#sudo writes!

[pseudinymous]

Sometimes I think writing a book is long and hard. But then I remember: just write 1,000 words, and repeat eighty times.

I can churn out 1k in a night if I want to, so suddenly getting to the end goal of a first draft seems much easier.

[pseudinymous]

MAGICAL GIRL DANNY PHANTOM

Alright son, you fuckin’ asked for it.

“GHOST PRISM POWER, MAAAAKE UP!”

“Danny, what the fuck?”

Sam was staring at him as if he’d developed several holes in his head. Which he might as well have, considering he’d just marathonned several magical girl animes back-to-back during a lapse in regular ghostly activities. Sam had decided to visit in order to check on him, after Tucker got worried that he hadn’t responded to phone or text in the past three days. The prognosis wasn’t good, and it was about to get even worse.

She stole a glance at his computer screen, and suddenly found herself hypnotically sucked in to the impossibly cute transformation happening before her. Why was it so… but she didn’t even like this stuff! She liked gothic stuff! Not cutesy Japanese kawaii… crap…

“I was just poking a bit of fun, Sam, relax,” said Danny, drawing her attention away from the screen. “As if I’d want to be a magical girl.”

Then a voice, impossibly behind them from every angle: “So you have wished it,”

Danny’s face dropped. So did Sam’s. Desiree now appeared in between them, uncomfortably close. Her face was dripping with glee.

“SO SHALL IT BE!”

Bang!

“You know, all the ghosts have been saying I need to get some hearing aids,” said Desiree. “But I think you’ll do just fine.”

I got too close to my word cap, I’ll write more if you ask for it. ;)

[pseudinymous]

Prompt: Sam wonders in the lab by herself looking for something and accidentally gets turned into a half ghost like Danny!

“Oh no.”

She’d just been looking for the Fenton Bazooka, surely it shouldn’t have been that hard to find even in this mess of a lab? It’s so big! It should have stuck out like the Statue of Liberty among all of this junk. And yet she’d had so much trouble finding it. Sam had started sifting through piles and piles of ectoplasmic weaponry, and then suddenly… bam!

It wasn’t the newly-acquired glow that bothered her, nor the bright green eyes. It wasn’t the fact that she could walk through walls or fly.

When she’d gotten zapped, being a goth, most of what she’d been wearing was black.

And now everything was white.

WHITE.

Still taking prompts in my inbox, shoot me anything~

[pseudinymous]

Technicalities

In which Technus tries to forcibly become the new manager of an electronics shop.

“S-see? Then y-you just press ‘sale’, a-and the order will go s-straight through.”

Technus glared at the POS system, giving it the sort of staring down that was only appropriate for inferior technology. The register was so old that it could, indeed, barely be considered a register; it no longer locked at all after a transaction (even if you used the key), nor did it pop out after pressing sale — you had to pull it out yourself. You had to pull it out yourself! What cheek. What lack of charm! How could a high-tech hip-and-cool electronics shop be working with such… such filth?

“I, Technus, greatly disapprove of this deplorable excuse for modern technology!” he said. Anyone else would have called it shouting, but unfortunately for the windows and everyone around him, this was his Normal Voice. “Female Working Slave, how is it you have allowed yourself to become so inexorably tied to inferiority?!”

A few emotions ran over her face, battling endlessly behind her mouth and eyes over whether she wanted to take that insult to heart or just run. Instead, she opted for freezing. Technus, MASTER OF TECHNOLOGY AND ALL THINGS ELECTRONIC AND BEEPING, didn’t understand. Why was the Female Working Slave not replying to him? Could it have been she was so ashamed of her inferior barely-point-of-sale mechanical machine? Or perhaps was she — was she proud of this atrocity, so proud that she might have taken insult to any attack upon it?

The situation could use some considerable thought. But Technus didn’t see any way that someone couldn’t be ashamed in such an embarrassing situation.

“Female Working Slave!” he began. The windows shuddered in their frames. “Today we shall procure a superiorly functioning point-of-sale electronical mechanical machine!”

She nodded, equally as mechanically as her POS system’s struggle to do anything other than add two digits together.

“Now, you will show me to your world’s point-of-sale mechanical machine hoard!”

More mechanical nodding. Technus didn’t understand why she looked so utterly traumatised, as he wasn’t even trying to be scary at this point — merely recommending some desperately needed upgrades. But this nodding soon stopped and turned into a distressed shake, and she nearly doubled over whilst trying to communicate anything at all.

“What?!” said Technus.

“I-I said-d that we d-don’t have POS ssystemss here,” said the Female Working Slave. “Sh-shop. Order f-from shop!”

“Is this not a shop dedicated to the latest in electronical and mechanical goods?”

“Well—”

“Well, then we should procure these futuristic, hip-and-cool POS systems for this futuristic, hip-and-cool shop!”

“Please,” said the Female Working Slave, gathering some resolve. “Just let the manager out of the cupboard and go away!”

Technus wasn’t going to have a bar of that, oh no! “That so-called ‘manager’,” he said, sneering, “did not even know how to combine inferior technologies together to create superior technologies! He is not worthy of being called manager of this great electronical establishment!”

“But it’s not yours,” she said, even more quietly.

“Possession should only be for those worthy of keeping such items!” Technus had both fists in the air, one of them waving about his electric staff in an eccentric manner, as the Female Working Slave ducked under it to avoid a four-thousand-volt electric shock. Technus barely seemed to notice. “You will assist me to run this shop in a worthy and respectable manner!”

At that moment, a customer walked in, took one look at Technus, yelped, and walked back out very, very quickly. Neither Technus nor the assistant noticed.

“Yes,” she said, in barely a whimper.

“This is most excellent!” said Technus. “Now, you will do as I say, and we will have the greatest electronics shop in all the lands!”

[pseudinymous]

(For the DP prompt) Harriet

Now this was living.

After a brief stint with the Milwaukee Journal, also known as the only publication which would take her seriously after that incident with the New Yorker, Harriet Chin decided that she needed a breath of fresh air. Preferably, fresh air in the utterly ghost-infested gutter town that was Amity Park.

She’d gotten a job as a reporter at the local TV station, and was currently chasing a ghost flinging itself through the air at 60 miles per hour, after chasing it from where they’d just spotted the Wisconsin Ghost. Which, notably, was definitely no longer residing in Wisconsin. This new ghost looked like it was fleeing — probably the only good response when you’ve pissed off the town vampire — and screaming all the way. It was on camera.

And she truly knew, as it screamed that it was the Box Ghost, and that it was going to kill her for chasing it with its Corrugated Cardboard Doom™, that this was the place for her.

Still taking prompts, feel free to submit more!

[pseudinymous]

Respite

Even after ten years, Danny and the Ghostwriter are still not exactly getting along...

Big thanks to @thehobblefootalchemist, who gave me the prompt for this piece.

The Ghostwriter was just sitting down to continue writing the second book in a series of novels when an unholy crash shuddered the very foundations of his house.

He ignored it and put a few more pen strokes down. After all, this was Amity Park.

Unfortunately the crashing seemed to continue. The pen was placed carefully upon the table after one of the windows nearly shattered, only to be bumped off by yet another earth-shaking thump. It felt like living in the pits of a battlefield — usually ghost fights didn’t get this bad, did they? Not that he ever participated in them enough to know. He understood exactly how weak he was and pushing that wasn’t a rabbit hole he wanted to fall into.

He opened the front door to find one Daniel Fenton wasted on the concrete outside. The ghost he’d tangled with was already flying off into the mid-morning sky, its need for violence apparently satiated by beating Amity Park’s ghost boy senseless.

Writer crept out of his house. They weren’t on the best of terms, yet. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m lying spread-eagle on the ground after a ghost mauled me. I’m fantastic.”

… Well, one thing was for sure. This Daniel Fenton certainly wasn’t an imposter.

He also didn’t seem particularly able to move — the man was staring up at the sky as if still quite dazed even though his speech didn’t slur, and Writer, in spite of himself, felt a mollusc of pity well up within his chest. “Do you want some help?”

Danny snorted his laughter and looked away. “As if I want help from you.”

The Ghostwriter looked around — there was no one else here. After a commotion like that most Amity Parkers would be hiding in their closets and trying their best not to be seen. At the very least, probably no one saw Danny get beaten into a pulp and then presumably lose grip on his ghost form. It might be better for everyone if his human form wasn’t found lying out to dry on the sidewalk sometime later.

“What are you doing?” Danny asked. Writer ignored the question and kept his pace up the driveway until he was standing over him, holding out a hand. “I said I don’t want your help.”

“Actually, you said ‘as if I want help from you’, which if you studied English a little harder in your school years, you would understand doesn’t quite literally mean as much as it implies. And in any case, I think we both realise your sister would have my head if I didn’t help you, and your head if you chose not to accept.”

Amity Park’s resident ghost boy glared at his equally miffed helper, but finally, with the air of someone expending great effort, reached up an arm. The Ghostwriter wasn’t sure, though, how much was actually great effort and how much was simple reluctance to be helped.

Danny was pulled to a standing position, but wobbled to the side just before Writer caught him.

“You might not want my help, but it’s fairly obvious you need it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Danny. He stumbled along as Writer guided him back down the driveway, up the stairs of the decking, and through the front door of the house. The front door of course was never opened — it was easier for the Ghostwriter to just haul the man in there intangibly, and considering Danny knew who he was and was himself quite used to intangible hijinks, it was the preferable method. “Thanks, I’ll be fine from here.”

The Ghostwriter let him go, and he collapsed in a heap on the lounge room floor.

“Mm. Yes. Fine, as you say.”

Danny glared, and had to be helped back up off the floor and hauled into the Spare Room.

There is a reason that the author, here, chose to use capital letters for the Spare Room. It wasn’t that the room itself was anything spectacular, no, but what was in the room was a different story entirely. Sure, it had a nice relaxing bed and a decent reading lamp, but one hardly needed any extra light with all of the strange glowing books, native Ghost Zone plants that were suspiciously potted and domesticated, and the downright off-putting ghostly fragments, smaller than the size of the tip of your nail, that seemed to go along with this. Danny got the most suspicious feeling that they were all somehow watching over the plants.

“Glad to see you drag Jazz into all of your creepy Ghost Zone shit,” Danny shot, even as the Ghostwriter carefully laid him down.

“I’m glad to see you’re willing to drag Jasmine into all of your dangerous ghost fights,” Writer shot back, glaring. “Mind explaining why you ended up on this side of town?”

“I don’t choose where the ghosts show up!” His voice was full of indignant rage from just having lost. “Anyway, that ghost wasted me! I tried to draw it away from here but it kept hooking me from behind!”

The Ghostwriter decided to leave that information where it was. “I assume you’d like some water?” he asked, skipping ahead.

Danny made a grunt that was taken as a vague form of acceptance. When the Ghostwriter returned with the glass, Danny took it without thanking him and almost threw three quarters of the liquid down his throat. The rest he splashed over his face. It was supposed to be a warm day today, Writer recalled.

“Where’s Jazz?”

“Shopping, I believe.”

“Good,” said Danny. Writer arched a brow. “Hey, you know what she’s like when she fusses.”

For the first time in their exchange the ghost cracked a genuinely amused smile. “Oh, I do. Now, mind if I leave you there and get back to my work?”

“I dunno, are these plants gonna eat me if you leave me alone in here?”

Writer shrugged. “No one’s died yet.”

“I feel so much safer,” said Danny, apparently unable to restrain his sarcastic tongue. The Ghostwriter ignored him, and left the room.

***

Writing this book was very much like attempting to restrain a lion. Difficult, messy, and if you were very unlucky it was dangerous — if only in terms of sanity. It also meant that breaks were frequent and frustration always imminent on the edge of the swimming pool that was his mind. The Ghostwriter sighed, put the pen down (this time it did not rattle its way onto the floor), closed his eyes, and tried to think.

“Those books are weirder than the plants.”

Writer’s head shot up — it seemed Danny’s exceedingly quick natural healing cycle had reinvigorated him enough to peel himself off that bed, and he seemed to be balancing rather well too for someone who’d just been so knocked around.

“They do tend to have minds of their own,” Writer agreed, quickly flipping closed his notebook, but trying to leave out just enough urgency that the other wouldn’t get curious enough to read it. “You seem to have recovered quite well.”

Danny just seemed to shrug oddly. “Yeah, I guess.”

“No ‘thank-you’?”

Silence. Obviously that was too much to ask. The Ghostwriter let out a heavy sigh and began tying all of his nice pens together with a rubber band. Danny had been more than just irritated when he found out just who Jazz was getting so friendly with, and when they’d eventually decided to go out with each other and live together, Danny had nearly exploded.

It had been a quiet explosion, of course. Precious few others knew Writer was a ghost, and anyone who didn’t know was under the keyboard’s spell; they simply didn’t notice the grey, glowing skin, the luminescent green eyes, the teeth. They could look at it all day and they would never be the wiser, for that was how his keyboard worked — he typed in a command, and reality changed to suit.

“I see you’re still upset with me.”

The direct query seemed to catch Danny off-guard. “I— but— you…” he stumbled, before collecting himself. “Dude, you’re a ghost. And you’re going out with my perfectly normal, perfectly human sister. It’s weird.”

“I’ll admit to it being unorthodox.” Writer found his arms crossing, and his muscles getting tight. Being questioned on his life — or perhaps post-life choices was one of his least favourite activities, and he’d already had enough teasing from Randy to last into the next century. “But that’s between Jasmine and I.”

“Sure it wasn’t just you?”

The words came out with just as much accusation as they implied. Danny had found himself taking a step forward, falling — out of habit — into an almost aggressive stance. Like a challenge. The Ghostwriter decided to play his game, and stared him right in the eyes.

“I never intended for any of this to happen the way it did, but I assure you the feeling was mutual. And with all of that amateur surveillance you did—“ Danny’s face twisted to abject horror. “—Yes, I do know about that, you should know by now that I hold the utmost respect for your sister. Is this how you would treat me if I were human?”

Danny grunted some noncommittal answer or another. The Ghostwriter’s frown grew as he stood from his chair, book and tied-up pens in hand.

“Mm. I see how it is, ghost boy.”

“Don’t call me that!”

Writer shrugged. “Well, I’ll admit to you not being a boy anymore, but you most certainly are — at least in part — a ghost. Perhaps you should use that knowledge to enhance your perspective.”

Oh yes. And there was the huff, the turn away — for an adult he certainly remained well within the throes of teenager-hood. The Ghostwriter found that the best strategy was simply to ignore him and continue going about his business. In this case, that involved carefully putting away his writing equipment in a draw and wandering over to the kitchen to make lunch. Jazz would be home soon. Danny ‘settled’ into a chair, face sour, arms crossed, and generally looking rather miserable.

“Since when do ghosts eat?” Danny shot, as Writer pulled some ingredients out of the cupboard.

“They don’t. Your sister however does, and since I don’t have any sort of job the least I can do is make some meals for her.”

“Mm. Okay.”

The Ghostwriter didn’t argue, because “Mm. Okay.” was probably the most positive response he’d gotten out of the half ghost all morning. He continued on with what he was doing: Sandwiches. Sandwiches were easy, and easy was important when your cooking skills were subpar at best and unable to be supplemented with a sense of taste.

“It’s weird watching a ghost look so domestic.”

Writer kept cutting up the carrot as he spoke. “No more strange than watching a human turn into a ghost and vice-versa, I assure you.”

“…Eh. I guess not.”

The sandwiches came together into little sets of four. There was chicken, lettuce, tomato, salad onion, and cucumber in there, with a bit of salt and pepper for good measure. Hard to mess that up, right? You just put equal amounts of each ingredient in except for the onion, which you went easy on. He could do Rules. He just couldn’t do anything that required taste testing to get right. At the end he had four sets; two went on one plate, two went on another.

“Eat.”

Danny looked up to the sandwiches as if they were about to attack him. Just… really? The Ghostwriter thought? This reaction still, even when he was obviously trying to be civil? He was willing to give having a neutral relationship with Jazz’s brother a go, but his stubborn demeanour made it all the more difficult. A slight of anger whipped around in his stomach, and he quelled it.

“It’s lunchtime and you’ve been mauled. Take it, or I’ll type on my keyboard that you did so whether you wanted to or not,” said the Ghostwriter, frown increasing with the seriousness of his expression.

Danny was still suspicious. “Is this forced care?”

“I understand what you’re like. And I also understand what Jasmine would be like if she found out I didn’t look after you properly after a ghost fight. So I suppose the answer to your question is yes.”

There was a ginger way he took the plate, before finally he cracked one of the first smiles Writer had ever seen on him. There was even a genuine laugh. Writer found one of his eyebrows cocked, unable not to show the scepticism he was feeling.

“No, just—“ Danny stuttered. “I mean, I guess Jazz would lecture you endlessly about needing to nurse me back to health, or something.” He took a bite, screwing up his brow as he did, though not telling the Ghostwriter why. “As if I need nursing when I can heal like this.

“Nursing present or not, you still need energy from something,” said Writer, turning on his heel and returning to the kitchen counter. “Human bodies are unforgiving, that way.”

Danny paused halfway through a mouthful, thought about this, and swallowed. “How do ghosts get more energy, anyway? I mean, it’s gotta come from somewhere, right? Or doesn’t anyone know?”

The Ghostwriter had picked up the knife to go and wash it, but slowly put it back down as his curiosity about this question piqued. “We absorb ambient ectoplasm from the air. Obviously it’s not so plentiful in the Real World, but that’s one of the reasons I revisit the Ghost Zone every so often. Doesn’t your ghost half require some similar type of nutrition?”

A shrug. “… Not really, I just eat and sleep, then I’m fine.”

Writer found himself frowning. “Isn’t that curious?”

“Is it really?”

“Mm. It’s just another impossibility about you, really.”

In the absence of any further comment he went back to dealing with the dishes — much as he disliked them he didn’t really want to leave them all to Jazz, not when she’d had such a busy week and this was her only day off.

“I gotta get out of here before Jazz gets back,” said Danny, suddenly, having finished the sandwich. In a surprising gesture of politeness he brought the empty plate to the kitchen and placed it neatly by the sink. “She’ll start, y’know… fussing.”

The ghost gave a sagely nod in reply. “If being coddled after injury isn’t your thing, then I can’t imagine this will be a fun place for you very soon.”

The Ghostwriter washed the plate as Danny gathered his things together. And if Writer hadn’t been listening for them, the words would have been so quiet that he’d have missed them: “Hey… thanks,” said Danny, as he slipped out the door.

After a few seconds of it sinking into his mind, the Ghostwriter laughed. It was in a way that was perhaps a little self-satisfied. And then he drained the water and sat in wait for The Great Fusser of Things to arrive home.

[pseudinymous]

Mascot

She couldn’t see halfway in front of her. Or perhaps, more accurately, her brain simply refused to digest it, to make it real.

“Sweetie, don’t look like that, your father and I made such a huge breakthrough today! I know you liked Phantom, but he was a ghost. He wouldn’t have cared the slightest bit about you.”

Jazz knew it was wrong. Oh, so very wrong. But now that this had happened she could never tell her mother; it would destroy her, break her, so much more than when she would just find out Danny was missing. Jazz was mourning her baby brother on the inside already, but Maddie… couldn’t know. Not ever.

“He was such a strange ghost, you know,” Maddie elaborated. “We found all sorts of functions that aren’t a normal feature of any other ectoplasmic entity we’ve ever seen.”

Jazz continued playing with her food. The chicken schnitzel in front of her now had its umpteenth fork mark, but she couldn’t bring herself to put it in her mouth. The bile was rising in her throat, threatening dangerously to bubble over.

“We were hoping we could contain him and use his data to predict and represent patterns of structure in other powerful ghosts, but I’m just not sure it’s going to match up properly. And we never expected him to succumb to experimentation so quickly either — it’s a wonder we got all of the data we did beforehand. We’ve been very lucky.”

Jazz’s grip tightened around the fork, her skin becoming a frightening limpid white. Maddie didn’t seem to notice. Lucky. She had dared to say lucky.

“Either way, I’m sure the town will have no problem finding a healthier mascot,” said Maddie, with a nonchalant little shrug. “They’d never understand the value in our data, anyway.”

The fork bent in her hand. Jazz screamed.

[pseudinymous]

Absquatulate

One came not without the other, and here Technus was, trying to run off yet again with only half the technology required to make something work. Screaming out plans for world domination, apparently, was more important than properly enacting them.

And oh, was there ever screaming. The people working for the IT shop he’d just ransacked had already ran as fast as their little ill-practiced IT legs could carry them, all except one — Tucker Foley stood in front of the door, arms crossed, with a frown the size of a Texan banquet carrying itself down either side of his face. In his arms he almost-but-not-quite concealed a compact disc.

“CHI-ALD!” Technus screeched, not at all happy to see one of the ghost boy’s little sidekicks. “LET ME LEAVE THIS PLACE AT ONCE!”

“No,” said Tucker, firmly. “Pay me.”

Technus looked as though he’d just been shot in the face. “WHAT?”

“PAY ME!” yelled Tucker, through a full-volume store microphone. The windows rattled and shook. A customer, who had taken to concealing himself in a corner, passed out. Tucker continued standing, very unimpressed, in front of an equally unimpressed Technus. The ghost had dropped several items in an attempt to cover his ears.

Tucker wanted to drop the mic, but it was attached to his head with a set of headphones, so the effect would have been a little less… dramatic.

“YOU THINK I, TECHNUS, HAVE ANY MONEY?”

“Get some. Or put that stuff back where it was.”

Technus stared at him. “NO,” he said, and then he took a way out through one of the walls instead of the door Tucker was blocking.

Tucker sighed, eyes rolling upwards. “One of these days that’ll work.” Too bad the store had never allowed ghost hunting equipment.A/N: Thank-you so much for submitting such a silly word, that was a lovely prompt.