Hello! Thank you for reading this. This is my first post, so I'm still figuring out the formatting. Please bear with me!
Day 1: Electricity
Danny had never been sure if it really had been the electricity that killed him.
Oh, to be sure, he was being electrocuted while he died, and the voltage had certainly been enough to kill him. The electricity certainly could have killed him. Would have killed him. But then there was the issue of a reality itself being torn asunder where he stood, and an entire universe opening up through his body and soul to consider. Not to mention ecto-contamination, although, at this point in his... existence... Danny was seriously starting to doubt that ecto-contamination was anywhere near as dangerous as his parents said it was.
Anyway.
Regardless of whether or not the electricity had killed him, Danny despised being electrocuted. It reminded far too much of dying.
Vlad knew this.
Whether or not any of the other ghosts knew this was kind of up in the air. However, what many ghosts certainly did know was that electricity-based attacks hurt Danny far more than other attacks of similar level. They knew that sometimes he was even affected more than a human would be. In other words, they knew that electricity was something of a weakness for the young ghost. So they used it. Walker used it, Vortex used it, the Observants used it, the one time Danny'd had the misfortune of running into them. Skulker and Technus, who had more access to such attacks than the average ghost used electrical attacks almost exclusively.
Which meant that, despite Danny's best efforts, what happened was probably inevitable.
He had been fighting Tecnus who, somehow, had gotten hold of some of Vlad's nastier inventions, ie the ones that electrocuted Danny. Luckily, the loud-mouthed and extremely annoying ghost hadn't any of the ones that shorted out Danny's powers. Therefore, the fight would have been just about normal, except that they were fighting in the school media room. Rather close quarters- quarters that Danny was restricted to by the fact that Tucker and Sam were with him, as well as the Dempsey twins, Nathan and Lester.
Sam was trying to get the twins out, which was complicated by all the wires in the rooms, and Tucker was trying to do... something with his PDA. Honestly, Danny hadn't heard what he was trying, only that it might somehow kick Technus out of one or more of Vlad's inventions. In any case, Danny was more than occupied with keeping Technus from electrocuting him into unconsciousness.
That was actually going fairly well but... Well. Technus knew Danny.
Danny saw the wires headed towards Sam, Nathan, and Lester out of the corner of his eye and dove to intercept them. He managed to get a shield up, but he didn't see the machine – one of Vlad's, box-shaped with circular protuberances – coming at him from the other side.
It smashed into him and kept going, bulldozing him directly into Tucker. Then, just as he realized that on top of his friend was way too close under these circumstances, thick, faintly green, cables spooled out of the box's holes, wrapping around both teens-
And then the pain started.
It wasn't as bad as the portal accident in a physical sense. No, in that regard, this shock was hardly worth noticing.
In every other respect, it was worse. He could hear Tucker screaming- and then he couldn't. And, gosh, the cables were in pieces all across the room- which looked pretty worse for wear itself. It looked as if all the equipment on one wall had been straight up vaporized. Had he done that? The ghost alarm was finally going off somewhere else in the school. He could hear students crowding through the hallways just past the door. And Technus was just standing there, bereft of any usable tech, staring at Danny.
"Ghost Child," croaked Technus, "I- I am sorry I- I didn't know- I-"
This was enough to bring Danny somewhat back to his senses. He snarled one word at the older ghost, "Leave!" before whirling, his eyes searching for his friends. There was Sam, more hesitant than he had ever seen her before, at the door. She must have gotten the twins out earlier... and now memory of the fight was trickling back... Before trashing the media room he had hidden Tucker- There!
Oh, jeeze, he wasn't breathing, he wasn't-
Danny stopped himself. He knew CPR, and then some. He checked Tucker's breathing again, and his pulse. Still nothing.
Sam slid up next to him. "He's not breathing?" she asked, breathless.
"No."
"Pulse?"
"No."
"I'll get the defibrilla-"
"No time. It'll take five minutes to get to the office and back, even at a run. I'll have to do this. Get ready to call 9-1-1."
Sam stood up. "Have to find a phone!" she shouted over her shoulder as she ran out.
Danny, meanwhile, had splayed his left hand over Tucker's chest, letting invisibility spread over the other boy's flesh and bones. Danny wasn't giving Tucker complete invisibility, just enough so that he could see his heart. His heart, which was, he could now see, quivering in the throes of fibrillation. Good. That was something Danny could fix.
He made his right hand intangible, and carefully edged his finger towards the sinoarterial node of the heart. Danny wasn't one-hundred percent sure what it was made of, but what he did know was that the little cluster of cells located in the upper right-hand side of the heart was the thing that sent the heart the instruction to beat, and the thing that defibrillators actually targeted. One of the articles Danny had read had called it the heart's 'natural pacemaker.'
Once the tip of Danny's finger was located firmly within the cluster, Danny built up a teeny-tiny ecto-electrical charge, and then let it go.
Danny could rarely bring himself to use that particular power in a fight. Before his sister, Jazz, had convinced him that he could use it to defibrilate people, the only reason that he had practiced with it at all was because Tucker had been (and still was) convinced that Danny could use it to recharge his PDAs.
The irony was not lost on Danny as his friend's heart stuttered back to life.