Chapter 11: Desperate Measures
Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom or any of its characters.
"But, Danny…!" Sam whispered back. "You know what could happen. What if he…? What if you…"
"If you have a Plan C, now's the time. He's got to be stopped."
Sam opened her mouth, then closed it. "Fine. Good luck." Plainly she wasn't happy about it, though.
Danny thought quickly. His first objective in Plan B was to get his rival to chase him. That had seemed a simple enough thing when he had come up with the plan, but now the rest of his friends and family had spread out around the lab to engage the enemy. With so many opponents to distract his evil self, how could he attract the other ghost's attention?
Suddenly, the solution came to him. Their opponent was half him. The other half was Vlad Plasmius. Neither half renowned for their even tempers.
Danny called up a palmful of ectoplasm. He still wasn't up the full strength, but that wasn't the point. "Hey, loser!" he shouted, and hurled the glowing green ball.
Like a proverbial opening shot of a snowball fight, it hit the other Danny on the back of the neck. Had it been a snowball, the target would have wiped it off, looked at the icy, cold mess in his palm and decided war had been declared.
As it was, the slow swing to face Danny, cape draping gracefully over his shoulders, would have been the envy of any comic book villain and was reminiscent of Vlad in his prime. "What did you say?" the bigger ghost snarled.
"You heard me." Danny charged another shot. "Loser. Moron. We beat you before and we'll beat you again. In fact, you beat yourself on the roof. Think you'll fare any better this time?"
"Danny, what are you doing?" Jazz screeched.
"What I should have done awhile ago," Danny replied, casually bouncing his ball of ectoplasm on his palm. "I'm tired of acting all scared of this guy. He's just a big lunk with an even bigger ego."
"Maybe it's time to remind you who exactly you're dealing with," their foe purred. He charged a shot of his own. This one was quite large and obviously aimed to obliterate Danny once and for all.
"Ah-ah-ah," Danny taunted, waving a finger. "Maybe you're putting on a good show, but we both know the truth, don't we? You aren't completely recovered, whatever you want us to think. You take this building down on us, even you might not survive."
The bluff worked. His evil counterpart bared his pointed teeth. "Need I remind you that you're not fully recovered either?"
"You don't know that for sure, do you? We'll see," Danny bluffed again. "Let's take this outside. Just you and me, old man." With that, he heaved his ectoplasmic ball at the other's fiery head and shot through the ceiling.
He could only pray he'd made his evil self mad enough to blindly follow.
Several years of experience with moving intangibly through his home had taught him exactly where every room was in relation to every other room down to the inch. Danny therefore knew that his own room was directly above the basement, two floors up. It was here he and Sam had placed their trap.
Danny barreled through the kitchen at his highest speed. Just before he hit the ceiling, he channeled all his remaining energy into one thing: splitting himself in half. This particular skill had given him a lot of trouble in the past, and he'd never tried it when so drained. If it didn't work, then Plan B was a wash and they were all dead.
The first part worked, barely. Splitting himself had never been more difficult. However, he managed it just in time. His two halves curved around the obstacle he and Sam had carefully placed on the floor of his room. They rejoined again almost instantly, and Danny swerved to the side to see if Plan B had been successful.
For a moment he thought he'd failed and the other Danny had not fallen for his taunts. There was a half-second of complete silence. Then the large object placed on the floor sizzled, and then it shivered.
A terrible scream split the air.
Bolts of lightning arched around Danny's room, burning odd patterns on the walls. Danny dodged them, somehow miraculously still in Danny Phantom form despite his exhaustion. He covered his face as two small explosions rocked the second floor.
Danny opened his eyes to a smoke-filled room. He heard his bedroom door fly open with a bang, and then a lot of different voices coughing as the smoke drained out into the hallway.
Slowly the room cleared. Danny waved his hand in front of his face to clear the last of the haze.
"D-Danny?" Sam's tentative voice, around a lingering cough, came from the direction of the door.
"Still here," he answered, and coughed himself. "B-barely."
In the door crowded a wide-eyed Sam, Tucker, and Jazz, all the entryway would hold. Jack peered over their heads, barely visible in the smoke even in his orange jumpsuit. Strike, unencumbered by such trivial things as doorways, came through the wall to survey the scene like the cop she was.
"Well, I knew you were prone to doing some pretty stupid things, but I never suspected this," was all she said.
This lay sprawled in the middle of Danny's room, on either side of the sparking remains of the Fenton Ghost Catcher. Actually, it was two somethings. One face up, the other face down. Both completely out cold, from the looks of it.
"What happened?" squeaked Jazz as everyone else tumbled into the room.
"Well, the plan worked. I think," Danny replied.
"This was a plan?" That was Tucker, his voice at a higher decibel than usual. "To make two of him? In what universe is this a good idea?"
"There aren't two of him," Danny pointed out, landing gently on the floor. Maddie came and kissed his cheek, something he normally objected to but put up with under the current circumstances.
"Looks like two guys to me," said Tucker.
Danny sighed. "He's made of a fusing of me and Plasmius, right? So I was thinking if we used the Ghost Catcher to split them again—"
"You'd end up with what, exactly?" asked Jazz. "An older ghost you and an older Vlad Plasmius?"
"Pretty much, yeah."
"And this is better how?"
"Halves his power, right?" Sam pointed out. "Makes him easier to beat. At least that was the idea."
"You went along with this?" Tucker demanded.
"I didn't like it, but we had no choice when the Technus thing went south. And you gotta admit, it did work."
"Not exactly," Strike said. She was kneeling by one of the figures and examining it closely.
"What do you mean?" asked Danny.
Strike turned the one that had landed facedown face up. And everyone saw.
It was not a twenty-four-year-old Danny Phantom and a fifty-something Vlad Plasmius. The two bodies were still obviously hybrids of Danny and Vlad. The one Strike had turned over more closely resembled Danny; he had Danny's hazmat jumpsuit and most of Danny's facial features. However, the white hair was clearly Vlad's, complete with the little ponytail at the nape of the neck. The other body looked more like Vlad Plasmius, but his spiky hair was on fire—and it was black. In fact, most of their colors were the reverse of the alter ego they most closely resembled. The one that looked like Danny had a white jumpsuit with black trim. The one that looked like Vlad had a black version of Plasmius' usual flamboyant wear with white trim. Both wore capes, the Danny-lookalike a white and the Plasmius a black. Both looked to be about thirty years old. They were also both in decent physical condition, though nowhere near the pure muscled bulk of their conjoined self.
"What the…?" murmured Danny.
"Well, this is weird," remarked Tucker and Sam simultaneously.
"Extremely strange," agreed Maddie.
"This isn't how the Ghost Catcher is supposed to work," Jack said, hands on hips. "It's supposed to take the ghost out of things."
"Looks like in this case there wasn't anything to separate from the ghost, so it did its best," said Strike. She too had her hands on her hips, but she looked more interested than puzzled. "And got pretty well busted in the process."
"But…this wasn't supposed to happen," Danny complained. "It was supposed to make him into me and Plasmius again."
"Well, obviously that's not what happened," pointed out Strike.
"Then what did happen?"
"I have a theory," said Jazz.
"Of course you do," said Danny. "Care to share?"
"I'm going to chalk your surliness down to exhaustion and ignore it," his older sister said in her most understanding manner. "What I think happened is that you and Plasmius had been blended together so long in this guy it was impossible for the Ghost Catcher to separate them. So it did something else instead."
"That's a disgusting theory. But it sounds like it could be true, so we'll roll with it," Danny added hastily when Jazz gave him a look. "So if it didn't split them back the way they were, then what did it do?"
"Exactly what you see." Jazz waved a hand vaguely at the two unconscious forms. "It found some other way to split them. Some traits went to one, some to the other."
"But which went to which?" asked Tucker.
"And why does one look more like Danny and one more like Vlad?" Sam wanted to know.
"That I can't explain. Whatever way the Ghost Catcher chose to split them, the Danny half had more of one quality and Vlad more of the other. Hence, the one that got more traits from Danny looks like Danny, and the one that got more from Vlad looks like Vlad. More or less."
"When Danny went through that thing a few years ago, one half was a hero and the other half was a total slacker," Sam recalled.
"That's good, Sam," Jazz said. "Let's work with that."
"But…" Tucker was putting the pieces together. "If the Ghost Catcher did that again, then…"
"…one of these guys got all the good in Danny and Vlad…" Sam continued.
It was Strike who finished the thought: "…and the other one got all the bad."
Author's Note: Sorry about the short chapter. Now those of you who have read Firefury Amahira's stories understand why I mentioned her at the beginning of this story. I had the idea to separate the hybrid with the Fenton Ghost Catcher at least a year before I read her stories, but I had planned from the beginning that they would not be able to split back into Danny Phantom and Vlad Plasmius the way she does and instead they'd split between good and evil.
Sidenote/Plug: If you haven't read Firefury Amarhira's 4-part Ultimate Enemy saga, you should. They detail the ten years between the explosion at the Nasty Burger and Dan's imprisonment in the Fenton Thermos through the eyes of Dan and Valerie ("Anathema" and "Jeremiad"), the "curing" of Dan using the Ghost Catcher and psychology ("Benediction") and the return of Dan to become the unlikely savior of the timeline he originally screwed up so badly ("Indemnification"), and they are excellent. Firefury obviously put a lot of time, love and work into these stories and it shows. If you like this story, you'll probably like hers too.
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