Love the take. Love the implications.
Maybe liminals are naturally angry.
Maybe ecto craves to be in the zone (the dead are made to be in the land of the dead, the ecosystem of the living simply isn't built for them). So liminals - who alive but not quite?
Like an itch under the skin of a pebble in your shoe.
Worst of all, this is an annoyance that can't quite be fixed.
Ever since the portal came on, the people of Amity have grown steadily more liminal.
When the city was taken into the Zone itself? There isn't a single non-liminal left.
Locals become moodier when they leave Amity. Journeys away are infrequent, short. Why would anyone move away when home is so perfect?
Because Amity Park? The location itself is liminal.
The land, the air, every inch of amity is halfway to the Ghost Zone.
The portal may be in the Fenton basement, but the veil is thin throughout.
The entire city dwelt in the Zone - briefly, perhaps. And perhaps there was a shield, sure.
A shield can only do so much.
To dance with death you must touch it, and Amity Park has been dancing since the day Danny Fenton tripped in his parents' portal.
A liminal city - a place just as alive as it's citizens. Just as touched by death.
Amity Park is Home to liminals.
Home in the way the Far Frozen is to the Yetis.
Home in the way Dora's Kingdom is to her people.
Amity Park is the Living Lair of Liminals. Phantom is their Frostbite in ghostly matters, Vlad is their Frostbite in living matters.
For all the man comes across as sketchy, Vlad Masters is a competent mayor.
(Vlad hardly notices himself becoming less hostile to Jack as the ecto levels of the city increase.
Hardly notices when he no longer wants to kill the man, when plans switch from murder and marriage to finding ways to fight both of the elder Fentons.
Hardly notices how much he holds back against both, more playing than fighting. How his goal switches from 'remove obstacle and obtain human' to 'bond-fight with frightmates to make them stronger and also Quality Time.'
Jazz adds a section on dehumanization (deghostification?) of human lives as a form of paranormal bias potentially as a response to and expression of past-self-loathing to her thesis.
Danny just breathes a sigh of relief that the fruitloop might actually be done with the whole murder thing - as weird as it would be to accept him as an actual sort of uncle-figure, it'd be better than worrying about his dad dying and his mom being kidnapped all the time.
Not that either of them realize the cause of this. Amity is very oblivious to its increasing liminality, including Jazz and the trio. Even with Valerie's Suit Powers smacking them in the face.)
Is it any wonder Jason doesn't want to leave? When he spent so long feeling awful he forgot what it was like to feel okay?
To feel better than just okay?
-------------------------------
Funny enough, what brings them to Amity is the same thing that once kept them away.
Amity Park has been a ghost-themed tourist city for as long as it's existed, stuffed with haunted houses, spooky cemeteries, and eerie scenery. When the city started reporting 'ghost attacks' on their news channels, the JL didn't bother to check in.
After all, they hadn't gotten any distress calls about it. It was just another cash grab to lure in tourists.
(The GIW feared the JL would be 'overly sympathetic.' Rerouting JL line calls would be a problem. But calls out of Amity Park? The GIW ensured their attempts to reach anyone but the GIW never got off the ground.)
This belief suffered damage when tourism dropped.
It wasn't just a matter of a poor season either. Hardly noticeable at first, truthfully.
Reports of haunted houses in the city closing here, a ghost show being denied a request to view a house there, tourist reviews reporting a sense of hostility from the locals there.
They only really noticed because Tim decided to cyber stalk Vlad Masters after he declined Bruce's invite to a gala - an invite the man had been angling for for literal years.
Having become a mayor recently, the man should have found networking all the more valuable.
Tim started his research by looking at the city itself: Amity Park, 'The Most Haunted City in America.'
The official city website was just a few dozen red flags in a trench coat.
The home page read (Un)Welcome to Amity Park. There were standard tabs - news, utilities, tourism.
News showed the same funny ghost theme, except...the article were all played straight. Masters' official addresses to the city even played the ghost topic straight - there were videos. He talked like he was serious about 'installing a new lattice of ghost shields to prevent damage to roads and sidewalks in future attacks.'
Utilities included 'Public ecto-device updates & maintenance' as well as a personal version. The sections were fully functional and the forms would actually be sent to the city.
A quarter of the city's budget claimed to be dedicated to this service.
The tourism page managed to be the most alarming.
Amity Park's ghost theme was due to it being a tourist trap.
The tourism section stated, in large, bold, underlined letters:
"Of the 257 tourists to visit Amity in the previous month, 2 died and another 19 were seriously injured due to a failure to adhere to local warnings and safety practices. If you must visit Amity Park please obtain a brochure from City Hall immediately and read it in full. Take care to adhere to all safety measures when within city limits. Thank You."
What followed was a long list of 'closed' businesses - all tourist traps and attractions, plus a few hotels (it hadn't been a large city to begin with. More of a town at 'barely scraping 20K people').
At the very end was a list of resources for people who "intended to visit anyway, or to move to the city" with a few small bed & breakfasts and houses for sale or rent.
If the 'attacks' were meant to drum up tourism, why shoot down would-be tourists at the gate?
Looking at footage from the 'attacks' only added to his suspicions.
Early on, the supposed ghosts were staticky blurs of color, barely noticeable on the screen.
Fiddling with the image resolution and sharpness didn't have any affect on it - though it did make the trees and cars in the background clearer.
Eventually he gave it up as a lost cause and started looking through the rest of the videos - and boy were there plenty of them.
Going in chronological order, he noticed a trend.
Over time, video and audio quality got worse. Like the camera itself was slowly becoming distorted.
Except much of it was amateur phone footage, meaning every camera in Amity Park would have to be degrading at the same speed.
Then, it worsened drastically all at once.
One video was slightly blurry and staticky throughout, but he could still make out what things were well enough.
The next video? Incomprehensible.
Noise and color and blurs.
Staticky-noise that, if he listened closely, almost sounded like whispers and screams and cries.
There was nothing recognizable.
It made his hair stand on end.
There wasn't much else to find. Or rather, what he found was a lack of what he should be finding.
Locals' social media pages were all dark, chat rooms for the city's people were inaccessible no matter how hard he tried. It was like the firewalls were coming alive to eat his code when he tried to force his way in.
Trying to hack a device in the city was worse; whatever code showed up on the screen was a type or OS he recognized. It gave him malware.
He almost went nuclear on his computer to protect his data, though he thankfully found a built-in off-switch before he had to do that.
Something was up with Amity Park.
---------------------------
When Tim debriefs the rest of the family on the weird situation, Bruce assigns him to investigate personally.
"Constantine checked in on the place a little less than two years ago to ensure the attacks were just tourism grabs, but it's possible he missed something. Or that the situation changed."
Going out of the city on a mission alone is, of course, not an option.
What better cover story to visit the city inconspicuously than Tim Drake-Wayne and Jason Todd going on a bro-bonding road trip to a city that explicitly asks people not to visit.
It seems like something an eccentric rich person would do as a family outing - good for the mission and good press.
Jason was rather in need of more news appearances. He'd only made two notable headlines since his 'miraculous return' - to the public eye, at least - and keeping his head down now that people knew he was back would only lead to more questions.
Half-hearted as he was about it, Jason agreed.
