I completely forgot that I needed to write a summary for this fic until I just went to post the first chapter so uuuuhhhh I might change it if I think of a better one later. But yes! Here's my new multi-chapter, Play Your Part! Currently planned to be 6 chapters, and somewhere around 20.000 words, I'm guessing? Depends on how long the chapters will be, of course.
Anyway, this fic is based on Cordria's A World Tipped on its Head - with permission, of course! This first chapter, especially, draws from it pretty strongly. From what I've seen it seems normal that people just copy-paste the original as their first chapter but tbh I don't like that much because the styles are usually way different. Also I wanted to tweak some details so. I hope that that's not, like, rude or anything!
As always, weekly updates go up every Saturday! I might change it for the last 2 chapters or so because I want to start posting Weirdward on the 31st but I'll see how I solve that when we get there.
Danny rushed down the street, his eyes cast downwards and his breath loud and raspy even to his own ears. The pavement sped by underneath his feet. It wasn't fast enough.
"Stupid alarm clock," he muttered under his breath. Pushed himself just that little quicker. He might not like school, but that didn't mean that he wanted to be late.
"Need a lift?"
The unexpected voice made him flinch, although he did his best to hide it. Instead he glanced over his shoulder, watching Sam melt into view. She was in her ghost form, her hair white and flickering and her eyes a vivid cyan. Bright, glowing, and sparkling with dark humor.
"No," he grunted, trying to ignore his tired legs to pick up the pace even further. Somewhere he was glad that it was Sam who found him and not Tucker. No matter how well meaning the boy was, the last thing Danny wanted was to be picked up and flown to school against his will.
She blinked at him for moment, and in the time it took for her to process this, he got a few dozen feet ahead. Then she nodded and drifted down to the ground.
Bright ectoplasmic energy whirled around her. White hair sunk down under the effect of gravity, dyed black once more. Cyan eyes darkened back to violet, and white clothes shifted back to black.
Sam ran a hand through her hair, straightened her clothes, and then sprinted to catch up with him again.
"You're gonna be late," Danny panted, suppressing a grin as she joined him.
"Are you kidding?" She laughed. "I can outrun you any day of the week."
He rolled his eyes, fighting down the retort that came automatically. If she chose to run with him and be late as well, well… who was he to argue? Instead he sent her a lopsided grin, determined to at least keep up with her.
Skidding to a crashing halt in front of his locker, Danny started whirling the combination lock, rushing to get to class in time. The bell rung, however, signaling that he was officially late for his first class.
He jumped in surprise at the loud noise, losing track of how many turns he had taken to unlock his locker. Sam, who could simply use her intangibility to get her stuff, already had her books.
She drifted back across the hallway, her signature scowl back on her face. She then slumped against the lockers next to him.
"We're late," she said unnecessarily.
"I got that," he answered her through gritted teeth. He tried to focus on unlocking his lock, frustrated that he had had to start over.
"Mr. Fenton! Miss Manson!"
This second unexpected voice had the same effect as the first; Danny started so badly that he almost levitated. He spun around, searching for the origin of the voice.
The hallway appeared empty, however. Completely vacated. Danny knew it wasn't, though. Mr. Lancer, the half-ghost vice-principal, had to be floating invisibly somewhere in it.
He fixed his eyes on the spot he guessed Mr. Lancer would be in. He had no way of knowing, and he really didn't care except that he had gotten caught by his least favorite teacher once again. It would certainly mean another detention.
The overweight teacher appeared mere moments later. Hands propped against his hips and his eyes blazing a bright red. "Late for school again!" he scoffed, pulling out a small notebook to write their names down. "I expected better from you, Miss Manson."
"I felt like running," Sam muttered back. Her arms were still crossed, her body slumped against the lockers.
"Such potential in you." Lancer shook his head, clearly disappointed, as he finished jotting down their names. "It never fails to surprise me that a child from parents like yours doesn't flourish in a modern school setting."
Sam's eyes narrowed, bright cyan sparking in the darker violet. She'd never been particularly fond of authority figures, and Mr. Lancer's tendency to compare her to her parents had put him in her bad graces.
Danny, while he heartily agreed with her, remained quiet. He just watched as the teacher took his eyes off of the book, fixing Sam with a glare of his own. He had no intention to get involved, no matter how much it hurt him in his soul to let the others walk all over him.
He wasn't half-ghost. He didn't stand a chance against them. And so he had no intention to jump into a situation that could get him killed.
Because, while Sam was normally very considerate of the difference in power between them, she was too riled up now. She could kill him and not even realize until it was too late.
In the end, Mr. Lancer broke the staring contest first. His gaze wandered over to Danny. "And you, Mr. Fenton. Although I'm not sure what to expect out of a mere human," he paused for a moment, making it clear how dirty of a word he found it, "I still expect you to be at school on time. Detention for you, and I hope you learn your place in our world someday. Miss Manson, get to class."
The teacher faded back into invisibility, and Danny took a deep steadying breath. Noticed that his hands were clenched into fists, and wondered when that'd happened.
He hated that he got more detentions that anyone else in the school. It was, without a doubt in his mind, because he was the only human in the school. It might be against the law to discriminate based on age, race, gender… but species wasn't on the list.
"Fantastic," he muttered, loosening his fists again. Turned back to his locker, even though he needed a few moments more before attempting to unlock it again.
"Come on, Danny," Sam said after a moment. Her voice was still tense, and cyan still danced in her eyes. "Let's get to class before you get into trouble again."
The emphasis on the 'you' didn't go past him. And while her half-smile and elbow nudge suggested that she had meant it playfully, it just felt like a sour reminder to him.
"What's on the list of torture for today?" he asked, trying to get his mind off of that topic again. There was no point, anyway. There was nothing he could do to change things. Instead he set about to make his third attempt at unlocking his locker.
"Twenty new reasons to stare at the sole human on the planet, either in distraught pity or in discriminatory frustrated anger." Her smile was halfhearted but understanding. "Also known as another biased English lesson on the twenty greatest halfa authors of all time, making doubly sure to ignore and/or taunt the human greats such as Shakespeare, Melville, and Doyle."
Danny sighed gustily as his locker finally opened. "Great."
"You gonna skip again? I'm sure Tucker will record the whole lesson for you to watch later."
"Nah." He shook his head, grabbing the books from his locker. "Ever since Lancer figured out how to duplicate, you can't hide from him. He can be teaching his lesson and hunting you down at the same time. Skulker's got nothing on him. Skipping is just too much work now."
"To class, then?"
He hesitated one last second. Then he slammed his locker shut and nodded. "To class."
"… and that is the main reason why Arthur Prachet far surpassed his human counterpart during that era. Also a major player in the rise of Prachet's work was the fact that Shakespeare's answer to Prachet's novel rhyme-scheme, the insufficiently thought-out and frankly annoying iambic pentameter, never seemed to catch on. The fact that only two of the human's works survive to this day is surely a testament to how dreary and drawn-out the human culture had gotten by that point in history."
Danny tuned out the teacher, only looking away briefly to add another tally to the top of his paper – the forty-eighth of that day. Having finished this task, he fixed his eyes back on the whiteboard behind the teacher. He wouldn't get scolded for not paying attention, anyway; this particular teacher in fact seemed to prefer it if Danny did absolutely nothing.
And, well. Danny was glad for a chance to not write down every detail of the lesson. As a result, his English notebook was full of blank pages, marred only by the tally marks at the top of every page.
When the teacher managed to slip in another slur against the human species, Danny shifted and added another tally to his page. Wondered, quietly, how many more the halfa could fit in a single lesson. So far the record had been fifty-three, but with almost 15 minutes left, it didn't look too good for the record.
He let his eyes drift towards the windows, letting himself sink deeper into his thoughts. 'Really', he thought bitterly, 'everyone in my family is half-ghost. Doesn't that mean that I am one too, kind of? Even if I don't have any powers, that doesn't make me human, right?'
Even in his own mind, the word 'human' had sounded like a dirty insult. The word had been so deeply drenched by negative connotations that, even in the comfort of his own thoughts, it sounded vile.
With a huff, he picked up his stream of thoughts again. 'I mean. If two dogs have a puppy that looks like a kitten, it's still a dog, no matter what it looks like or can do. I just wish…'
A ball of paper hit him in the head, and Danny jerked up. Send a glare at the offending piece of paper, absentmindedly adding another tally to his paper – the teacher had surely gotten in another insult while Danny had been distracted, just because he was in the room.
He unwrinkled the paper, quickly reading the scrawled words – Betcha wish you coulda phased through that – and scowled. He raised his head to fix Dash – the obvious sender – with said scowl, pointless as it was. Without the glowing eyes a halfa would sport, he simply couldn't hope to reach the same level of intimidation.
Still, like it wasn't bad enough that he had to listen to teacher drone on and on about the brilliance of half-ghosts and their powers, his fellow students had to add to whole thing. Like he had chosen to be the only pure human on the whole damn planet!
Dash just grinned back, flashing his eyes a menacing red. He ripped another piece of paper out of his notebook, scribbled a message, and balled it up. Then he lobbed it through the air, forcing Danny to make the difficult choice of what to do with it.
On one hand, he could catch it and find out what Dash had threatened him with. On the other, he could bat it off into a corner and ignore it for forever.
In the end he didn't have to pick. A ball of cyan light intercepted it before it reached him, disintegrating the paper into ashes and dust.
"Hey!" Dash called out. His eyes turned red fully as they darted around, looking for the creator of the ectoblast.
Both Dash and Danny found her simultaneously – not that it was hard. Sam lounged in the back of the class, her eyes still bright and sparks of matching cyan still writhing around her hand.
"You stupid-"
"No energy manipulation in this classroom!" the teacher shouted, interrupting the incoming fight. Then, unbelievably, he followed it up with, "Fenton, detention!"
Danny's head whipped around. "What for?!"
"Stop instigating my class." Lancer flared his eyes red, warning.
"But-"
Danny bit his tongue, cutting off the retort. It made no sense, but he couldn't win this confrontation.
It wasn't fast enough, though. Red energy sparkled around the furious half-ghost teacher, as bright as his eyes.
Having no desire to get into this fight, Danny slunk out of his seat and beat a quick retreat from the room before the situation got worse. Sure, the teacher probably wouldn't actually attack him, but, well. Everyone knew that sometimes it was hard to control ghost powers, especially if you're angry.
And the last thing Danny wanted was to get evaporated over something so stupid. So ordinary.
Still, he couldn't help but feel a brief pang of disappointment. The record for number of human slurs spoken in a single class would remain unbroken.
"Danny, sweetie," his mom said when he finally came home from yet another day in hell – sorry, school – as she pushed her goggles up on her forehead, "it's not your fault. There's nothing wrong with you."
Danny groaned, dropping into a chair in his parents' basement lab. "Tell that to the teachers and the other students."
"You'll get your powers eventually, honey." She smiled at him. "Slow development runs in your father's side of the family, you know. Jack didn't get his powers until he was eleven…"
"I'm fifteen." A scowl found its way to his face once more.
"Which isn't unheard of," she lied smoothly. "You're a Fenton."
Danny rolled his eyes. "What does that have to do with anything?"
"You come from a long line of powerful half-ghosts. Before you know it, you'll wake up and you'll be just like your great-grandfather, the-"
"-great halfa explorer who helped conquer the new world from the human barbarians," Danny finished dully. They had had this exact conversation dozens of times, and he had practically memorized it by now. "Has it ever occurred to you that I might never get ghost powers?"
She blinked at him. "Of course you'll get your powers. You just need to think positively."
"Yeah, sure." He shrugged, figuring he might as well go along. His parents were both stubborn to no end; if they wanted to believe that he would still get ghost powers, there was nothing he could do to change their minds.
"In the meantime, look at this." Her aura brightened slightly as she picked up her latest device. "It's called the 'Fenton Human Hearer'."
It was placed in Danny's hands, a grin on her face. "Jack and I know that there are pockets of humans left in this world. If we ever find one, this will turn their incomprehensible mutterings into something we can understand!"
Danny raised a skeptical eyebrow, eyes on her instead of the invention. "Don't they speak English?"
A whir from the machine. Then, "Don't they speak English? Fear me."
Now he dropped his eyes to the gadget. From the corner of his eyes, he saw his mom do the same. Maddie shrugged, then plucked it out of his hands. "I've never met a true human. I wouldn't know."
"I don't count?" he asked, not sure how he felt about the implication. Was it because he was better than a human, or just because she refused to concern the possibility?
"You'll get your powers," she said with conviction. "You're a halfa – a Fenton."
He nodded quietly, his unasked question thus answered. She still believed that he would get his powers, even if he was years and years past even the latest of late bloomers.
It didn't make sense to him. Why keep denying it? Somehow, against all reason and expectations, he wasn't a half-ghost. He hadn't inherited any of his parents' powers, not even a shred of their ectoplasmic sides.
Consumed by these thoughts, he silently watched his mom tidy her side of the lab. His parents were constantly working on all kinds of inventions, and thus new pieces of technology appeared and disappeared on a daily basis in the cramped basement. Most remained unpopular, however; his parents' obsession with humans made their inventions largely useless to the rest of their half-ghost society.
Maddie paused in her work, picking up a small, strange-looking necklace. She studied it for a moment, a crease in her brow. "Where did…" She shook her head. "I wish Jack would tell me when he gets new things. Danny, can you put this on Jack's workbench for me?"
Nodding, he slipped out the chair again. Took the necklace from her hands, turning to head towards the messier side of the lab.
But, just as her fingers slipped from the chain, a surge of energy flooded throughout the lab. It was powerful enough for even Danny to feel it, the hum of pure power in the air.
He saw his mom twist around, her eyes widening in surprise and fear, glowing vivid chartreuse. Similarly colored ectoplasm formed around her hands, as if to fight this unseen enemy.
It was the last thing Danny saw before blindingly white light wrapped around him. He screamed in terror, feeling the energy ripping at his body, and could do nothing but clutch the strange necklace to his chest.
Then, blissfully, he passed out.
Bit of a slow start, but it's just kinda introducing the setting and the AU. Next chapter things start really kicking off, and I'm excited for it!
Next week: Chapter 2 - Life's Not Making Sense