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Staff Day in Chaos
Ectober Haunt 2022 Week One: Chaos Promps
By: Agapostemon
It was not often that Principal Ishiyama managed to wrangle the entire Casper High Staff into participating in a Staff Day event, but it was summer. Every staff member in the building was easily lured into accepting a Staff Day bonus in mid-July, as far between paychecks as they ever got.
Mr. Lancer, however, was certain that he'd intentionally scheduled a vacation to Walden Pond State Reservation for the usual week of Staff Day. He'd known what he was doing, was trying to avoid awkward team-building exercises with his longtime colleagues. Was especially trying to avoid running it, like he did every year. Both, that is, trying to avoid running it and somehow running it anyway.
Booking a vacation in Massachusetts, being half-way across the country, should have finally been enough to keep Mr. Lancer out of the whole mess. But somehow, three weeks before his long awaited trip, Principal Ishiyama called him into a meeting. "I was hoping you'd take on Staff Day again this year," she said, voice warm, even as she made it clear that this was not a request.
Confessions of an Event Planner! Mr. Lancer swore to himself. "I'll be out of town that week," he said. "I cleared it with you back in January."
"I do remember," said Principal Ishiyama. "I think it's so good that you're taking that time for yourself, William. So to support that, I moved Staff Day to the week before your trip! You'll be able to get through Staff Day planning with something lovely to look forward to."
" Jacob's Folly! " said Mr. Lancer, not quite able to stop himself. He breathed in through his nose, exhaled through his mouth. He grit his teeth. "That sounds like a wonderful idea, Principal."
Mr. Lancer already knew he was lying then, but he would later realize that his discontent over the change in schedule had been a vast underreaction. Staff Day was coming for him, and it would be his last responsibility before his temporary reprieve from Amity Park.
When Staff Day rolled around, Mr. Lancer was predisposed to be gloomy about it. Even despite the truly glorious weather. Even through the early morning book swap, and the rotating craft tables, all genuinely pleasant. Things continued to go off without a hitch all the way through lunch-time, which had been catered deliciously by the Nasty Burger.
As Mr. Lancer licked mustard off his fingers, he found his mood quite turned around. Perhaps I was hasty in trying to opt out this year. They were eating outside. The sun was hot, but the breeze was brisk. Mr. Lancer thought that if the weather was always like this, he'd be an outdoorsman. He was almost enjoying communing with his colleagues!
Of course, that contentment and cameradie came to a screeching halt after lunch, as Ms. Tetslaff explained her staff relay race. Mr. Lancer wasn't especially athletic, and he was suspicious of things like relays in general. But that was not the problem. Ghost attack, he realized as the walls in the gymnasium began to pulse with threads of green. The Turn of the Screw!
Like everyone in Amity, Mr. Lancer was by now well familiar with the look of ectoplasm.
"This looks worse than usual," said Ms. Tetslaff, breaking off her explanation and looking uneasily at the room around them. It did. There was an unusual sickly quality to it that Mr. Lancer didn't want to quantify, although he couldn't quite help coming up with several graphic metaphors. The walls looked infected, almost. Gangrenous.
Pushing that imagery out of his head, Mr. Lancer stepped from his place in the crowd of his colleagues to the door. "Wait," he said, with the fiercest scowl he could muster. "I am the vice-principal, and it is my responsibility to get you all out of here safely. Don't trample each other."
There was a lengthy pause, and then the green veins in the walls seemed to pulse. Everyone ran for the door, screaming. Mr. Lancer could not quite help but fall to the side of their concentrated charge. I'm just lucky that I went sideways and not straight down , he thought. Don't trample anyone, indeed.
Ms. Tetslaff and Mr. Falluca, ever Mr. Lancer's allies, were at the back of the stampede. They weren't really even part of the stampede, Mr. Lancer was gratified to notice.
"Up you get," said Ms. Tetslaff, extending a hand down to Mr. Lancer's eye level. "We've got to get this chaos under control."
She said it with that almost admonishing tone of hers, but Mr. Lancer had worked with her long enough to know that she was trying to be encouraging. He took the offered hand.
Ow . Mr. Lancer rubbed at his shoulder once he was on his feet and steadied. "If you dislocated my shoulder, I'm suing," he said.
"Oh grow a spine, Lancer! You're fine." She was utterly unapologetic.
Mr. Falluca turned from where he was looking wistfully off after their colleagues. "We should get out of here," he said. Sure enough, there was another pulse in the green of the walls. "Phantom might show up any minute, but sometimes that means things get worse before they get better."
"This doesn't look like any of the usual suspects, either," said Ms. Tetslaff, just as the fire alarm began to sound.
" Catching Fire!" said Mr. Lancer.
Ms. Tetslaff shot him an irritated look. "Do you see any students around?" she said. "You're allowed to just say 'shit.'"
Mr. Lancer glared at her. "Let's focus on finding our colleagues and the exit, thank you."
"Agreed," said Mr. Falluca, who then hesitated. "But William, if you make an expletive from one more book title before we get out of this building alive, I will not be responsible for my actions."
There was no accounting for taste. Mr. Lancer suppressed a sneer and headed out the double doors of the gymnasium. He wasn't going to look behind himself to be sure his colleagues were following him. He just wasn't.
Taming of the Shrew , of course he was. His heart wouldn't beat right in his chest if he didn't know that Ms. Tetslaff and Mr. Falluca were with him and safe. "Stay close," he said. "I don't want us splitting up and getting caught alone."
"We'll be careful," said Mr. Falluca.
"If only we had time to tie ourselves together," said Ms. Tetslaff. Regrettably, Mr. Lancer had no idea if she was joking.
The green of the walls pulsed again, sending an ominous light across the floor, and Mr. Lancer realized that he could now smell fire. Not a false alarm, then. He didn't know how to feel about nearing the center of the disturbance.
Wordlessly, Ms. Tetslaff pressed a piece of cloth into Mr. Lancer's hand. A bandana. He turned to look, saw Mr. Falluca looking at bemusedly at a bandana of his own. Ms. Tetslaff had already secured hers around her mouth and nose.
"You smell the smoke now," she said. "Don't pretend you don't."
"They work better for fires when wet, don't they?" said Mr. Falluca.
Ms. Tetslaff thumped him on the shoulder. "Anything's better than nothing. Just don't get yourself caught on fire."
Mr. Lancer turned to face ahead again, peering down the hallway. A student, looking faded and tired and transparent, stood in the hallway. "The rest of the staff got out," Sydney Poindexter said. He seemed to pale. "It's coming."
Sydney vanished completely. The Canterville Ghost! Mr. Lancer hated it when ghosts did that. He thought he almost wouldn't mind them, if they weren't so bent on being startling.
"I don't like to speak ill of the dead, but there is a reason that boy was bullied," said Ms. Tetslaff.
Mr. Lancer swatted at her - always a mistake. She grabbed his wrist before his hand even entered her personal space, squeezed tightly enough that Lancer yelped. She let him go, and he found the gumption to say what he should probably have started with. "The bullying killed him. Nobody deserves that much bullying."
Ms. Tetslaff looked momentarily somber, but it didn't stick. "I didn't say he deserved it," she said.
Mr. Falluca separated the two of them. "Can we just focus on getting out of here? Phantom doesn't usually take this long and we have no idea when he'll show. There are too many unknown variables to delay!"
Last year, Mr. Falluca bought a Roomba for his science classroom. It was more class pet than it was something the room needed. Mr. Lancer could not quite help the mental comparisons then: sometimes pets don't look like their owners. Owners could look like their pets instead. Mr. Falluca did now, antsy and agitated like his Roomba when it got stuck in corners.
Mr. Lancer shook out his wrist, inclined his head toward the hallway that led to the nearest emergency exit.
As they walked, the smoke thickened. The air grew hotter. Mr. Lancer's bandana hadn't been moist when Ms. Tetslaff handed it to him, but it was damp now from sweat. Gatorade, he thought nonsensically. When I get out of here. Gatorade.
"We're getting closer to the fire," said Ms. Tetslaff.
"We should turn around," said Mr. Falluca.
Mr. Lancer turned around to look at them, to agree with them, shrieked.
They had not been walking toward the fire, the fire had been creeping toward them. Mr. Lancer stepped forward, pushing his colleagues behind him. He was under no illusions. Ms. Tetslaff and Mr. Falluca didn't need his protection, but Mr. Lancer was the vice-principal. Protecting the staff was his job.
Somewhere between his shrieking and his stepping and the quavering way in which he tried to square his shoulders, the fire seemed to retreat.
It did retreat. Mr. Lancer exchanged uneasy glances with his colleagues. "Hello?"
The fire roared upward, but something told Mr. Lancer he shouldn't flinch, so he didn't. Ms. Tetslaff's bulk to his left was steady and reassuring. She wasn't giving ground either. "What seems to be the problem?" Mr. Lancer said.
The fire shrank again, and now Mr. Lancer could see a figure in the flames. It was in the center, hot enough to burn blue into the cooler orange fire around it. "You haven't hurt us yet, so what do you want?"
There was a faltering pause, and Mr. Lancer felt Mr. Falluca step up to his right shoulder. Feeling bolstered, he looked the ghost right in the brightest part of them. Their core , a voice that sounded a little too much like Phantom's said in Mr. Lancer's head.
The ghost shrank again, their flames not even licking the walls of the hallway. With a clearer picture of his surroundings, Mr. Lancer did not even need to look over his shoulder to realize that they were mere paces from the emergency exit. He would have run for it, would have sent his colleagues running for it, but Mr. Lancer felt certain that giving ground now was the worst thing he could possibly do. For the structural integrity of the high school, for himself. Dante's Inferno , for the ghost that was starting to look like little more than a wraith. It was sinister and angry, but fragile. Hurt.
Mr. Lancer looked at his colleagues. Both seemed rooted to their places on his either side. They could handle this until Phantom swept his chill through Casper High, thermos in hand. They could. It was the only option Mr. Lancer would consider.
In that moment, his upcoming vacation at Walden Pond seemed so very far away.
Author's Note: Hope you all enjoyed my first foray into writing for Danny Phantom. I finally watched Phantom Planet just in time for Ectober, so it seemed like I should do the thing. I'll be doing the prompt fills in weekly batches, and I've had a busy few weeks so I'm obviously working a little behind. I definitely feel like I don't have a good sense of Ms. Tetslaff and Mr. Falluca's characters so PLEASE concrit is very welcome. For Week Two, I'll be pulling from the Order prompts, and I'm extremely excited for the idea I've got going. Should be easy writing (fingers crossed). Thanks all!