Summary: Two years ago, Danny Phantom disappeared. Now ghost hunters Tucker Foley and Sam Manson are being taunted by a mysterious opponent...
Based on a challenge from SNAFU The Great;
"Two On Two:This one is simple enough. Named after the cutscene in Resident Evil 5 in which Al Wesker and Evil Jill beat down Chris and Sheva inside the Monarch Room.
The character doing Wesker's role must use the following dialogue: 'You haven't changed,' the family reunion line, 'So slow to catch on,' and of course, the 'two on two' line. The character doing Jill's role has to be masked or wearing a cloak of some kind when the big reveal is made. You can mix it up, use good characters for the evil roles and vice-versa."
Disclaimer: "Danny Phantom" and all associated characters and situations are the property of Butch Hartman and Nickelodeon, used for entertainment purposes without permission or intent to profit. Yeah, you've read it before.
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"Double Threat"
By J.T. Magnus, 'Turbo'
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It had been two years since Daniel 'Danny Phantom' Fenton had disappeared. Two years since the people of Amity Park had been left to fend for themselves against the ghosts that used their town as a throughway between the Ghost Zone and the Mortal Realm. Two years since the line had been crossed one time too many by those who refused to see the difference between enemies and allies. Two years that had felt very long indeed, not just for those who had crossed the line, but for those who had failed to hold that line. Two years for the mill of the gods to grind...
It was ironic, technology created originally by one of their worst enemies was the only thing that allowed them to fight all of their other enemies, and those enemies were many. It seemed like not a day went by without some new - or old - ghost crossing over and terrorizing the city. Today, it had ended up with them chasing a cloaked and hooded figure throughout all the local landmarks; Casper High, the Nasty Burger, the ruins that were once FentonWorks, only able to keep pace by using hoverboards like that once used by the 'Red Hunter' before Valerie had moved away, a hoverboard that had been created by Vlad Masters, also known as Vlad Plasmus, when he had used the 'Red Hunter' as a catspaw against Danny Phantom. It didn't help that every time they seemed to have caught up with their quarry, it was only for long enough for the mysterious figure to beat them senseless before it was gone again and once more taunting them to come after it, all without ever saying a word. They had finally caught up with it again in a location that brought back memories, the same venue where almost seven years ago Danny Phantom and the ghost rocker Ember had faced off in their first major confrontation, back when friends were still friends and people still supported Phantom, before he had revealed his identity in trying to stop Plasmus' 'Disasteroid' and everyone had turned against him.
"Tucker, you go to the left; I'll come around from the right," Sam Manson shouted at her partner.
"Right!" Tucker Foley shouted back.
"No, you go left!" Sam repeated in frustration, causing Tucker to roll his eyes.
"Okay, then!" Tucker answered in annoyance. He really couldn't believe anyone thought people were so stupid they couldn't answer 'right' and not mean the direction, but it didn't seem like Sam was trying to be comedic. Sometimes it was like she forgot they were supposed to be equal partners and just treated him like a sidekick.
With a faint growl of frustration, Tucker leaned to the left, directing his hoverboard that way as Sam went the opposite path. Skimming over the tops of the seats, they flew towards the stage intending to flank their target in a pincer and finally catch them. It was making Tucker slightly nervous, however, that the hooded figure was calmly standing on the stage as though they aren't even there. Even when the two hunters stepped off of their hoverboards onto the stage itself, one on either side of the figure, it didn't react.
"Alright, whoever you are," Sam spat out harshly, "Time to be a good little ghost and come out and get in the thermos!"
Instead of a vocal reply, the figure responded with action; before either of the hunters knew what had happened, the figure had moved from the middle of the stage to where Tucker was, standing right in front of him. Tucker hadn't even had time to react before a palm strike to his chest caused him to stagger backwards, only to be hit again while still unbalanced, this time by a blast of ecto-energy. The combined force of the two attacks sent Tucker flying backwards into a small wall at the side of the stage. The impact had been high enough that he actually slid down the wall until his feet touched the floor again and he groggily stepped away from the wall, reaching for his Fenton Thermos as best as he could. He wasn't fast enough and the motion had left him out of a defensive position, leaving him open for the figure to hit him with a pair of quick punches to the stomach, followed by a hook to the jaw before grabbing Tucker's head and bringing it down to smash the hunter's face into his knee. Almost mercifully, unconsciousness took Tucker as the figure let him drop sideways to the ground, his nose broken and bleeding.
"Tucker!" Sam shouted in alarm.
The red tide of anger, mixed with a touch of fear both for her friend and for herself, overwhelmed any sense of reason which Sam had possessed, causing her to dismount one of the mounted weapons from her hoverboard. The figure turned towards her and, although any expression was hidden by its hood, she was almost certain that it was smirking. With a furious roar, she pulled the trigger and began firing, the automatic firing of the weapon sending bolt after bolt of energy towards the figure. Whether it was shooting in anger or that the hooded figure had some form of ghostly power that was letting it avoid the shots, Sam couldn't know, but none of her fire was touching it. Then it suddenly burst into motion, moving towards her at a dead-out sprint, dodging the bolts of energy that were still being fired as though they weren't even moving. The distance between them closed with every second and Sam could see the warning lights on her weapon start to flash as it began to overheat. By that time, it was too late as the robed figure lept into the air and performed a somersault - somehow managing for their hood to never come free in the motion - to carry them the rest of the way toward Sam's position. Instinctively, the ghost hunter brought her weapon up crossways in a defensive stance; but, that was exactly what the figure was hoping for her to do and they lashed out with their foot to land a falling axe-kick that smashed the blaster in two before lowering their foot to the floor and shifting into a stance with better footing.
Looking down at the broken remains of her weapon, Sam's eyes widened in momentary shock that led to a growl of frustration as she through the pieces away. Growling deeper, she launched a strong right hook at her opponent that was deflected by a rising forearm block. A second punch, this time a left jab, met with a second block from her opponent's other forearm; while she wasn't making it through to their covered face as she wanted, Sam was able to take satisfaction in that each punch drove her opponent back a step simply from the force behind it. With a smirk, Sam drew her right arm all the way back before launching it forward in a haymaker punch intended to break through their defences and knock her opponent to the floor there and then. Raising both arms in an X-block, the robed figure caught the punch where their arms crossed; but, what took Sam by surprise was that this time, there was no step back, the figure stood their ground. While Sam was still staring at the point of impact, the robed figure counterattacked, bringing up his foot and kicking her straight in the stomach with the bottom of it, leaving her to be the one sent stumbling backwards.
Now the robed figure went back on the attack; launching a series of quick jabs that Sam avoided before she found herself ducking under an attempted lariat. Suddenly between the figure and the fallen Tucker, Sam felt a moment of indecision of whether she should try to keep fighting or break to check on her friend. The urge to take advantage of the opening provided by being behind her opponent overwhelmed her, though, and she drew up her leg and attempted to launch a side-kick towards the robed figure's shoulder-blades. In her moment of indecision, however, her opponent had begun to turn around and in doing so found himself in position to be able to catch Sam's leg in mid-kick. The ghost-hunter jerked her leg a couple of times, trying to break free from her opponent's grip, but to no avail. Using the momentum of Sam's last escape attempt, her opponent started to turn, pulling her along and lifting her into the air as they started to spin around. After a couple rotations, the robed figure released her and let Sam go flying through the air. Practice, almost too much of it, in taking hits and being knocked down over the last two years allowed Sam to twist slightly as she tumbled through the air so that when she landed next to where Tucker had fallen, she did so in a crouch instead of a crumpled heap. Wincing from the impact knocking the air out of her lungs, Sam forced herself to her feet and prepared to launch another assault on her opponent. What she wasn't prepared for was the blast of ecto-energy that came out of the shadows behind her, towards the side of the stage, that knocked her back down to her knees.
Then came the clapping, slow and steady clapping, as a female figure with cyan-blue hair clad in black stepped out of the shadows with a guitar slung over their back to walk past Sam and Tucker without even a glance at them until she was standing next to the robed figure. Fate, it seemed, had a sense of irony since, in the very place where Sam, Tucker and Danny had first fought her years ago, Ember McLain was making another appearance. The clapping stopped as Ember placed a hand on the robed figure's shoulder and, though Sam couldn't figure out how she did it without disturbing the hood, leaned in and kissed him - Sam could only assume on the cheek from the angle it was happening. Then Ember pulled away and, without moving her hand from the figure's - Sam now had to assume that it was Ember's latest partner in crime - shoulder, turned to regard Sam and Tucker with a cold chuckle.
Through the pain she was feeling after the ecto-energy blast to the back, Sam looked up and glared at Ember; "You..." The venom in her voice was almost physically present as she continued, "Shouldn't you be in a discount bin somewhere, McLain?"
"What's the matter, Samantha?" Ember taunted, "Don't like my comeback tour?"
The ghostly rock star using her full name was just a cruel mix of metaphorically kicking her while she was literally down as far as Sam was concerned, "I'll like it better when you're off the charts permanently!"
"Oo, taking one-liner lessons from the dipstick?" Ember took her hand off her partner's shoulder and pressed a finger to her lips as if in mocking thought before swiping it through the air to point at the pair of ghost hunters, "Oh, wait, that's right, you and your cesspool of a town ran him off, didn't you?"
"That was Plasmus' fault!" Sam snapped, "He set people up to think Danny was a bad guy when they discovered who he was!"
"But he didn't have to work that hard at it, now did he?" Ember countered. "It was all there already, just waiting on a reason."
"What do you know?" Sam spat, "You're too busy trying to mind control people to care about what they really think or feel!"
"Says the queen of imposing her views on everyone else. Oh, I've heard about the high school and 'Ultrarecyclovegetanianism'... from a couple people, actually," the ghostly rock star retorted smugly. "Of course, what do you care what they wanted, you knew better and it was for their own good, wasn't it? You know the difference between you and me, don't you? I've never tried to hide the fact that I'm manipulative and mind controlling, hell, I revel in it! I can make some stodgey old tweed-wearer throw out his Mozart and start listening to me rock and I don't feel bad when I do it, either. But unlike you, whatever I do to other people, I still know exactly who and what I am, I don't lie to myself."
Knowing she was outnumbered, and quite possibly outmatched as well - possibly even verbally as well as in combat ability, Sam reached out and gave Tucker's shoulder a quick, hard shove, "Tucker! Wake up!"
Fortunately for the goth, the force of the shove was enough to jar the geek awake.
"Ugh, what did I miss?" Tucker asked, wiping the blood from the lower half of his face as best as he could, then his eyes caught the new arrival, "Ember?"
"Yeah, Tucker," Sam growled, "Ms. Mind Control, Ember 'Rock Star' McLain herself. We should have known considering where her new friend actually led us. It was an ambush; not that either of them probably know anything about how to do a fair fight..."
"Shouldn't she..." Tucker winced slightly, his ribs hurting, as he pulled himself up to his knees, "...be failing to get a record deal somewhere?"
"If it isn't the tone-deaf geek, too," Ember chuckled coldly. "Well, isn't this one big family reunion. I would expect you to be happier to see us."
Sam looked at her with suspicion, "Us?"
"So slow to catch on..." Ember shook her head mockingly, "And after all the trouble we went to arrange everything too."
For the first time that night, the robed figure made a sound; a cold, hard and humorless chuckle came from the shadows that cloaked their identity.
"Don't you agree, Phantom?" Ember asked in an overly-innocent tone.
Sam and Tucker both inhaled sharply at the name that Ember used, but that breath was almost immediately knocked out of them when the robed figure removed their robe and let it drop to the ground. For the first time in two years, they laid eyes on their missing friend... the same person who had led them a chase across the city before beating them mercilessly over the last few minutes. It was almost too much for them to take in and understand. But there he was, standing there, wearing a black jumpsuit similar to the one he'd worn before but for the lack of white details - replaced with dark grey - and the absence of the 'DP' logo that the old one had on it. The biggest change over the last two years, however, now that the hood was gone and they could see it, was that the stark white hair of Danny's ghost form had grown long and spiky, almost like a character from a video game would have, with bangs hanging down over his eyes, barely covering them, and those were the other major change; instead of glowing the familar green that they had two years before, Danny's eyes were now glowing with the same blue ecto-energy as Ember's own.
"Oh, and Samantha, about that 'fair fight' thing you mentioned? I think the odds are fair," Ember informed them, "Two... on two."
"Danny!" Exactly what Tucker was trying to achieve by calling out his name, convincing Danny to be on their side, begging for mercy or something else, wasn't exactly clear.
"Like she said," Phantom responded, cold disdain in his expression, "'Two... on two'."
"Snap out of it, Danny," Tucker kept trying to reach his old friend. "She's got you under some kind of mind control!"
"You don't get it, do you? I'm not under anyone's control but my own," Phantom shook his head at them disappointedly, "Heroes last only as long as public opinion, I'm done playing one, playing by everyone else's rules. What did it get me? Spit in the face and a knife in the back, ran out of town by my own parents. Do you know I actually laughed when I heard that Technus destroyed FentonWorks with their own technology? All their precious ghost-hunting devices turned against them, I sometimes wish I could have seen it."
"They're your parents, Danny!" Sam exclaimed in shock and horror.
"Really? Because they seemed to forget that the moment they learned I was the 'ghost-child'!"
The girl was finding it hard to believe just how far her friend had gone to the proverbial 'dark side', "They just didn't understand!"
Ember wrinkled her nose up in mock-amusement, "You haven't changed."
"No," Phantom agreed, "She hasn't; still making excuses for everyone, still acting like people have some kind of 'better nature'. But I've seen people's true nature - it's to hate, deceive and betray, and if that's what it means to be human, well... then I'm glad I'm a ghost!"
Sam's face paled, "You don't mean that, Danny..."
Phantom raised his hand, now glowing with blue ecto-energy, so that the pair of ghost-hunters could clearly see it, "My name... is Phantom..."
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Author's Note; As a minor glimpse into the creative process, I'd just like to note that sometimes fight sequences are the hardest thing to write because of the choreography involved in the movements of the characters around their environment...
