I wanted to make a ghost powered version of Trish who calls herself Glitch and she has Technomancy powers, aka the same abilities as Technus to control and communicate with any electronic device. Unlike Technus she focuses on the latter which is talking to or even creating a new consciousness in certain machines with enough processing power for it that she already shares an emotional attachment too like her tablet and such.
As for how she got these powers lets go with an accident at Axion Labs while trying to help Danielle deal with a major problem where Trish gets zapped while trying to hack into the system to force Technus out of it which inadvertently gives her most of the same abilities. In a way, she's kinda replacing Vallen in getting an 'upgrade.' Trish can't sense ghosts directly but she can indirectly detect them through various inventions from both Fenton Works and Axion labs.
P.S. It's a little like how things work for Daniel in my Danny Program/Ghost In The Machine AU.
Summary: Dogs have a long and complicated relationship with death in mythologies all around the world, and even though he doesn’t get a lot of moments in the series, Damon Gray -coincidentally- also has a complicated relationship with death and dogs..
“There is a flame that I've been fanning, there is a fire waiting to catch
There is a Hell that has been building from the moment we first met
If there ever was a time, if there ever was a chance
To undo the things I've done and wash these bloodstains from my hands
It has passed and been forgotten, these are the paths that we must take
Cause you and I, Tom, we are men, and we can bend and we can break”
-The Hounds, The Protomen. Act II: The Father Of Death
The sound of a dog barking near his ear and the sensation of fur covering his whole body made Damon Gray shoot awake and instinctively reach for the gun he’d begun keeping in his desk.
Disoriented from sleep, his scrambling hands found nothing but the lamp beside the couch where he had fallen asleep, knocking it to the ground and causing him to fully compose himself as his mind caught up with his body. He wasn’t in his bedroom, he was in their tiny apartment’s living room. There wasn’t a dog, there was a movie playing on the TV that he claimed to be watching as he ‘rested his eyes.’ And lastly, he wasn’t covered in fur, but rather a blanket that Valerie had no doubt tossed over him when she came home from work and found him sleeping. He smiled to himself at what a paranoid old man he’d turned into since becoming a father so many years ago.
Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, Damon made his way down the hall to the bathroom to wash off his face. The dog on the tv was aggressively barking now, and even though he’d turned it down before getting up, the sound was enough to flash him back to the incident at Axion that had nearly cost him everything. He had never exactly been a fan of dogs -in fact he had always preferred cats- but he had also never been able to hate them either. In fact, when he learned about the Mastiff Protocol at Axion Labs, he’d been thoroughly impressed by how well trained the “volunteers” (the corporate word for the dogs they had been preparing to use as security) had been. He knew that the breed was highly intelligent with an excellent memory and even better guardian senses and he had to respect the work ethic of any creature that determined… but he also had to acknowledge how superior his security system was.
.Was.
He stressed the last word in his mind as he sighed and finished cleaning his face. No matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise,he couldn’t help but blame himself for the Green Hound incident. Of course, he hadn’t known what they would do with all those dogs after agreeing to use his system, let alone that one would ignore the old adage of ‘letting sleeping dogs lie’ and instead start tearing up the lab in what seemed to be some act of revenge, but maybe it their (or rather his) security was a bit better they could have cut down on the damage and he’d still have a much better job. Maybe then his daughter wouldn’t be spending her school nights giving herself gray hairs chasing ghosts and he wouldn’t feel himself flinch every time a dog barked too loudly in his direction.
Speaking of, he thought, suddenly aware of the relative silence of the apartment, Valerie’s way too quiet tonight…
Damon loved his daughter, really he did, but that girl could snore in a way that gave a sawmill noise envy, and the fact the he didn’t currently hear her cutting logs drew his attention. They had an agreement that she’d always be back in the house by 10pm on a school night and a quick look at his watch told him it was too late in the evening for the silence of an empty room. Rounding the corner to her room, he listened at the door for a bit for the miraculous sound of a normalized sleep volume, but instead he heard nothing. Well, nothing would be an understatement; Damon Gray heard the absolute sound of emptiness on the other side of the door.
Knocking twice on the door, he whispered her name.
“Val? Sweetie?”
Silence greeted him. A door cold to the touch.
“Valerie…” he called again, this time louder and slightly concerned.
There was a response this time, the sound of tiny claws scraping against the door. Damon recognized the sound from a trip to his grandmother’s house in Florida years ago, it was the sound of a dog excitedly scratching at the other side of the door. Desperately flipping the mental switch away from fear, his mind went back to rational parent mode and the scratching became more excited at his presence. As disappointed as he was that his daughter was apparently breaking curfew again, he was entirely too tired to deal with a smuggled animal ruining the security deposit. “Not the worst thing your teenage daughter could bring home, old man,” he told himself as he grabbed the doorknob, “count your…”
The door opened inward into an ice cold abyss. In front of him there was only the top of a glowing white stone staircase and, as far as he could see in any other direction, there was simply darkness. He moved to close the door as an immediate reaction to the sight, his mind shutting down and opting to reset the scenario. However, halfway through the motion a voice cut in to his mind.
But then where’s your daughter, Damon?
It was a rough and scratchy thought, a mocking thought that rested in his mind despite the voice that had put it there not belonging to him in any sense.
His angered grip tightened on the doorknob to the point of almost causing him pain, and as he grabbed a few deep, panicked breaths, he stepped silently into the blinding darkness, the phantom scratching at the door transforming into a wood splintering fervor the second he released his hold on the anchor to the outside world
The staircase into nothing was held up by nothing and was seemingly eternal. He almost wasn’t thinking straight as he made his way down; turning around was out of the equation (even if he’d wanted to, the one time he had looked behind him whatever entrance or exit to the path had existed was replaced with more stairs curling up into more darkness) and there were a few moments when he considered just rushing into the darkness just to get to the bottom so he could throttle whatever was at the end of this haunted path. He couldn’t bring himself to sprint forward though, the thought of the path ending abruptly and him falling into the nothingness forever kept him from making any careless moves.
He wasn’t sure how far down he’d traveled before he reached some sort of bottom, but given how strong the damp smell of mildew and age had gotten for him he was sure he was approaching some sort of end. As if on queue, the steps ended and he found himself deep enough in what he chose to believe was warm water that the bottom of his feet were submerged. Suddenly, a light appeared from the north of his position, pale red illuminating everything around him and giving him a definite direction to move in as he heard something splashing around behind him in the darkness
The water was foamy and churned, and as he skimmed towards the light he couldn’t help but think of the beach in the summer. It was a delusional thought for sure, Damon knew it, but he needed the familiarity to keep himself sane moving forward and not a sobbing mess scared out of his mind. There was no sunlight in this place, but there was a light to guide him.. There was no ocean breeze but there were waves lapping at his ankles.
There are no sharks in this place but there are things with teeth and hunger all the same…
The voice in his head was louder this time. Closer.
The world shook at this realization, and whatever imagined path in the darkness Damon was standing on sunk for a bit, submerging him before being bobbed back to the surface. He gasped for air as he resurfaced, scrambling in the churning fluid for stability and desperately wiping his eyes clear to avoid being robbed of any other senses in this place. When he finally got his vision back fully, he noticed that the environment had changed once again. Whatever floated through this space with him had risen up to his knees now, his feet completely lost to him beneath roiling foam. He was walled in by what seemed like cages on both sides now, but rather than the polish of smooth steel, the bars he saw around the pool that was once an ocean were all roughly hewn from one continuous block of ancient yellowed stone. The red light from before was now directly over him, and even though he still found no source for it, he chose to believe he had made some kind of positive progress.
Curiosity got the better of him however, and as the paralyzing thought that he was actually the one in the cage started bubbling in his mind, he made his way across the flooded path towards the wall on his left. At first he saw nothing on the other side of the bars, just more of the same darkness he had wandered down stretching ad infinitum, but as he opened his mouth to call out, two burning yellow lights manifested from the blackness.
Instinctively, he jumped back just as the sound of paws scrambling across stone filled the room. Some were farther away than others, but the one that he had just peered into wasted no time filling with the massive visage of a ragged and decaying dog. Its eyes were lanterns against a midnight sky, circles of pure gold set against the green fur lining most of its body. The creature snarled at Damon, baring its teeth against the bars before going into a barking frenzy and bashing its skull against the solid brick separating them. It was unrelenting in its attempts to get out, and as the sound of bones breaking against stone intermixed with the feverish barking, Damon could only watch in horror as the creature’s head split open from the central impact, its eye bulging out from a freshly shattered skull and teeth bending against each other before breaking loose of the jaw and dribbling down the wall. Blood, thick and black against the red lighting, pooled in the cage before overflowing into the flotsam, bone fragments and brain matter carried out towards him on a wave as the beast continued thrashing against the prison.
Now he ran. The corridor went on endlessly in either direction, and even though he no longer had a sense of direction, he no longer cared. Damon ran straight in the direction he was facing and he prayed that there would be an end to this. Every cage he ran past, the creatures seemed to get more and more intense in their desire to be free. Teeth breaking against stone, reabsorbed and healed into the shattered jaws of monsters only to fly out again in a mist of blood and tissue. Fur coming off in slick sheets from full body charges against something archaic and unbreakable, bones that wished they could say the same snapping against the impact before mending themselves back into gouged flesh.
Maybe they were telling him he was going the wrong direction. Maybe this was all some cold pizza and guilt inspired nightmare to teach him a lesson. Maybe he didn’t fucking care. Damon ran… until the sound of breaking stone behind him crumbling into the building river of viscera finally caused him to look back.
What he saw was massive, just looking at it almost caused Damon to drop to his knees as a sense of hopelessness washed over him. It was easily the size of a passenger plane, a body of pure cosmic black that rippled with muscles and purpose, the pool barely soaking the base of its massive paws as it trudged into the room and stared him down amidst the cacophony of violence that still played all around them. However, the creature almost looked bored watching him frozen in terror, or rather it would have if there was only one head to be bored of him. In addition to the eyes that watched him, Damon noticed an additional head on either side of the creature's central one, each one resembling some combination of wolf and, ironically enough, a mastiff. Something writhed in the spaces between the creatures’ ears, barely visible in the dim light if not for the reflection from the snake’s scales. The auxiliary heads growled at the walls as it moved towards him, each step sending a tidal wave of gore in every direction and quieting the prisoners as they retreated back into the nothing that they’d sprung from with whimpers of defeat.
The dog had not barked since it arrived, and now that it had quieted the hell-raising around them, it looked content to temporarily puzzle over Damon’s existence in this space. Each head tilted to the left in confusion, and as he slowly stepped back, he watched its ears perk up, alert but not making any direct move against him as the others had. After watching each other in silence for a bit, the dog decided to take the lead, throwing his massive body across the path and blocking the direction he had just run from. It laid all three heads on its paws and proceeded to ignore Damon with a huff of further boredom, the ripples churning the waters again even across the parking lot of distance between them still.
He didn’t need to be told twice. Turning to go once again, he shuddered as the pale eyes from the cages watched him with burning hatred. Something shimmering in the ‘water’ caught his eye before moving on though, and as the creature behind him howled loud enough to shake the planet, Damon Gray picked up the Axion Lab dog collar and ran harder than he ever had in his life
He ran until the minutes became days, ignoring the rising sensation of the slurry that now reached to almost his waist as deafening fear drove him through the darkness. By the time he stopped, the eyes on either side had fully retreated back into their stone prisons, leaving him alone in the quiet again under the hazy red light. He had started calling out Valerie’s name again once he was sure he was alone, convinced that finding her was the key to finding the way out.
Of course, he thought, heartache dragging him down as he moved forward, that’s assuming she’s actually even here.
As if responding to his thoughts again, something else splashed in the nearby darkness, something large, snapping his concern from the internal to the external again.
“Val?” He called, taking a tentative step forward. “Val is… is that you?”
Burning hope and icy fear clashed in his heart as he called out again to the noise.
“Valerie!” He yelled, the steam of uncertainty driving him forward as another unseen splash sent waves in his direction. “Valerie, can you hear me?!”
He was terrified of an answer. If It was her, then they’d be together and maybe they could figure this place out. Maybe. But if they couldn’t? If the sea just stretched forever and this was some cruel glitch in reality, well… the idea of dragging his daughter through a directionless void forever was worse than anything he’d been through. Honestly, his mind was racing so quickly in the direction of the noise being his daughter, he almost didn’t consider the alternative.
Almost.
“Va-”
A flash of teeth appeared in Damon’s mind, biting into the name and dragging it away into the muck. He stumbled in his motions, kicking up his own wave from the infinite pool and splashing it against the nearest wall. He couldn’t afford to fall again, couldn’t bear to see what happened when the ‘water’ got too high against him and the horrible things he imagined below the non-surface moving their way upward.
As he prepared to creep forward, now trying to be more cautious despite all his previous thrashing, a geyser erupted directly in front of him, throwing foam and debris against the cages and completely soaking Damon again. Luckily for him, he had thrown his arm across his face this time, shielding his eyes and mouth from the ocean spray. His dripping body was the only sound now, and the water around him had gone completely still, only disturbing where the drops from him hit the surface.
He could also feel someone else there with him now.
He didn’t bother calling out to his daughter again, he knew that whatever had calmed the waves was too cold of a presence to be anything living. It reminded him of the lab incident, it reminded him of being in the Fentons’ basement, it reminded him of being the last one in the cemetery after his father’s funeral; it was the feeling of death walking. And walk it did. Damon heard each movement as it closed the distance between them, a casual stride through the flood to reach him. He didn’t run. He couldn’t run. It felt as though gravity had magnified a thousand times and glued him to the spot where he stood, a primal fear that recognized that hunters responded more aggressively to sudden movements.
Hot breath coated the back of his neck, a primal warning from a thing that didn’t breathe and didn’t care. Damon wanted to close his eyes and swing on it, if he couldn’t flee, he wanted to fight so badly, to fill the silence with something other than the judgmental huffing of something that reeked like ancient tombs. Fear and anger made him tear up, violently shaking in the stilled waters as the image of his daughter flashed in his mind again. Suddenly, the feeling moved from behind him, and as Damon looked up for the first time he saw the creature was now directly in front of him, red eyes peering down and cutting through the darkness like wet clay.
It was massive, easily over seven feet tall, with the head of a large or white wolf sitting atop the body of a lean and athletic man whose skin was the same color as Damon’s. They wore a white and gold longskirt and on their right hip they carried a massive mace. It raised a hand to his chin, lifting Damon’s eyes to meet their own as their ears perked up and their nostrils flared, and while the hand was human in shape, its nails were rough and jagged claws.
TO ME UNHAND THE STONE ANCHORED TO YOUR SOUL. FROM ME SEEK PASSAGE.
He heard a voice in his head again, different this time, and as he was about to ask what they meant, the creature jabbed its free hand into Damon’s chest and squeezed. Shock ran through his body, and the horror of the situation demanded his attention enough that Damon’s eyes shot down the fresh wound, expecting a splatter of blood and pulp to be running down his chest. To his surprise though, what he saw was somehow even worse; hands, not his own but coming from him nonetheless, had grabbed onto the stranger's wrist where he had been punctured.
He did scream this time, and as the silence was disturbed, the wolf-headed creature slowly withdrew their hand from Damon’s chest, pulling more and more of an alternate body out as he retreated. It didn’t hurt him in a physical sense, but the more the others struggled against each other the more Damon flashed in and out of memory, his mind struggling under the weight of whatever was happening.
There had been an accident. A man was dead and the lab was giving him the day off.
The sea had started to recede from him, which is lucky considering he would have fallen to his knees screaming anyway from the pressure inside his head.
A secret folder. Layouts to a model of his security system that was supposedly not in use anymore. Termination order.
The phantom was fighting back, trying to push its way back inside of his chest despite the claws shredding whatever soulself had been stitched together in its new home.
Termination order. Stolen funds. Termination order. Poisoned bags of dog food. Termination order. A speeding car blowing through a red light. TERMINATION ORDER.
With one final pull and one final scream in the darkness, Damon watched as a pale husk was separated from his soul, the new body thrashing in the water as the wolf-headed figure offered him a hand up from the shallows. The last memory burned away as he accepted the help, standing in the ocean again with only the bottom of his feet submerged.
A Black Dog on a highway, smiling with human teeth. A speeding car unable to stop at a red light. A sudden weight in his chest. A hazy face in the mirror that wasn’t his. A man was dead and the lab was giving everyone the day off.
“....T-Tom?” Damon asked, looking into the eyes of a dead man once again, “Tom Callumson?”
The figure stopped trashing and laser focused on Damon, completely ignoring the clawed arbiter that stood between them. Tom Callumson had been the man in charge of Axion Labs security, he had hired Damon and when he had been fired the first time they said that Tom was the one who agreed to let him come back in any capacity. Tom Callumson had also died earlier that day, a car crash after running a red light and meeting the grill of a freight truck with the driver’s side of his Camaro. Tom Callumson had also also been reported to have been mumbling to himself over the past two weeks about how ‘they’ were out to get him, which had begun to worry the company about competition stealing their designs…before Tom began complaining about hearing…
“Scratching at the door…” Damon whispered to himself.
“Gray? GRAY?!” Tom yelled, a wild look of fury in his eyes. “It should have been you, Gray! You uppity fucking prick! Over some rank fucking dogs?! SOME FUCKING DOGS?!”
His eyes darted around the room in paranoia, but whatever Tom was seeing now Damon was completely blind to it. He wouldn’t have cared anyway, his mind was too busy connecting the threads from their jumbled up set of memories, piecing together a timeline that made sense for him. The termination orders, they’d been signed right before Damon even had his interview, but the names… Curie, Turing, Tesla, Kirby, Redi, Lovelace… he recognized them as the ‘volunteers’ that Axion had gotten rid of as security due to poor performance. That would explain why they were so eager to get rid of him after the Green Hound incident, he was just the fall guy, those poor dogs never had a chance but he was the sucker who, unfortunately, gave them an excuse.
He had also been covering up some less than spectacular security failures in his free time too, taking bribes from other companies to look the other way as some equipment had been messed with before major testing could be done. In fact Damon was remembering right, Tom may have cost a few scientists more than their pound of flesh when things had gone wrong.
All Damon could do was look at him in disgust. Death had stolen his body but it seems his rotten spirit was just as determined to break the rules, staying behind like so many others in the last few years to make things miserable. Fishing the Axion collar he’d gotten earlier out of his pocket, he rolled it between his fingers, the silver of the pendant a perfect match for fading light of the broken soul glaring at him while pinned standing to infinite nothingness.
“Somehow, Tom,” he said, flipping the tag over to see his hitchhiker's name etched into the stained metal in the dim red light, “I think the dogs are the least of your worries now.”
The wolf-headed creature had been standing beside Tom this whole time, and with a nod he reached out his hand for Damon to place the collar. Relieved to be rid of it, he tentatively dropped it into the beast’s palm, flinching a bit as Tom made another attempt to lunge at him with hatred in his eyes unbound to humanity.
The attempt was short lived however, and as the wolf-headed man wrenched Tom’s head back into his grasp and jammed the silver medallion of the collar into his mouth, Tom began to scream. The noise cut through the darkness like an explosion, bringing back a collection of barking and howling from the cages as eyes lit up observant and hungry on the other side of the darkness. Liquid silver began running out of the corner of Tom’s eyes like tears, and Damon noticed that the water had started boiling underneath him, the sea churning into a mass of whip-like tentacles each lined with cynodonts that had seemingly leaked through their confinement for the sake of furthering punishment. He took a step back and closed his eyes as the mouths began ripping chunks out of his former coworker, each bite stripping away spectral flesh. The falling silver began to harden into chain-links still connected to his eyes, and as Tom tried to choke out defiant screams, something under the surface began pulling at either side of the chain, slowly dragging him deeper into the nothingness as the sound of ripping and tearing increased in ferocity. Damon didn't want to see what was happening to him, but as the sounds of muffled screams slowly trailed into rattling metal, he couldn't help but spare one final look. Tom was waist deep in the infinite by the time Damon managed the strength to open his eyes, silver chains being pulled from his eyes and mouth where the obol had disintegrated and started overflowing. His skin was tiger-striped with gashes, and where there was once what could be called flesh, there was now matted and disgusting fur, the scabbed lines where they met oozing a vibrant green in the darkness.
Damon wanted to reach out to him, he wanted to make it stop even if for the selfish reason that the longer he watched the sicker he felt, but as he moved forward, the wolf-headed creature rounded on him, putting themself squarely between Damon and a steadily sinking shade of Tom.
He hesitated, waiting for the creature to make a move or even speak. “Is…is my…”
SHE IS WHERE YOU SHOULD BE DAMON GRAY. NOW BEGONE FROM HERE, THIS IS NO HOME FOR INNOCENCE.
Once again not waiting for him to respond, the creature shot his hand out with impossible speed and jammed the tip of his pointer finger into the space between Damon’s eyes. The world collapsed into true darkness as his eyes rolled back into his head, and he stumbled for a moment before he began to fall backwards Expecting to feel the warm sensation of water on his back at any moment, he braced himself for the soft impact of waves, only to instead feel the hard crush of drywall against the back of his head. His eyes shot open on impact, the blurry shapes in the darkness across from him no longer the hulking visage of a monster but instead forming into the door to his daughter’s room once again.
Senses flooded back into him; the mildew smell was released into the artificial citrus scent of the air fresheners around the house, the static quiet replaced with soft snoring bleeding through the hallway, pale light at the end coming from the tv where the dog was no longer barking for its owners attention. He was home… but he had to be sure. For the second time tonight, he grabbed the doorknob to Valerie’s room with fearful intensity, opening it slowly, but this time rather than the yawning silence of a void, Damon was met with a wall of sound, his daughter passed out at an impossible angle that would have destroyed his back if he ever tried to recreate it. Despite everything he’d been through tonight and the near airplane level decibels, he smiled at the small victory
Well, this should be a home for innocence, he thought to himself, the burning eyes of a wolf-headed man still engraved in his mind. With a sigh somewhere between He closed her room door and made his way back to the living room where his laptop was, flopping on the couch as the credits rolled on what he was supposedly watching. He knew he wasn’t going to be sleeping for a while, he knew that there’d probably be a long while before he could comfortably close his eyes and not have to hold his breath at the slightest chance of eyes glaring back at him in the darkness, hungry and resentful, but for now at least… he could start searching for a new job.
—-----------------
Hello everyone, thanks for reading. I haven’t done a strictly horror piece in a while but I wanted to pull something from my drafts and I figured I’d start the year with something a little more off the wall. I’m a big fan of horror in short story format and especially with a show like Danny Phantom I feel like if you look beyond the action angle that they typically take with the children and think about the adults who aren’t strictly dedicated to fighting the supernatural there’s a lot of potential to explore the darker elements, hope you enjoyed, and remember: No corporation is your friend and they’d all just as soon drag you into hell as they would flip a light switch.
So I was thinking. Danny Phantom’s got a lot of dead dogs in it. Like...most shows are satisfied with only one dog being dead, but not Danny Phantom.
There’s no way that Axion Labs only had one guard dog that was put down. That was a big ass facility, there were more dogs. There’s probably just one ghost of them and the rest moved on with nothing tying them to the living world.
aside from a lot of keysmashing and stimming, i cant think of a better way to let @darks-ink know how much i loved “the secret life of pets” than quick fanart!! which also happens to hit days 6 and 16 of phanniemay :Dc
(i wanted it to be a lil more than a sketch, but i burnt myself out at the beginning of the month trying to do big/finished pieces every day 😅)
((also, how do u draw dogs???))
