i'd like to precede this with a warning: i wrote this while sick on a sudden impulsive urge to do so and i'm still writing another multi-chapter fic that is most certainly my main focus for now and for however many weeks to come before i finish it (which certainly won't be for a while) so ... don't look for any updates in the coming future? LISTEN. i PROMISE that i will continue updating this and forming some sort of plot for it but any and all updates will be irregular and without much warning until i'm given the chance to focus fully on it. yeah? okay. just throwing that out there.
second, i'd like to acknowledge The Full Catastrophe (TFC) on here for their danny phantom au fic called treading water. the idea of this au sort of thing is completely due to reading treading water one too many times so i feel the need to point that out. you really should read treading water, as you don't need to know anything about danny phantom to understand it completely. next! i'd like to acknowledge tumblr's very own mirokei for their troll!jim design. i love it very, very much and i use that design completely so if you ever can't wrap your head around jim's physical description just check that the heck out.
furthermore! i had posted an entirely different chapter before this that was basically just the first episode with minuscule differences up until the very end. while this is two thousand words shorter, i prefer it to the other, less entertaining and original one. basically: you're gonna want to reread this chapter if you have already read it before. it's completely, entirely, 100 percentedly different.
Jim Lake felt like weird things had been happening to him all day.
It started in the morning, when he'd woken up with a magazine that he didn't remember pulling off his bookshelf laying open across his face. And then it continued when he found signs of raccoons all around his house, from the tipped over garbage can to the way trash seemed to surround his house like a protective barrier. To make matter worse, the basement window had somehow been nudged open. He made sure to close and lock the basement door before he stepped out.
Not long after this occurred, Jim was riding his bike to school with his best friend, Toby Domzalski, when he shouted over his shoulder that they should take the canal to save time. Toby had skid to a stop with this weird look on his face and insisted that they didn't.
"Why not?" Jim asked, growing more frantic by the minute. "We're late enough as it is, Tobes."
"We shouldn't go down there because I can feel it." Toby said it as though he'd just blown some big conspiracy up and out of the water, but all Jim did was roll his eyes and hop back onto his bike's pedals.
"I think all you're feeling is your fear of heights."
"False!" Toby shouted back, though the both knew it was true.
Nevertheless, they took the bridge and ended up a few minutes late to Coach Lawrence's Health class, which he wasn't too happy about. They both got detention slips for after school. Apparently the big blonde jock who sat behind him thought this was funny, because he chuckled happily under his breath and muttered something to the kid next to him. After that, they both started staring and laughing.
"Stuff it, Steve," Jim muttered, opening his Health book to chapter four.
Steve leaned forward, his huge hand enveloping the entire back of his seat. "What was that, Lake?"
"Palchuk!" Coach Lawrence yelled from across the room. "You want one, too?"
"No, thank you, sir," Steve replied easily. Despite his tone, Jim could feel him glaring daggers into his jacket right up until the bell rang and dismissed everyone.
Since sophomores were the only ones required to take Health class, Coach Lawrence was free for the rest of the day to teach P.E, which in and of itself seemed like a teacher violation of some kind. Today he'd pulled out old ropes from the 1980s for them to climb, which, once again, couldn't possibly be legal in this day and age. Had this guy ever actually been to high school?
Somewhere during that class, Jim had told the girl he liked that he'd 'See her eggs' instead of 'See her later' in Spanish. He was really just trying to block that memory from his head, but it was hard when afterwards she'd asked if he would try out for Romeo in the upcoming school play and he had told her yes.
Idiot. He'd never acted a day in his life.
After school, of course, was detention, but Coach Lawrence had football to coach so Señor Uhl came to watch over the class. On the upside, Jim wouldn't have any homework to do that weekend, so that was pretty cool.
Apparently detention and football practice ended at the same time, because Jim found himself at his locker right when the football team was walking past and out of the building. Toby was just closing his locker beside him when Steve purposefully pretended to trip and spilt red Gatorade all over Toby's front. The few jocks still around burst into laughter around them.
And here's where, perhaps, Jim had messed up. Or maybe it was just fate that he had stepped forward and told Steve and his buddies to leave Toby alone. However, more than likely, it was just due to his lack of sleep and dumb impulsiveness that the events that followed afterwards even happened in the first place. If he would've dropped it, nothing in Jim's life proceeding that moment would have ever happened at all. And while that was kind of scary to think about, it was also a bit infuriating that the decision of one single jock carved out the rest of his future. Yeah, definitely more aggravating than scary.
"Leave him alone, Steve."
"Or you'll do what?" he growled, stepping forward to grab a fistful of Jim's collar. The fabric popped as it stretched. Jim's feet were barely brushing the ground.
Jim gritted his teeth. "Alright. Do it. Punch me. But in thirty years you're going to be fat and bald and working in a muffler shop and Toby is going to have a degree in coding or software and he's going to be a billionaire."
"I do like computers," Toby offered, but his grin fell short when Steve warningly punched the locker beside him. He stepped back once more, offering Jim nothing more than two wide eyes.
The sun was beginning to set low over the town now. Shadows crept their way underneath Steve's eyes and decorated the darkened school hallway.
Jim had struck a chord and he knew it by the flicker of fear that morphed into unbridled rage in Steve's eyes. His friends had left him now, disappearing out the school's front doors. There was nobody there to back him up.
"You're gonna pay for that, Lake," Steve growled. By the tone of his voice, Jim got the impression that he genuinely would.
That was all he got to think before he was being dragged by his collar out the school doors and into the dark of night. After being lugged forward for a bit, Jim finally got his feet underneath himself and struggled to stay up, stumbling and tripping repeatedly over his own tangled feet. He pushed and pulled against Steve's grip mostly due to lack of oxygen from the choking hold he had on Jim's collar, which wrapped itself around his throat and cut into his Adam's apple. A blindly-placed jab at Steve's face met hard with his nose. Jim could feel the warmth of blood on his knuckles and the stumble in Steve's steps. The jock stopped abruptly. Black spots dotted Jim's vision before …
WHAP! Steve's hand connected hard with Jim's eye. He could feel it swelling shut even before Steve started moving again, quicker this time. His vision swam.
"Where … ?" Jim choked out. Steve was fully dragging him now.
He'd messed up. He knew that now. Tears blurred his already spotty vision, though mostly due to the complete lack of oxygen and the burning in his right eye. Despite himself, he couldn't help but think about what his mom would say. Behind him, Toby yelled in a panicked, non-threatening way at Steve to stop.
"I might be in a muffler shop," Steve growled, coming to a stop once more. His voice echoed and came back and, somehow, Jim knew where they were: the canal. While empty, a tumble from this height could still break a bone or two. As if to emphasize this, Steve finished his statement with, "but you'll be broken at the bottom of the canal."
Oxygen deprivation suddenly didn't seem so bad. He blindly reached for Steve to anchor himself down and scratched Steve's cheek in the process, which only served to make the already angry teen angrier. He'd known that Steve had violent tendencies, but this? This was purely homicidal. Something was seriously wrong with this.
And then Jim was falling. His elbow met concrete first, and then his back, and then he was tumbling end over end down the side of the canal all the way to the concrete bottom.
He blacked out at some point on his way down but was awoken relatively quickly by Toby's shouts of panic and repeated yells of his name. Everything hurt. A hole had been ripped in the knee of his jeans and the elbow of his jacket, leaving behind bright red concrete burns. His face felt swollen and funny. But, other than that, he was most definitely alive. And … yes, he could wiggle his fingers and toes. At least nothing was broken. Still laying down, he pulled at his jacket sleeves and brought them up and over the wounds. The air stung.
"James Lake."
Jim was filled with dread. The voice wasn't one he recognized and the fact that someone who knew his name was just sitting in the canal waiting for him did not bode well. He lifted his head to look up at the face of his potential attacker but was met only with an inconspicuous pile of rocks. His head had narrowly missed a rather sharp one when he fell. The thought of being impaled on it gave him newfound, fearful energy. He sat up quickly and immediately regretted doing it.
Toby slid down the canal side and landed clumsily, dropping to his knees next to Jim. "Oh, my God! You're not dead! Are you dead? Is something broken?"
Jim distractedly grabbed ahold of Toby's wrist (he was reaching out to touch his eye) and pushed it gently to the side. "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"Someone … Someone said my name." Jim's mouth went very dry.
"James Lake."
Both teenagers yelped in surprise.
"There! There it is again! Those … Those rocks know my name!"
Toby looked at the rocks, then back at Jim again, then back at the rocks. "That's a pile of K-spar. Minerals don't talk! There's gotta be a walkie talkie in there or something."
Jim got on his hands and knees and crawled closer to the source of the sound, his head pounding with every movement.
"We should get out of here," Toby grumbled. "You need to get out here. What if Steve comes back?"
"He's not coming back, Tobes," Jim reassured, shuffling through a few of the rocks that surrounded the edges of the main pile.
Behind them, something growled lowly, just barely out of earshot.
"I don't like this," Toby said, voicing what was already obvious. He sent a few fearful shots around them.
Suddenly, Jim saw it. There, stuck underneath the mineral, was a device the glowed with soft blue light. He picked up the rock that obscured it and stared down at what looked to be a silver and blue stopwatch, engraved with symbols and crafted with the gears showing.
"Whoa," he muttered, watching as the hand spun and stopped.
"Wow, a broken watch," Toby said. "Can we get out of here now?"
Jim reached out to grab ahold of it. "I wonder what it says."
"Probably, 'you're an idiot, listen to your friend and leave."
"Ha," Jim whispered. His fingertips brushed against the silver and it shone brighter, the blue of the light basking his entire hand in an ethereal glow.
The watch clicked and moved and stopped again, but this time, Jim screamed. A horrible, twisted feeling enveloped his entire arm and crawled slowly over the rest of his body. Everything down to his organs felt heavy. His arm started swelling up like a balloon.
"Jim!" Toby shouted. He fell to his knees beside his best friend. "Jim, what's happening?"
Jim opened his mouth to speak but all he could do was wheeze and gasp for breath. It felt like his lungs had completely stopped expanding, or like the muscles that made it move weren't strong enough to pull air in. His jacket sleeves popped and stretched over his elbows and yet did not rip. His neck grew in size to fit within the confines of the stretched collar.
Toby sat helplessly and watched it happen. Tears streamed from his eyes. Was … was his friend dying? A nauseating feeling wrapped itself around and inside of his stomach as he watched his friend's skin shift in color from pinky peach to cool blue. Toby's grip on Jim's arm weakened and fell away when Jim's skin became hard and gravelly.
Something growled in the distance, but this time, Toby heard it as clear as if that something was standing right next to him. They had to get out of that canal and fast. What if a mountain lion had wandered into Arcadia? Or worse?
Jim had stopped screaming but his mouth was wide open as if he hadn't. Toby watched, horrified, as Jim's eyes began to glow the same damning blue as the amulet. Teeth elongated into fangs on his lower jaw. Dark gray spikes began to rise atop Jim's head. His ears flattened and fell backwards like a cow's.
When it was almost over, Jim could breathe again (though he was still gasping for air). His feet stung and ached all over. He ripped off his shoes and socks and watched, horrified, as they too elongated and rejointed themselves. Claws replaced toenails. Blue stone replaced skin.
Jim took another shaky breath. And then, without warning, he passed out.
"Jim!" Toby screamed, reaching out and shaking him furiously. His skin felt cold, though … God, Toby didn't know. He didn't know much of anything anymore.
Footsteps began to echo down the canal like small thunderclaps. Toby cried and shook his friend. "Jim! Jim, please!"
Underneath the bridge came a stream of warm orange light. It basked Toby completely and partially covered Jim, who looked almost peaceful in his unconscious state. Toby, however, was on the verge of hyperventilation. The thing before him did not look like Jim. To make matters worse, he didn't even know if the thing before him was alive.
Two huge figures emerged from the orange light. One, with a pristine, dignified accent, yelled, "Grab the blue one, Arrrgh!"
"Human," the bigger one, Arrrgh, grumbled. he looked curiously out at Toby and Jim.
"I'll take care of it!"
Arrrgh reached forward and grabbed ahold of Jim with one hand despite him being two feet taller than before. Toby screamed and and shook. The night kept getting worse. First Jim and now these?
The smaller one stepped forward and leaned down, his six yellow eyes studying Toby closely. "If you favor your life, you will come with us or be killed mercilessly by the hands of a troll twice my size."
Toby blinked and sniffled. Troll? As if in answer, something way too close for comfort roared and shook the ground on which they stood.
The troll groaned and rolled all six eyes. "In simpler terms: get inside! Now!"
Toby wasn't sure was prompted him to stand and run for the orange light. Maybe it was the seven foot tall giant with four arms telling him to do so. Maybe it was the something coming steadily closer. Maybe it was just because the fifteen foot tall one was cradling his best friend like a toddler. Whatever the reason, he dove for the light and crashed clumsily atop a huge mineral staircase. Behind him, the smaller one stepped inside and the doorway shrunk until nothing but concrete remained. Arrrgh was just inside, watching the concrete as though it itself would jump up and eat the four of them.
Jim groaned and stirred in Arrrgh's arms.
"Quickly!" the smaller one ordered. "To the study!"
"Amulet?" Arrrgh asked.
The smaller one displayed his lower right arm, which had been hidden behind his back. Within his grasp was the blue and silver watch from before. "Come, human," he said. "To Heartstone Trollmarket!"
And, with that, Toby promptly whimpered and passed out entirely.