DP x Sam&Colby
(Y'all...I have been watching Sam and Colby for a while, but I think this is pretty darn ooc (out of character) for them both since they are real people and have changed a lot in terms of attitude, personality, and content. This is a bit more goofy(and angsty ???), but this crossover has been on my mind for FOREVER! Please enjoy!)
"WHAT'S UP GUYS, IT'S SAM AND COLBY!" Colby shouts.
The shout echoed through the warehouse as the YouTubers cringed. They are very rusty when it comes to breaking and entering, having put it on the back burner since getting arrested.
"Annnnd today we're here at the Axion Lab Warehouse in Amity Park, Illinois!"
"WHOOOOO!!!" Colby whoops again and slings an arm around Sam, jostling the arm with the camera. Sam adjusts and pushes Colby off, laughing a bit.
"Old fans may be sitting on the edge of their seats with this video because...We don't exactly have permission to be here." The camera pans to the side, zooming in through a window at the chain-link fence then back to Sam's face. It's exaggeratedly pulled into a nervous wince. Sam switches the angle of the camera to aim it at Colby in front of him.
Colby claps his hands, shifting his shoulders slightly. "In a post we asked you guys where we should go to next and a lot of you seemed really interested in this place!"
"A year ago this lab collapsed in an explosion during 'an unknown entity attack' and has been locked off since then! The townsfolk say that the whole town is haunted, so we may also go to a few other places and investigate. We are the first explorers to investigate these labs so we've gotta be quiet while we explore. Speaking of exploring, GET THAT XPLR MERCH! WE'VE GOT NEW DESIGNS, STICKERS, AND HOODIES RIGHT NOW!!!"
Sam stops recording, putting a thumbs up. Colby leans over as Sam pulls his phone out of the hoodie pocket. Sam opens the notes he made on the warehouse.
"We should probably get away from the windows before someone calls the police or something." Colby glances at the obvious way they'd broken in, the fence still pushed open. They made their way cautiously into the warehouse, filming segments every once in a while, talking about the history of Amity Park and Axion Lab as a company.
"Now we couldn't find too much information on the hauntings of the place, but one person we talked to said that there's a male, teenage spirit that will show up in the windows and move things around. Some even report hearing voices and crashing noises. No one is really sure how he died, but we've heard it was a project gone awry," Sam says, gesturing to the debris around him as Colby pans from the wall to his friend.
"Maybe he's just trying to help clean it up," Colby jokes.
Sam chuckles, "For sure! Just a bit of sweeping here, little elbow grease there?" Sam and Colby continue walking through the building. "I've also heard that there is a dog spirit here named Cujo. If you bring it a-" Sam reaches into his backpack "-squeaky toy, it will be nice and protect you!" Pulling the bright red bone from the black bag, Sam squeaks it a bit for the camera.
"Oh! I love doggie ghosts!" Colby gasps, turning and grinning at the camera again. Suddenly, a loud thud slams across the warehouse. The men jump, camera whipping to face where the sound came from. Colby looks at Sam, both waiting for it to happen again.
"Holy sh*t! That was so loud!" Sam exclaims. "That came from the center of the lab.
"Isn't that where it's said the entity started the explosion?" Colby asked behind the camera again. Sam pointed to his friend.
"OH! DUDE! You're totally right! That's where the most damage was caused."
The YouTubers make their way to the center of the lab, continuing to film more segments they'll edit in later. As they enter the center of the lab, Sam pans to the ceiling, where a giant hole was blasted into the roof by the explosion.
"Whoa! That was one gnarly explosion!" Colby says, staring at the crumbling sides of the hole. "We've gotta be careful around here, guys, because we're still not sure how stable this place is and can only assume that it's pretty darn delicate!"
Sam nods, "This is also where the sound came from so let's set up some of our equipment and take a look around."
They introduce every bit of equipment: Alice box, LED rope, EMP Reader, and REM Pod. They'll decide which clips to use and which to just subtitle in later. As Colby walks around the larger area, arranging the LED rope around where the ceiling lets light in, his eye catches on a bright green, cylindrical object. He picks up, lifting it so Sam can see it.
"Check it out! There's a weird looking bottle over here." Sam looks over, then double-checks his notes and pulls out the camera, pointing it at Colby. The man stands with his find, confused as his best friend frantically gets the camera to start recording.
"OKAY GUYS!!! You will never guess what Colby just found! Colby doesn't know this and, honestly, I didn't even remember this until you found that, but my sources said that a thermos is a trigger object for the teen ghost!"
Colby jumps, holding the thermos away from him, "You're KIDDING! me! Why am I always finding the haunted object?!"
Sam laughs, "I don't know dude! Bring it over. It might help with the investigation." Colby walks over the crumbled debris and freezes. Sam puts his eyebrow up, confused.
Colby points somewhere behind the camera. "I swear I just saw something over there, dude. Like a big blob or something!"
Sam pans to the hallway Colby had been pointing at as his partner stumbles over the rest of the debris. Sam almost thinks he sees something dart past the doorway, "WHOA! Oh my gosh! I think you're right! There was definitely something there!"
"See!?" Colby shouts. He holds the thermos out like a pointer.
Sam nods then turns to Colby, "We should get this investigation underway, like, now!" Colby nods and they stop the recording to switch batteries in all the equipment: camera, light, night vision, etc. As they finish the final touches, Sam gasps as something tugs at the backpack on his shoulders.
He whips around, camera recording, only to see nothing. He taps his shoulders crazily and then turns back to Colby, who's eyes are wide from the sudden movement. Sam tunes back into the rapid questions Colby was spitting out.
"-at is it dude?! What happened?"
"I swear I just felt something pulling on the backpack."
"Just now?!"
"Yeah! It felt like something was trying to take the pack or something."
"Weird...Welp! Let's get to the investigation then!"
The men go through all their equipment, receiving almost nothing from both the LED rope and REM Pod, but a ton of responses from the spirit box. Both men had flinched when the radio station responses were filled with a tired sounding child. They had no idea what station this ghost was pulling from, but it felt like it was always ready with his answer.
So far they'd figured out they were talking to the teenage ghost who haunted the building. He'd said his name was Phantom, which was not the worst name they've heard a ghost call themselves. Phantom told them he died in an "stupid accident" and not much else. He was 15. Just a kid when he died. Sam and Colby had had to take a small filming break after that. They met so many ghosts who died young, but thinking about a teenager who died, not much older than they'd been when they'd started exploring, it hit home hard.
After the break they set the spirit box aside and laid the ALICE box next to the trigger object.
"Are you trapped here?" Sam asked, sucking in a breath.
They wait for the response: "Yes"
Both Colby and Sam look up from the box. It was definitely the clearest response they'd gotten ever from the box: it hadn't even had the robot tone ALICE usually had.
Colby shivered as he asked, "What can we do to help you?" The temperature in the warehouse was falling quickly as the sun set.
Silence filled the warehouse and somewhere a small rock was displaced, falling to the ground near where Colby had found the thermos.
"Bottle. Button."
"Bottle? Do you think he means the thermos?" Colby asked, picking the object up from where it'd been laying by the ALICE Box. He turned it around in his hands, glancing at the strange design. Sam nodded.
"Probably. Is there a button on the cap? Isn't a thermos usually opened by unscrewing the top?"
The thermos was already pretty out of place. It was made of some sort of amalgamation of weird metals, not one plate made of the same sheet. All along the sides were code dots and neon stripes. The cap was covered in weird green paint. Someone had to have had very weird taste to have been carrying this around with them.
Colby turned the thermos again. His eyes widened as he faced it towards Sam. There was a green and red button on the side, but the words that used to be on it were scratched off.
"Ummmmm...Which one do we press?" Colby asked Sam, scratching his cheek with his other hand.
"Green." The ALICE box answered. The men stared at the box again.
Sharing a look, Sam nodded and pointed the camera to where Colby sat across from him. Colby held a finger over the button as Sam explained that maybe there was something in the thermos the ghost wanted out.
As Colby pressed the green button down, expecting the cap to just pop off, a loud green blast erupted from the thermos. A strange energy zapped Colby's hand, causing him to drop the thermos. Sam was pushed back by the force of the sudden blast, camera angle forgotten and pointed kind of to where the beam pointed.
As suddenly as it erupted from the thermos, it was done and lying where the beam had been was a glowing boy. Sam gasped, abandoning the camera completely to rush to the kid's side. Colby followed, crouching beside where his friend hesitated to touch the boy.
He had bright white hair and looked nothing like anything either had ever seen. He wore a weird astronaut, hazmat love child of a science suit. It was black with a symbol that was obscured by the boy's limp arm. Colby pointed to the boy's cheek, where a lightning scar ran up to meet the kid's eye.
"What the hell?!" Colby whisper-shouted. This was nothing like ANY of the investigations before. Of course they'd seen things before and been touched and scratched and everything aside from actual possession, but never had they seen a solid, perfectly (kind of) alive looking figure before.
Sam reached out, setting a hand on the kid's shoulder, expecting to fall through the assumed ghost. When it met a solid body, he almost pulled back.
"Hello?! Are you okay?" Sam asked, softly jostling the boy. It was enough to roll the boy over and both gasped as they saw his face. It matched the face of one drawing they'd been sent anonymously.
"Isn't that..." Colby started, trailing off as what they were looking at really set in.
"Phantom?" Sam asked, looking up to the brunette. What were they supposed to do? Should they call 911 about a ghost boy? Would they even be able to help him? Would Sam and Colby be able to help him? Was this because he hadn't moved on? No, they'd met ghosts who didn't move on and none had ever been this solid. None of them had even been solid!
The boy stirred, shocking Sam so much, he fell onto his butt, and Colby took a few steps back.
"Phantom?" Colby whispered.
The boy groaned, snapping his bright, neon green eyes open as he realized he wasn't alone. Too quickly, he sat up and scrambled away from the men. He was shaking and covered in green stains and cuts. Drips of green fell from some.
Blood Sam and Colby realized, worry overtaking the fear very quickly. Colby held his hands out in a placating gesture as Sam stayed still, not daring to move in case it scared the boy too much.
"What...Where am I?"
"You're um...You're in the abandoned Axion Lab Warehouse." Colby said, hands still up. "We were investigating the ghosts here when they told us to hit the button on the thermos and you popped out."
"Were you the ones I heard? I...I thought I was hallucinating that. I didn't think it would actually work!" The boy was tired, eyes drooping slightly as the revelation came to him.
"Are you actually a ghost? What happened to you?" Sam asked, finally sitting up further, despite how the boy tensed. The boy looked between the YouTubers and shrugged.
"Something like that."
"Are you a demon?" Colby asked, settling a hand over the cross on his necklace. The boy shook his head as his legs got blurry and changed into a tail-like shape, pulling what would be his knees closer to his chest.
"No...I've met them though. Stranger creatures. Who are you guys?"
"I'm Sam...This is my friend Colby. We're YouTubers. We explore abandoned and/or haunted places all around the world. We've never come across someone like you though." Sam said, trying to not offend.
The boy looked around the warehouse, still dazed, "I wouldn't expect to you. Most experts don't even know I exist...Did you say YouTuber? What's that? Some kind of blog?"
"Uh...Yeah. I guess you probably died before 2005. It's a video website where you can watch whatever you want." Sam answered. Colby finally put his hands down when the kid quirked up an eyebrow at him.
"Yeah...I died in 2004---Wait! What's the date?!" The boy was suddenly in front of them, kneeling down desperately, like he'd teleported. Sam leaned back a bit and Colby crouched down to be the same height. The boy looked at them, fear and grief already filling the bright eyes.
"It's...It's October 2025." Sam whispered. Dread filled the boy's shoulders.
"I've been gone for 20 years?"
Electricity filled the air as the men comforted the young boy, the young almost ghost, as he sobbed and screamed into the empty air. Clouds blocked the stars that night.
.
.
.
WELL! Twasn't that interesting!? Again, it ended up longer than I wanted it to be and you know I had to add that bit of angst at the last minute ~3~
I'm not the biggest fan of the non-aging Danny Phantom AU, so I imagine that the thermos is just kind of a "No age here" zone and so Danny is still like 15-16 here. I think that, with this au, Danny was running from the GIW and BadReveal Fentons (I love when a boy is hurt. Mmmmm Angst), as you do, and was really injured. One of the ghosts, thinking they'd be able to retrieve Danny, souped him and was ended shortly after. The ghost depends on the angst you'd like to taste.
Sam and Tucker couldn't find his thermos (Don't think about how long they spent searching for him in the rubble and destruction across the city. Don't think about how Sam's parents had to figure out how to comfort their grieving teen or how Tucker's parents needed to turn off the wifi just so he'd sleep).
Jazz turned 18 a few months after he disappeared. She went to college. Had her own family (Don't think about how she was holding her first baby in her arms and sobbing because he looked just like Danny. Don't think about how worried she was to visit her parents again, after her husband insisted. Don't think about the car ride home when her husband comforted her after she disowned her parents).
Ellie(Dani) was stuck in the ghost zone (Don't think about how a part of her felt like it was missing. Don't think about how her small human side was getting weaker and eventually she couldn't transform back and forth. Don't think about how she started fighting anything that moved just to feel something).
*cough* sorry. I don't know what that was about. Anywho! How did you like the prompt? Was it fun!? Not exactly my average DC x DP, but I hope you enjoy this one. I've never seen anyone do something like this so I wanted to try and fill that void.
