It took months for him to realize it, but ever since the accident that took half his life, Danny could sense the approach of death. He could, metaphorically speaking, hear the fall of their footsteps, the wind whistling over their scythe.
The length of time was because, in the modern world, the dying are segregated. Kept away in homes or hospitals. Not out and about where teenagers could run into them. Certainly, people died in public only infrequently.
But death is an unavoidable fact of life. Sooner or later, he was always going to run into it, and he did.
The first time was in the park, on a peaceful, ghost-free day. Maybe that was surprising, considering how often he got into violent, dangerous fights. Maybe it was just the universe being kind for once. He’d been walking past a group of elderly people playing chess when he felt a prickling in his eyes. The prickling turned into tears. Tears he couldn’t stop until Sam and Tucker dragged him away.
They chalked it up to a freak act of teenage hormones and left it at that.
Except, that wasn’t the last time it happened. A car wreck. A day at a restaurant. An ordinary walk down the street. In the middle of a ghost fight, where Danny saved a civilian from being crushed by rubble and barely registered that his tears stopped in the same moment.
But he didn’t put things together until that time he and Sam visited Tucker in the hospital, after he broke his leg.
It wasn’t a power Danny had any desire to experiment with, but like all of his powers, not knowing the limits of it felt irresponsible at best. Although most adults wouldn’t consider Danny responsible, between skipped classes, missing homework, and staying up until dawn to play video games, the fact was that Danny took his responsibilities very seriously. He just had to prioritize, sometimes.
(Also, he was a teenager. If he didn’t have some fun now and again, he’d shrivel up and die. Playing video games was one of the few fun things he could do at all hours.)
Eventually, between himself, Sam, Tucker, and Jazz, they worked out that this power only activated, for lack of a better word, when the death was going to happen within twenty-four hours, and usually much less than that, such as in the case of things like almost-getting-squished-by-rubble.
The good thing was that for some things, Danny could intervene. But for others, there was nothing he could do. He could stop cars, but not strokes. He could give CPR, but not a new heart. He could tell people to go to the doctor, but there wasn’t any cure for old age.
And that was assuming he could find the person and figure out what was wrong in the first place. He couldn’t always.
Which led to things like the current situation.
.
Regardless of supernatural goings-on, school was a blessed constant. A point of stability when everything else threatened to dissolve. Danny’s friends were there. Ghost hunters weren’t going to burst in without warning. People regularly practiced evacuating.
Was it his favorite place? No. But even Vlad couldn’t just shut down a public school. So, even when Danny resented it, he appreciated school.
Worst thing that could happen, outside of a ghost attack, was Dash sticking him in a locker, and Danny had figured out how to pick them from the inside. He did so now, and hopped out, sneakers squeaking a little on the linoleum.
Today was a completely normal day. He’d walk into class late, get scolded and marked tardy, sit through a lecture that was both boring and confusing, finish up the day with more of the same, and hang out with Sam and Tucker after school. Maybe do some homework. Patrol at night, since tomorrow was Saturday.
Normal.
Maybe if he repeated it often enough, it’d be true.
He trudged down the hallway, having made himself depressed. If he went faster, maybe the teacher wouldn’t be too upset, but it wasn’t his fault that Dash was a troglodyte.
He reached the door and paused, his eyes were stinging. Had he gotten something in them, or…?
Or…
The tears began to fall.
Oh, no. Oh, no. This couldn’t be happening here. Not now. Not– No. It couldn’t be happening to someone in his class, or– His teacher? Could it be the teacher, Mr. Falluca?
He opened the door slowly.
“Thank you for joining us, Danny,” said Mr. Falluca. “I’ll be marking you tardy for– Are you alright? Why are you crying?”
“Uh,” said Danny, scanning the room. No one looked hurt or anything, but he of all people knew how to hide injuries. Just because they didn’t look hurt– Wait, could it be someone in one of the neighboring classes?
How did someone die at school anyway?
Wait, no, stupid question. He knew people who had died at school.
“Lockers,” he said. The word was hard to force out. He took a few steps back, and looked to the lockers on either side of the door. They weren’t made to be easy to see into.
But…
Danny put his hand on one of the lockers.
“Danny?” said Mr. Falluca, having come to the door.
“I think someone’s stuck in here,” said Danny. “I don’t think they’re conscious.”
Falluca blinked and withdrew before coming back with his key ring. “If this is some sort of joke,” he started, warningly, fishing a key labeled ‘locker master’ in tiny script from the mass of jingling metal.
Mikey tumbling, unconscious, from the locker wasn’t a joke.
.
So. The day wasn’t normal.
That was okay. Disaster (death) had been averted. Mikey would be… not fine, but alive. Danny was also fine. Mostly. Even though he was currently in (the front seat) of a police car.
The police had wanted to know how Danny had noticed that Mikey was in the locker, so he’d had to stay for a while after. They were bringing him home now. Mom had sent him a text a few minutes ago to let him know they had ordered pizza from his favorite place for lunch, and Jazz had just come home from picking it up.
The policeman parked in front of his house. “You’ll be okay, kid?”
“Yeah,” said Danny, jumping out as fast as he could. “Thanks for the ride.”
“No problem.”
Danny took the stairs to the front door two at a time, and more or less barreled through the door at top speed. He was hungry and tired and stressed and wanted that pizza, darn it.
CW: Torture, psychological torture, medical abuse, non-consensual body modification, kidnapping, Spectra. This fic is an excuse to torment Danny.
.
The topic came up during a planning meeting for the Winter Truce. All the adult ghosts in the area were there to divvy up responsibilities, such as decorating, catering, and sending invitations out to children. However, as often happened during the few times such a large number of ghosts gathered in one space, things turned to fighting, resolved themselves, dissolved themselves, called a time out, got bored, and engaged in gossip.
(Not all the steps, particularly the resolution, were necessary.)
The topic was Danny Phantom. Newest (part-time) resident of this area of the Ghost Zone.
“He’s a menace!” complained the Lunch Lady.
“A terror,” agreed Ghost Writer.
“He has a protection Obsession and his first contact with other ghosts was people attacking him,” said Skulker with a dramatic groan. “I don’t know what you expected.”
“You were one of those people,” said Desiree.
“So were you!”
“How was I supposed to know? I’d been trapped in a bottle for years.”
“His Obsession isn’t protection.”
“Nocturne!” scolded Frostbite as everyone turned to look at Nocturne in surprise.
“What? I’m not his ally, and he hasn’t exactly tried to hide it and you know it.”
“Still. It’s rude.”
“It’s ruder to not share it, don’t you think?” asked Nocturne, stirring his drink with a claw. Stars glittered in the depths of his cloak. “He shouts it out like the Box Ghost. Box Ghost, wouldn’t you be offended if someone thought you were Obsessed with, I don’t know, tape?”
“THE HORROR! THE BOX GHOST CARES ONLY FOR TAPE USED IN PACKING PARCELS!”
“There you have it,” said Nocturne, gesturing lazily.
“I hardly think that is an accurate analogy,” said Frostbite.
“Come on, old man!” interrupted Johnny. “Don’t leave us in suspense!” His shadow chittered and hissed in agreement.
“Phantom’s Obsession,” said Nocturne, raising his glass, “is helping.”
“Well, that’s crap.”
“Oh, no,” purred Spectra, leaning forward and drumming on the table with blood red nails. “Based on what I’ve observed of the pest, that fits very well.”
“But,” said Ghost Writer, “he is singularly unhelpful.”
“Not exactly,” said Skulker, thoughtfully. “Any time one of us has asked him for help, has he said no? Think about Pariah.”
“Pariah, indeed,” said Nocturne with an air of dark amusement.
Frostbite glared at him. “Phantom is a generous soul.”
“He’d have to be, to die with something like that on his mind, and so young, too,” said Spectra, grinning. “A real martyr.”
“Wow, so what made him such a pain in our processors?” asked Technus. “How’d he get like that?”
“Fighting him as soon as you laid eyes on him might have had something to do with it,” said Spectra, prodding.
“Hey! He’s the one who suggested that!”
“Those little humans in his haunt probably ask him for a lot of help, though, don’t they? Walker, dear, you spent a few weeks there. That should be long enough to get a good idea of the lay of the land.”
Walker glared. “I know what you’re doing, Spectra,” he said. “You’ve spent time there, too.”
“Oh, yes, but I want to hear you say what you did, hm?”
Walker’s frown deepened. “He isn’t well liked there,” he said. “As a human or a ghost.”
“Wait, wait,” said Kitty, “are you telling us that fighting us is the only thing he’s got going for him, Obsession-wise? That’s not healthy, is it? Hey, fuzzball, you’re a doctor, right?”
Frostbite cast his eyes towards the ceiling. “No, it isn’t healthy. But I am sure he has other outlets—”
“Enough for someone as energetic as he is?” asked Spectra. “What’s his family like, Johnny? Are they supportive of his needs?”
“Uh,” said Johnny. “They’re sort of… ghost hunters.”
The ghosts who had once been part of the Circus Gothica put their heads together and started whispering.
“Oh, that’s right. I’d almost forgotten. What a terrible situation for a child.”
“Is there a point to this?” asked Amorpho, peevishly. “Or are you just feeding on all the schmucks?”
“The point is that there is a child suffering. Did you shapeshift away your heart?”
“But there’s nothing we can do about it!”
“That isn’t entirely true,” said Desiree.
“Don’t tell us you’re going to wish it away,” said Ghost Writer, with scorn.
“No more than you could write it away. We both know our alterations to reality are ephemeral.” She twined her fingers together. “The problem here is his lack of less violent options to sustain himself, isn’t it? What if we could give him one?”
“Only one here he’d take that from is big Frosty over there,” said Kitty, “and since he hasn’t yet…”
“Not like that,” said Desiree, her tail twitching. “His powers are all very combat ready, aren’t they? What if he had something that could be used more… gently?”
“Again, we aren’t going to wish for him to have powers,” said Ghost Writer.
“No, let her talk,” said Kitty. “You have some kind of plan, right?”
“Well, after being released from that horrid little bottle, I decided to find gainful employment.” There were titters of laughter, but Desiree glared them into submission. “I found it. How many of you have heard of the Hothouse?”
“You must be joking,” said Frostbite.
“Not at all. Consider: what would happen if Phantom had a healing power? How much different could he be? How much happier? Nocturne, you must have insight, having seen his dreams. Would he still fight if he could do something else?”
“Oh, he enjoys some aspects of combat,” said Nocturne. “But he’s downright scared of seriously injuring someone. You have noticed that he doesn’t damage any of us? Think about how many times he’s dismantled that one’s armor.” He pointed at Skulker. “Do you really think he is physically incapable of doing that to flesh? He’s fought Undergrowth and he still sends the Box Ghost home without a scratch.”
“YES, HIS GENEROSITY TO THE ANNOYING PLANT MAN IS COMMENDABLE. LUCKILY, THE GREAT BOX GHOST IS MADE OF STERNER STUFF.”
“But the Hothouse?” asked Frostbite, aggrieved.
“A touch of discomfort for something that will change his existence for the better,” said Desiree. “When he no longer reacts to seeing us with a punch or a ghost ray, we can teach him. He can be part of the community.”
“We do fight a lot, though.”
“With my position,” continued Desiree, “I can make sure we get the best discount.”
A long pause.
“A discount? You didn’t say anything about paying for anything!”
.
“You… bought me a spa treatment?” asked Danny, blankly. The ticket hung limply in one hand, its envelope in the other.
“It’s a group gift,” said Skulker, gruffly. “Because of the Pariah thing.”
“That was ages ago.”
“Do you know how long it takes to get a group of ghosts to agree to anything?”
“Okay, yeah,” said Danny. “But this is super suspicious, you know?” He also wasn’t really a ‘spa’ person.
Skulker seemed to sigh, and Danny tilted his head, curious. The amount of control Skulker had over his fake body always fascinated him. How was he emoting like that? Why did he even bother?
“Look, if you don’t at least show up, everyone will be mad at me. Can’t you help me out here?”
“That makes it sound even more like a trap,” said Danny, despite twitching at the word help. “Like they’ll all be waiting for me or something.”
“Don’t you have any friends or anything?”
“Rude.”
“Well, ask one of them. It’s a legitimate business.”
Danny made a face. “Fine. I’ll look into it.” He tucked the invitation/coupon/gift card/thing into his pocket and, withdrawing his hand, took out the thermos.
He had to love ghost physics, sometimes. Infinitely large pockets were great.
“You can’t be serious,” said Skulker.
“Well, I can’t have you running around doing who-knows-what for Vlad or setting up ambushes for me around town, so, yeah. I kind of am serious.”
Skulker sighed. “Let’s just get this over with.”
.
Skulker tumbled out into the Ghost Zone. Getting ‘flushed’ through the Fenton Portal wasn’t unpleasant, exactly, but it was certainly disorienting. He righted himself and tapped the comm. button on his gauntlet.
“This is Skulker reporting–”
“Back so soon?” interrupted Technus in his aggravating, high-pitched voice. He threw in some cackles. “Did you give up, or were you–”
“The portal opens up into his house, you nitwit,” growled Skulker. “It wasn’t like I had to go far to find him.” In fact, the boy had been in his pajamas. “The point is, the whelp has the invitation now, so pass on the news.”
.
“Excellent,” said Desiree. She steepled her fingers. “The next time he comes into the Ghost Zone, we will use the invitation to summon him. The rest of you will be able to fulfill your roles for the duration of Phantom’s stay, I trust.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Johnny. “Hang around, chase him down if he gets far enough. Which he won’t, between you and Ghost Writer here.”
“Our powers aren’t undefeatable,” said Ghost Writer.
“You’ll also be keeping an eye out for other clients trying to leave prematurely,” said Desiree.
“Doesn’t it, like, bother you at all to call them clients?”
“Not really. Why?”
“They aren’t here because they want to be, you know?”
Spectra leaned forward from the dark shadows behind Desiree’s desk. “Darling, you’re the ones hiring us. Don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical to argue about terminology?”
Johnny held up his hands. “Yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it.”
“Don’t let her get to you, Johnny,” said Kitty, wrapping her arms around one of his and glaring at Spectra. “We’re doing the kid a favor, remember. It isn’t like we’re having them take away any of his powers.”
“More’s the pity,” said Walker, casting his eyes upward.
“For once, I agree with the spoilsport,” said Spectra. “Are you sure we can’t get the ‘bosses’ to make an exception, just this once?”
“I’ve already asked,” said Desiree. “No exceptions. We only add or improve abilities, we don’t remove them. We don’t want that. He’s too useful for getting rid of nasty problems, like Pariah Dark. Besides which, they’re already being fairly generous as is, given that between all of you, you couldn’t scrape together–”
“You didn’t help that much with the payment, either,” pointed out Ember. “I’m the one footing the bill.”
“But I am vital to everything else,” said Desiree, “and we are getting a very good bargain. There are some ghosts who would kill for the package you’re getting. A full Healer’s Suite for a difficult client, plus a bit of redirection, and all the rest of you have to do is help keep him and the others contained for the duration of his stay.”
“WE ALSO CHECKED THE ‘AESTHETIC FREEDOM’ BOX!”
“Does he have to be here?” asked Desiree.
“Listen, have you tried to keep him out of anywhere he wants to be? It’s impossible.”
“THE BOX GHOST DOES NOT ‘HAVE’ TO BE ANYWHERE. THE GREAT BOX GHOST DOES AS HE PLEASES.”
.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” Danny told Jazz, rinsing off his toothbrush. “Before you guys get up, at least.”
Jazz started her toothbrush up just as he turned his off. The sound made a good barrier against eavesdropping parents. “Alright, but if you aren’t I’m calling Sam and Tucker for a search party and sending the Boo-merang after you.”
“Ugh,” said Danny. “Please don’t. I’m sick of getting hit by that thing.”
“Then you’ll be home before I get up.”
“I already said that,” said Danny, aggrieved. “Jeez.”
Jazz popped her toothbrush in her mouth and shrugged.
“Whatever,” said Danny. “Goodnight.” He then proceeded to turn invisible and drop through the floor, all the way to the basement.
Every time he did this, he was surprised his parents hadn’t coated the walls and ceiling of the lab with something ghosts couldn’t phase through. It was sure convenient for him, though, so he wasn’t about to say anything about the oversight.
He flew through the portal quickly, not wanting to linger and risk discovery. On the other side, he oriented himself toward the Far Frozen - he was overdue for a checkup and he wanted to ask Frostbite about that spa thing - and he started forward, only for the Zone to warp around him, twisting, shifting, plunging him through tissue paper thin leafs of reality. He hit the ground hard.
A new record for getting attacked coming through the portal. Who did he know who could do something like that? He filed the question for later as he pushed up off the tiled floor and saw what had to be at least half of his usual enemies.
It was time to fight.
.
“I wish for Phantom to lose consciousness,” said Spectra.
“As you have wished it,” said Desiree with a smile, “so shall it be.”
.
“That was easier than expected,” observed Technus, toeing Phantom’s crumpled form.
“Out of the way, out of the way,” said a Hothouse attendant, elbowing ghosts out of the way. “Miss Desiree’s powers aren’t absolute. We don’t know when he’ll wake up.” Upon reaching Phantom, she produced a syringe and jabbed it into his arm with cool efficiency. “There. Much better.” She stood up and faced the other ghosts with a smile. “We will, of course, alert you when he’s ready for pickup.”
.
The problem with treating Phantom was, of course, his ridiculous and disproportionate amount of power. That he was an unusual kind of ghost was secondary. They’d done business with Vlad Masters-Plamius in the past. They had data on that.
No. His power, his strength, was the problem. Usually, their ‘difficult’ clients weren’t nearly so strong. People rarely wanted to forcibly give someone who was already a threat additional powers, although there were certainly exceptions, especially in the ‘inconvenient or aesthetic abilities’ category.
So. Their first step in treating Phantom was to (temporarily, of course) disable or counteract his powers. They couldn’t completely turn them off, of course. That would be counterproductive. For them to force his powers into fruition - or to graft new ones onto him - he’d still have to be able to access his special abilities in general.
Simple drugs would do the trick for curtailing his physical strength and his ability to fly. Keep him uncoordinated, disoriented. They’d doubtless have to adjust the cocktail he was on as they worked. Even with their vast collection of records, half ghosts were all so unique.
There was nothing they could do about invisibility, but enough of their staff had alternate ways of perceiving invisible things that it wouldn’t be a problem.
Intangibility, human or ghost based, was largely a non-issue. As part of their dealings with Plasmius, they had commissioned a number of adamant-titanium alloy items. The combination of earthly and ectoplasmic materials was nearly impossible to phase through or phase with. The greatest stumbling block there was keeping it on Phantom, although from their research it seemed that he wasn’t comfortable with shape shifting, generally only managing it as a reflex.
Ice powers could be counteracted somewhat by keeping him in a hot environment… although given the other stresses they planned to put him under, that wouldn’t be healthy long term. They would have to be careful with that one.
The biggest problems were ectoplasmic constructs like ectoblasts and shields, and the so-called Ghostly Wail. For the constructs, they’d have to rely on the room and their restraints. For the Wail, on the other hand…
They had to do something about it now, before Phantom woke up.
Phantom lay on the bed within his assigned room, deeply asleep. He looked very young like this, and very alive. She thought she might be able to predict the aesthetic changes that would be added to his spa package. There were certain features that team just loved to play with.
That wasn’t her job, though. She pulled her syringes from her pouch and got to work.
.
Danny woke slowly, as if sleep was a syrup that clung to him. But he had to, because… Hadn’t he been fighting? Where was he? He opened his eyes to a ceiling that refused to focus and tried to sit up. His arms refused to cooperate.
“I’m glad to see you’re awake, Mr. Phantom. Welcome to the Hothouse Spa and Clinic.”
That made him work a little harder to get up. A ghost in a neat uniform floated next to the bed he was on. Her hair and sleeves were both pulled back.
“In accordance with the package that was ordered for you, you have been sedated and will be monitored until we have completed your treatment. Your treatment will start shortly. In the meantime, we invite you to explore the amenities available to you.”
Danny’s vision swam and he dropped his head.
“Please enjoy your stay,” said the ghost, pleasantly.
Danny didn’t see the ghost go, but he could feel her absence. Okay. Right. He’d been right about the spa thing being some sort of trap. He’d obviously been drugged. Either that, or he was suffering the effects of some ghost power.
Thinking made him feel nauseous. He swallowed.
Right. So. He had to look around. See where he was. What he could do. What he could use. Start making an escape plan. He wanted to get out of here before Jazz came after him.
Danny made a heroic effort to get off the bed, and rolled off onto the floor. The air was knocked out of him
“Well,” purred a painfully familiar voice, “that was certainly pathetic.”
Danny flopped over to squint at Spectra. He wanted to ask why she was here, but, like the rest of him, his tongue wasn't working properly.
He clenched his fists, drawing power to them, but the energy discharged into sparks before he could do anything with it.
"Look at you, lying there. When violence isn't an option, you're useless, aren't you?"
While it was true that Danny solved most of his problems with violence, they were generally problems of the violent variety to begin with, and he thought that using his immediate reaction to being kidnapped and drugged was kind of unfair. Then again, Spectra was the textbook definition of unfair, and he had to keep reminding himself of that. Jazz said it was important to remember that she was full of crap.
Besides, violence wasn't his only option.
He called his rings and turned human. Falling through… wherever he was wasn't going to be pleasant, but once he was out and his head was cleared, he–
His fall stopped abruptly, all his weight hanging from his wrist, which, unlike the rest of him, wasn’t phasing through the floor. Something wrenched in his shoulder, and although it was far from the worst injury he'd had, even if he only counted this month, whatever was disorienting him didn't do anything for pain. Except maybe make it worse.
His vision went black for a moment, and then Spectra pulled him back up through the floor. The sudden movement sent pain radiating from his shoulder.
Spectra grinned at him. "Like I said, pathetic."
He went ghost again just in time for her to throw him into a wall.
Shield, he thought, rather desperately, shield, shield, shield!
He got one up just in time to block Spectra's black claws. They scraped against the shiny green surface.
"Shields are all very well and good," said Spectra, "but what happens when they break?" She pushed, and, sure enough, Danny’s shield shattered. "You can't protect anyone like this. Completely unhelpful. What good are you?"
You know what? Screw this.
If Danny's coordination and awareness had been torpedoed, he'd just scream his way out of this. He inhaled and Wailed.
Silently.
Spectra leered at him. "What's the matter, useless freak? Ghost got your tongue?"
She slammed him into a wall and he passed out.
.
“My,” said the observer from the aesthetic team, “he’s rather stoic, isn’t he? I mean, I know we sealed his voice, but no ghost sounds, either?”
“He doesn’t have the structure for it,” said the primary medical advisor.
“Really?”
“Current theory is that it’s a side effect of how he was formed,” said the medical advisor, nodding.
“Huh. Fascinating. We’ll have to include those in our healing plan.” She made a note on her pad of paper. “Our sound designer will be thrilled, even if we don’t get to play much with his actual voice after all. He’s really looking forward to taking a look at that Wail, too.”
“Do you have any thoughts about what aesthetic you’re going to go with for him?” asked the project manager, sipping a drink that gave off copious amounts of neon blue steam.
“Oh, yes,” said the aesthetic team member with a nod. “Overwhelming cuteness. We have a good base to start with, and I think it will fit well with the overall purpose of the client’s stay. Imagine: small, soft, fragile, fluffy, a dozen or so wings longer and wider than he is tall, a body just the right size to cuddle, nice, bright, diffuse aura, big, bright eyes, sharp teeth, always teething, always sleepy… That is what his powers will be tuned for, yes? Constant fatigue?”
“At first, sure,” said the medical advisor.
“To help with the transition,” interjected the second psychological expert. “It tends to be easier for clients like this to accept changes if they are too tired to actively resist them.”
(Even the executives of the Hothouse hadn’t liked the idea of having Spectra entirely in charge of that aspect of this operation.)
“Yes,” agreed the medical advisor. “But once his healing factors equilibrate, his form settles, and he rebalances his energy consumption, he should be more active again.”
“Ah, well. Anyway, imagine something like that coming up to you and asking to be held. Isn’t it just a precious image?”
The project manager laughed a little. “Don’t forget, this is the person who defeated Pariah Dark in single combat. That’s why we’re taking all of these security precautions.”
“Of course! Ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the time, he could be a tiny little gentle thing, but that point zero zero one percent… When his friends need that kind of help, he becomes a soul-crushing, mind-numbing terror. Isn’t that way cuter?”
The other ghosts in the room considered the picture for a second and made various sounds of agreement.
“About the wings, though,” said the medical advisor.
The aesthetic team member groaned. “Are you saying we can’t do them? I thought we had complete freedom on that front?”
“You do,” said the project manager, quickly.
“Yes, yes,” the medical advisor said, reassuringly. “But, as a general caution, we do want him to be functional and able to care for himself by the end of this. More than that, we still want him capable of taking up arms, if it comes to that.”
“Yeah, that’s why I mentioned that point–”
“Point zero zero one percent, yes,” the medical advisor nodded. “More specifically, about the wings, we don’t want to deviate too far from a human body plan, because we aren’t sure how his form will map to his human body. We don’t want to add anything that won’t be sustainable for him while he’s in human form.”
“That rules out a lot,” said the aesthetic team member, pouting. “But one of our junior team members mentioned a possible work-around I’d like to try.”
“Oh? Do tell. Upper management is always happy to hear about new ideas.”
The aesthetic team member grinned. “As long as they’re workable, right? Well, her idea was to make the wings aura structures. His aura doesn’t seem to follow him into human form, right? And he can certainly use the extra ectoplasm filtering capability - I mean, he’d have some of that with physical wings, as well, the way we make them, but, you know.”
The medical advisor tapped his lips. “There are some potential complications from aura structures that I want to look into before approving anything, but I think it should work.”
“Great,” said the project manager. “So, he’s going to be taken to the baths to soak for a while. Any concerns? No? Excellent. We’ll meet again to observe his next session with Spectra.”
.
Danny woke submerged up to his neck in ectoplasm. Uncomfortably hot ectoplasm. Probably hot enough to burn, if he was in his human skin, or even his ghost if his ice powers weren’t naturally countering the heat. Naturally, he flailed and once again came up short when something caught around his wrist.
He hissed as the motion jarred his injured shoulder. It was only sore, now, instead of still being dislocated, but it still hurt. Reaching down, he found the cuff of a manacle and a short chain leading to the bottom of the tub he was in.
Another thing he found was a lack of clothes.
Usually, that wasn’t a problem for him, because his jumpsuit reformed and repaired itself with only a thought from him, but the fumes from the ectoplasm were making it hard to think, on top of everything else, and it was hot.
Even though he couldn’t see very far through the luminescent green ectoplasm, he was still able to unerringly trace the lines of his death scar. The idea that it had been on display to Spectra and who knew who else made him, well, more nauseated than he already was.
“Hey, you’re new here, aren’t you?”
Danny flinched, hard, into the side of the pool.
“Shoot, are you okay?”
Danny squinted through the ectoplasm fumes to see a ghost woman in… basically the same situation he was in. Actually, he was far from the only other person in the room. There were many other tubs.
Cautiously, Danny nodded.
The woman smiled, shakily. Her hair floated on the surface of the ectoplasm around her, rainbow-hued, like an oil spill. “That’s good,” she said. “They sealed your voice, huh? That must be hard.”
Danny raised his free hand to touch his throat.
“Yeah,” said the woman, “a seal, that’s… Do you know where you are? What they…” She lowered her voice slightly, “what they do here?
The answer to that was no, but Danny could conclude that it was bad above and beyond everything else.
The woman bit her lips, white fangs stark against the black. "They call themselves a spa, but they’re professional torturers for hire. They'll torment you until you're in the shape the people who hired them want."
Well, Spectra fit right in, then, didn't she?
"There's people who want to be here, too, if you can believe it." The woman laughed, but it was a strained, shallow thing. "Because one of the things they can supposedly do is give you new powers. But I can't imagine going through this willingly." She hooked long black talons over the side of her tub. "When I get out of here, I'm going to find whoever did this to me and destroy them."
Well, that was… something. He was going to go with something.
It did seem to imply that someone, or several someones, had paid these guys to hold him. Considering all the ghosts he'd seen right before he blacked out… Ancients, he was an idiot for not shredding that "invitation" Skulker had given him.
He was going to leave them in the thermos for a month next time he got them. At least. Together. In the same thermos.
The woman peered at him through the steam. “How old are you?”
Danny frowned. She didn’t expect him to actually answer, did she? She’d pointed out that he couldn’t talk in the first place.
Whatever. It was way past escape time for both of them. He put both hands on the chain and called on his ice. The ectoplasm around him became blessedly colder. He pulled. It didn’t matter which way he pulled, as long as it was all one direction, so his lack of coordination didn’t matter as much.
He’d get himself free, then help the other captives get out and hope that at least some of them were less drugged than he was.
He pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and he could practically feel the metal begin to give, when–
There was a sharp prick in the back of his neck. The colors around him, already blurred by the steam, melted.
.
When Danny woke up, he felt… more liquid than he should. Less solid. He clenched his hands and winced as his skin proved to be… Sunburned? How did he get sunburned on his palms?
Oh, right. The hot ectoplasm.
He pried his hands open and, very slowly, sat up. The world still tilted horribly around him, but it wasn’t actively spinning. His mouth felt like paper towels. He swallowed.
The room he was in… Was it the same one he’d woken up in before, with Spectra? He hadn’t been there for long. At least, he hadn’t been there while awake for long. It could have been the same room.
The room looked like it belonged in a high end hotel, except that the door didn’t have a handle on the inside, and there were no windows. There was a bathroom, sort of bent around one corner. No door for that. A mini fridge?
Danny rubbed his eyes, and quickly decided that was a bad idea. Skin-on-skin contact was bad. It just hurt too much. Okay.
Carefully, he maneuvered himself off the bed. He just had to get to the door. Yeah. Yep. All he had to do.
Several hazardous minutes later, he was leaning against the door. The door that had no handle. That was a problem.
Or was it? Couldn’t he just phase through? Turn human and phase through? Why couldn’t he do that?
He frowned down at his hands. There was some reason. It was… He caught sight of the metal around his wrist. It contrasted strongly with what he was wearing which was…. A hospital gown?
He was confused, a state he didn’t think would lift until the drugs left his system. He hoped he didn’t build up a dependency.
But. Door. He went human and phased through. He came up short against that metal band around his wrist. Okay. Okay, so he couldn’t phase that through things. He’d just have to get the door open from this side. There was a handle on this side. He tried it, and discovered that it was locked. Of course it was locked. Right. He looked around the room, trying to see if there was anything that could help him.
It was a sort of antechamber. A very small waiting-room-like space. There were two chairs in pastel blue and pink, tastefully muted paint, a tiny table stacked with magazines, and a small landscape painting of the Tetrahedral Prairies. It was lit from above with a single light fixture behind glass.
He frowned at it. Maybe he could–
The opposite door opened, revealing Spectra. She smiled. “Oh, my, were you that eager for our next session?”
Danny was not. He started back through the door, but Spectra grabbed him, the distance between them too small for Danny to get away. She pulled back, pulling Danny’s arm taught once again. All the joints of his arm felt like they were about to pop out. Stars danced in his vision.
“You know, I’ve never been a fan of physical pain - much too… crude, I suppose? But this I could get used to. I suppose you’re just sweet like that, hm?” She leaned past his shoulder and clipped something around his arm. Then she dropped him, draping herself languidly over one of the chairs.
It took a moment for him to realize what had happened. On the other side of the door, there was an unphaseable metal bracelet around his wrist. Now, on this side of the door, just before his arm disappeared into it, was another almost identical bracelet. He pushed forward, experimentally. The metal jarred against the door.
He was stuck.
Well, not completely, he could slide across the door, up until he hit the thicker doorframe, but that wasn’t a useful degree of mobility. Not with Spectra sitting right there.
“Oh, right. You were so pathetic, I almost forgot!”
Whatever it was, Danny doubted–
She stabbed him, the long, sharp talon of her index finger sinking into his leg. She pulled it free and hot, red blood came pouring out. He could– He had to– But if he went ghost with his hand in the wall like this, what would happen? He didn’t know. Didn’t want to know.
"For someone who claims to want to help, you spend an awful lot of time doing the opposite," said Spectra, leaning back in the chair and propping her feet on Danny's shoulders as he tried to put pressure on the stab wound.
Danny, not having a lot of other options, hissed at her.
Spectra tasked. "Don’t give me that! It's true. Do you even know how many ghosts you've hurt? And if you're as heartless as your parents, at least think about the humans you've hurt. That's before we get into the burdens you put on your so-called friends and allies. How many scars does your sister have because of you?"
His vision grayed out briefly as he felt his ghost half stir at the insult. The part of his wrist that was stuck in the door felt uncomfortably dense. His eyes were glowing, his sight limned with green that threatened to blot out everything. Bad, bad, bad, this was bad.
Something - Spectra’s heel, maybe - brushed the side of his neck, and then he felt her hook her toes under his jaw, the curve of her foot cupping his pulse.
“Now, now, you are paying attention, aren’t you? Do your sister that much courtesy, at least! Don’t you care about what happens to her? Or do you only care about yourself? Well, you are a… whatever you are. A crime against nature, shall we say? An abomination? A freak? I’ll bet you haven’t thought about anyone else from the moment you got here.”
That… it wasn’t true. The whole reason he was trying to escape was so he could go home to his friends and family.
“Oh, I can see those little gears in your head turning. You don’t even need to say it out loud - not that you can. You’re thinking something saccharine about your friends and family. But isn’t that just for your own comfort? No thought for your responsibilities? For how many people are going to suffer because you were curious? Have you no shame?”
Spectra pulled her foot back to rest on his chest. She slowly put weight on it, the sharp heel of her shoe driving hard between two of his ribs. He could feel her draining him of energy as images of terrible things happening to Amity Park flashed through his mind’s eye.
Most of his enemies knew he was trapped here. What did they have planned for Amity? What would happen to Sam and Tucker? To Jazz and his parents? To Valerie? They’d try to stop the disaster, he knew. They’d be in danger. All of them would be in danger. Because of him.
“Not much you can do after the fact, is there?” purred Spectra. “What will you do, if you go home to ruins and blood? If you weren’t as stupid as you are careless, you’d beg to be kept here.”
Danny twitched. A greatly abstracted attempt to throw Spectra off.
“Oh,” said Spectra, as if she had just remembered something. “But you can’t, can you?”
She laughed.
.
“You, ma’am,” said the aesthetic team member, “are an artist.”
Spectra preened. “I do try.” She settled elegantly on the couch. “What’s next?”
“It’ll be a while before you’re on again,” said the medical advisor. “You really pushed him, which is what we wanted, but he needs recovery time.”
“Not mentally, surely,” objected Spectra.
“No,” said the other psychological expert. “You remember those films we picked out? We’ll be playing those for him once he returns from the baths.”
“Ah, yes. The educational films. With emotional enhancement, I presume?”
“Of course. We don’t want to drag this out longer than we have to.”
Spectra scoffed. “Anything else I should know about?”
The aesthetic team member grinned. “The sound designer came up with a great plan. We’re building off the study we did of Ember McLain’s voice.”
“Oh, you’re giving him another power? Is that alright with management?”
“Minor adjustments to an existing one, to fit the aesthetic plan,” said the aesthetician, waving off the false concern with ease. “It would be like, oh, making your flames white instead of black.”
"On the subject of sound," said the medical advisor, "we're fitting him with a prosthetic ghost sound generator on the advice of the psychological counsel."
"It will help him learn which sounds are connected to which emotional states," said the other psychologist. "So when his own structures for it grow in, he'll be able to use them properly."
"Oh?" Spectra raised an eyebrow. "He'll have voluntary control?
The aesthetician laughed. "Hardly! Between the aura modifications and this, he'll be an open book to any ghost with eyes and ears. Which will be good for him. Isn't the reason he got into so many fights that he was so hard to read?"
Spectra rolled her eyes. "And his atrocious personality."
"He'll have about the same level of control as a newly formed ghost," said the medical advisor. "After that…" He made a face. "Unfortunately, his control will always be limited. To avoid impinging on his human internal organs, we had to simplify the design, and we decided that the range, depth, and complexity of the emotion conveyed was more important than voluntary control."
Spectra didn't bother to hide her delight. "That's perfect. I love having music with my dinner."
"If we could have made the structures smaller scale–"
"No, no, no," said the aesthetic team member. "He has to have the biggest pur possible."
"I know," said the medical advisor, flatly. "You've told me so several times."
"Yeah, because you don't get it."
.
Danny jolted out of a nightmare, his heart beating rapidly and his core aching with failure and despair. It took him several heaving and panicked minutes to realize that it hadn't been real.
Not that it made him feel any better when he figured out where he actually was. He was in one of the tubs again, but this time it was dry. He looked down at himself. The hole in his leg had been neatly wrapped in bandages. A flat metal disk was somehow adhered to his chest, exactly where he knew his core to be. There was a small electronic box stuck to it, with little lights on the front.
He tried to reach for it, but found that this time, both his hands were trapped. His right wrist was chained to the bottom, as before, and his left arm was strapped firmly to a little ledge on the side of the tub. A nauseatingly thick IV tube was plugged into the crook of his arm, and he followed it up to a rack hung with dozens of pouches of colored fluid.
“Ah, you’re awake.”
Danny jerked his head up to meet the eyes of a purple-skinned ghost. He smiled, showing off brilliantly white teeth.
“My name is Mandy, and I’ll be carrying out your calibration today. We’ll be taking you through a range of base emotions: surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and finally happiness.” He laid his hand on the rack of IV pouches. “All the emotions will be ectochemically induced. Our proprietary emotional formulas also include mild paralytics, to prevent injury. After calibration, we’ll give you a relaxant, clean you up, and then you can have a soak while the other treatments are applied. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
Danny shook his head frantically. Mandy just smiled wider.
“Here we go,” he said, twisting something on the rack.
A bright purple liquid dripped into the IV tube, mixing with the clear substance that was already there. Danny watched it flow down until it hit his arm. At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then, his hair all stood on end and he was overtaken by a sense of shock so intense it made his heart stutter. The disk on his chest started to vibrate, producing a sound just at the edge of hearing, and he jumped, not expecting that. But his jump was… delayed. Clumsier that it should have been, and not as strong, either. It didn’t jostle his wrists against the cuffs. He’d known about the paralytic, but it still surprised him.
“I think that’s enough,” said Mandy, and Danny twitched away from his voice startled, but this twitch was even weaker than the one before.
Slowly, Danny’s heart rate returned to something normal. The humming of the plate on his chest subsided, but didn’t vanish.
“On to fear!” Mandy turned the tab on a lurid orange pouch.
Maybe it was because Danny was already afraid, but this sensation left him almost insensate. When he came to, he was cowering, and the plate was vibrating so hard it was disrupting his breathing - a thought that sent another spike of fear through him.
“And… anger!”
The liquid that dripped into him was fuschia, but the color that crept across his vision was green, followed by bright blue-white. Rage became cold faster than it became hot, and he was too angry not to let it spill out of him.
He was cut off with a wash of scalding hot water.
“Ah-ah!” said Mandy, waggling a finger. “None of that! That could have been dangerous. You’re not the only one here, you know?”
Danny bared his teeth, still furious. It was the only movement he was really capable of.
“All these other clients… You don’t want to hurt them, do you?”
Something in Danny withered.
Mandy did not give him forewarning about disgust, but Danny was more than able to identify the wave of revulsion that left him gagging and retching, and then gagging and retching because of the retching. If there had been anything in his stomach, it could have been messy.
Almost as soon as that started to fade, he began to cry. His brain scrambled for reasons he could be feeling this way, and settled on grief. Everyone was dead and gone. That’s the only reason he would feel like this. Before he’d recovered, he was filled with a joy so obviously artificial that his skin crawled even as he silently giggled, the vibrating plate sending shudders through him.
“Calibration complete,” said Mandy, cheerfully. He turned one last knob, and something milky flowed into the IV tube.
Starting from the crook in his arm, Danny felt all his muscles relax one by one, all sense of tension slipping away. His head fell back against a pillow.
Mandy pulled something up from the side of the tub, and started spraying Danny with uncomfortably hot water. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” he said, wiping snot and bile from Danny’s lips. “It’s just how your body reacts to these things.”
The tub filled. It was hot enough that Danny felt like he was sitting in a pot of soup, and he started panting, some reflex to get cooler air into his body.
Between the heat, the vibration, the paralysis, and Danny's general misery, he… drifted. He didn't sleep. He didn't think he could sleep. But his thoughts rabbitholed through anxieties and fears until they, too, exhausted themselves into a gray blanket of malaise.
It was in this stare that he was carried back to 'his' room and carefully arranged on the bed. The IV was still in his arm, whatever poison was in it dripping into his veins. Across the room from him a person in the Hothouse uniform was adjusting a giant television screen.
When they finished, they came over and adjusted a knob on the IV rack. The world, from the vibration at his chest to the ache of his scalded skin came back into sharp focus. He gasped, not at all ready for it.
He still couldn't move.
"We have some movies set up for you, dear," said the spa attendant. "We hope you find them improving."
Danny, unable to do anything else, watched.
The movie started out as a classic fantasy. A great warrior defending his home from an even greater evil, accompanied by a cast of quirky supporting characters. Then, in the last act, the hero went out to fight alone, to hold off the evil, telling his friends to stay behind. The hero was, barely, victorious, but he returned to find his friends wounded and dying, caught by surprise by another prong of the villain’s attack. The hero tried to save them, but couldn’t, and the movie ended with the hero lamenting his lack of healing knowledge.
And then another movie started. And another. They all had different lengths, and there were dozens of them, all of them with complimentary themes. No matter how strong the hero was or how hard they worked, if all they knew how to do was fight, the story ended in abject tragedy.
And Danny couldn't help but cry.
He hated himself for getting invested in things he knew were designed to torture him and break his heart. But he did. He wanted to solely blame the drugs that were still pouring into his system, but as that pain within his chest, a pain exacerbated by the buzzing disk, grew and grew, he knew that couldn't be all of it.
Before the movies ended, he was emotionally wrung out, ached to sleep, and was filled with a desperation for any sign that his friends and family weren't dead so great that he probably would have sold his soul for one.
Despite this, Danny held a tiny spark of hope. He had come up with a way to escape, despite everything.
Changing the temperature of something, especially changing it unevenly, warped it. Doing so repeatedly stressed it. The high temperature of the rooms and his general exhaustion mean that Danny couldn’t bring his ice powers to bear in an attack.
He could, however, focus on making a little band of the metal cuff around his wrist freeze and melt repeatedly.
Was this a very effective method? Was it something he expected to come to anything?
No.
But it was all he had.
One of those so-called spa attendants came in. She smiled at him and held up a pair of earplugs in one hand, and a sleeping mask in the other. "I'm getting you ready for your nap, okay?"
It was not okay, but Danny couldn’t say so. He couldn’t even move.
The attendant put the sleeping mask on first, then put the earplugs firmly into his ears, pushing them deep enough to be uncomfortable. He could, just barely, hear the disk vibrating on his chest. Otherwise, he was immobile and insensate.
And then the touching started. Hands, all over. He couldn't hear, couldn't see, couldn't move, couldn't anticipate. All he could do was lie there and experience hands running up his arms, down his back, through his hair…
He didn't want to. He wanted to be somewhere else. He wanted to be home. He wanted, at least, to be able to fight back.
He felt broken inside.
.
"Alright," said the current monitoring psychologist. "He's reached the breaking point. Time to roll it back." His breakdown had to be carefully shaped, after all.
They watched as the more hands-on technicians pulled away from the client, then turned to the medical advisor.
"So, what do you think? How soon can we start the next phase?"
The medical advisor peered over their shoulder at the readings. "I'd like to have him go through at least one more treatment cycle and consult your colleagues before we move on. But if he reveals a notable vulnerability…"
"Of course, of course. Aw, look at that. He likes having his hand held and his head patted."
"Oh? How can you tell?"
"Wavering stress levels. See? There’s not much of a reaction, seeing as this is a pretty disturbing and traumatic experience for him, overall, but, especially for humans, bodies will react without the consent of the mind.”
“Speaking of bodies,” said the medical advisor. “Do you mind turning to that section?”
“Sure. Huh. Is that temperature fluctuation normal?”
“It’s hard to tell. He’s something of a singular entity. Unique. It is something to take note of.
.
Danny was still awake when they came for him again and ‘prepared’ him for his next ‘treatment.’ He was starting to get feeling and movement back in his limbs, but he wasn’t in any state to struggle with them. Still, making himself cooperate with them made him feel nauseous. He was just trying to conserve his energy, but…
It felt wrong. Like he was making a mistake. But he wasn’t sure what else he could do. If he fought too hard now, he might get sedated again, or they might notice what he was doing to the metal cuff around his wrist. So, he stayed docile and let them lead him, staggering, around the room.
They took him out into the hallways, and he tried to keep track of where they were going. Even a vague idea of direction could be an advantage. The halls, like the rooms he had seen so far, were done in a blandly pleasant style, but they seemed to pulse sinisterly. And what was that perfume? It felt like it had crawled into his nose and was now tearing at the backs of his eyes.
He walked with the… orderlies? Aides? Nurses? Attendants? He knew they’d introduced themselves as something but forgive him if he hadn’t been paying attention to that detail. He walked with them through labyrinthine halls and passageways and rooms full of… full of…
… Something was wrong.
The attendants giggled and patted him. The hallway in front of him stretched and time seemed to slow to nothing, and–
And he was in the tub again. Chained to the bottom, like before.
“Hey, are you back with us?”
Danny turned to see the ghost who had spoken to him the first time he had woken up in the tub. She was barely recognizable. Her hair had lengthened and darkened, her eyes were pitch black, all the way through, and the taloned hand that hooked over the side of the tub was easily three times the size it once was.
“Yeah,” she said, lisping a little on her fangs. “Not pretty, is it?”
Danny shrugged, and started trying to focus on the cuff again.
“How are you holding up?”
Danny hunched his shoulders and tried to keep his emotions off his face. He didn’t do a great job.
“I’m sorry. If I could do something to help…” The ghost trailed off.
The plate on Danny’s chest issued a weird sound that made Danny’s whole body shiver.
“What was that?” asked the ghost.
Danny tried to point at the plate on his chest, trying to show it to her, even though it was mostly submerged. She looked at it with a sort of horror.
“What are they doing to you?”
Well. It was good to know that whatever this was, ghosts who actually spent all their time in the Zone were also baffled by it. And by good, Danny meant ‘marginally useful, but also incredibly disturbing and not at all comforting in the grand scheme of things.’ Or, more simply, ‘bad.’
Then, he felt it. The cuff cracked.
He looked around the room, wildly. The only attendants were far off in the corners of the room. It was now or never. He pulled.
The edges of the cuff scraped bleeding lines into his wrist, but he didn’t care. He was free - at least of that obstacle. There were others.
Not the least of which was a hungry, starved thing inside him, an empty pain made worse by Spectra’s taunts and the movies he’d been forced to watch.
(Even now, he didn’t want to think too hard about his Obsession.)
He clambered out of the tub, then reached into one next to him, and yanked on the chain connecting her to her tub. He hadn’t been able to get his own out, but now he had the advantage of greater leverage and no longer being in a vat of near-boiling ectoplasm soup. He pulled, and ice crackled around his closed hand.
It came out.
“Thank you,” said the ghost. “Thank you, thank you.”
But that was all Danny could do. They’d been noticed, and Danny wasn’t in any condition to fight. He could try. Part of him wanted, desperately, to try. But he’d do more good if he left, recovered, and came back with some sort of plan. And backup. Maybe an army of backup.
“Sorry,” he said, and he dropped through the floor.
Phasing as a human was different from phasing as a ghost. For one, as a ghost he’d still have control of his trajectory. As a human, not so much. He tumbled through floor after floor, the sheer scale of this place chilling him.
There was just so much.
Then he was falling through rocky soil, then stone, then ectoplasm-laden air. He was out.
He flicked himself into ghost form and narrowly dodged a ghost ray. He looked up, around. Skulker. Technus. Johnny. Among others. Ancients, he’d thought they’d at least respected him, even if they didn’t like him. Jerks.
He flew, weaving. A fight with these odds would not be in his favor.
Another blast clipped him, making him spin. He raised his own hand, preparing to shoot back, just to get room–
Do you even know how many ghosts you've hurt?
–He hesitated.
The next ghost ray hit him straight in the face.
The rest of the fight didn’t go any better.
.
“I think this presents an opportunity ripe for the taking,” said the second psychological expert while Spectra sulked. “With this prompt, I think he will accept the modification easily.”
“I think we should have a few more rounds,” said Spectra.
“But the personal connection will be lost,” argued the other psychological expert, “and he’s good to go on the physical side of things, yes?”
“Everything checks out,” agreed the medical advisor.
“And aesthetically?”
“Putting the final touches on our package, but that’s inserted during the recovery period.”
“See? Perfect. Just because you want to keep feeding on him doesn’t mean we have to drag it out.”
“It especially doesn’t mean we should drag it out,” said the medical advisor, “since it’s still unclear how much stress he can handle. I vote for the proposed course of action.”
There were other murmurs of agreement.
“Excellent. I’ll tell the attendants to prep him.”
.
“This is all your fault.”
Danny twitched, only just starting his journey into consciousness. He felt tenderized. Bruised. Splitting at the seams. Like an overripe fruit fallen from a tree.
“What were you thinking?” asked that same, grim, accusatory, voice.
His thoughts felt like soup. What had he been thinking… about what? What did he do?
Danny pried his eyes open and immediately winced. It wasn’t particularly bright, but it was bright enough to hurt. He’d seen enough to know he’d never been in this room, with its dark stone walls and glowing carvings.
“Get up and look at what you’ve done.”
With effort, Danny rolled over and forced his eyes open again.
On the floor in front of him, sluggishly bleeding ectoplasm, was the ghost woman who had been in the tub next to him. The one who had been nice to him, who had explained more about this place than anyone else here in just a few sentences.
There was so much ectoplasm. She wasn’t moving. His hands fluttered over her, uselessly. He didn’t know where to start.
The thing that was still stuck to his chest keened. Something about the tone made him both cringe and try to echo the sound with his own voice, despite it being silenced. A bit of drool, stained with ectoplasm and blood, dripped from his lips.
“She wouldn’t have gotten injured if you hadn’t tried to escape. She wouldn’t be hurt if you had known some other way of doing things. If you had done something other than fighting.”
Maybe under different circumstances, Danny would have argued. Maybe he would have seen the flaws in this reasoning, in the accusation. Perhaps he would have realized that he hadn’t fought, not really. Perhaps he would have been able to say that it was the spa people who had hurt the ghost woman. But he’d been led here, he’d been prepared for this, and the only conclusion compatible with how he felt was that, yes, this was his fault, yes, he had caused this.
The knowledge hurt more than anything he’d ever experienced. More than any fight, more than any wound, more than dying halfway and stumbling back to life.
“But now that you understand how broken you are, you can fix this.”
At last, Danny looked up at the spa woman. He didn’t recognize her, and that made him start to tear up, too. How many of these people were there?
“Yes. There is a way to fix this, and I can help you.”
Danny crawled towards her, trying to communicate begging in mime.
“All you have to do is heal her.”
Danny sobbed. He didn’t know how. He didn’t know what to do.
“I’ll even show you how.”
Danny felt like he was on a roller coaster of hope and despair, shifting between depths and heights so quickly it made him dizzy.
“Here,” she said, gesturing at the walls. “All you have to do is take it inside of you and make it part of you.”
Danny looked around wildly. He didn’t understand. There were only the walls and the carvings–
Oh.
“It’s all there for the taking. A way to help more than hurting people ever has. As if hurting people could help them.”
Danny stood as if in a trance and began to turn, trying to take in all of the carvings. He had started to pant, one of the few ways he could express the ache building inside him. If he had a voice he’d be groaning. The weird purring whine of the plate on his chest wasn’t helping matters.
By the time he’d made a full turn, his vision had started to blur. That was fine. His eyes weren’t the important part. It was that ache, that hunger that was not hunger. His Obsession. His purpose. And, oh, he had failed it, he had made mistake after mistake… but he could fix things. He could heal them.
The pain built and spread until it radiated throughout his body. There was a change taking place inside of him. Parts of himself were twisting, warping to accommodate it. Something new was growing. Something he wanted so badly that the wanting was becoming. Something being made following instructions only understood by the parts of himself that were secret even to himself.
Something clicked into place, bringing relief. The changes didn't stop, didn't slow, and the pain was still growing, but it felt more right.
"There you are." They took his hands and guided them down to touch ectoplasm soaked fabric and cold ghostflesh. "Do you feel it?"
Another one of the new and growing pieces of himself slotted into place, pushing what was already there aside. He felt uncomfortably stretched, as if reaching for something he wasn't ready for.
"It isn't entirely unlike an ectoblast or ghost ray, and you are, at least, proficient in those." Her voice dripped with scorn. "But this is a much higher art. You must seek to help instead of harm."
That was all Danny had ever wanted.
He reached for his powers, but flinched away from the ones that hurt. He groped blindly, reaching for anything and everything. Then, he finally made contact, and energy washed out of him.
He was only barely upright in the first place. He fell. Something moved near him.
"You bastards," snarled the ghost woman. "You drugged me and used me as a prop!" She tried to throw herself at the spa person, but they dodged, and then there were dozens of others.
She was alright then. Good.
Danny closed his eyes.
.
“It’s a little creepy,” said the medical advisor’s assistant, walking around Phantom.
“He’s always been creepy,” muttered Spectra.
“He’s not going to react,” said the other psychological expert. “Emotional and mental burnout is common after that kind of treatment. If he’s anything like a regular ghost, he’s probably not even picking up our tone, much less what we’re actually saying.” They walked over to Phantom and gently tilted his head up. “I think it can be interesting. In any case, this proves that his Obsession has nothing to do with fighting. He wouldn’t be anywhere near this docile.”
“Hm,” said the medical advisor. “In any case, he’s healthy enough to start the second phase, but his wake-sleep cycle should be closely monitored. We’re aiming for a ratio between 1-5 and 1-3 before he’s released.”
“Don’t we usually have ratios closer to 1-20 for things like this?” asked the assistant.
“Most of those aren’t part human,” said the medical advisor. “If he spends much fewer than one hour in six awake, I would start to get worried about life functions. We can account for those while he’s under our care, helping him bathe, intravenous feeding, things like that, but he has to be able to maintain his health once we release him as well. It just isn’t responsible to release him, otherwise.”
“But he is ready to receive the aesthetic package?” asked Spectra, examining her nails.
“Yes,” said the medical advisor. “I suppose you want to inflict the injury?”
“Of course. If I can’t deal psychological damage, I at least want to do physical damage.”
The assistant shivered. “I still don’t understand why we need this part…”
“It eases the acceptance of the aesthetic package if the ghost’s core sees a need for it. After all, the base function of the aesthetic package is a self-healing factor, even if we’ve learned how to use it for other purposes. I think a shoulder injury will be ideal… Perhaps another leg injury as well?”
Specta glided over, a sharp smile on her face. “Don’t mind if I do.”
.
Danny opened his eyes slowly. He hurt. Everywhere. He deserved it, too. He curled in on himself and groaned.
Groaned.
He sat bolt upright. He could– Was that–?
“Can I–?”
He could talk again. He could– He could–
“Now, I know you aren’t going to use that awful wail of yours and hurt all our other clients.”
Danny startled, looking up at the ghost who approached him.
“You’re going to be good, yes? Helpful?”
Danny was nodding. Why was he nodding?
“Good. Come along, I have something you can help with. You want to help, don’t you?”
Danny knew he shouldn’t want to help these people. He did. He slid off the bed and grabbed the IV stand he was connected to. Walking was difficult, and he was tired by the time he got to the doorway, but he managed.
He padded along behind the ghost, hating every minute of it, but unable to stop, because he wanted to help so badly it made his heart hurt.
But the way was long, and he found his eyes slipping closed…
.
Danny’s existence was nightmarish. Or… he was having a lot of nightmares. He wasn’t sure. His life, or his dreams, whatever they were, currently consisted of getting woken up by a revolving cast of spa people, led out into the hall, unresisting, and then dozing off before reaching whatever the destination was.
He’d say it didn’t feel real, but it felt all too real at the same time. He wasn’t sure how many times it had happened. His memories were blurring together, which, he supposed, might be the point.
But this time was different. This time, Spectra was his guide. This time, they had actually gotten there. There being a room full of ghosts who were, apparently, paying customers.
(He didn't know why he followed Spectra here. He didn't want to be anywhere near her.)
“Sit here,” said Spectra, pointing at a small stool. “This is where you’ll be of the most help. Today, you will be helping by using your healing powers to accelerate the recovery process of the people in this room.”
Danny frowned. “Don’t I need to…?” He raised his hands. To heal the ghost woman, he’d had to touch her.
"You haven't noticed?" sneered Spectra. "In addition to a powerful active healing power, you have been given a passive healing power. As it is always on, you only need to be in the general vicinity of people who need healing.”
Danny froze for a moment with raw greed before remembering that Spectra was describing something Danny already had. Theoretically.
“Why are you telling me this?” asked Danny. None of these people had been particularly forthcoming with information so far.
“It would be irresponsible of us to do this and then not explain what your new powers are,” said Spectra, primly.
Danny wanted to laugh. Seriously? Irresponsible?
“Remember, emotional harm is still harm, freak, and harm is the opposite of help. I should know. You don't want to be like me, do you?”
Everything Danny had been about to say shriveled and died.
“Wait,” he said, instead, “it’s always on?” Something about that bothered him, but fatigue had snuck up on him again, and his thoughts were starting to slow.
“Oh, there’s technically an off switch, one just as accessible as the rest of your powers, but with your Obsession you’ll never be able to use it. I actually heard one of the doctor types say that your core will probably either repurpose or deconstruct it within a month."
“I don’t have an Obsession,” mumbled Danny.
“Are you sure? If you didn’t have an Obsession, you wouldn’t be sitting on that stool. Come on, if you don’t have an Obsession, do something unhelpful.”
Danny cast about, trying to think of something he could do without getting up and… oh…
Oh, no, this was much worse than it had been before. He’d never been stuck like this before.
"If you didn't have an Obsession, I wouldn't have had nearly as much fun with you when we first met. I don't think I could have talked you into half the things I did if you didn't need to be helpful."
Danny clenched his teeth, then stood up and hit her.
.
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised. Having him still be able to fight was always the plan. It’s not our fault that you managed to make yourself look like that much of a threat despite the drugs.”
“Are you quite certain you’re giving the brat the right drugs?” snipped Spectra.
“Between them and his core shift, he should be so suggestible right now that you could tell him he was bright neon pink and he might believe you. He should barely be able to think. At all. And he won’t even remember this. Again, it’s your own fault.”
Spectra hissed.
“I mean, there isn’t any point to it, even, other than satisfying yourself. We’ve already got everything but recovery treatments taken care of. Why do it?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” said Spectra.
“Clearly.”
.
Technus stared at the other ghosts. “Why me? I know I’m the hippest out of all of us, but I don’t have any particular connection to Phantom, astral, LAN, or otherwise!”
“Trust us,” drawled Johnny, leaning over the handlebars of his bike, “it has nothing to do with you being cool. Just, me’n’Kitty aren’t really the nurturing type, Ember needs to be on tour, Skulker is just… Skulker. Walker’d throw Phantom in jail. And Desiree’s busy.”
“What about Nocturne?”
“That’s funny. Anyway, you at least have an attention span and can plan ahead. You’re the best person for them to release Phantom to.”
“But what will I do with him.”
“Dunno, man. Whatever they tell you to?” Johnny shrugged. “They’ve got some kind of care plan, anyway.”
“No, I mean… He’ll be awake, some of the time, won’t he? What do I do with him then? He’ll be trying to get away. Or punch me in the face.”
“Dunno. But he’ll be Obsession-starved, won’t he? Just find something for him to help you with. You’ve got projects and stuff, right?”
“Well, yes.”
“There you go, then.”
“But they can’t be done by just anyone,” whined Technus.
“Phantom’s not just anyone. His parents are inventors, yeah? It’ll be fine, dude.”
“Come on–”
“Really, dude, do you want Nocturne to have custody of Phantom? Besides, you have time. He’s not getting released today.”
Technus… did not want Nocturne to have custody of Phantom. “Fine.”
.
Something… was different. Danny didn’t know what it was. He’d sort of lost track of everything for a while, after his escape attempt and the horrorshow that followed. There was a sort of vague impression of things he’d done. Being led around. More treatments. A lot of sleeping. But the memories held no detail.
But something was different. He sat up and the disk on his chest made a small noise of discomfort. Absently, Danny raised his hand to pick at it. His fingers met smooth skin.
His heart skipped a beat.
Danny looked down. The disk was gone. So… What had made that noise? As if to echo his silent question, a hum of confusion emanated from inside his chest.
Inside. Inside. Did they– Did they open him up? Did they phase the thing inside him?
A keen started up, and Danny curled up, hugging his legs and trying to push reality away from himself. What were they doing to him? Why were they doing it? None of it made sense. They’d given him healing powers at his enemies’ request, but they’d also put whatever this was inside of him, and broken him to the point he could barely stay awake for an hour at a time. He didn’t understand.
He wanted to go home.
.
“Good to get confirmation the primary aesthetic package took,” said the aesthetician, sipping her drink.
The medical advisor sniffed, offended. “There was already confirmation.”
“Sure, sure, but picking out the differences between the prosthetic and his own internal sound with a special tool isn’t the same as hearing it yourself, is it?” She sighed. “I can’t wait for our one year courtesy check-in. He’s going to be so cute and fluffy.”
“You know, if you want something cute and fluffy, you can always get a doll.”
“I have a bunch. It’s different when they’re people, too. More interesting. Spicier.”
The medical advisor shook their head. "I'll never understand you artistic types."
.
Danny did try to escape again. Sort of. He made plans. Psyched himself up. But then he’d remember the woman he’d hurt… He’d remember that he was helping the other ‘patients’ with his new healing abilities… He’d even remember those stupid movies where the heroes fought and lost.
He couldn’t bring himself to actually do it. Every time he almost did, he felt like someone had poured an unholy combination of anxiety and depression directly into his brain. He just. Couldn’t.
And combined with the physical effects of the drugs and his captivity… and whatever these people were doing to him…
He couldn’t.
There was probably some kind of psychological term for whatever was happening to him. Jazz would know it. Would he ever see Jazz again? Sam? Tucker? His parents?
He wanted to go home. He wanted to be somewhere safe. He didn’t want to be responsible for people getting hurt anymore.
.
“Right now, he’s sleeping for about four hours at a time, and waking for about one hour at a time,” the spa representative told Technus. “His periods of wakefulness will get longer as he recovers. He should eat a standard meal - we have suggestions listed on this paper here - every time he wakes up, and will probably need to use the bathroom. You do have a bathroom, don’t you?”
“And a shower! I’ve been meaning to upgrade it so that–”
“Great,” said the representative. “Otherwise, find some small task for him to help you with. We’ve had him periodically providing aid to our attendants, but obviously that doesn’t provide much fulfillment value to him.”
“Obviously? Why is that obvious?”
“Because he isn’t familiar enough with his new abilities yet. He’ll have trouble conceptualizing the effects until he’s more cognizant of his surroundings. Something with visible, physical, results will be better for him. In any case, he’s still Obsession-starved enough that he’ll be receptive to instructions, as long as you can frame them in terms of his Obsession.”
Technus nodded, feeling uncomfortable. He knew what Obsession starvation felt like. But this way, Phantom would only experience it once. With his new powers, he had many more options when it came to ‘helping people.’ New tools in his belt, as it were.
Technus would certainly like new abilities like that. Oh, to be able to take over technology passively. Alas. He’d never encountered that particularly groovy power, and he didn’t have anything the Hothouse would take in trade.
Still. When talking about sending Phantom here… Well. They’d been thinking in terms of the more distant future, and Technus hadn’t thought he’d be the one to take him home. A completely valid reason to be nervous.
“He’ll eventually get to the point where he’s not so docile. That will likely happen sooner rather than later given his history with you, at which point it will be acceptable to release him.”
“He’ll be all better, then?”
“Of course not. But I’m hardly going to tell you to try and keep him when he’s actively fighting you. If he gets to that point, he should survive just fine out in the larger Zone.” The representative rolled their eyes. “The self-healing powers we’ve given him should let him survive through anything but core destruction, and I don’t need to tell you how hard that is to effect.”
“Hm,” said Technus.
“It might even be better that way,” continued the spa representative. “In the case of a full-body wipeout, the aesthetic package would assert itself almost immediately. Of course, my superiors think it’s better if it takes effect gradually… That’s why we balance the added self-healing so that it’s exactly equal to native healing under normal circumstances, and only starts to make changes when the subject is injured.”
“Okayyyy,” said Technus. “So, this is everything? We’re good to go?”
The representative sighed. “No one cares about my work. Yes, that’s everything. If you can get him to bathe once in a while, that would also be good, but it isn’t necessary. Phantom is just in the next room. The sedation should last for the next three hours. Have a good day!”
.
Danny woke, groggily, and the first thing he registered was that he was in a different room. He wondered if he could pretend to still be asleep so they’d leave him alone for a little longer.
“Phantom!”
Danny startled at Technus’s voice, and tumbled out of the… Well. It wasn’t a bed. Blanket nest?
He clawed himself up the side of a computer cabinet, pulling a few wires out in the process. The rest of the room was similarly strewn with technology.
Was this Technus’s lair? Why? How?
(Embarrassingly, it didn’t look all that different from Fentonworks after Jack and Maddie went on an inventing spree. They could at least try to be better than the tech-Obsessed ghost… really…)
“You need my help?” asked Danny, feeling a headache start to bloom behind his eyes even as that not-exactly hunger stirred inside him. He shuffled forward, then forced himself to lean back.
“Yes! With a fantabulous new invention! Don’t worry about your technological incompetence, I will walk you through everything you need to know, and I am the most hoppin’ teacher of tech ever!”
"You," said Danny, straining to get the words out, "you aren't going to use anything I help you make to hurt people, are you?"
"What?" said Technus. "Who? Me? Naaaaaaahhhhhh. This is all just stuff to help me out around the lair."
A distant part of Danny found that reassurance suspicious. The rest of him accepted it at face value, unable to bear doing anything else.
.
Danny didn’t know how much time was passing, but he was being helpful. He was supposed to be helpful. That’s what he was for. That’s what he did.
Sometimes, as he was falling asleep, he remembered that he was helping Technus. That he wasn’t home. That he was still a prisoner, but now to his stupid body that couldn’t stay awake and his stupid Obsession.
He really couldn’t deny that he had an Obsession anymore.
Sometimes, he’d sneak away from a project for a few minutes, trying to find the way out, but stopping was nearly painful. Other times, he’d finish a project early, start looking, and then fall asleep before he’d gotten anywhere.
But… it was better than the spa. Technus really was only asking him to help with little things, although the projects had gotten more complicated as Technus realized Danny’s technical skills actually existed. No weapons. Nothing that could hurt.
Danny was helping. It was nice.
.
“Here we are, you can help me fix this speaker set while I check this out.”
Phantom slid into the chair and started turning over the small device. “What are you checking? The servos we did yesterday?”
“No,” said Technus. “These.” He touched the little knots in Phantom’s aura, right next to his shoulders, and Phantom stiffened. The knots pulsed with pale light. It was a wonder that these would become wings in just a few days.
“Wh- What is it?” asked Phantom.
“Hm? Oh, just checking on those aura construct doohickeys the Hothouse wanted me to keep an eye on.” Technus used a touch of telekinesis to bring over the papers so he could refer back to them and the sheets rustled. “They gave me all these care checklists. One of them got set on fire the other day, though. You remember that, don’t you? They should really go digital.”
“What? Aura constructs?”
“The aura constructs. You know. Didn’t they tell you?”
Phantom laughed, harsh and desperate, the sound clashing oddly with a mechanical whine from the device he’d been working on. “No one told me anything.”
“Ah, well. As awesome as I am, it isn’t my bop. Aura constructs are like… I don’t know, man. Auras are sort of… They’ve sort of got a magnetic field type thing going on, right? To draw in ectoplasm? Kinda like with solar flares. Aura constructs are, like, a riff on that. The aura field is sort of… twisted, to hold onto ectoplasm differently, so it’s semi-tangible or pseudo-tangible. You get me?”
“W-why?”
“Usually to help the aura extend further, to get totally rad ecto-absorption rates. But the vibe I got was that they did it more for the shape. Your constructs are going to look like fluffy wings or something like that.”
“N-no. Why did you– Did you do this to me? What did I do to you that was so awful that you all decided to– to–”
Technus realized, rather too late to react properly to it, that Phantom was crying and that the whine he was hearing was actually a rather subdued core-keen.
“Nothing,” said Technus. “We didn’t do this because we hate you, ghost child.”
“Then why?”
“Well,” said Technus, “we thought… Isn’t it a relief? To have a power directly related to your Obsession? To not have to fight us anymore?”
“I don’t have to fight you because of my Obsession,” hissed Phantom. “I have to fight you because you keep hurting people.”
“I don’t hurt people!” protested Technus, offended. “I want to take over the world, why would I hurt people?”
“You tried to use a military satellite to do it! What exactly did you think that thing would do? What do you– You used my house to crush rush hour traffic! We’re lucky no one died. And that’s just you. Spectra tried to murder my sister, and bragged about it to my face! Skulker hunts me for sport! Desiree turns people into random monsters because of the stupid monkey’s paw game she plays! And, and–” Phantom twisted away from Technus and phased through the table. His face was blotchy red and pale. His cheeks glittered with tears. “And you didn’t ask me.”
Technus frowned. “You wouldn’t have chosen differently.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It’s your Obsession!”
“And I should get to decide how to– to cope with it! Not you! Not them.” Phantom sniffled. “And they did things to my body and I don’t understand it, and I… I hate you. Why’d you do this? I just… I know the thermos isn’t that bad, I’ve been in there for hours before, I just–”
Technus wasn’t one for guilt. Or introspection of any kind, honestly. But he was sure feeling it now.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, uh. Phantom. Is there, I don’t know, anywhere I could bring you?”
“Bring me?”
“Well, yeah, like… I know that saying I hate you is like the jive with kids these days, but I’m getting the signal you don’t want to be here. Genuinely. But I can’t just let you go.” He had all those health checklists, after all. “So, is there anyone I can bring you to? Friends? Dead relatives?”
“You could bring me home.”
Technus laughed, even though that might not have been appropriate. “Back to the living realm? And your creepy parents? Ghost child, I’m not that irresponsible. Surely, you must have encountered some ghosts that you don’t fight on sight?”
“Well, there’s the Far Frozen.”
Ugh. The Far Frozen. It was cold enough to freeze his microprocessors off over there. It did match up with how old Frostbite was acting at the Truce planning session, though.
He forced a smile. “Well, then, ghost child! To the Far Frozen it is!”
There is a boy sitting across the table from you, balancing a coin on edge.
The boy has your face.
"Order and chaos are two sides of the same coin," says the boy. He flicks the side of the coin, and it spins across the table like a top. It comes to a stop in front of you, still spinning, right between and in front of where your hands grip the table.
"Oh?" you say. You aren't sure what else to say. "How so?"
"Think about it. What is, in your opinion, the ultimate expression of chaos?"
You watch the coin continue to spin. Part of you wants to smack it down. A stronger part of you is curious. You want to see how long it will spin. And you've never been good at denying your curiosity, anyway.
"Entropy," you say, finally.
The boy nods. "Disorder. Ultimate disorder. And the end. The universe in its ground state. But it's called the law of entropy, isn't it?”
"That's only a convention. Nature doesn't call it anything."
The boy waves a negligent hand. "Entropy. The end. The heat death of the universe. A universe where everything is the same, everywhere, forever. Doesn't that sound like order."
"Maybe," you allow, but, at this point in the conversation, you have more important questions. Even if you would like to continue a conversation that has to do with space. "I know I'm dreaming."
"Do you? That explains some things."
"I practice. But I didn't come up with you. Who are you? And why are you here?"
"Order and chaos." The boy tilted his head. "You're taking this much better than the others."
"What others?"
.
You are sitting at a table. Across from you is something that looks like you, something wearing your face. It is opening a pack of cards, short neat nails exactly the color of yours tear through plastic and start to pick at the sticker holding the box closed.
You can't take this anymore. You stand and slam your hands down on the table.
"Who are you?" you demand. "Where am I?"
The thing across from you looks up, and you feel relieved it got the eyes wrong, until you remember - mirrors. It doesn't have anything wrong at all.
"You've been dealt a bad hand, haven't you?"
"What?"
The thing looked back down at the box of cards and finally got them open. The paper rectangles slid out into its hand, and it started shuffling them. "Did you know, there are more than eight times ten to the sixty-seventh different combinations for a deck of cards? That's fifty-two factorial, by the way."
You narrow your eyes and cross your arms. You are feeling for the wires under your skin, but they lie quiescent. Unresponsive.
"Why have you brought me here?"
"It's sort of ordered chaos. Card games, I mean. Chaos from order. Or order from chaos. You're aiming more for the second one."
"Answer my question, ghost."
"You have every right to be angry." It slid a card from the top of the deck and flipped it over. The king of clubs. "Racism." It drew another card, the queen of hearts. "A missing mother." The ten of diamonds. "Poverty." The jack of spades. "A doomed love. And then there's you." It revealed one more card, the ace of diamonds. "All alone. But you are what you need to make a bad hand a good one." It rearranged the cards, lightning fast.
The hand it dealt was a straight, you realize. Not the best hand, but not a low one, either.
"So… the question is, which side are you going to choose?"
"Side?"
.
There is a chessboard in front of you, ready for a new game, all the pieces set up. The white pieces are on your side.
Seated in the white velvet chair across from you is your doppleganger. It smiles, all your own cunning and trickery reflected back at you full force.
“Fancy a match?” the doppleganger asks, gesturing to the board.
“What is the meaning of this?” you ask. You are, you notice as your hands curl around armrests, sitting in a black leather chair. The room you are in has no visible doors. It also doesn’t feel like a proper room, and you have to wonder what part of the Ghost Zone you are in.
“Chess?” your double asks, deliberately misunderstanding. “It doesn’t particularly have a meaning, except as a diversion, an entertainment. Or do you mean the metaphor?”
You stand and throw the board, table and all, to one side in a single, powerful motion. “I’m not in the mood,” you say. “You must know who you are dealing with. So, why have you brought me here? What are you playing at?”
Your doppelganger laughs. You grit your teeth. You’re a billionaire, a public figure. You’ve heard yourself recorded more times than you can count. But your laugh can’t possibly sound like this, can it?
"It's one thing applied to your young rival, but for you it's different, is that it?" The doppelganger smirked. "It's about applying order to chaos - your order. No one else's."
You've had quite enough of this, and you reach for your other side, your other half, your ghost--
It doesn't come.
The doppelganger laughs again and stands. They put both hands on your chest.
"I hope you have fun," they say. "The other players are ready."
Then they push you and you fall back into the dark.
.
The first thing you notice is that you are no longer wearing your own clothes. The next thing is that you’re lying down and not particularly comfortable. The third is that the coin the other-you had earlier is still spinning, hovering an inch or so over your palm.
So. You get up. Look around. Resist the urge to swear, because you’re not that kind of a hero, and if you get into the habit you know you’ll never stop.
The ground is stone. Marble. Big squares of alternating black and white, like a chessboard. It’s also shaped, molded into hills and valleys and even some fairly convincing trees. You can see a castle in the distance.
You must, you reasons, be somewhere in the Ghost Zone.
Not that that really helps all that much. They’re called the Infinite Realms, not the Easily Navigable Backyard.
Still. The chess theme makes you feel uneasy. Will you be expected to fight someone?
You hear a sound behind you and turn.
.
The first thing you see is Danny. He is standing, holding something cupped between his hands, looking away across the checkerboard hills. He is wearing all black, loose clothes, topped by a soft, round, almost spherical hat.
You must make some kind of sound, because he turns to face you, and you can see, now, that the thing in his hand is a silver coin, levitating, spinning, in the palm of his left hand. He looks at you in surprise, blue eyes bright against the monochrome features of this place.
“Oh,” says Danny, softly, “Valerie. I guess it was you they were talking about?”
“Someone was talking about me?”
“Sort of. There was… I guess they must have been a shapeshifter or something, because they looked just like me. They said there were others. So, you, and I guess there must be someone else?”
“Not with me,” you say. “What are you wearing?”
“Don’t know. Just woke up with it. I guess it’s the same for you?”
You look down at yourself. You haven’t done so since you first… appeared here. You’re wearing red, vibrant and garish. The color distracts you, momentarily, from the fact that it’s in a military cut.
You are holding the deck of cards in your left hand. You drop the cards in surprise, but, to your dismay, they scatter back into your hand.
Danny stares at the cards in mild… She isn’t sure what to call the expression, but it isn’t surprise.
His head jerks up, suddenly, and an expression of disgust passes over his face. You turn to see Vlad Masters, all in white. A cape snaps behind him, although there is no wind. You feel your lips curl as well.
.
You look down at the two teenagers, your disdain matching theirs.
“Daniel,” you say.
“Vlad,” he spits back.
Valerie Gray says nothing. You aren’t sure what you’ve done to earn her enmity. Perhaps she still has some hard feelings regarding that mess with Danielle despite seeming to accept your explanation.
“Well,” you say into the silence. “It would appear we are on opposite sides, Daniel.”
“Don’t give me that,” says Daniel. “You don’t know what’s going on any more than we do. Do you really want to start fighting us when there could be so many other enemies out there?”
The coin spinning in Daniels hand stops for a split second, a winking head catching your eye. Of course, Daniel didn’t notice at all, too busy glaring up at you.
“Oh,” you say. “Of course I didn’t mean that we should cooperate with whatever horrible ghosts put us here. But I am certain there’s a reason you are black and I am white. This is a chessboard, after all.”
“Or a checkerboard. Val’s in red.”
“Of course she is.” That is the color of her suit, after all.
“And,” says Daniel, as if scoring a grand point in the ongoing and very one-sided battle of wits the two of you engage in, “you’re the only one carrying a chess set. Colors mean different things in cards.”
“Or blind luck?” you sneer at his coin.
Daniel falls silent, the coin flashes tails. Then a flower. How many sides does it have?
“Maybe. But considering the circumstances, I think you could use some luck, don’t you?”
You survey your surroundings. “Well. Yes. I suppose so. Now… I believe we should go that way.” You point to a castle you see in the distance, one that shines a gleaming white. You don’t know anything about it, but seizing control of the situation early on is important.
“No,” says Valerie, crossing her arms. “You don’t know anything about ghosts, right?” Her eyes flicked to Danny.
Oh, trying to use a witness to manipulate you? How precious.
“I did work with Daniel’s parents, my dear.”
“I don’t think we should go near the ghost castle,” insists Valerie.
“I agree,” says Daniel, quickly. “We should try to find a small group of people first. Something we can handle. Castles have armies. We don’t want to deal with a hostile one.”
A white castle being more likely to be friendly to a fellow man in white, you would generally disagree. However, Daniel and Valerie trying to leverage each other against you is amusing. So, you’ll play their little game for a while longer.
Some of the ghosts flinched, straightened, or showed other signs of surprise when he greeted them. The woman from before, the one with braids, pushed her way to the front and gestured at him, presenting him to the other ghosts.
But none of them said anything, or made any other sound, much less started to explain anything to Danny.
“So,” said Danny. “Why are you all here? Why are there so many of you?”
The ghosts looked at him. They did a lot of that, didn’t they?
Finally, the woman with braids stepped forward and tapped her throat three times. Deliberately, maintaining eye contact, she shook her head.
“You can’t speak? None of you?”
The woman nodded, the rest of the ghosts following suit.
“Could you maybe… try?” He winced. “I mean, you usually can’t be seen, right? Maybe I’ll be able to hear you, too.”
The woman sighed, exasperation exaggeratedly clear on her face. She opened her mouth and closed it several times, her lips forming the shape of words.
“Okay,” said Danny. “I guess not. Maybe you could write something?”
The woman pointedly swiped her hand through the kitchen counter.
“I could hold a pen and you could move my hand?” suggested Danny, miming the action, one hand ‘holding a pen,’ the other ‘holding paper.’ He didn’t really want to do something like that. Not for very long, anyway, but it would be better than mime.
The woman took a few quick steps forward, and put her hands on top of his. She paused for a moment, and looked up at him, clearly surprised. Then, she pushed down. Danny couldn’t feel it at all.
“Sign language?”
The woman raised an eyebrow.
“Alright, I don’t know sign language, either,” admitted Danny, defeated. Even if he did and they did, the ghosts here probably wouldn’t have used American Sign Language. Or even, necessarily, a living sign language. “Charades it is. If you can tell me why you’re all here, I’ll try to figure out a way to help you out.”
Assuming, that was, that what they were here for wasn’t murder and mayhem. Then, the only thing that Danny would be helping them out of was the living world. Not in the sense that he was going to kill them, but in the sense that he’d be sending them back to the Ghost Zone. Somehow. All several hundred of them. Across an ocean from where the portal was.
At least he had the thermos?
The woman gave him a small smile. It was probably reading too much into it to interpret it as hopeful.
She turned away, and made a separating motion with her hands. The ghosts cleared a path, and she led Danny through it, to a door. Danny followed, a touch of ectoplasm tingling his fingertips, just in case.
The door led to a large, formal dining room. There were pictures on the wall, family pictures. Danny felt his breath catch in his throat as he saw one with him and Jasmine in it, sitting among the rest of the ‘kids’ of the family. Vivian, Lewis, Leo, Iris, George, and Eugene. He remembered Martin taking that picture, just a couple years ago.
He looked around at the rest of the pictures. There was one Fenton family portrait after that, and a few scattered photos of Maddie and Alicia from when they were younger. Of the others, most of the others were of Martin’s immediate family. His parents, Theodore and Cathrine. His brother, William. His sister-in-law, Sophia. His nieces and nephews, Vivian, Lewis, and Leo. The rest were of Danny’s other cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, great grandparents. All of them in casual clothing, in casual settings.
It… hurt. Martin must have done the decorating, or at least decided which pictures would be included.
Danny couldn’t believe he was dead.
The ghost woman flitted from picture to picture, pointing at people in them. Martin, William, Theodore, Isabella, Alfred–
“Something about the– my– the people who died,” said Danny. The woman nodded sharply. “Did you– Do you know what killed them? Do you know why?”
The woman raised a hand and tilted it back and forth.
“Kind of.”
She shrugged.
“So, you know what killed them?”
Another hand wiggle.
“You know why they were killed?”
A sharp nod.
“Was it murder?”
The ghosts around them bared their teeth in a dozen silent snarls. Danny understood the impulse.
The woman nodded.
Well, it wasn’t as if Danny hadn’t expected it, but the information came as a blow. He let himself close his eyes for a moment to regather himself, a necessary habit when strong anger made your eyes glow green.
Someone was trying to kill his family. Someone had killed his family.
Well. Turnabout was fair play.
“Do you know who did it?” Danny asked.
The woman nodded, then touched her mouth and shook her head, then shrugged.
“You know, but you don’t know how to tell me?”
The woman tilted her hand from side to side again. Kind of.
“Okay, maybe I can just go through letters, and you can tell me when to–”
The woman was shaking her head vigorously. She held her hand up, fingers splayed, and then brought them together. Then, she held up both hands and lowered and raised her fingers several times.
Danny glared at her hands, stumped and frustrated. She repeated the motion, then threw back her head in a display of frustration that echoed what Danny was feeling. She strode over to the other ghosts and gathered up a group of them. She made an open-handed motion at them, then another as if lassoing them together, then that earlier motion, of raising and lowering fingers.
“There’s more than one. It’s a group.”
The woman snapped her fingers - there was no sound, of course - and nodded.
“But do you know who they are?”
Shuffling. Some nods, some shrugs, some shaken heads.
“Could you point them out to me?” asked Danny.
The woman shrugged.
Danny pulled a chair out from the dining room table and sat down. “Do you at least know some of them?”
Nods.
“Okay, I can work with that,” said Danny. “But… why are all of you here? Were you killed by these same guys?”
The woman laughed, soundlessly, pointed at herself, and shook her head. A moment later, her clothing rippled, shifting from something fairly modern to something a viking woman might have worn. A long smock dress with a strap dress over it, a belt, a cloak, and brooches and beads tying it all together. Golden clasps glittered in her hair.
She looked familiar like this. Like someone Danny had seen in a picture somewhere, once. He frowned trying to think of where, and only stopped when he noticed her frowning back at him.
“Sorry,” he said. “Just thinking about about something. So… You’ve been around for a while? Viking times?”
The woman made the ‘kind of’ signal again.
“Can you - Do you know the year? I know the calendars changed, but…”
The woman held up nine fingers, then three, then two, then signed ‘kind of’ again.
“That’s a long time,” said Danny. “But, then what do you get out of this? What do any of you get out of this?”
The woman walked across the room, straight through the table, and pointed at another picture. It was of a young William and Sophia sitting on a picnic blanket in the middle of a flowery field, but Kyr Argyn was clearly visible in the background, and that was what the woman was pointing at.
“Under the castle… is it related to what happened to my grandparents? Or are you buried there or something?”
The woman froze, then nodded, once, twice.
“Is it… for you, specifically, just that you saw… whatever happened to my grandfather? To Prince Leon?” That didn’t explain all the other ghosts, or why they were ghosts in the first place, but it would make sense as a motivation for the woman. If someone had been murdered on top of his grave, he’d want to do something about it, too.
The woman’s face twisted up, as if she were trying to figure out what, exactly, to say, and how to say it, but then all the ghosts went stiff and turned to face the door. Danny felt it, too. An approach. A newness. Mist dribbled sluggishly from his lips.
He stood, turning as he did so to face the dining room door. Vivian was standing there, her face pale. Right next to her, on the wall near the door, was a photo of her, and it struck Danny that she was dressed just like she was in the photo - business casual, large colorful barrettes, the lesser seal and key on the bracelet on her wrist.
The expression she wore now couldn’t be more different, though. In the photograph, Vivian was laughing. Here, in the dining room, her face was twisted with despair.
Danny saw her mouth the words oh, ancestors, but she didn’t say anything out loud. She couldn’t.
Danny didn’t know what to do for Vivian. Not being able to really touch her took away a lot of options, and she didn’t seem to be listening to him. She kept trying to say something - or maybe a lot of things - but Danny couldn’t hear her, and–
His cousin was dead. She’d been twenty-five.
She was dead, and she was here, a ghost, having a breakdown. Danny sat down on the floor in front of where she was kneeling, hoping he could at least remind her that he was here that way.
The ghosts were watching, their eyes bright pinpricks as the sun went down and the dining room was cast into shadow. They kept a respectful distance.
“Vivian,” tried Danny again, once it seemed that Vivian wasn’t shaking quite so much. “Vivian, I know this is- this is scary, and you probably don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t either, all that much, but… Can you try to tell me what… Tell me how you got here? What happened?”
Slowly, Vivian looked up. When she had been alive, her eyes had been that soft, almost violet blue that was common in the royal family (which, yes, was because of inbreeding; just because it was true didn’t mean Danny liked to think about it). Now, they were a watery, faded, but somehow still cutting magenta. Their weak glow glittered on the tears she’d shed.
She hugged herself.
“I’m sorry,” said Danny. “I’m so sorry. If I had–” If he had what? He’d only just gotten here. Vivian might have been dead since she went missing. “I’m sorry you’re dead.”
Vivian flinched.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Danny, miserable. “But, maybe, if I can figure out what happened, we can stop whoever it was from doing it again.”
Vivian chewed her lip, then nodded. She held out her right hand, the one with the bracelet. Vivian was in the direct line to the throne. Prince Theodore, her grandfather, had been the heir. In the normal course of things, Vivian would have eventually taken the throne. She’d even been preparing for the trials.
Her position came with certain traditional roles. One of those roles was keeping track of the Lesser Seal of Avlynys and one of the Great Gate Keys. William had kept them on a necklace, when it was his turn. Vivian tended to switch them between a necklace and her bracelet.
Spectral copies of both hung from Vivian’s wrist. The usually-emerald gem on the key - the central element to an eye design - had gone as pink as Vivian’s eyes, the pond-and-tree design on the seal wavered as Danny looked at it, and both items looked as pale and washed out as Vivian, but they were recognizable.
More importantly, Vivian’s wrist was torn and bleeding under the bracelet. Her skin was bruised, a sickly greenish color. As Danny watched, the damage swept up her arm and over her whole body. Her clothing was torn. One of her eyes was swollen shut. Her jacket and shoes were missing. Her skirt was–
Danny returned his eyes to her face, then her hand.
Despite all her other injuries, Vivian’s hand and wrist showed the most damage. It looked like someone had been trying to rip the bracelet off of her, and had been willing to break her arm to do it.
“They wanted the seal?” asked Danny. “Or the key?”
Vivian nodded, and the signs of her death bled away. Did Vivian even know she’d done that? Danny wasn’t exactly an expert on ghost formation, but it seemed a bit early for shapeshifting, even with something minor.
“And then you came here?” asked Danny. “Or did you form here?”
Vivian sucked her lips in. She looked like she was trying not to start crying again.
“Sorry,” said Danny, quickly. “Sorry, was that insensitive? That was insensitive, I won’t–”
Vivian shook her head and looked away for a moment, seeming to survey the other ghosts. Some of them waved at her, others tapped their own wrists or pointed at Danny. The woman with braids pointed at her eye, then Danny, then her wrist.
There was something else. Why wouldn’t Vivian show Danny?
Vivian turned back to him, shoulders slumped. She mouthed something at him. The only words Danny could make out were don’t and you. And he could only figure out that last one because Vivian reached out to him when she said it.
“I’ll be okay,” said Danny. “Promise.” And then, because Vivian was family, not a stranger, and she wasn’t going to rat him out to his parents or the GIW, he transformed.
The ghosts went completely and utterly still for a moment, then exploded into motion, some of them grabbing onto and shaking each other. They seemed excited.
Danny still couldn’t hear them.
Vivian stared, eyes wide and stunned.
“See?” said Danny. “I’ve– It’s like I have super powers, right? I’ll be okay. Really.”
Vivian nodded slowly. She raised her hand again and flipped over the key, to face the decorative gem away from Danny. A simple compass was engraved on the head. Vivian then adjusted her grip on the key until it was horizontal.
The spoke of the compass nearest Danny lit up.
Danny had seen more impressive ghost powers before, but he was still curious. “So, does it show you where you need to go, or…?” Despite himself, despite knowing that he wouldn’t be able to touch, he reached for the key. His fingers brushed against it, and the key dropped to the floor with a clatter.
“What?” hissed Danny. He’d been pretty sure he’d been figuring out the rules to this, but what?
He picked up the key. It felt solid. It looked real, not immaterial like it had been on Vivian’s bracelet, and the gem was green again.
Vivian tried to take it, but while her fingers stopped against it, she couldn’t get any purchase, and when Danny tried to put it in her hand, it fell through her palm and onto the ground again.
“That’s… weird,” said Danny. He held the key horizontally. The compass didn’t light up. “Great. I’m sorry for breaking… I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.” He ran his hand through his hair. Maybe if he knew more about Avlynys, he’d at least have some context. “Is this the original? Did we teleport this here? Is it a copy?”
Vivian shrugged at him. She didn’t seem any happier… of course, she wouldn’t be happy anyway. Dying was… bad.
The sound of a door opening startled Danny, and he snapped back to his human form, suddenly paranoid about being seen, and shoved the key into his pocket. The ghosts must have heard it too, because, except for Vivian and the woman with braids, they all flitted through the walls, towards the front of the manor.
“I’m going to see who that is,” said Danny, quietly. He backtracked through the kitchen, not wanting to use his powers in an unfamiliar environment unless he had to. He didn’t know where the bathrooms were, for one.
Yeah. Better safe than sorry.
“--can’t just decide things unilaterally!” A pause. “Of course I still support you, I’ve always supported you in this, you know that, but we need to do things the right way, and that hasn’t. Changed.”
Danny peered around the doorframe into the entryway. Matthew was standing there, in a long coat and rather rumpled suit. There was a pin on his lapel with the same eye design as Vivian’s Great Gate Key, but it was cracked clean through, part of the enamel falling out. His hair looked like it had been slicked back with product sometime in the last few days, then not cared for since then. A series of pimples lurked in the stubbly beginnings of a beard. At least one of them had been scratched through and was still sluggishly bleeding. He was speaking into a phone, trying to get his shoes off one-handed.
“Yes, we do need stability, but upending our rules isn’t the way to go about it– We need to modernize, not turn ourselves into another tax haven for– If you haven’t noticed, I’m not king. And even if I were, I wouldn’t make upending– You do realize my position as a prince is different from that of a common business owner– No, I’m not calling you common, I’m talking about my own business interests. I’m well aware that you have a ti– Ancestors watch me, Skyppa, are you really going to take offense over thinking I called you a commoner? Which one of us is living in the fifteen hundreds now?”
A movement caught his eye, and Danny watched one of the ghosts double over in laughter. Maybe it was funnier in-context.
“Do you actually have any relevant Assembly business to talk about, or are you just trying to use a national and personal tragedy to promote your own interests? Which is something I wouldn’t appreciate even if I did agree with you wholeheartedly. Which I don’t.”
Danny could hear someone, presumably Skyppa, shout, “I’ll remember this!” on the other side of the line. Then there was a protracted moment of silence, and then Matthew pulled his phone away from his face, looking at it with clear disgust.
“I’ll remember this, too,” he muttered.
“Matthew?” Danny called, stepping into the room. “Are you okay?”
Matthew stared blankly at him for a moment. “Oh,” he said, blinking. “Danny. Does that mean your branch of the family is here?”
“Not Aunt Alicia, yet,” said Danny.
“She would be hard to get a hold of,” said Matthew.
Danny nodded. Spitoon wasn’t an easy place to get to. “What was that?” he asked. “With the phone.”
Matthew grimaced, the motion putting on the dark circles under his eyes. “Julius Skippa. Member of the Assembly. Wants me to change the throne’s requirements for foreign businesses so we can ‘start fixing things.’ Usually I’m sympathetic - I want more international business - but it isn’t as if this happened because we don’t have Walmarts…” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I’m sorry you had to see that. Have you seen Iris and George?”
“No,” said Danny. “I’ve only seen Joanna.” And Vivian. And dozens of ghosts.
Oh, god, no one else knew Vivian was dead. How was he supposed to let everyone know? He had to let everyone know. They still thought she was just missing.
“Have you heard anything about Vivian?” he asked, timidly.
“No,” said Matthew. “We– It’ll be best to get the whole family together to explain. Can you help me find everyone?”
“I think they’re mostly asleep. In the bedrooms,” he added.
“Alright,” said Matthew. “Could you get them? And then… I think the dining room would be best.” He forced a smile. “I need a… moment. And I don’t think I’d survive waking Madelin up like this.”
“Sure,” said Danny.
When he looked away from Matthew, it was to see all the ghosts, except Vivian, pointing at their eyes and their hearts. That was incredibly ominous and also incomprehensible.
“Is something wrong?” asked Matthew.
“No,” said Danny. He walked through the ghosts. He’d have to figure out what was going on there eventually… But first he wanted to hear what Matthew had to say.
They slept. Dreamed. Visited worlds that had been taken by the others, engulfed in the Dream. They lived snapshots of lives. They were a small, soft thing, kept in a gilded cage. They were a dragon, not yet hatched. They were a worker in a living factory, a tiny organ of production. They were a traveler in an empty, parklike world. They were a weapon made of weapons, dancing over a battlefield. They were an unfledged putto, their wings already large enough to trail meters behind them. They were a student in a school whose lessons spiraled and only made sense in slant rhyme. They were a child in families of every size and composition, in communities or isolation, in wealth or in poverty.
They dreamed. They woke up.
Their cradle-nest and room no longer felt small to them, but cozy verging on roomy. Every day, it seemed larger, and Danny felt smaller, though they didn’t know if sizes were truly changing (as much as anything had a true size here) or if they were simply gaining a deeper understanding of how immense their parent was.
They would play with Cujo and cuddle with Clockwork, or play with the toys in their room. They might have thought they were a little childish before, but now they were objects of fascination. Mysteries, worlds within themselves, connections, fantasies, and sensations.
Amid Danny entertaining themself, Clockwork would send their avatars to fetch Danny for meals, or for cleaning, although Danny had yet to be cleaned as thoroughly as the ‘bath’ again. Sometimes, Clockwork would teach them things. Sometimes, they would have conversations. Sometimes, Clockwork would comment on how much they were growing.
Danny didn’t feel like they were growing. At least, they weren’t growing up, weren’t growing larger, or older, or stronger. He felt smaller, softer, more manipulable.
But the texture of that thought - it didn’t feel bad, exactly. Being easy to manipulate meant that they were sensitive to the Love of others, that they could respond quickly and flexibly to their care.
Clockwork made a faint, amused sound of agreement. Indeed, and you are very Loving. But know also, there are parts of you that do not move, that remain yourself. The avatar ran a hand through Danny’s hair. So that you may be yourself, forever. It pressed a kiss to Danny’s forehead, and Danny leaned into it.
On a rare few days, something different would happen. One of the largest chains around Danny’s collar would ever so gradually tighten, leading them forward, and the other would, almost imperceptibly, slacken, and the manacles around their wrists and ankles burned cold, ensuring that they would never misstep, never stumble, never move with anything but the utmost grace. All the while, the chains would vibrate, and Danny couldn’t resist obediently harmonizing. In effect, Danny was drawn on like an infinitesimal mechanism within the incomprehensibly massive clockwork machinery of their parent, singing all the while.
At the end of these episodes, Danny was always exhausted, sore and hurting in ways they didn’t know they could hurt. But there was something so… comforting about it, about knowing that their path was mapped out, that they couldn’t step off it, couldn’t mess up, that they wouldn’t be allowed to. More than that, it was reassuring to know that they were being useful, even if they didn’t know exactly what they were doing.
(It eased some of the guilt they felt at not being there to help Amity Park, to stave off and redirect the attentions of the others. They knew, now, that the others, for the most part, meant no harm, that they were only playing. That didn’t mean that they weren’t still dangerous to humans simply by being there.)
(And Danny’s desire to help didn’t mean that they weren’t dangerous in just the same ways.)
(Maybe Danny should be afraid of this. Maybe they should be terrified.)
When they finished those mysterious tasks, Clockwork buoyed them up with pride, and doted over them even more excessively than usual. Danny always ate ravenously and slept deeply on those days.
There was one more thing that marked a normal day - Clockwork fretting over how long it was taking the ‘doctor’ to come.
Danny hadn’t known there were doctors among the others. Spectra and Bertrand didn’t count, no matter how much time they spent lurking in hospitals.
Right? Right.
On even rarer occasions, Clockwork would loosen Danny’s chain and let them go to ‘play outside.’
It was in this way that Danny knew they were traveling. The Dream around them was becoming colder. Wintry. Infinite gardens of flowers turning into glittering ice sculptures of the same. Snow drifting from the sky, individual flakes wavering like mirages.
It reminded Danny of Christmas. They did not like Christmas. But they did like going outside. They liked the cold, and how it seemed to settle in their bones and the hollow places where their heart once was.
Sometimes, Nocturne would come, draped in hypothermia and the waking dreams that came with it. He would push Danny into snow banks that all but swallowed them whole and speak about things that both frightened and appealed to Danny.
She spoke to them about the mask they would someday wear. How it would be just as featureless as the first Clockwork had offered them, but decorated exquisitely. He described filigree so fine it would drive a man to madness, how the edges of it would drip with chains, bells, and embroidered veils, and how each of these things would serve to protect or bind them. He spoke of how she would braid them into his hair. She spoke of clasps and locks so clever and cunning that they would become harder to open each time they were closed again until freeing them would be an act of such devotion it would make the stars shiver, even for the one who held all the keys.
He would stroke Danny's horns and tell them about how the mask would cup them, when they had grown so large and curled even the thought of it made their head hurt. He would tell them how their horns would be covered in metal more precious than gold and hung with yet more chains and bells and baubles, bound to their mask.
When Nocturne finally tired of regaling Danny about the mask, she would speak to him about wings and bells. About how, every time one of their bells rang with their joy, they would be wracked with the sublime agony that both caused and accompanied the growth of wings. She told him about how the wings would reduce them even as they exalted them. Danny understood, somehow, that this was as true a way of looking at things as their vision of the gift of veils, even if they seemed to contradict.
She would speak of how Clockwork would shorten their chain and pull them in. Keep them close. Keep them inside. Keep them still and quiet. She spoke of how their understanding would contract even as it deepened. She told them they would grow younger, softer, more innocent. That they would be faceless, voiceless, next best thing to formless, unable to move unless it pleased Clockwork.
Their birth, Nocturne said, would be in reverse. A fetus in a womb, Loved entirely by their parent, but a nonentity in all essentials.
That wasn't new information, exactly.
All of this scared Danny. Terrified them, really, but at the same time…
… Danny would be lying if he said there wasn't an appeal to being smothered in Clockwork's star-strewn depths, stripped of all but his most important quality: Love.
They also knew that what Nocturne was telling him, as true as it was, was not the whole story. At least, it was not the only truth.
But still, it hurt, so he wept until their glowing tears froze on their face and venom drooled from their lips. Then, Nocturne, apparently satisfied, would take his leave.
For better or worse, because they did love their older sibling, Nocturne wasn’t there today. Tonight? Time was funny, in the Dream, even before bringing Clockwork into it.
Danny walked through the snow, chain jingling behind them. Today, they wanted to explore. He cupped his hands, letting snowflakes fall into them and examined their fractal patterns, each a world on its own. They could, he knew, fall into any one of them, and still have Clockwork’s towering edifice behind him.
They were so absorbed, they didn’t notice the building in front of them until they smelled its astringent, minty odor. It was pristine white, as if it had been carved from the surrounding snow. Towering, square, and clean. Pale blue shadows gave it some definition, but for all its solidity, it was wraithlike.
Places were also people, in the Dream. Who was this?
Danny waved.
Nocturne might be able to pull up Danny’s fear, but most of it had been washed away in their bath. Danny didn’t recognize this person. There was no reason to be afraid.
There was no response from the building. Danny started to walk parallel to its wall, still keeping a fair distance. That’s when he saw it. A slender spike of ice pushing in against the wall of the building.
No, Danny saw as they drew, cautious and curious, closer. The ice had made a hole in the wall.
The wall that was trembling.
This seemed… Not right. No, not right. Too physical a problem for the Dream.
They took a step to the left. The building remained much the same, but the ice was the idea of stopping in place, the thought of an obstruction, of being held, a dream of freezing. A not-quite-living concept, doing the thing it had been bred for.
Danny had met things like this in Amity Park. Not quite like the others, they still spawned around them, clinging to them like parasites at times. Dreadful pests. Dangerous pests.
Memory smeared across Danny’s thoughts, coloring the surroundings. Unlike the others, Danny actually had earned some victories against these things. Although he suspected that his defeats at their hands should have been more embarrassing than he could actually comprehend in his current state.
They were still awfully human, after all.
(At least, that’s what he kept telling himself. It might not be terribly true anymore, for all that Nocturne kept claiming that Danny would always be the most human of the others.)
They let their shadow loose, the depths of it consuming the obstructive idea whole. The idea would, after a fashion, be fine. Ice and immobility went hand in hand. It simply was no longer here.
… and some of the underlying idea was now part of Danny. They had already been partial to cold. Clockwork had already blessed them with a certain degree of stasis. It hardly mattered.
Danny put a hand up against the side of the building, concerned that such a thing had trapped it and given it such pain. Was it alright? Had they come to see Clockwork?
A sort of introduction laid itself across Danny’s shoulders, casually referencing a part of Danny’s history he generally tried his very hardest to forget. Danny might be on the path to accept the part of themself that was shadow and madness and metaphor, but that was quite different from wanting to dwell on their interaction with the Great Darkness.
Frostbite was the closest thing English could offer to the name of the other.
Frostbite seemed to like telling stories, although Danny was having a hard time understanding them. The interaction was friendly, and Danny allowed a sort of courtyard to rise up around him, and an avatar to come sit next to him. They were close enough to Clockwork that Danny did not feel any need for fear.
If they were in danger, Clockwork would come. It really was as simple as that.
Frostbite’s avatar was huge and soft-looking. Like a teddy bear. Smaller versions of the avatar moved under its fur, making it sway and fluff strangely. Danny wanted to touch. Somehow, they knew that if they did, they would shrink until the avatar’s body was like a landscape to them.
Danny refrained from touching.
Yet, as they talked to Frostbite, they could feel something--
Oh. Danny knew what this was. Clockwork was giving Danny permission to Love Frostbite. And they did.
Danny realized, then, that although the situation they had solved hadn’t been a lie, it had been… curated. A way to let Danny know Frostbite.
Clockwork and Frostbite were talking, their true, massive selves conversing on a level so far beyond Danny that, even now that he had begun listening to it, they could only pick up the most general of the concepts discussed, and only then through a very human filter.
The subject, Danny gathered, head ringing from his poor attempt at understanding, was healing. Frostbite must be the doctor Clockwork had been talking about. Danny closed his eyes and plucked a metaphor-image from the airs of the Dream, an ice crystal that pulsed with a reflection at a great remove. It showed Clockwork and Frostbite as ordinary people discussing the health of a beloved child.
Can you remove the infection? asked reflection-Clockwork, wringing their many hands, the very picture of a worried parent.
Purification will take time, responded Frostbite’s image, clad in a doctor’s coat. His face was made of snow, serene and peaceful.
What has caused it? Why has this happened? What causes my child to hate themself?
Brief impressions of thought and emotion flickered through the cold, heavy, not-air. Fear, anger, guilt, desire, rage, hatred, pain, mourning.
I must examine the patient to answer those questions.
Danny was always willing to cooperate with those he Loved, so they did not object when Frostbite laid them down on the table and opened them like a book. It was difficult for Danny to register the action, as they were still looking into the crystal in the courtyard and trying to see things in that human way, but they couldn’t help but shudder every time Frostbite turned one of their pages.
What will help? demanded crystal-Clockwork.
My supplementary self once recommended isolation and punishment.
Isolation? Punishment?
For some, when they feel they have been appropriately punished, they cease to feel guilty over their tresspasses, real or perceived.
It is guilt, then, that causes my child such harm? I shall strike it from them.
Guilt may exacerbate self hate. But then, so may many other emotions. It is not unique in this, and in itself it is not a harmful emotion, properly tempered. I would advise against removing it.
But what treatment would you recommend, now?
There is only one: they must be taught to Love themself, and love themself, and that they are Loved and loved, even when seen truly. Especially when seen truly.
What of masks? Do they not protect?
They also may conceal damage. Would you wish to remove a mask, and find nothing behind it? And, if that comes to pass, what would happen to you?
The crystal shattered in Danny’s hands. Frostbite’s avatar was smiling down at him, kindly. They knew this was difficult for him, but they would make it as easy as possible, and would he mind coming inside for a more extensive exam?
Danny shook their head, and followed Frostbite’s avatar into their perfectly white halls. They felt like a hospital, but also like something else. Something oddly familiar, but not.
As they walked, Frostbite explained that they would be meeting their supplementary self as well, and that he would assist in the examination. The supplementary self believed in vigorous prophylaxis, and it generally occupied itself with ensuring that all others took their medicine. Danny nodded politely, not really understanding.
That lack of understanding was why he was so surprised to see Walker there. Walker, who had tried to imprison him in the Dream. Walker, who had called him a rule-breaker. Walker, who had tried to bind him in--
“I wouldn’t have done that if I knew who had prior claim on you,” drawled Walker. His voice was eerily human, but the evenness and order behind it were not. Walker always spoke with authority behind him. It was hard not to listen to him, because everything he said was backed up by rules and laws. “But you’ve got to admit, you’re in a bad way, kid. You’re dangerous. If I’d been allowed to lock you up…”
But, Frostbite reminded him, he hadn’t. They should focus on the treatment now, rather than treatments in the past, because that was Clockwork’s domain.
The examination was uncomfortable, but brief, consisting mainly of looking down Danny’s throat and under his skin. Then, Frostbite and Walker gave him a brightly-colored conundrum with the same air as one might give a child a lollipop after a flu shot.
Danny meant to pay attention to the conversation they had with Clockwork afterward, even if he couldn’t understand, but the conundrum had made him curious. It was something about the nature of mass in the universe…
Before they knew it, they were home again, snuggled in the arms of Clockwork’s avatar.
My heart, it said, sadly, reluctantly, do you still wish to return to Amity Park?
Okay, so. Clint had a concussion. A nasty concussion. Not the worst he’d ever gotten, but he was impaired. Probably wouldn’t be hitting any bullseyes in the next few hours, that was for sure.
However, he wasn’t nearly as impaired as he was letting his current captors believe, thank God.
(No, wait, a god was the reason he was concussed in the first place. Screw god.)
At least, that had been his initial impression. When one of his teenage captors disappeared in a whirl of sand and the other two had started hitting buttons that turned the… Yeah, okay, he didn’t know what he was in, but he’d seen brick. He was pretty sure that things with brick in them weren’t supposed to turn into a blimp. Or a jet. Since the two remaining children (who had tied him up surprisingly well) were arguing about turning it into a jet.
Had Barton seen some weird stuff in his time? Yes. Did he frequently work from an aircraft carrier that also flew? Yes. Had he just spent the last several days mind-controlled by a Norse deity alongside a kid who was fifty percent dead? Yes. Was he, Clint Barton, also incredibly strange? Yes. Yes, he most certainly was.
But a guy had to draw the line somewhere. He was just debating if he should draw the line before or after the weirdly competent children simultaneously being wizards and mechanical geniuses.
… Or, now that he was starting to reorient himself, they were just using the Fentons’ gear. Where were the Doctors Fenton anyway?
.
Maddie Fenton squinted at her phone. “Jack, honey,” she said, with the kind of venomous sweetness she generally reserved for Vlad Masters and Pamela Manson, “I think we’ve been had.”
Jack with an equally uncharacteristic grimness surveyed the mostly empty street. “I think you’re right.”
“There’s been another report,” said Maddie, still squinting. She wished she remembered how to make the words on the phone bigger. “Park and Amity.”
Jack started for the GAV. “Park Place? Or Park Row?”
“Park Row is in another city, dear.”
“I was sure there was a Park Row here as well!”
“Alright, and which Amity is it? Or did you mean A. Mitty?”
“You’re the only one who calls Alfred Mitty Boulevard that, dear.” Maddie sighed. “I suppose we’ll just have to check them out one by one.”
“Ha! Well, with the Fenton Ghost Assault Vehicle, that’ll be a snap!”
.
The most surprising thing about all of this, mused Danny, was that his parents had yet to add to the chaos. Uncharacteristic of them, really.
He phased a prone SHIELD agent’s body armor into the sidewalk and pivoted to punch another in the face, bypassing their helmet and face-shield. Come to think of it, were the ones wearing armor and combat gear agents, or were those just the ones in suits? Not that it particularly mattered. His job right now was just to keep anyone from getting killed. A task that would get exponentially harder once SHIELD’s backup got here.
“Why,” he asked Loki, when the rhythm of the fight allowed it, “are we still here?”
Yes, technically the answer was ‘we haven’t gotten Barton’s signal yet’ and, yes, he knew the real answer was probably ‘self-sabotage’ of one kind or another, but keeping everyone alive was a strain, if not on his abilities, then on his focus and attention. There was Loki, Loki’s various minions, SHIELD, the police, random people still inside the nearby building – It was a wonder the GIW hadn’t shown up, and Valerie and his parents would be here before too much longer. Not to mention—
“Phantom!”
There was a slight pause in the gunfire.
Danny looked up to see Valerie Gray, Iron Man a growing red streak in the sky behind her. His secret identity had been a very secondary concern since Loki snatched him, a lost cause, really, considering this fight, but the only way Valerie would have gotten the memo this fast was if someone told her.
… Maybe Danny would pretend to be mind-controlled a little longer than strictly necessary, for the purpose of punching a certain few SHIELD personnel. Namely, Fury and Coulson. He felt like he deserved it. As a treat.
“Hi, Red?” tried Danny, knowing that he was just trying to delay the inevitable.
“What,” demanded Valerie, calling up her biggest gun, “do you think you’re doing?”
“We need to leave, now,” said Danny.
Loki grinned. “But the fun’s just getting started!” He multiplied himself, which was the ‘we’re leaving’ signal, and Danny disappeared.
Valerie fired the gun, which was honestly really unfriendly of her. What had SHIELD been telling her?
Finding the real Loki was easy. Danny had experience at this point, and a touch was all it took to make him invisible and intangible, too.
“Do you think Barton’s gotten what we need?” asked Loki, airily.
“I think Barton’s been caught,” said Danny, flatly. “If we came to draw out my parents, it hasn’t worked, and the only reason I can think of why it wouldn’t work is if they got distracted by something else.”
“Like Barton breaking in prematurely.”
“Yeah.”
“Pity. I suppose we’ll have to—”
And this is where Danny was revealed as just as self-sabotaging as Loki, because he had neglected to remember that Valerie’s equipment could pick him up while invisible. Unfortunately, the fact that he did know that combined with his sharp reflexes meant that he was able to shield himself and Loki from the blast.
“Oi! Red riding hood, can you see them in all this?”
“What did you just call me?”
And there was Iron Man. Lovely.
“Red, can you point me at them or not?”
“Come on,” said Danny, tugging on Loki’s elbow.
“But this is entertaining.”
“It’ll be a lot less entertaining when your brother and Captain America get here.”
“Oh, very well. We’ll go. To Fentonworks.”
“Oh, come on—”
The sandstorm blindsided them, literally and figuratively, the heat of cutting through Danny despite his intangibility.
“WHEN I FIND LANCE THUNDER,” shouted Tucker, voice supernaturally loud and deep, “I’M GOING TO KILL HIM. HE KNOWS HOW MANY DIFFERENT PARK AND AMITYS THERE ARE!”
Ah. Heck. Duulaman. Why did Tucker have Duulaman’s scepter? Were they trying to solve mind control with different mind control? That was a terrible idea.
… But admittedly about on par with Danny’s current plan. Darn it. There really weren’t a lot of better options out there.
“Oh,” said Loki, “I didn’t know there were any humans who still practiced the arcane arts!”
“Uh huh,” said Danny, pulling on his core to cool the air around them and gritting his teeth. “That’s Tucker for you. This is going to be fun.”
“And by fun you mean…?”
“Absolutely miserable. You’d better hope you’re as good at magic as you think you are.”
“He hasn’t seen us yet.”
Sand swirled around them and deposited them on top of a sand dune directly in the middle of the Park and Amity crossing. A few of the SHIELD vans had turned to stone, and others were slowly dissolving into sand.
Tucker was still, mostly, in his normal clothes, but gold bangles were wrapping themselves around his right arm and his beret was looking awfully Nemes-like. His eyes glittered red, accentuated by kohl.
The scarab jewel on the end of the scepter flashed, and Danny felt a tug on his mind.
.
“How dare you,” hissed Loki, reasserting his control of Phantom with a twist of his staff.
“How dare you,” snapped the dark-skinned boy. “He’s mine. He was mine first, and you have no right to him!”
“I have every right! I am a god, you pathetic sorcerer!” Loki called on his magic, and on Phantom’s blanketing the sand with ice.
“You?” sneered the boy, tilting his chin up. “You think you are a god? I am Nebmaatre Djedamun, called Duulaman! I am the Son of Ra! The Son of the Sun! I have lived and walked through the Duat and returned, as Osiris! Who are you, foreigner, to take what is mine?”
The ice beneath Loki began to steam, and the sun burned down from directly overhead, a position it should not be in under any circumstances at this latitude on Earth.
So. That was how it was going to be, was it?
“I am Loki Laufeyson, god of mischief and rightful king of Asgard.” He bared his teeth and called up his armor, scepter growing into a full staff, the false sand desert morphing into an equally false vista of ice. “Let’s see if you’re worth my time. Human.”
.
It turned out that extended desert-based trauma and resultant obsessive sand-proofing of technology was good for something. That something was freak sandstorms caused by strangely glow-y teenagers. Who knew. Not Tony, that was for sure.
“Hey, Red, you okay?”
“I’m fine,” hissed the girl – and Tony really had to have words about whoever was setting SHIELD policy regarding the recruitment of teenagers, planetary threat or not – doing something that had her hoverboard zooming back to her, shedding sand as it went.
“Great,” said Tony, “you know this new guy?”
Red was silent, and Tony wished he could see her face through the tinted visor of her suit. “I know the kid, not the ghost possessing him. I’ve never seen any of them use sand like this before.” She looked up. “Or the sun.”
Yeah, whatever was going on with the sky was throwing Tony for a loop. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, yadda, yadda, yadda, like he hadn’t heard that spewed in his direction a few hundred times. Thor made him believe it a little more, though. There had to be some explanation behind all the freaky stuff he could do.
The sand was abruptly replaced by a blizzard, and Tony pulled the girl to the roof of one of the buildings just in time for the river to melt into a gleaming river, its banks thick with reeds and flowers. The river rose out of its bed, sporting fangs and scales, eyes sharply green. Sand sizzled against its clawed feet and the plants wilted and burned. The good thing was, there didn’t seem to be any actual people down there, beyond Loki, Fenton, and the new kid.
The possessed new kid. More mind control. Just what they needed.
“Any way to un-possess someone?”
“Shoot them with one of these,” said Red, lifting a gun Tony was pretty sure she hadn’t had before. He had no idea where she had gotten it from. Neat.
He reached for it.
“Nuh uh,” said Red. “This stays with me.”
“Okay, little Red, I don’t know if you’ve noticed—"
“Here’s how this’s gonna go,” Red interrupted him. “I’m going to go take down Phantom while those two are distracted with each other. You cover me. Once I’ve got Phantom, I’ll shoot the ghost in Tucker out, and you and SHIELD have a clean shot at Lorry or whatever.”
“And I’ll be way better at covering you if I have a weapon that can actually do damage to these guys.”
“I don’t have time to argue with a stupid billionaire—”
The building they were standing on turned into a sphinx, and moved, dumping them at its feet. It leaned close and growled, eyes glowing. Both Tony and Red fired at it, their weapons leaving craters on its face. It only made it flinch.
Then lightning cleaved the sky.
“It’s about time!” shouted Tony, ignoring Jarvis’s comment about the rising temperature of the sand for the moment.
Thor jumped up on the rubble that had been the sphinx and shrugged. “The directions were very confusing, and there is strange sorcery on this place!”
“No kidding! Where’s capsicle?”
“Captain Rogers was taking the plane with the Widow!”
Next to him, Red started to move again. “You’re not a ghost,” she said.
“Yeah, he’s an alien, get with the program. Are you sure you can take care of Fenton?”
If Tony hadn’t been looking for it, he wouldn’t have caught the split-second hesitation.
“I’ve fought him before,” said Red.
That didn’t mean anything by itself. Tony had frequently fought gravity, the ground, and chemistry during pre-horrible-kidnapping benders. That didn’t mean he’d ever had any chance of winning. Still, he supposed they had to take it. There weren’t any other options.
“Come on, Red, you know I was always holding back.”
Feeling like he was in a cheap horror movie, Tony looked to the right to see Danny Fenton.
.
Delight was almost certainly the wrong emotion to be experiencing at the moment, but Danny wasn’t exactly in what he’d describe as a proper state of mind. Besides, Tucker’s giant lens was really cool. Danny hadn’t known that a lens made out of illusions could focus light like that, but it was logical enough. Most illusions probably were just bending light, at their base. Although why he was going through the steps of creating a false sun, the fake lens, and aiming, Danny didn’t know. Wouldn’t it be easier to just create lasers or something like that to begin with?
“There is something wrong with the people on this planet,” hissed Loki, ripping the lens to shreds before it could melt through Danny’s ice shield.
“Well, yeah,” said Danny. “But I’m not sure you can generalize what’s wrong with Tucker to the rest of the planet.” He leaned as heavily into his ice powers as he dared in human form, which was actually quite far, and used telekinesis to bat away a pair of animate statues.
Arctic cold and equatorial heat pushed together in the air, swirling into clouds. Lightning forked from the sky. Danny caught a bolt and swung it to the side, glassing the sand under him.
Tucker was looking up at the sky, teeth barred. “Who dares strike against my people?”
Oh, Tucker really was a great friend. But fighting Thor really wasn’t a good idea—Assuming the lightning was Thor arriving, and not a random weather phenomenon caused by three people with superpowers playing with the laws of physics.
Good distraction, though.
Danny appreciated what Tucker was—Well. What he assumed Tucker was trying to do, underneath the past life personality takeover. Rescue him, and all. But Danny did have his orders.
Loki’s mind control and Tucker’s were different. Loki’s was focused and direct, while Tucker’s diffused like dust on the air, subtle but insistent. Loki’s staff was of this world, powered by something native to this part of the universe. Duulaman’s was laced with ghost magic. Loki’s drew on something primal, something that brushed at some fundamental force Danny could only guess at. Duulaman’s control was woven, carefully, from ancient spells layered on one another like steel folded over and over.
Tucker’s pull on Danny’s mind wasn’t negligible, but Loki’s control of Danny was stronger.
Also, this couldn’t possibly be healthy for Tucker.
“Tucker!” shouted Danny, over the howling wind. “Snap out of it! Don’t let Duulaman make you do this!”
The expression on Tucker’s face was offended and incredulous. Danny would have liked to laugh but the fate of the world was at stake here.
“That’s what I want to say to you, idiot!”
“Hey, I’m not doing this willingly! Why do you even have that? You know what it does to you!”
“Forgive me for wanting to get the big guns when my best friend is shanghaied to lead an alien invasion!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I’m not leading it, that’s all him!” He gestured behind him in Loki’s general direction.
Oh, and there was Thor. And Iron Man. And Val. Oh, they really did have to get out of here. Danny didn’t think he could handle all this while still in human form. They looked like they were having some sort of planning session over by the sphinx, but he didn’t think that would last all that long. On the other hand, it looked like Loki was sneaking up on them, so that was about to become very interesting.
The sensation Danny was coming to associate with Duulaman’s magic spiked as Tucker tightened his grip on the staff. “His arrow minion shot Jazz.”
Danny froze. “Is she okay?”
“She’s not bleeding to death, if that’s what you mean,” said Tucker.
Danny expanded the list of SHIELD agents he wanted to hit to include Barton. He probably wouldn’t hit him, given the mind control, but he wanted to.
“Look,” said Danny. “I do have a plan.” One that was, admittedly, falling apart rapidly.
“Which you haven’t told us beyond trying to use us for shopping!”
The influence of Tucker’s magic on Danny wasn’t as strong as Loki’s. But that didn’t mean it was nothing.
Danny gritted his teeth. “That’s because the stuff wasn’t for me to use, it’s for you.”
And then Tucker was hit by one of Iron Man’s repulsor bursts.
.
In Tony’s defense, he still wasn’t used to the illusion thing, and he wasn’t the only one who had fallen for the fake Fenton. He hadn’t meant to hit the kid with the staff, and given a few minutes out of battle, he’d probably feel bad about it.
He also hadn’t realized how angry Fenton would get about it.
The boy’s body flickered and his eyes started to glow with a radioactive light even as the rest of him seemed to fade into shadow. The air got cold and heavy.
And then the quinjet arrived, laying down cover fire between Phantom and Tony. The feeling vanished as Fenton threw up a shield, protecting himself and Loki.
And then, because the day just had to get weirder, a blimp with Jack Fenton’s face on it showed up and started shooting at the quinjet.
And then an absolute monstrosity of a vehicle, an unholy cross between an RV and a tank, barreled over the top of a nearby dune and started blasting everyone.
Between defending himself and trying to keep the poor unconscious kid from getting shot again, Tony was just barely able to see Phantom grab Loki’s arm and phase into the ground. What he wouldn’t give to be able to get out of stupid situations so easily.
Finally, proving that the only god of this world or the next was Murphy, a green-tinged energy bolt went wide, soaring over the sand, the ice, and several streets’ worth of intact buildings to ping off the bottom of the helicarrier and somehow short out all the camouflage panels.
The fighting stopped as the blimp turned into a jet and zoomed – complete with sound effect – away, and the Fentons seemed to realize who they were firing at.
A blond civilian Tony had somehow missed in the chaos staggered into view, followed by a bedraggled cameraman. “Yes!” he said, hands raised in jubilation. “Yes! Now this is some freak weather, baby! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been able to report on the weather? This is the best day I’ve had all week!”
Before Tony had any time to process that, Maddie Fenton got out of the Monstrosity (which was quickly becoming capitalized in Tony’s head), calmly walked over, and slapped the man across the face. She grabbed his shirt and pulled him down to her level. “Do you have any idea how many Parks and Amitys there are in this town?”
