaking it gingerly. Jack Fenton stepped aside and a woman in a blue jumpsuit mirroring Jack’s took Lance’s hand in turn.
“Great to meet you, Mr. Thunder. I’m Maddie. My husband is a big fan of yours,” she said, a little quieter than Jack’s near-bellow.
Lance snapped on his newscaster smile. “Always good to meet a fan. I’m here for the FentonWorks TV spot for Amity Park Action News. I assume you folks have some time?”
“Of course!” boomed Jack. “We’ve prepared some really cool stuff. You’ll get to see our newest invention, the Fenton Ghost Battery!”
Lance turned back to the van and waved his cameraman over. “That’s great. Really great.” Checking the list from his pocket on topics the producer wanted, he continued, “It would be great if we could start off talking a bit about you two, the people behind the… monstrosity in the middle of town. How did this all start? What makes you do what you do?”
Maddie looked thoughtful. “How about you meet our kids? You can interview us all together. Jazz and Danny are both pretty involved in what we do, even if they aren’t the most enthused about it.”
Lance held back a grimace. Great. Kids. “Sure, whatever you think is best. Where should we set up?”
Maddie called her children down from their rooms while Lance and the cameraman moved into the kitchen. By the time the other two Fentons got downstairs, Jack and Maddie were mic’d up and ready to go. The cameraman handed the teens wireless microphones so they could run the wires up their own shirts.
Once all four Fentons were seated around one side of the kitchen table, Lance began. “Good morning, everyone, this is Lance Thunder here at FentonWorks for an Amity Park Action News Special Edition. I’m here with Jack and Maddie Fenton, along with their children, Jazz and Danny.” The teens waved at the camera, Danny a little more wearily than Jazz.
“Why don’t we start with you, Maddie. Can you give a short explanation for what FentonWorks is and does, for the folks at home?”
“Sure, Lance. FentonWorks is a company that Jack and myself started primarily to research ectoplasmic entities, or as they’re widely known, ghosts. We invent and produce a wide variety of anti-ghost equipment and are some of the very few experts on ectoplasmic entities in the world,” Maddie explained.
“Yes, I believe I’ve seen some of your equipment out and about in Amity Park. Your Fenton Thermos is one of the ghost-fighting tools of choice of Danny Phantom and has received a lot of popularity in recent months,” Lance said.
Jack interjected with a grumble. “That ghost kid stole the first Thermos we ever made and has been terrorizing the town with it. If I ever get my hands on that ghost kid, I’ll…” He trailed off, mumbling something about molecules. Over at the other end of the table, Lance saw Danny wince while his sister looked over at him sympathetically. He wondered what that was about, so he decided to move the conversation.
“So, Danny, I’m sure being around all this innovation is quite exciting for a young man. What do you think about your parent’s work? Ever get to help out?”
“It’s pretty interesting, but I don’t do much with it because I’m so busy with school. I do help out sometimes with… testing,” Danny began, but the cameraman coughed. “Not getting anything from his mic. ‘S not on.”
Lance pointed at the small black box clipped to Danny’s jeans pocket. “Sorry, son, would you mind flipping that little switch there?”
“Oh, my bad, I didn’t see it,” Danny said, turning on the mic. As soon as he did, the cameraman’s headphones screeched so loud everyone in the room winced. The cameraman wrenched the headphones off his head and massaged his temples, groaning.
“I’m so sorry!” Danny said, “Tech gets really weird in here. It’s all the ecto-energy from the experiments and the fields that the, uh, ghost tech gives off.”
“That’s totally fine, son,” Lance said, ignoring the glare the cameraman shot his way. Any excuse to move on to the next point on the producer’s content list. “I think I’ve got enough material for some background. How about we move along to the tech you were going to showcase?”
Jack stood up so abruptly he knocked over the chair he’d been sitting in. “Just what I was waiting for! Right this way, Mr. Thunder. You’ll love the lab!”
“Best we get out of here before Dad tries to offer him some of the fudge he made with the new Fenton Fudger last night,” Lance heard Danny whisper to Jazz. He tried not to think about what could possibly be wrong with the fudge considering the way the equipment had gone haywire just a few moments ago.
The lab turned out to be the basement. Contrasting with the seemingly ordinary suburban house upstairs, the lab’s walls were study-looking steel, along with just about everything else in the place. A large set of industrially-sturdy yellow and black doors took up most of the far wall.
“Over on that end is the Fenton Ghost Portal,” Maddie explained. “It’s our main source of research material. It opens into a dimension we call the Ghost Zone.”
Lance signaled for the cameraman to start rolling. “What exactly is the Ghost Zone?”
“The Ghost Zone is a dimension separate, yet connected to ours in many ways that we don’t yet comprehend. It is the home of the ghosts that so frequently plague Amity Park and is full of ecto-energy. We speculate that over there, the roles of ghosts and humans are completely reversed. That is, if you went there, you would be able to walk through walls and such, while the ghosts are completely solid.”
Danny coughed something that sounded suspiciously like “confirmed.”
“Very interesting,” said Lance. “Now, about this door – excuse me, portal – could a ghost walk through that portal right now?”
“Don’t worry, it’s completely secure! Except when it isn’t,” Jack said cheerfully.
Maddie shot an amused look at Jack. “We have the highest possible security on those doors. However, ghosts are actually deviously quite clever. It’s a constant cycle of ghosts figuring out how to get passed our security measures and us putting new ones in place. I wouldn’t worry at the present, however. It’s currently on lockdown as we’re performing some maintenance.”
Lance Thunder definitely wasn’t sweating. He never sweat on camera. “Mr. Fenton, how about that demonstration?”
“Over here, Mr. Thunder. I present to you the Fenton Ghost Battery!” Jack gestured to a fairly ordinary, if large, battery hooked up to another device that was mounted on a steel and glass cage containing a-
“Excuse me, Mr. Fenton, but what in the blazes is that?” Lance exclaimed.
“For demonstrative purposes today, Maddie captured this ectopus. Ectopuses are one of the weakest, simplest creatures in the Ghost Zone. They possesses no real intelligence. Think of them as the pigeons of the Ghost Zone. Annoying, but overall harmless.” The ectopus looked rather insulted. Lance didn’t mention it.
“Here we are using the Fenton Ghost Battery in conjunction with some older inventions of ours, the Ecto-Converter and the Ghost Crammer. The Ghost Crammer is used to make the ghost smaller and compress it into this battery while the Ecto-Converter uses the ghost’s ectoplasm to power whatever the battery is being used to power. The battery casing is really just so it’s compatible with anything that takes nine volt batteries,” Jack added.
“I see,” Lance said. He didn’t.
“So, I press this button and the ghost is sucked into the battery, then we can use it to power Fenton Blasters to fight ghosts! Isn’t that great? Using ghosts to fight ghosts! Ha!” Jack’s eyes were gleaming with excitement. “Here, watch this!” He pressed the button, and everything went wrong.
Well, not at first. The ghost was sucked into the battery. Check. The ghost bursting out of the battery? Uncheck. Very uncheck.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEE! The ghost’s screech was, for lack of a better term, unearthly.
“Uh oh,” said Jack.
“Uh oh? UH OH?!” Lance squeaked, holding onto his hair.
“Activate FentonWorks Anti-Creep Mode! I’m locking down the lab. Just a moment, Mr. Thunder,” Maddie shouted, keying in several commands at one of the many terminals around the lab.
“FentonWorks Anti-Creep Mode activated. Our special today is fudge – I mean, pain!” A tinny version of Jack’s voice echoed from speakers overhead.
“I’ve, uh, got to go,” Danny said, grabbing Jazz and dashing up the stairs right before a metal wall slid down to block the way out.
“Poor thing, he’s terrified around ghosts,” Maddie said. “Always runs the other way. You should see him around ghost equipment. Even worse.”
“Why are you standing around talking?! GET THAT THING!” Lance didn’t know where to go. He was trapped in a metal bunker underground with these people and that thing and it was squirting green goo everywhere and it was totally going to ruin his hair.
“It’s quite alright, Mr. Thunder. These things do happen. Just wait until the Anti-Creep Mode gets at it. I’ve made a few upgrades!” Jack patted Lance on the back.
“Upgrades? Jack, which parts did you upgrade?” Maddie asked, troubled.
“I changed the ecto-energy identification parameters so it’d ignore our ghost weapons! Had to shore up that weak point after the last time,” Jack replied, looking rather pleased with himself.
“Jack, we’ve been running our ghost weapons on ectopus energy for weeks! It’ll ignore the real thing now, too!”
“Oh. Whoops,” Jack looked dejected. “To the weapons vault!”
Maddie and Jack ran over to another huge set of metal doors. Lance couldn’t hear quite well over the screeching, but they seemed to be arguing over the passcode. He ran around the lab looking for a place to hide when four very slimy green tentacles wrapped around him from behind. Lance let out a screech of his own as the ectopus attempted to swallow him whole. Strangely, Lance could still see a distorted green-tinted lab through the ghostly flesh.
“My hair,” he tried to moan, but it came out as a choked gurgle. From what he could tell, Jack seemed to have abandoned trying to unlock the vault and was futilely tugging on the vault handle. Lance could feel ectoplasm seeping through his hair to the roots. Surely, this was the end, he thought.
It was at that moment that Danny Phantom phased through the ceiling. At the ghost boy’s arrival, what Lance assumed was the FentonWorks Anti-Creep Mode came to life. Phantom got a few ectoblasts off, causing the ectopus to spit Lance out onto a lab table, but was smashed into the wall by a huge metal Jack Fenton cutout that sprung from the floor.
“Ooph,” choked Phantom, dropping to the floor once the cutout had retracted. “I forgot about that.” He pushed himself slowly off the floor. His earlier ectoblasts seemed to have stunned the ectopus, however, so when Phantom unclipped the Fenton Thermos from his belt and aimed it at the creature, it didn’t so much as move. “Thaaaaat’s it,” he said to himself. “Good ectopus.”
As soon as he’d said this, two grappler missiles fired from ports in the walls and caught Phantom by the ankles, hanging him from the ceiling. Lance stared at him from his puddle of ectogoo. The Fentons stared from their position by the vault.
“Did we just… capture the ghost kid?” Jack said, incredulous.
“Uh, hi, Mr. and Mrs. Fenton. I don’t suppose you’d let me go for saving your lives?” Phantom asked with a nervous grin. He was ignored.
“Maddie, we caught the ghost kid! HA!” Jack grabbed Maddie’s hands and danced them around in circles. They slowed to a stop when they heard a pounding at the metal wall blocking the stairs.
“That must be Danny and Jazz making sure we’re alright,” Maddie said, pressing a button on the console. The wall slid away and Jazz ran into the room.
“Mom, Dad, I heard the Anti-Creep Mode activate! Are you okay?” Jazz exclaimed, stopping when she saw Phantom hanging from the ceiling. Phantom shot her a rueful grin. Jazz looked like she was trying not to laugh.
“Oh, great, you guys… caught the ghost kid! Great job, Mom and Dad!” Jazz’s enthusiasm seemed a little too upbeat. “So, I guess the FentonWorks Anti-Creep Mode caught him? You haven’t deactivated it yet?”
“You’re right, Jazzy-pants, we did!” Jack said gleefully. “Now to get him down from there and into a containment-“
“FentonWorks Anti-Creep Mode deactivated. I hope you enjoyed your fudge- I mean, pain!” Jack’s tinny voice sounded from the speakers yet again. The claws holding the boy to the ceiling fell away, allowing him to orient himself in the air and phase back through the ceiling with a cheeky grin.
“Damn you, ghost boy, the next time I see you I will-“ Jack shouted at the ceiling.
Maddie placed a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Next time, sweetie. There’s always a next time.”
“That is true, Mads, that is true,” Jack admitted, letting out a breath.
They seemed to have forgotten about Lance, but his shrill moany noises drew their attention back to him, on the table in a pile of oozing slime. The cameraman was in the same corner that he’d crouched in at the start of this whole mess, camera aimed at the action the whole time. Action that now included Lance Thunder screeching about his hair and Lance Thunder sprawled in a puddle of slime.
“Get. That. Camera. Off!” Lance squawked, flailing about and sliding off the table. He didn’t know whether the man complied.
The Fentons helped him up, apologizing the whole way.
“It’s alright, Mr. Thunder. “We’ll get you in the Fenton Cleaner and you’ll be good as new!” Jack mollified.
Lance jerked his arm out of Jack’s gloved hands and stormed out of the lab and the house without a word.
Hey everyone! Happy May! Starting off Phanniemay a day late since I was driving home from college yesterday, but here it is. I thought it would be interesting to think how ghosts become ghosts, particularly in as strange a place as Amity Park.
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Alice (1231 words)
She came to gasping, air rattling through her windpipe and scraping against her already-raw vocal cords. She tried to speak, but sounds coming out of her throat could hardly be construed as speech and this made her breath faster, hyperventilating because the air wasn’t reaching her lungs no matter how hard she tried and everything was too loud and too quiet, too hot and too cold. Her vision was going foggy and surely her entire chest had collapsed or was collapsing and how could this be happening to her? It made no sense and everything hurt and –
“Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, shh, shh. It’s alright, you’re fine, it’s over now,” a light baritone sounded from behind her, a cool hands settling on her shoulders.
“Can’t- can’t breathe,” she choked out, or tried to. What crawled out of her throat still didn’t sound like words (too jagged, too much like screams) but the stranger seemed to understand.
“Okay, I’m really sorry and this is probably going to be even worse of a shock than how you’re feeling right now but you’re going to have to trust me,” said the voice, hands moving on her shoulders as the source of the voice moved around her to kneel face-to-face. She couldn’t help but stare at the stranger before her, whose shock of white hair (stuck out in all directions as if he had been struck by lightning) fell into a pair of startlingly green eyes.
Pushing several strands impatiently away from his forehead, he repeated, “Do you trust me?” She jerked her head in what felt like the right direction. “Alright, I’m so sorry but I need you to stop breathing.” His voice cracked slightly on the word “stop.”
“W-what?” She wheezed. “But I-I need t-to-“
“No, you don’t. Not anymore.”
“What do you mean not any- oh.” She hadn’t realized that she’d stopped trying to breathe soon after he’d started talking. Her hands crept up to her chest, fingers splayed over where she thought her lungs to be.
She saw herself reflected in his eyes as he spoke again, those eyes immeasurably sad. “You were trying to force air into organs that don’t exist anymore. Your consciousness was overriding your instincts and your body was getting confused trying to carry out instructions that don’t make sense to it.”
He wasn’t making any sense. How could he? He spoke again before she could. “What’s your name?”
“Alice.”
“Alice. That’s a nice name. Alice,” he repeated, as if trying to commit it to memory. “I’m Danny,” he said, holding out a gloved hand.
She shook it, slowly, unsure as to what was going on. Now that she could think straight, her mind was buzzing with questions and his cryptic explanations weren’t helping. “Nice to meet you, but what did you mean about my organs?”
He let go of her hand. “You don’t have organs, because- gahh.“ He stopped, running his hands through his hair anxiously. “Why haven’t I gotten any better at this?”
Alice blinked. She briefly considered answering but after a moment’s thought decided against it. He was definitely talking to himself. And she definitely wasn’t thinking about the fact that she wasn’t breathing.
Danny untangled his hands from his hair to take both of hers, breathing out slowly. “Alice, you don’t have organs because you’re a ghost. You’re dead.”
The boy came back some time later. After the way she’d screamed at him earlier, she was surprised he did. She didn’t remember seeing him come in to what looked to her like an abandoned gardening shed, so when he coughed quietly she started.
“Sorry, I thought you’d seen me coming. I guess I went invisible again. Scare my friends all the time,” he chuckled nervously.
She lifted her head and looked him right in the eyes. “I have some questions,” she said.
“Makes sense that you would. Shoot.”
“How am I a ghost? I don’t look like a ghost. I’ve seen them flying around and- and-“
“Destroying things? Hurting people? Yeah,” he admitted, running a hand through his hair. “Here in Amity Park, things work a little differently. The high concentration of ecto-energy makes it a lot more likely that a person’ll become a ghost when they die, particularly if they have some unfinished business.”
“But I didn’t die! I think I’d remember if I did.”
“That says otherwise,” he gestured at her chest. She looked down and swore. Her abdomen was a grotesque shredded mess, intestines peeking out of a bloody hole the size of a softball.
“HolyshithowdidInotknowthatwasthere.”
“You’ve forgotten already. You probably can’t remember how you died, either. Death trauma’s pretty huge and you feel pain differently because you don’t have nerves and... Sorry, I’m rambling. It’ll start to disappear as you forget more and more.”
“Forget?! Will I forget my family? I can’t forget my little… my little…” She broke off. Little what?
“Alice, look at me. Little what? Little sister? Little brother? You gotta remember,” he said, determined.
“Little… brother,” she decided. “I have. Had. A little brother.”
“What’s his name? Can you remember his name?”
“I think it started with a J.”
“Umm, James, Jared, Jehoshaphat...” He rattled off.
“Jehoshaphat? Really?”
“What? It’s in the Bible. I think. Jeremy, Joey-“
“Joey! That’s it. My little brother’s name is Joey,” she said excitedly.
“Good. Hold on to that for as long as you can, ‘kay? It’s really important that you remember Joey.”
“Why would I forget him? How could I?”
“Because, Alice, that’s what happens to ghosts. That’s how they become like Ember and Skulker and Technus. They lose track of who they were and their existence boils down to one thing, their obsession. So with Ember, you get the rock star persona and her thing about her name. Skulker hunts. Technus is crazy about tech. That is what will happen to you, in time. If you can hold on to who you were, remember Joey, then maybe you can stay yourself for a little while longer.”
She thought about this for a time, fingering a small gold cross around her neck. “What about passing on?”
“Passing on?”
“Heaven? Hell? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen to people when they die?”
“To be honest, I have no idea. Maybe Amity Park’s different. Maybe the Ghost Zone is Purgatory. Maybe the ghosts here don’t want to or aren’t able to pass on.” He added, quietly, “And I’m not sure what that means about me.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, nothing. A chat for another time.” He paused, seeing her fingers wrapped around her crucifix. His eyes softened and he smiled. “Maybe you’ll be able to pass on. Just because I haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it can’t happen, right?”
She returned his smile with one of her own. “Right.”
Something in the boy’s belt beeped. “Shit,” he swore, taking a small device out of his belt and tapping at it for a few seconds. “I’m terribly sorry but I’ve got to go.” Seeing the panicked look on her face, he added, “I’ll be back later. Promise.”
She nodded and he got to his feet, dusting off his knees. “Danny?”
He turned back toward her. “What is it?”
“Thank you.”
“No need to thank me. If I can help you even a little, that’s thanks enough.”
In the span of one blink of Alice’s eyes to the next, he was gone.
Planning on starting up this blog with Phanniemay in a week or so. I’ve got other (old) writings hanging around but don’t feel good enough about them to post for the time being. Feel free to stick around and see how this goes (: I hope to start writing consistently!
