!!!!!!!!! @fanfiction-artist-prototype I finished it. The very circular family tree of Peter “Pete” Parker Howlett (Spider-Man) !!!! And just in time to be a Hobbity birthday gift too
This was so much fun to work on and i think I’ll do a flat one with fancy scrollwork/decoration on the sides, but not right now...later (soon)
i thought the red-blue were (squinting) Spider-Man colors and i did the lines with a whiteout pen. Most of the details for the tree come from Peter's conversations in chapter 13
I nearly forgot Victor and he didn’t fit nicely on the front. So I stuck him to the backside of Logan, I thought it was thematic. Past and future Peters are not really different people, but the dream sequence in chapter 20 probably lets me get away with putting him on both sides, like a mirror around a corner.
the two imbedded links are short videos showing off how it rolls and where exactly Victor is spacially, respectively. Tumblr will not let me upload more than 1 video so OneDrive workaround here we are, if you can't see them tell me and ill try to fix it.
also, my first mock up and one of my favorite free online family tree maker's finest attempt to help me get this family plotted out
anyway thanks @fanfiction-artist-prototype for making such a convoluted family tree for me to do paper craft of and such a wonderful story to inspire
Shameless fic rec: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59726128/chapters/152339734 Passing Through (Can't the Future Just Wait) by FanFiction_Artist_Prototype
This is fantastic and the fact that it's cylindrical alrbdkjfh
(Also spoilers but not quite, the fact that Victor is on the back/mirroring Logan works SO WELL for an idea I have that's set technically after the events of Passing Through!!)
And lmao once you put it to paper it really does just look complicated doesn't it
I’m so glad you like it!! I wanted to put Victor on the tree but he didn’t fit nicely and he’s not actually part of Peter’s made up family so i thought behind Logan was fitting because that’s where he is in the story. eeeeeeee uncovering more authorial ideas is exciting!!!!!! I love Logan and Victor by extension. They are just so juicy
If Peter was just Peter Parker (Spider-Man) his tree would be simple, if he just got adopted by Logan it would be simple, but noooo he just had to meet the Parkers again and make me put them on the tree twice *rolls eyes* I love him
A dog is physically incapable of saying the phrase "I want to go on a walk". The dog can hear the phrases "go for a walk" and "take a walk" realizing they both use the same word "walk". They can understand that the word "walk" means a very specific activity that the dog loves. It can lock in on that to where the word "walk" used by itself rather than in a sentence can get a dog amped up.
eridians are radially symmetrical and have no eyes, which means that it's normal and expected not to "face" someone to acknowledge them, and even engage in other activities while doing so, effectively dividing your attention between multiple points, so i wonder how long it took rocky to realise how frequently grace would just. look at him. direct his complete and entire ability to focus or protect himself towards unnecessarily fondly gazing at rocky, acknowledging him or just reminding himself that he's there and taking comfort from that. probably not very long, he's not stupid, but i'm willing to bet it never stopped feeling like something special, no matter how often grace did it - because of how often he was the focal point of grace's entire universe, even.
+ because there is no joy without suffering to define it i wonder how long it took rocky to stop wondering why won't you look at me when you're talking to me? about his fellow eridians after he returned. to stop feeling like a ghost in the life he once inhabited and can never return to. i think that one might have taken a while.
one time i was making potato soup and i needed broth for it but i was out of broth. but in my dog food cabinet there was a carton of chicken broth that i had bought for my dog. now the box did say HUMAN GRADE and the ingredients were just bog standard chicken broth. it did say something about joint health for dogs on there. but the ingredients were normal. i even compared the ingredients list to some normal person broth and they were the same. so i did put dog broth in that soup and it did taste completely normal. but i did use the dog broth.
Geological horror. You find a geode and crack it open and the crystal lining its walls is human blood that can't be genetically matched to anyone. You find a human skeleton but every one of the bones is made from rock, a rock that you know can't be whittled into those shapes. You find layers of clay and loam that sport ancient fossils at the top and the still-rotting corpses of modern animals at the bottom.
This reminds me of the blood river in Antarctica. For like a century scientists had no clue why this river looked like, acted like, and felt exactly like blood. Turns out it’s just really high in iron.
Blood Falls isn't just high in iron, it's the byproducts of extremophile bacteria that have been isolated under a glacier in a iron- and sulfur-rich anoxic brine for the past 5 million years.
Hmmmmm, Danny becoming Clockwork? Not getting absorbed into the entity or becoming clockwork, but growing up to become him?
It used to be such a common trope. At least, as long as you filtered for fics that contained Clockwork and Danny and obsessively read through every one. Not that I would know anything about that.
Hmmm I don't think I've done one like this. Related to this ask game
.
Injuries were a occupational hazard of being a superhero. It was kind of like being an athlete. The damage just... built up.
Now, being half ghost meant that Danny had some advantages that someone strictly human wouldn't. His body was made of ectoplasm, and could go from solid to liquid in a moment. His range of motion depended more on his state of mind than ephemera like muscle and bone. The wounds he did get healed better, faster, more completely.
But there were exceptions.
One of them was a transient but recurrent dull ache in his chest he'd had ever since Dan had shoved one of Clockwork's medallions into it. This, he thought, leaning close to the mirror, might be another.
The cut, courtesy of his mother's ectophobically treated machete, ran from his hairline to the center of his cheek, cutting through his eyebrow on its way and only missing his eye because the organ had reflexively flattened itself against the back of its socket. It hadn't started healing yet. Danny was pretty sure it was going to scar.
Trying not to grimace, he gave it another squirt of halfa-safe anesthetic (thank you Frostbite) and applied butterfly bandages along its length. Then, he took a moment to look more closely at his eye.
Squishing itself like that must've been the last hurrah for his iris, which had been getting... weirder... ever since he started going through what Frostbite called 'settling' and Danny himself called Puberty #2. His pupils had faded into nothing earlier in the year. He supposed that eventually, he'd have solid color eyes like Vlad. For now, they just looked uneven.
There was a knock on the bathroom door. "Danny, man, I know you got beat up today but are you gonna be done soon? I've gotta go."
"Shoot," said Danny. "Sorry! Gimme a sec!"
He swept up the scattered components of the first aid kit and phased them directly into the box.
"Come in!" he said, rinsing his hands.
"Thank you-- Oh, man, that is gnarly."
Danny turned off the sink. "Yep," he said, partially phasing through the wall to get past Tucker and shutting the door behind him.
Sam, sprawled on the couch in her PJs, sprained and wrapped ankle elevated on the arm, looked up from her tablet. "Ouch," she said. "Is it gonna scar?"
"Probably," said Danny.
"Check human form yet?"
"Nope. Wanna let it heal a bit here first. See if that anti-ecto stuff wears off." He turned his legs into a ghostly tail and coiled comfortably on the armchair. His armchair, this week. He'd won it from Tucker in their last bet. Tucker would probably win it back soon enough, but in the meantime...
Sam was still frowning at him. "I thought you said she didn't get your eye."
"She didn't. Apparently, I'm going to be rocking the solid-color look."
"I think it's more than that. The color looks off."
Danny shrugged. "A bit darker, yeah, maybe. I think my skin's been going blue, too, so that might be making it look different."
Sam made a face, and Danny shrugged again, trying to communicate how little he cared. Because he didn't. As long as it didn't leak into his human form, he was fine. He'd given up on appearances by the time they'd graduated from high school.
"I live!" proclaimed Tucker, emerging from the bathroom, and their downstairs neighbor banged on the floor. "Hey, Danny--"
"Still not haunting them," said Danny.
"Aw," said Tucker. "Any interesting emails?"
"Not really."
Being superheroes - or even superhero sidekicks - didn't leave much time for normal jobs. Luckily, Sam had her trust fund, and they'd managed to put together a home business reverse engineering ghost technology and providing 'ghost consulting' services. Tucker's current project was retrieving business data for an office that got wrecked by Technus, but he was almost done and wanted another one.
Tucker flopped down in the community armchair that none of the three of them liked and that Danny would've blasted into smithereens if they didn't keep using the thing. Better to have a crappy armchair than no armchair.
"Anyway," said Tucker. "Are we going to talk about it?"
"Talk about what?" asked Danny.
"The fact that your parents keep getting closer and closer to killing you?"
"No, we're not talking about that," said Danny. "Because it's not true."
"Mm," said Sam.
"It isn't," said Danny.
"You had to move out because their house started to be poisonous to you."
Danny flipped her off and then rubbed his chest, grimacing.
"You've got to get that checked out, too, Danny," said Sam.
"Frostbite says it's fine."
"I meant Clockwork."
"I don't want to bother him," said Danny. He'd harassed the old ghost enough over the years with all his random time travel accidents and disaster-related begging. He rather thought Clockwork deserved some peace at this point. "If I'm supposed to see him, he'll show up. I shouldn't've even told you about it, it's nothing."
"Maybe he's waiting for you to actually look for him before he just shows up," pointed out Sam. She also made a note on her tablet.
"What are you writing?" asked Danny, suspiciously.
"I'm making a note on my calendar every time I notice your chest is hurting."
"You can't tell when my chest hurts. It's my chest."
"How long have I known you?"
"Okay, okay, okay," said Tucker. "Calendar's a good idea. What if you told Danny when it gets to every day in a week or something like that? Okay? Anyway, what were you working on before, Sam?"
Sam rolled her eyes. "Getting us some advertising. Can't rely on just showing up after ghost fights and flyers stapled to telephone poles or whatever forever."
Danny groaned. "My parents are going to kill me when they find out we're competing with them." Or suggest a collaboration. Danny didn't know what was worse.
"So, you agree, your parents are going to kill you...?"
Danny flung a pillow at Tucker's face.
.
Danny woke up with his heart pounding, which was strange because he'd gone to sleep in ghost form, and the dream he'd been having wasn't a nightmare. He peeled his face off his pillow - he'd rolled over in the middle of the night, and already regretted not covering up his cut better - and floated blearily to the bathroom, rubbing his chest. It didn't really hurt, not right now, but having a heartbeat in ghost form was... disconcerting even as it faded.
In the bathroom, he blinked at his glowing outline in the mirror, then fumbled for the light switch.
He looked... pretty awful, actually, with ectoplasm smeared all over his face and in his hair, which stuck to the line of his jaw and made him look several times scruffier than he really was. He leaned close to the sink and splashed some water into his face before looking back up.
His skin had gone blue around the cut, which appeared to have healed completely in the night, and had, in the process, turned black. Both his eyes had deep, dark circles under them. The left one had a distinct reddish tinge to it, and although there was a darker spot in the other one, it was distinctly fuzzy, dissolving into the faintly celadon sclera.
Gently, Danny probed the scar. Well. At least it looked kind of cool? A bunch of the ghosts he'd fought had scars like this. It was also pretty creepy looking, which wouldn't do him any favors as far as public relations went, but whatever.
He turned human. His human form, as ever, appeared largely unchanged. Black hair, blue eyes, pale, smooth skin-- Wait, no. He leaned closer to the mirror. Yeah. Okay. The scar was still there, it was just so pale and thin that he could barely see it. Ugh.
And now he had to do laundry, unless he wanted glowing ectoplasm stains on his pillowcase.
Tucker found him shoving his bed sheets into the washer a few minutes later.
"Oh, hey, wanted to ask if you wanted pancakes today," he said. "And if I should do banana or chocolate."
"Sure," said Danny. "How about chocolate?"
"Sweet. I'm gonna have to use Sam's vegan chocolate, though, so don't blame me for that. Also, are you doing laundry? Can you do mine too?"
"Uh huh," said Danny. "Lemme just--"
He fell to one knee, breathing hard, hand clutching at his chest.
Danny was seeing-- Danny was seeing that one scene from his dreams. The last time they'd gone out to eat at the Nasty Burger, the three of them, and then, past tearing into the future, Dani and Jazz, and a blush spreading over Jazz's cheeks-- her last term at college, and she'd met someone--
He came awake, back to himself, head swimming, heart pounding. Sam and Tucker were both leaning over him. Because he was flat on his back on the floor.
"What-?" He blinked a few times. "Who the hell is Jason Stevens?"
.
"Okay," said Sam, after he'd convinced them he wasn't dying and they called Jazz to check on a few facts. "You're having time visions of Jazz's future boyfriends--"
Danny grumbled at the mere idea of Jazz having a boyfriend. He felt justified, considering her last boyfriend tried to have her possessed. "Only one boyfriend."
"Future boyfriend. Whatever. You've got to go see Clockwork." She waved a forkful of pancake at him. "Clearly, whatever is happening has to do with him."
Danny grumbled again and poked his pancakes.
"If this is about us, we can take care of ourselves, and Amity Park too."
"Your ankle is broken."
"Sprained. And Tucker's finally decided to stop sucking at all things athletic."
"I never sucked," protested Tucker.
Sam raised an eyebrow as she shoved her pancakes in her mouth.
"Okay, I have put on some more muscle, but that's a good thing."
"But it'd be worse to have you just randomly collapse in the middle of a fight with, say, Skulker."
"It'd probably be fine with Skulker. He's got, like, his hunter code of honor."
"Aragon, then. It's not like we have a dearth of guys who want to eat you."
Danny grumbled again.
"You've got to learn how to use your vocabulary, man," said Tucker.
.
After Danny had recovered from his... episode, and they'd all finished eating, and Danny slid himself into their closet. The small space was full of wires, metal, and glowing tubes, all framing a narrow box that stretched the depth of the closet and was anchored in the wall with massive bolts that'd definitely lose them their security deposit.
It was, unfortunately, necessary. Danny couldn't reliably make portals on his own yet, and Sam and Tucker couldn't make portals at all. It was, at least, safer than the one at Fentonworks.
He pressed his hand to the panel fixed to the side of the closet, and the portal sparked to life - but it sparked blue, and the spark smeared into a swirl before fading into the more normal green.
"Oh, hell, diagnostics?" He ran his hands over the sides of the portal. He couldn't sense any issues with ectoplasm flow.
"On it," said Tucker, opening the electrical panel next to the closet while Sam opened the remote diagnostic kit on her tablet.
"Uh, I'm not as good at this as you two, but I'm not seeing any problems," said Sam.
"No, I'm not, either," said Tucker. "That was... weird, though."
"Maybe we should--"
"No, you are not getting out of seeing Clockwork," said Sam. "I'm not going to watch you have another random time travel heart attack."
"It wasn't a time travel heart attack," said Danny, grudgingly. "You guys are so mean."
"Why are you lumping me in with her?" asked Tucker. "Anyway, we can keep working on diagnostic stuff here, and if the portal blows up you can always break into Vlad's."
"It's not going to do that," said Danny. At least, it had better not, after all the time he'd spent designing it specifically not to blow up. If it did, he might just have to time travel about it.
(At least it'd more dignified than death by hot sauce explosion.)
Before Sam or Tucker could snark at him about unearned optimism or familial tendencies, Danny flew through the portal. This would probably take a while. Even when Clockwork wanted Danny to find him, it was always a little--
Oh. Huh. Clockwork's tower was right there, straight line of sight from the portal.
That... did not bode well.
Danny looked around, half worried that it might be a trap, but everything else seemed completely normal. He flew forward, unnerved. The future vision seizure or whatever it was must've been a lot more important than he'd thought. And, possibly, a lot more dangerous.
He reached the steps of the clocktower and... the doors didn't open. That was bizarre. The doors always opened before he got there. It was a whole thing. Clockwork showing off his powers.
On the closed doors was a single, green sticky note. In small script, it read: The key is under the mat. You'll figure it out eventually. Everything is the way it's supposed to be.
Danny looked down at his feet. There was a mat there. He flipped it up with a touch of telekinesis, and there was a key. A brightly polished brass one. He picked it up, and startled at his reflection.
Blue skin, red eyes, a black scar across his eyes, the clocktower rising behind him... For a second, just a second, he'd thought it was reflecting Clockwork.
And--
The future flickered across his vision, the sound of a ticking clock in his chest.
