Chapter Trigger Warning: Ghost Hunger (nothing graphic, but it's discussed), Mind Control, Possession, Attempted Murder, Parasites.
Chapter 2_ Well, that escalated quickly
The encounters after finally accessing his ghost persona became… bizarre, to say the least.
First came the blob ghosts. Sidney called them harmless puppies, they just floated around the Infinity Realm and could be either pets or food, depending on each ghost Core's need of ectoplasm.
Apparently, some ghosts (like blobs and plants) could sorely feed on ambient ectoplasm to survive; more "complex" specters had to add something more solid, like anything grown on ghost plants and some blobs (which were the equivalent of cattle in the Infinity Realms since they didn't have Cores); then there were some entities that required a special diet… But those were extreme cases and it was better to avoid them at all costs.
(Sidney's favorite example of the last case was Pariah Dark, former King of Ghosts, whose diet was made exclusively by the flesh and cores of his enemies and sometimes his subjects.
Whatever remained of such ghosts were skeletons, just puppet-husk, that feed the ranks of the king's undying army.
Fortunately the regent had been sealed into his Lair, where no one was foolish enough to go.)
Then the Ectopusses arrived, behaving like ectoplasmic racoons with the towns trash. It took a while for Danny to understand how to deal with them, but after asking hypothetical questions to his parents here and there and tinkering with one of their Thermos (which they had supplied him), he just went Ghostbusters on them and stuffed the entities inside of it when he crossed path with them.
Apparently that had been the right thing to do, because when he met for the first time the ghost of a Lunch Lady, he managed to offer a trade accord with her: he would give her every aggressive/non-sapient/feral ectoplasmic animal he captured and in exchange she would give him receipts for how to implement into his "human food" the raw ectoplasm that the artificial portal filtered from the Infinite Realms.
(Danny felt still too squeamish about eating blobs, since they were too cute, and knowing a way to avoid making the food come back to life would have been nice.)
In an attempt to avoid contaminating the house food, Danny took up cooking into the basement lab when his parents and Jazz were out, both for concern about their health and for safety hazard, since he was technically experimenting with a volatile substance.
This decision was added to the lucky streak of coincidences, because Danny was there when Nicholai Technus, the ghost of a senile scientist, burst out from the Portal he had left open to gather a sample of unfiltered ectoplasm. After asking what his intentions were (Jazz and his mother had driven into his brain the need to first assess the threat/unknown variable if not immediately dangerous before jumping to conclusions), the teen managed to channel the other's obsession into something not-world-domination oriented… Like tinkering with the failed experiments and electrical junk that were in his parents' waste basket.
(He was also able to redirect the ghost back into the portal and to his own Lair, "to let him experiment undisturbed", or something. It had surprisingly worked.)
However, since life is a constant balance of things, if he was lucky on the ghost-related half of him, the human-half had started to… get side-tracked.
After the Retaliation Skeleton Prank (where at the end every victim had participated to hide the proofs in one of the Mansons' vans after the bullies had fled), Danny had started to concentrate more on controlling his powers to avoid them slipping into his everyday-life and cooking his Ecto-food (since it required a long preparation) than to spend time with Sam and Tuck or his family.
He still played online at DOOM and did group researches for school with them, but since he was busier than usual, his free time was getting limited. The absence hadn't been heavy enough to become an issue (so far), but the duo had started to notice, as had done his family.
Jazz hadn't confronted him yet, but her inquiring glances had become more frequent when he refrained from sharing his (ecto)food with her when there were only the two of them at dinner. (He only ate it every other day per the Lunch Lady diet suggestion since his body wasn't still used to consuming and processing ectoplasm. It would have to increase his intake in few weeks, though.)
Then the Ember and Desiree incidents happened.
The fight against the singer served as his official debut to the public attention, since before then he had tried to go vigilante and stick to the shadows while playing ghost-animal control.
Everyone in the school seemed to go out of their mind with her songs, sans Danny and Mr. Lancer. Even Sam wasn't immune, but denied it every time she got caught humming "RemEmber" absentmindedly.
(The only odd thing was that, while everyone else had this… maniacal light in their eyes while singing and talking about her, Jazz seemed the only one genuinely interested in the rockstar's works. Though, Danny wasn't entirely surprised, since she was a closet pop-rock fan.
And Ember's music sounded somewhat familiar?)
The fangirling and fanboying went on for a week (which Danny didn't find overly weird, since once Jazz had made an essay about teenage trends that she and Sam had made him read and this behavior fit her analysis) before her first concert was announced to be set in Amity Park.
His friends and sister dragged him with them, sneaking out from the lockdown that the Fentons had imposed on them in fear that this new hype was just the influence of a ghost.
This Ember-chick had never been seen before and her credentials were non-existent, never mind the permits for a worldwide broadcast and the use of Amity soil.
Once the five arrived, the latest theory of Danny's parents proved to be true (it was a first among the ones they had fed him about ghosts over the past few weeks) because his Ghost Sense went off, putting him immediately on edge.
It was true that ghosts weren't inherently malicious, but if this was a feral kind, it would be dangerous with all this assembly.
Thus, Danny snuck away from the others using the crowds as an excuse and turned invisible in the chaos, slipping away to transform unnoticed.
Still invisible, he flew up as Phantom and surveyed the situation, trying to poke his Ghost Sense into behaving as a true sensor (like he had been practicing with Sidney). It took a few tries, but a faint ping answer in the zone of the stage.
Worried for the safety of the performers and the technicians, Phantom zoomed to check and came just in time for a revelation: Ember was a ghost and the concert was a means to obtain absolute power and never be forgotten again through mind-control.
The vigilante couldn't let that happen.
There were two solutions though: either Thermos her while she still hadn't noticed him or try to reason (and then battle when things went south). However, before he could come to a decision, the chance was swept away when the rockstar seemed to notice that something was off and with some kind of sound power found him spying.
Having lost the element of surprise, Phantom dropped the invisibility and at least tried to reason with the girl with the flaming blue hair, but being both a literal hothead and half-drunk with power from the week-long worship, she just lashed out, so he began brawling with her in the air.
She was powerful but sloppy, so the vigilante managed to dodge most of the blows and respond with his own, however the few hits that caught him had been hard and painful. The worst thing was that the dueling duo had ended flying above the crowd and they were chanting Ember's name, making her aura brighter and her hair change from a mere torch to Gondor's Beacons.
This was bad, if he didn't stop the audience, the rockstar would become practically invincible!
The teen realized that he could at least reduce the people witnessing the concert by destroying the cameras. The world would be disappointed by ending of the transmission and that would leave only the Amity Parkers present.
So, he "accidentally" blew up every camera with some "stray" shorts and slowly Ember's energy dwindled.
One last effort…!
Suddenly the most horrible sound known to humankind cut through the air, forcing both ghosts to cover their ears (along with the humans). But Danny was familiar with that sound. He had grown up with it.
Thus, even if he was suffering from psychic damages, the vigilante managed to Thermos the singer… Then zoom to the stage and grab by the scruff of his t-shirt one Tucker Foley to distance him as far as possible from the microphone.
The nerd yelped in fright, then in protest, but both were drowned by the crowd cheering and hollering for Phantom for saving their ears from a doom worse than death.
Uncertain, Phantom waved at them, then found his sister and his other friend to drop off Tucker.
He managed a clumsy "Thank you citizen!" before flying off and turning invisible to hide and de-transform.
Then Danny snuck back with the group as they exited from the gate of the concert and claimed to have been lost in the crowd the whole time, but he had seen Tucker on stage and demanded to know why he had been there.
The Techno-Geek smugly strutted about trying to impress Ember with his singing talent, so he had smuggled himself to the backstage and overheard the white haired flying kid argue with her. Once he had realized that the rockstar had been trying to brainwash the world, Tuck had decided to intervene and be the one to charm the crowds.
The teens praised the tone-deaf boy, but not without teasing him at the same time while they walked home.
They got in trouble with the Fentons, but once they mentioned the two ghosts the parents lit up in Glee and sprinted to a research frenzy, but not forgetting to ground their offspring.
Desiree's encounter… hadn't been so smooth.
After the first granted wish that summoned her at the bazaar, more and more followed with near disastrous consequences: at least three different kind of safety appliances attempted to murder in cold blood Mr. Lancer (one of those being the fire emergency tube that wanted to strangle the man like a boa constrictor).
(After said third time Phantom had to beg his favorite teacher to take a sick day because he didn't want the man to join him on the other side permanently. Apparently the toxic green kitty eyes of Doom seemed to work because the man had sighed and gone home, if only for the sake of a teenager who had risked his afterlife for him.)
The problem with the wishing ghost was that her style was "hit and run": as soon as the wish had been granted, she fled without staying to witness the results.
And that… was a problem, since the more irresponsible people were catching on her powers and were trying to find loopholes to the adverse effects.
(Unnoticed by anyone, a lawyer managed such a feat and was never to be seen again in Amity Park.)
Danny almost asked his parents for a suggestion, before that reckless human being that was his male best friend (while he was unsupervised due to Sam's cold) wished to be as cool as "Inviso-Bill" to regain the popularity he had had on Ember's stage.
(Tucker never had it to begin with, but he had rewritten his memory about the incident and convinced himself that the aftermath cheers had been for him instead for Phantom.
No one had had the heart to tell him the truth since then. Though, evidently, that strategy had backfired on them spectacularly.)
Now Super TF was flying around complete with yellow spandex suit and green bedsheet-cape, attempting to "solve" the results of other wishes with various degrees of success…
Meaning: most of the time Tucker just made messes so Phantom had to clean after him (like the possessed car incident).
The other affected people had been relatively easy to save because he just had had to phase a hand in their chest, grab the artificial coreless ghost that Desiree had created to possess them, pluck it out and Thermos it.
The problem with Tucker's had been that the… magical ectoplasmic parasite (there was really no other term to define it) had almost stitched itself on the boy's soul, so just grabbing it hadn't been enough.
To complicate the matter, Super TF had considered the action as a hostile act and had started to retaliate with extreme prejudice.
And to add another wonderful news (note the sarcasm), if Danny accidentally hurt the affected, the injuries stayed even after the extraction of the parasite.
(Thankfully, he had discovered this during the football match where Dash had wished for monstrous strength and so had become a real monster.
The black eye Phantom had given him had lasted even after the "exorcism", so the vigilante didn't go as hard on the following flights. The quarterback could survive a shiner since he received them regularly during the marches and training, but a granny or a nerd were more delicate.)
Phantom didn't have many options there: fight it off and hope for the best that he didn't kill Tucker or try a full overshadowing (which he had never attempted) to unravel the thread that kept sewed the parasite to his friend.
…Thread?
A metaphorical lightbulb went off above the halfa's head at the word, since his parents had been experimenting with the Ecto-line lately and came up with a Dreamcatcher machine that would be able to filter ambient ectoplasm and separate form it the pollution or otherworldly germs that could infect people.
But Danny in his clumsiness had tripped once and stuck an arm inside the mesh that had split it into two: human and Phantom limb.
Being a halfa was a state of being, not something you could equally divide in two, according to Sidney. However, the Fenton Catcher had done it, so… it wouldn't be too hard for it to separate a parasite from a soul, would it?
Phantom managed to slip away from the fight and sped to the FentonWorks, where he snatched the invention and fled back to where he had seen Super TF last time.
His best friend wasn't still there but following the trail of destruction he found him: the parasite must have taken control, because his appearance had changed to a monstrous one and he was terrorizing the neighborhood.
So, the halfa zoomed in at max speed and ensnared him like a hell butterfly, leaving behind the unharmed boy while keeping the evil blob tangled with the Catcher.
Tucker blinked at the hissing and struggling lurid green parasite, while Phantom Thermosed it, and shuddered, probably at the thought of being infected by it. He announced loudly that he wouldn't wish things aloud anymore and fled back home, probably to take a shower or two, to wash away the sensation.
Being reassured by this, Phantom went to check his other (ill) friend, who was lethargically peeking from her window at the destruction left behind in her garden by a possessed lawn mower (which Danny had already purified when he saw it running after a civilian in the park).
The Goth's anger had been visibly stirring for a while, because at his arrival, she finally snapped.
(If Phantom had to fight Sam as well, he was going to cry.
She was more fit than Tucker and Fenton's human form, what would she become as an infected?)
– I wish for all the destruction to be fixed and the responsible to be caught by Inviso-Bill. – Sam enunciated between gritted teeth while the halfa's Ghost Sense triggered and an incensed voice replied, obliging to the request.
The garden returned pristine and the Thermos snapped shut after being forcefully activated by Desiree's powers because it had sucked in the spirit.
– Uh, I didn't think about it. – Phantom muttered, stunned.
– Because you're a rookie, Inviso-Bill. – Sam grumbled, cocooned into her blanket.
– It's Phantom! – The halfa protested, desperate.
He hated with a passion the nickname the news had given him, but he couldn't certainly go to the anchorman and ask them to change it! He would be tempested by questions he didn't want to answer, so he was stuck.
– I'll call you Phantom when you get better, Inviso-Bill. – The Goth taunted him, before turning to get back inside. – Thanks for your services! – She called over her shoulder.
The boy gaped in shock that morphed into indignation, then defeat. There was no chance to reason with her when she got stubborn like that, so it was better to let go (for now).
At least now Desiree wasn't wandering around and causing any more chaos.
Maybe if he was lucky, no more ghosts would try to take over Amity in the near future.
Little did he know, the storm brewing at the horizon of Wisconsin would capsize his entire world…
A/N. The lawyer, seeing the chance, just said "hold my beer", took out the "plan in case of genie" they made in college on a whim/dare and put it to work. xD
Hiya! Sorry for keep you waiting, I had a rough patch at home and all my spoons had spilled on the ground and I didn't manage to pick them up until now, so onto the schedule!
A shout out to EmeraldAndAmethyst, because I took a leaf out their book about ghost hunger and creative ways to deal with it thanks to the Lunch Lady's help. Thank you for the inspiration!
This chapter has a more filler-y vibe than the rest, but I wanted to cover all my basis before tackling one of the Big Bad Bosses: "Bitter Reunions"! Hope you'll like my take!
Type ya sooner this time (I wis- hope! I hope I said! Σ(￣ロ￣lll))
P.S. To my FFnet readers: it seems that this site/server has been forsaken by its creators, so while I'll try to keep updating on it, FFnet would probably meet its demise soon… But despair not! I'm also on AO3 under the same penname, so if you want you can jump there to say hello!
[DarkAbyss53: Thank you! Here's the new chapter, I forgot to post it last time, hope you'll like this as well!
Hawkeight: Thank you! The "–" are a cultural thing from my country, most of the books here use that for dialogues, so it stuck to me and would feel weird otherwise. Hope you'll like this chapter too!]