Are you enjoying the marathon of updates? :D
Some people have asked if the Jasmine from the future has any sort of mental disorder. To be honest, those kinds of subjects are out of my league; any character as deeply disturbed as Jasmine may well match up with a plethora of mental disorders, but I have not specifically written her with any of them in mind at all.
This is also a minimally-edited fanfiction, and I try to maintain a fun, action-packed air instead of being very serious and realistic. Sure, you can probably look at my work and find a ton of serious moments but I always try to lighten the mood up afterwards, and not dwell on it excessively. I think it's important to balance fun, happy moments with sad, serious ones; not only does it keep a reader much more interested, but when there is a genuine sad or serious moment, the mood shifts and it leaves much more of an impact on the reader than if the mood was the same the entire time.
I'll stop trying to educate everyone on how I write now... I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it! :D
"Look, and there's the teacher telling the boy's friend Sam about the CAT test key the boy has stolen." One observer pointed a worried claw at one of the images.
"And that future has spawned another wretched monster; Dan Phantom! He's gone back to ensure his creation is inevitable!" The other observer spoke in a worried tone. "You haven't fixed this, Clockwork. You've made it worse!"
"Patience," Clockwork was still grinning. "We have plenty of time. As for Dan, you may find he's met his match with our friend."
"I hope you know what you're doing."
"Of course I do. You'll see; everything will be okay."
~Line Break~
"You're saying that we could have taken these time medallions off, as soon as we got here, but you didn't tell us?" Jazz fumed. "I meet the one person I absolutely cannot stand, and it turns out to be myself. Oh, the irony."
"I saved our brother, Saxophone." Jasmine retorted, pointing at a still unconscious Danny lying on a stretcher with a blanket covering from his shoulders to below his feet, able to be wheeled around. "I'd be dead meat if it wasn't for me."
"Says the person who caused this entire mess in the first place. You aren't even a tiny bit remorseful!" Jazz's voice raised in a mocking tone. "'What's in it for me? Oh no, my miserable life is in danger! Let's rip my brother in half, create an ultra powerful ghost and assume that it's going to protect me!'" She put her hands on her hips and glowered at her future self.
"Oh, you wouldn't be half as mad at me if you knew what our brother did." Jasmine shrugged and adopted a smug smile.
"He's not your brother!" Jazz snapped back, but then she took a deep breath. "Okay, look. I don't like you any more you like me, but if any of us are going to stop Dan, we need to work together."
"Taking the high road, I see." Jasmine folded her arms. "As much as I hate to admit it, we should conveniently agree to put our massive differences aside for now before Danny conveniently wakes up in about five seconds, for the sake of the plot."
"What plot?" Jazz raised an eyebrow, but before she could receive an answer, Danny gave a large groan.
"Whoa!" Danny opened his eyes. "Where am I? What happened?" He tried to sit up in bed, but yelped in pain. "What's wrong with me... everything... hurts."
"Hey, it's the halfa." Jasmine couldn't resist a snide comment. "Half a boy and nothing else. Not even a brain, I expect."
Jazz ignored her older self, rushing towards her brother. "Danny! You're awake!" She took his hand; it was still a shock to find it felt so warm again. "How do you feel?"
"Like a train hit me in my stomach. I can't sit up." He began to unfold the blanket, and Jazz, somewhat nervously, let him. "Jazz, uh... what's with all the bandages?"
"This may come as a slight shock to you, and I don't want to freak you out too much-" Jazz started.
"But I ripped your ghost half out with these claws." Jasmine chimed in. "They were about as long as you are tall and certainly traumatising enough to give you dissociative amnesia!"
Jazz shot the older version of herself a burning death stare.
"What?" Danny jumped, and then lay back down on his bed. "Ow. Need to stop doing that. So... I'm not a ghost anymore?"
"We've got bigger problems." Jasmine started to speak. "The ghost half that I ripped out of you, I combined with Vlad's ghost half to create the ultimate protector. I may have caused him to develop some... resentful feelings towards me and the world at large..." Jasmine scratched her head. "Maybe having a ghost that I eliminated and locked in a thermos alone for seven years may have something to do with it."
Danny leaned towards Jazz. "And we're working with her because...?"
"I'm helping you get back to becoming a half-ghost before Dan destroys me, your entire world and I." Jasmine pointed out. "Although, technically if we succeed, you'd be a quarter ghost, quarter human. If we're really going to be specific and include Dan in the mix, you're going to be three fourths ghost and one forth human, and-"
"Jazz." Jazz noticed Danny was beginning to pale a little.
"Pronounced Jas-min, Jas-min, you fool!" Jasmine pointed out. "Anyway, do you want the plan first, and we explain the tragic backstory as to how we got into this mess on the drive there, or do we explain the backstory first?"
"Plan." Both Danny and Jazz spoke at the same time.
"Alright, then." Jasmine blinked. "This whole thing started... yesterday, for you two. The day our Danny over here made up his mind to cheat on the CAT test."
"What!" Jazz shot a look at Danny.
"What?" Danny shrugged. "I didn't think it was- wait, this is relevant in some way?"
"Oh, it is, boy." Jasmine folded her hands behind the back. "And you get caught red handed by Lancer. He gathers you and your mother and your father right by the Nasty Burger –full of Nasty Sauce containers that were being slowly heated up because the recent scrap with the Lunch Lady caused a grill to come a little too close – and boom! You guys all get knocked off."
Danny flinched at the harsh language Jasmine conveyed it with.
"I never saw you again, Danny. Not a glimpse until now." She glowered at Jazz's brother. "Not once did you come and say hello from the Ghost Zone, even though you would be perfectly able to! I guess I'll never know why; I remember distinctly thinking that you weren't a jerk back then, but that was before I had to pick up on all your hero duties."
Anyway," She continued. "I move in with Vlad, and I vow that I'll never let anybody important ever get hurt again if I can help it. Vlad wasn't being particularly helpful in this regard, so as soon as I turned the legal age to become a mayor, I sucked him into a thermos and forgot about him for a little. Later I decided to wipe him out completely, but that's a minor detail."
Jazz and Danny exchanged shocked glances.
"As it turns out, keeping people safe is both unpopular and expensive; who would've guessed? But I keep going, dishing out unemployment benefits, making the world safer, bribing a few people, and suddenly, I'm President. Pretty cool, no?"
Jazz rolled her eyes. "Yeah, if not for all the minor details you appear to be not all that concerned about."
"Everyone's entitled to their own opinion." Jazz shrugged. "At least, that's what I learned in office. That's when I had this great idea; the only place safer than being dirt poor or homeless is when you're asleep! It also has the added bonus of, you know, people not telling me what to do when I know best. I seek out this guy in the Ghost Zone; he's this shadowy figure with a scar called Nocturne. We actually had a pretty good partnership going, making these Sweet Dream Caps and giving them out for free."
"It didn't last too long, though." Jasmine remembered. "He didn't like the fact that I was easing them in rather than putting everyone to sleep, instantly. If we did what Nocturne wanted, though, there'd always be those few annoying people who didn't want to be trapped in a state of perpetual dreams. But anyway, what happened at the end of that was a minor detail."
"More minor details, I see." Jazz observed.
"Yes. You think you're quite the observant one, don't you?" Jasmine continued. "So at some point down the line, when pretty much everyone was wearing a Sweet Dream Cap, I flipped the sleep switch and sent them all to dreamland! Unfortunately, there were still some people that didn't wear them, which is what I wanted Dan to help out with. Annoying, but that pretty much brings us up to now, no?"
Danny stared. "You are a terrible person. You know that... right?"
"Eh, I do what I do." Jasmine shrugged. "Should we get on the road?"
"But wait," Jazz frowned. "Weren't you supposed to tell us the plan first?"
Jasmine began to wheel Danny out the front. "Whoops! I must have just felt like inconveniencing you, I guess. I still have the Fenton RV in my garage; we can take that."
A road trip from Wisconsin to Amity Park, Jazz thought, with a sociopathic President-dictator version of herself and her brother, who she recently discovered was about to cheat on a test, somebody that, more than anything else, needed a six-month stay in hospital for the injuries he had sustained, set in a weird sleeping dystopian future.
What could possibly go wrong?
