For robotbeowulf's prompt: "How does being constantly exposed to high amounts of ectoplasm affect the citizens of Amity Park?"
I do so dearly love AUs where people other than Danny and/or Vlad get ghost powers, they're so much fun to play with, haha.
Danny shrugged, shifting his backpack to lie a little more comfortably on his shoulders, and pretended very hard to be a regular student. It wasn't easy, but it hadn't been easy for the last two years. The constant secret-keeping from everyone was wearing on him.
Not to mention the constant ghost attacks, of course. He was pretty sure all of Amity Park was covered in a thick film of ectoplasm by now, considering how much of it he and the other ghosts spilled and fired during the almost-constant battles. Sure, his parents said that the stuff evaporated and then returned to the Ghost Zone, but his parents also said that humans couldn't have ghost powers, and Danny was the (mostly) living proof that that wasn't true, either.
He was jerked from his thoughts—literally—by a fist, grabbing him by the shirt and slamming him against the lockers he had been walking by.
"Hi, Dash," Danny muttered, trying to hide away his weariness with apathy. "Good morning to you too."
"Fentonia," Dash growled back, leaning in close to Danny's face. A little too close, thank you, ever heard of personal space? "Finally."
Danny bit back the automatic reply—aw, were you waiting for me?—and settled for grimacing at Dash.
Not that that went over well, of course, because Dash's other hand found its way to Danny's shirt as well. With Danny well in his grasp, Dash lifted him, slamming him against the lockers again, this time with his feet off of the ground—no easy way of getting out. Not without using his powers, at least.
"What's wrong, Fenturd?" Dash asked, pressing Danny against the lockers even harder. "Ghost got your tongue?"
Ha ha, how creative. How funny. Danny was sure he'd come up with funnier jokes in his sleep. "Fuck off," he grunted at Dash as his back was slammed against the hard metal behind him again.
"Ooh, he's got bite today." Dash leaned back a bit, a vicious grin on his face, then crowded Danny against the lockers again. "Oh, no, never mind. Looks like he's all bark."
Danny snarled back at Dash before he'd really thought about it—before he could stop himself, really. It wasn't even words, really, just an animalistic snarl and the pulse of his core that meant his eyes were glowing.
Oh, fuck. And Dash was way too close to miss that.
"Hey, there you go!" Dash… cheered? The fists clenched in Danny's shirt released, and his feet thumped down on the ground before he'd really caught on to what was happening. Dash was already turning away from him, nudging Kwan. "See, I told you Fenton could do it too!"
That… was not the reaction he'd expected to get to ghostly glowing eyes. What the fuck?
Kwan laughed audibly, and Danny wrenched his eyes away from Dash and towards the other boy. The… the laughing, visibly cheery boy.
Seriously. What was going on?
"So, uh… No bullying anymore today?" Danny asked, and then felt like he could kick himself. Absolute moron. Who asks that sort of thing?
Dash snorted, apparently amused (amused?) by Danny's idiotic question, and waved a dismissive hand. "What's the point? I got what I was after."
Okay? Good? That explained absolutely nothing. If anything, Danny felt even more confused. Had Dash seriously been bullying him trying to get him to glow eyes his? To snarl at him?
What?
Apparently he vocalized that last thought, because Kwan's eyes turned back to him, a hesitant grin on his face.
And then Kwan's eyes flashed a bright, glowing, cyan.
Danny, still leaning against the lockers he'd been pressed to, froze up automatically. He knew what that meant. Had spent enough time combing through his parents' research—and with his own experience—to know that briefly glowing eyes couldn't be caused by ordinary ghostly causes. An overshadowing ghost altered the eye-color of their host, but that was constant.
And, if there had been a ghost, Danny would've felt them. He'd grown more than strong enough to sense ghosts even if they were hidden in a host.
"He's had them for a while." Dash spoke casually, like this wasn't a big fucking deal. "We couldn't find anybody else with that brand of ecto-contamination, y'know, so Kwan was feeling super down about that."
"Dash," Kwan groaned, sounding put-upon. As carefully as Danny listened, the only thing he could hear was the undercurrent of care Kwan held for Dash. For his friend.
"Shut up, man." Dash nudged his friend, then picked up his explanation that didn't explain anything. "See, but I knew I had seen you do them too. The glowy eyes, I mean." Dash underlined the latter with a vague gesture at his own eyes. "So I just had to push you into doing them while Kwan could see, to prove that he wasn't the only one."
"Uh." Danny blinked at them, feeling like he missed everything Dash had said after the words "ecto-contamination". What?
No, seriously, he knew he'd uttered that word a lot these past five minutes—even if only in his head—but what?
"You had to get him angry, though," Kwan muttered, bumping shoulders with Dash. "You know that's not the only way to make them glow."
"Yeah, but it was the easiest to push him into," Dash easily admitted.
And then, while Danny was still reeling, feeling like he'd missed at least seven steps in this conversation, Kwan stepped in closer and shot him a bright smile. "Thanks, Fenton. I feel a ton better."
"Uh, yeah." Danny blinked, watching the two of them wander off like nothing happened. "You're welcome?"
"Man, what was all of that?" he muttered to himself, staring at the empty hallway for a moment before pushing himself away from the lockers. He desperately needed to talk to Sam and Tucker, see if they had any idea what all of that was about.
Somewhere, he kind of wished that Jazz was still in Amity. She would definitely know what the hell all of that was all about.
Seriously. Dash had just casually muttered the words ecto-contamination, and then suggested that it was common enough for there to be accepted variants of it.
How had Danny missed all of that?
"There's Val," Sam whispered, leaning in closer. Danny followed her gaze and, indeed, there was the girl they'd been looking for all morning.
Well, it figured that they wouldn't manage to pin her down until lunch, but it was frustrating nonetheless. Sam and Tucker hadn't known what the stuff with Dash and Kwan had been about, either, so they had decided to ask the only person they could reasonably ask: Valerie Gray.
But that, in turn, meant that they had to just sit on the knowledge until lunch.
At least she had picked a distant enough seat that they could talk in private. Small blessings.
"Let's hope she actually knows what's going on," Tucker muttered, before nudging Danny forward. "You go first, dude."
So quick to sacrifice him to the ghost huntress. Danny shook his head but walked over, slipping into the seat opposite of Valerie. "Hey, Val."
"Danny," she greeted him back, raising an eyebrow at Sam and Tucker, who sat down on either side of him. "Well, this feels like an interrogation all of a sudden."
He shot Sam a meaningful glance, but she just grinned back, pushing herself to sit more squarely on the seat. Rude.
"Danny had a weird interaction with Dash and Kwan this morning," Tucker started explaining, breaking the tension before it could really go anywhere. "We were hoping you could offer… I dunno, some clarification, since you know them better than we do."
She snorted, leaning back slightly. "They're Dash and Kwan. Every interaction with them is weird."
"Well, yeah, but they were…" Danny paused, briefly hesitant to mention it—what would Valerie think of ghost-powered humans?—before powering through. "They were talking about ecto-contamination, and known variants of it."
The look they got in response was flat. Flat, and clearly confused.
After a long and exceedingly awkward moment of silence, Valerie cleared her throat and asked, clearly hesitant, "None of you noticed?"
"Noticed what?" Tucker frowned, glancing between the three of them and Valerie.
"That pretty much everyone in Amity Park has ghost-like traits?" She raised a questioning eyebrow at them. "Everyone, but especially the kids here at Casper High, has ecto-contamination so bad that we're all, well. Becoming a little ghost-like." She paused, shook her head, then asked. "None of you seriously noticed?"
Danny drew back, considering his words, but before he could really think about it, Sam had already flapped a dismissive hand. "The three of us spend so much time in and around Fentonworks that we're already contaminated to hell and back," she dryly explained. "And honestly, Valerie, how much time do we really spend with anyone outside our direct circle?"
"Fair enough," Valerie allowed with a shrug. "Right, so, it mostly seems to be caused by the Portal and the constant ghost attacks. I mean, obviously, right?"
"Right," Danny agreed, ignoring the way his stomach was turning. He'd tried so hard to keep everyone safe, but had the presence of ghosts been endangering them all along? Had the spilled ectoplasm really affected people, and so badly too?
"Now, what we started noticing pretty early on is that people generally only display a single ghost power, once they become contaminated enough to actually have a discernible ghost power. Some people consider them distinct variants: people with invisibility, with intangibility, flight, etcetera."
Sam and Tucker both hummed, thoughtfully. Valerie raised her other eyebrow at that, then shook her head and continued on.
"Generally people don't get contaminated enough to display more than those basic powers, but exceptions exist, I guess. And your contamination is probably way worse than anyone else's, except maybe actual ghost hunters like the Fentons." She made a face. "And that's assuming their jumpsuits don't protect them, which I doubt."
"I'm pretty sure they do," Danny mumbled, trying to inconspicuously watch both of his best friends from the corner of his eyes. The more Valerie explained about the ecto-contamination that apparently haunted all of Amity Park, the more their expressions twisted into something they usually called "suddenly understanding weird shit that had been happening".
It was, unfortunately, a somewhat common expression these days. What with ghosts becoming a common thing, and all that.
"I… Some of the plants in my greenhouse grow unusually well whenever I'm near. Some even seem to react to my presence…" Sam admitted, her voice quiet, uncharacteristically reluctant. After a moment of hesitation, she tacked on, "And sometimes, when I really really don't want to deal with my parents, they just… overlook me, like I'm not there at all."
Like she was invisible, they all heard, despite the fact that Sam didn't say the words.
Seemingly encouraged by Sam's admission, Tucker added on, "I rarely, if ever, charge my tech. Their batteries just don't seem to empty as long as I have them on me. And sometimes when I'm digging into code, it feels like… like I can alter it directly, like I'm tapping into some inner world that doesn't—shouldn't—exist." Just like Sam, Tucker also paused for a moment. "When I'm running from a ghost or whatever, sometimes I run into an alley that I know has a dead end and never hit the wall."
Like he was just phasing through it, going intangible before he hit it.
Danny swallowed through the clog he suddenly found in his throat, watching Valerie turn a meaningful look to him. She wanted him to tell her about his— his ghost powers. But he couldn't just pretend all of his powers came from the contamination of living at Fentonworks, could he?
And he definitely couldn't pick certain powers as acceptable and others as not.
"I… I guess weird shit has happened to me too, yeah," he finally admitted, cautiously, hoping she guessed the source of his reluctance wrong. "But I never really thought about it, to be honest. Anything I could blame the ecto-contamination for could just as easily be caused by actual ghosts." And in a way it was, of course. Anything caused by his ecto-contamination was caused by an actual ghost: Phantom.
"But," he tacked on, knowing Valerie wouldn't just let that lie. She was far too stubborn not to investigate. "Dash and Kwan apparently saw me with glowing eyes?"
Valerie hummed, then nodded. "That makes sense, I guess. I know Kwan has the glowing eyes variant as well, so that would explain why they've been targeting you."
"It's been around that long?" Sam asked, leaning forward, clearly curious despite herself. "I figured it would've taken longer than that to show up."
"Oh, no, that was long after I got kicked out of the group," Valerie said dismissively. "But Kwan saw me with a ghost scanner one day, and he begged me to scan him. I guess he was seriously worried that he had been overshadowed, even if overshadowing doesn't work like that."
"I don't think he got rid of that fear, to be honest." Danny shrugged, uneasy. "At least, he seemed pretty cheered-up when I, uh, glowed my eyes at him and Dash."
Tucker snorted, and Danny could see Sam crack a grin as well, probably at his word choice. Well, fuck them. What did you call it, if not "glowing your eyes at them"?
"Anyway, I can't help but notice that we all told you, but you haven't said a word about what you can do," Sam prodded, nudging Valerie. "Come on, Val."
"Yeah, that does seem a little unfair." Tucker leaned forward as well, an expression of genuine curiosity on his face.
And, honestly? Danny kind of wanted to know as well. Her ghost hunting suit probably hadn't protected her, and her new suit definitely didn't. If anything, the Technus-made suit probably had just worsened it.
"I…" Valerie visibly hesitated, then gave in. "I can fly, a little. It's not really all that great, but at least I won't break anything if I ever fall out of a tree or something."
She said it with a light tone, like it was just a casual joke. All Danny could think of, however, was all the times he'd seen Valerie fall off of her hoverboard, especially at the start.
He carefully does not wince.
"That's pretty neat," he forced himself to say instead. "Less lame than glowing eyes, at least."
Valerie grinned back at him, but before she could say anything the bell rung.
"Guess we'd better head to class," Sam said with a grunt, pushing herself off of the bench.
"Yeah." Tucker got up as well, then nodded at Valerie. "Thanks for the explanation, Valerie."
Danny followed suit, shooting her a smile. "Same. Thanks, Val."
She had given him a lot to think about.