DPxDC Idea
I had a little idea an have no time to actually write a fic, so I just wrote a sorta-summary and am posting it like this.
This is inspired by the game Home Safety Hotline and may contain hints to spoilers for that game. It's really clever, I really like it. I recommend you play it if slightly spooky without any "real" horror appeals to you.
Alright, Danny's been Ghost King for a few years and has realized more than just his usual rogues make their way to the living world, and a lot of those ghosts don't stay in Amity. By himself, it'd take forever to track down all those spirits and specters that are out causing mischief. Luckily, not many that escaped his notice are all that powerful and could only cause minor disturbances, just enough to get noticed by the living.
Many people outside Amity don't even recognize the activity as ghosts, so they blame other sources. Scratching in the walls is mistaken as mice, whispers and apparitions are mistaken as hallucinations and carbon monoxide hallucinations, attempted overshadowings mistaken as stokes or migraines. In this day and age, where does everyone turn to when looking for advice or how to solve problems? The internet.
Team Phantom devise a method to try and track down ghosts that are stuck or tormenting the living by building a website meant to look like a help hotline, and with some algorithm trickery make it one of the top options when searching for signs similar to ghost presences. Add some bits and bobs to make it appear as a more normal-looking website on any computer affiliated with government organizations, and youâve got some protection from the GIW.
Calls start slowly, so the three of them can handle it by themselves. Once more people are calling, they decide to start a call center. They hired some trusted people around Amity and even a few ghosts who want to help. To get around worrying about the ghosts messing with the tech while personally taking a call, they decide to automate the system to record callerâs reports for the employees to listen to, and then send a report back, offering their services to bring the spirit back to the Realms.
Itâs been surprisingly lucrative, and Danny hasnât had to dip into his kingly funds much other than at the start. He still keeps prices low, just enough to not garner suspicions at offering a free service while paying his workers fairly (he doesnât want to know why some of the ghosts want mortal money). What heâs started having more trouble with is not enough employees to take the calls. Sometimes ghosts lose track of time and donât show up for their shifts (he doesnât blame them, time gets weird in the Ghost Zone), and heâs run out of people he trusts who want the job.
Eventually he decides to put out an ad, deciding heâll slowly trust whoever takes the job with a little more information over time, see how they react, and measure to see if theyâre trustworthy.
What he doesnât think about is how posting it on the website will let more people than just those that live in Amity apply.
Meanwhile, in Gotham, one Cassandra Cain is looking for a job. She doesnât need the money, B gives her access to way too much, but she wants the experience. Sheâs at the age sheâs heard most kids get a job, and she wants to see what itâs like.
And she quickly found out retail and fast food are NOT for her. She doesnât think those conditions are fit for anyone, honestly. Sheâd have to see if she could get Bruce to work on that. But that still leaves her out of a job. She got overwhelmed with a lot of people, so virtual options would probably be best, and something that let her interact with people without having to speak. There werenât a lot of options out there, and she wasnât skilled enough with a computer yet to take programming ones.
Thatâs when she found the listing for the hotline call center. Based in a small Illinois town, but had virtual options, listen to recorded customer calls, diagnose their issue, and send an information packet on potential next steps. It was indirect, could also help her practice her reading, and flexible. It was perfect.
It didnât take long to hear back after she applied (Danny was freaking out, he didnât think anyone outside Amity would apply. Heâd turn this kid down, but sheâd mentioned her difficulties with speaking in her application and SWEETY YOU DONT MENTION STUFF LIKE THAT ON AN APPLICATION. But she said the job would be perfect for her and he just couldnâtâŚ) and she got the job!
Her first day rolls around and sheâs given access to the database. A lot has been redacted, but she has descriptions for common problems like mice, carbon monoxide, black mold, etc. she gets her first call recording and carefully reads through the entries before selecting the one that sounds right. She sends it off and waits for the next. The calls come a little too regularly, with too similar intervals between them, so she figures her new employer is testing how well sheâs doing (Dannyâs giving her previous resolved calls that werenât anything supernatural. She even got the ants right! He had even gotten that wrong!)
Eventually, her shift ends and she tells her family how well her first day went at dinner. They congratulate her and go on patrol as usual. The next day, things ramp up a little.
She logs into the database at the beginning of her shift and noticed some new entries. She now had access to descriptions of shades, blob ghosts, will oâ wisps, and more minor spirits. She gets a recording reminding her all this info is confidential and that sheâs not allowed to share it with anyone. Sheâs a little confused, but she reads through each just as carefully. The calls come less regularly, so she figures sheâs actually connected to the system now (Danny gave her access to the most common ghosts they get calls about and is listening in while heâs handling ghosts to make sure she doesnât get anything sheâs not prepared for).
Her shift ends and over dinner, she mentions that sheâs had to diagnose some odd things. They assure her thereâs more pests and hazards out there than youâd expect. She doesnât tell her family about the distraught woman haunted by the Ecto-Echo of her husbandâs habit of making her coffee every morning after he passed a few weeks ago. Or the person who had a Shade masquerading as their shadow. Just about one of her caller's cockroach problem.
The next day follows a similar pattern; more entries, slightly more powerful ghosts, reminder that the info she's been given access to is confidential and could get people hurt if it got in the wrong hands, congratulated for her good work, read through carefully and learn signs of each, diagnose calls, before calling it a day (Danny was so proud of her, she'd only confused a blob ghost with a ghost animal once, and it hadn't caused him any trouble when he went to collect them).
She'd used the bat-computer to check up on some of the callers she'd diagnosed, and they seemed to be doing fine. Some had posted about their weird experiences on their social media and how her employer had somehow helped them, but often didn't quite know how (Danny liked to hide his powers, so most of what customers saw was him using ghost tech. When it couldn't be solved with just a quick souping, he had to pull a little ghostly trickery while the customer wasn't watching). She didn't know how her boss was somehow across the world multiple times a day to help clients in different countries, but he seemed to at least be helping people. She started not having any stories she could tell her family at dinner.
At some point, she heard reports that one of the speedsters probably messed with time travel again before clocking into her shift. She had almost all the available entries and had gotten very good at recognizing tricky cases. She answered a recorded call, just like at the beginning of each of her shifts, but this one was a little different. Danny had sent out an announcement to be on the lookout for a specific phenomena that often occurred after shifts in reality, as they were highly dangerous and needed to be dealt with swiftly.
She studied each entry and paused on what she was supposed to keep a careful eye out for. Revenants, corpses that came back to life, often seen shambling around the graveyards they were buried in. Something about that sounded familiar. A section in their entry said the person brought back often had a ghost in the Realms (which she still didn't know what that was) that was in terrible pain from shifts in reality trying to pull them back to their body, but the separation of dimensions preventing them.
Expectedly, she did get a call from someone convinced there was a zombie wandering somewhere along the east coast. She double checked it couldn't be anything else before submitting it and notifying her boss.
Curious, and she knew no one would be in the batcave around this time of day, she brought her laptop with her down to the bat-computer. She found cameras in the area the caller reported, and froze at what she saw. Shambling across an abandoned street was a rotting corpse. It really did look like a zombie. It was covered in dirt, wearing an old-fashioned suit, and had skin sloughing off its bones.
But what Cass could only focus on was how much its movements read that it was in pain. It was suffering in such a horrible way its mindless being didn't even deserve. It was horrible.
Then, there was a flash of green and an area of the cameras were covered in static. The glitched portion somehow read with kindness and pity. It slowly approached the corpse, simple reaching out gently (what was presumably a hand), ignoring the way it lashed out. It suddenly fell, caught and slowly lower to the ground by the strange being she couldn't see. It closed the thing's eyes before carrying it off in the direction the map said a graveyard could be found.
After that, she finished her shift and went to dinner. Her family asked if she was alright, and she only replied it'd been a long day.
She clocked in early the next day and messaged her boss for more information on Revenants. Dinner that night was one of the few times Jason agreed to come by, and if he noticed how she kept glancing at him, he didn't say anything.
A week later, she asked her boss what might happen if a Revenant was exposed to, as it was called in its entry, a "Corrupted Ecto-Spring" ("...an ugly hole in the fabric of reality that connects the world of the living to the Realms. The ectoplasm that leaks through the tear stagnates and festers into toxic pools that kills humans and makes ghosts sick."). Danny requested a video call.
