Disclaimer: I do not own 'Danny Phantom' or any of the characters, concepts etc. Those are owned by Butch Hartman/Nickelodeon, I believe. I make no claim to anything in this story, it is a perspective with hypothetical scenarios added in.
[AN: Hey all, welcome to another story and thanks for taking the time to pop in and take a look.
This one's kinda random, as it spawned from a realisation I had about how badly most fiction handles things like invisibility and its practical issues. It really has no relevance to my other DP fics, I just thought it would be funny. It's written form Danny's perspective, if you couldn't tell.
Thanks again for reading. /AN]
Putting the Eyes in Invisibility
Ghost powers sound really fun, right? I mean, come on; Flying (awesome), Ecto-blasts (certainly come in handy), Super Strength (no complaints there) and Cryokinesis (very cool… see what I did there? Never mind).
Of course, some of the others are less fun…
Take Enhanced Senses for example.
Sure, it sounds really fun to be able to read a comic book at midnight without a reading light to give you away, until you realise that the same thing that lets you see in the dark also means that normal light becomes really, really bright! Or maybe you'd like to hear what the A-Listers are planning to do to you before you walk into their ambush? Well I hope you don't mind not being able to listen to music with your girlf- uh, I mean female-best-friend-that-I-have-absolutely-no-romantic-interest-in, because what she (and you used to) consider a normal volume now causes your ears to bleed!
Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating slightly, but super-senses aren't exactly a walk in the park, especially since I can't control them at all, unlike my other powers.
But that's not even the worst one; oh no, Invisibility is way worse.
You know what Sci-Fi's never tell you? If you're completely invisible, you can't see ANYTHING!
Turns out it's actually a physics and biology thing; we see stuff because our eyes pick up light waves reflected off an object, and our brains turn it into a picture. But ghostly invisibility works by letting light pass right through you, including your eyes.
I think you can see the problem… (What? Nothing? Come on…)
The first time I became invisible, I thought I'd fainted, because everything was black. Not like, 'close-your-eyes' black, or even 'middle-of-the-night' black, but actual 'there-is-no-light-anywhere' black. I didn't even know I was invisible until Sam and Tuck told me that I had disappeared.
Anyway, I spent the next month trying to find a work-around; it wasn't much good to be able fly around invisible if you didn't know where you were going, after all. Eventually, I hit upon the brilliant idea of keeping my eyes partly visible, so I could still see something. Of course, I still didn't have particularly good control of my powers by then, but I figured it couldn't be that hard.
Ugh, famous last words…
My first attempt ended with my head becoming invisible, and nothing else. So not only couldn't I see anything, but apparently it looked like someone had cut my head off; Tucker fainted and Sam just about freaked, not that she'd ever admit it.
The next time I tried was even worse. I managed to make everything but my eyes invisible. Good start, right? Well then I decided that I only needed my retina to stay in the visible spectrum, because that's what picks up light. Of course, I forgot that the pupil serves a very important purpose in regulating how much light gets in to the eye, so the instant the rest of the eye disappeared…
BAM!
Instant solar flare in my eye! Everything was a white blur for a day afterwards.
When I'd recovered, Sam gave me this smug lecture on why it was a bad idea, including the pupil thing and the fact that I'd need my cornea to actually focus anything I was looking at into recognisable shape. I decided to just keep the entirety of my eyes visible next time.
After a while, I finally got enough control to make my body invisible and my eyes sort of translucent, but it was like seeing through prescription sunglasses, with the wrong prescription! Everything was dark and blurry, and I spent hours bumping into things 'cause I didn't recognise them as objects.
Then I decided that intangibility would be the easiest way to fix that problem. Boy was that a mistake.
If I thought invisibility was bad, then intangibility was even worse.
Intangibility basically means that I force myself out of phase with the physical world, and it's the weirdest sensation EVER. You can't feel anything, you can't hear anything, you can't smell or taste anything, you can't even breathe! Pretty much the only thing you can do is see.
Unless you're invisible.
See, this time, I forgot to hold my breath like I normally do, and the sudden inability to breathe freaked me out (even though I don't actually need to breathe for a couple of minutes at a time if my I've got the ecto-energy to spare), so I lost control of the semi-visibility I had and went fully invisible.
Do you have any idea how freaking weird it is to not be able to experience any sort of sensation? Everything we take for granted just… gone. It was only for a couple of seconds, but it felt like an eternity.
Suffices to say, I never did that again; now I'm way more careful about how those two powers interact.
So yeah, Ghosts Powers can be awesome, but some of them kinda suck if you don't know what you're doing.
P.S. Did I mention that not being able to feel anything is really freaking weird?
[AN: And there you have it; like I said, random.
I was just thinking that only two things I've seen actually get invisibility right. One is the Predator series, since the Predators always use different wavelengths, like Infrared, when they're cloaked, and the other is Battlefield 2142, because it has an imperfect cloak and it blurs your vision while using it.
Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope you found it at least vaguely amusing and/or insightful. As always, reviews are nice if you feel so inclined.
Thanks again. /AN]
