Badger Cereal Week 2025 - Origins
The Tower
“Daniel, if I may ask… how did it happen to you?”
The logical part of Danny knew he shouldn’t answer. Giving any information about himself that the man couldn’t find out on his own was dangerous, because who knows how he’d use it.
But at the same time, Danny was high off the energy of the night, free from extradimensional responsibilities (at least for a day), and he’s always wanted to tell someone about it. He couldn’t do that with his parents, or Valerie. None of his enemies would be able to listen to it either.
But this someone, he knew, would understand.
So he took a deep breath, exhaled, and started to repeat a speech of his that he’d rehearsed a million times before. Sometimes in the shower, or before he’d go to sleep. Even while flying on patrol.
“It was stupid. And completely my fault,” Danny paused to look back at Plasmius to see a mocking expression on his face, but surprisingly he had the man’s full, sympathetic attention instead. So he kept going. “My parents had just finished building the portal. They were so defeated when it didn’t work, and I thought it was safe. So one day, I brought my friends to check it out after school. They dared me to go in. I tripped over a wire or something. And then…”
Danny involuntarily hunched his shoulders, remembering the blinding green and white light, enormous pain for what felt like forever, and then nothing. Nothing until he saw his friends kneeling over him, stricken and frozen.
“When I woke up, I was like this. For a second I thought that I really had…” Danny shuddered. “But then I changed back and everything was fine. I went to school a week after. And that was it.”
He heard Vlad harrumph, behind him and Danny looked back at the man with accusatory eyes, annoyed that he might be mocking his recounting of that day, after he’d decided to open up to him.
What he said next wasn’t too dissimilar.
“You are quite the lucky child.”
“Lucky?” Danny found himself scoffing bitterly. “Getting hit by a gazillion volts of nascent ecto-energy is lucky?”
“Yes, and you are taking my words the wrong way,” Vlad insisted, flashing Danny a hard look. “You are lucky because it was quick.”
Danny found himself silencing from how the elder half-ghost intonated the word quick.
It was because it was the scary kind of quick that was merciful. Painless, to some degree. Like you could barely feel it.
Quick, because it was all over in an instant.
Danny recalled the time when Vlad’s ecto-acne resurfaced and how he threatened his friends’ lives in exchange for a cure. He saw Vlad’s accident in the past. How the energy enveloped his face, and how he ran out with his burns in hand, the skin threatening to peel away from his melting face.
And he watched through Clockwork’s mirror as Jack and Maddie did nothing. They didn’t chase after him.
They just… let him go.
They let him go, and there was really only one conclusion for him to draw. Vlad was most likely left to wither away, alone, for twenty years, without understanding what was happening to him.
“And yours… wasn’t.” Danny stated. There was no point making it sound like a question. The implications were there. “… How long?” He dared to ask.
Vlad hummed.
“... Ten years. I believe I was officially a half-ghost around five years in. The doctors gave up trying to find a cure for my condition a couple of years after that, and I was eventually discharged when I proved I could walk normally and stopped chronically dropping things.”
“I’m banned from handling any lab equipment at school,” Danny mentioned offhandedly, remembering how little control he had over his limbs randomly turning intangible.
“Yes, I know,” Vlad chuckled. “Very amusing. But I believe you’ve picked up all of these newfound abilities rather quickly, all things considered,” the way Vlad had said the last part loaded with an air of annoyance.
Danny was relieved that at least the truce hadn’t completely changed Vlad’s outlook. With how open the man had been during their conversation, Danny was beginning to think that someone had replaced Plasmius or even possessed him.
It was good to confirm, from the hint of the man’s bitterness towards Danny’s success without his guidance, that a new manipulative enemy was not something he had to worry about the next day.
“It’s partly thanks to you, unfortunately. I had to learn quick,” Danny said, figuring he’d throw the man a bone. Just once.
“It could be quicker.” Vlad replied, clearly unable to hold himself back.
“No thanks, Plasmius. Your kind of quick, just like my accident, wouldn’t be any less painful. Even today that won’t change. So please, just stop asking.”
