He'd been threatened, attacked, assaulted, nearly sent to the Ghost Zone by his own parents, beaten within an inch of his half-life by Skulker, and there was a motorcycling maniac on the loose.
Things were just about back to normal. With a happy sigh, Danny dropped onto his bed to stare at the ceiling and try to block out the "sound" of his father's mental shouting. It was strange, but some people had louder thoughts than others. Not that he intended to call Jack an idiot, but mental volume seemed to be directly related to intelligence. He had inadvertently learned more about Dash than he ever wanted know.
On the bright side, he couldn't hear Mr. Lancer even when he tried.
He jumped as the door opened, but it was only Jazz, trying not to laugh. "Danny, it's very difficult to do my homework with you projecting your thoughts again."
His face turned an interesting shade of red. "Sorry."
His sister started to go, then curiosity got the better of her and she turned back. "So what about Dash?"
"You don't want to know," Danny replied, shaking his head. "I wish that I didn't."
She hesitated before leaving again; he didn't have to read her mind to know what she wanted to say. She'd been saying it at every opportunity of late. But he didn't want to talk about what happened. He wanted to forget it had happened. He forced away the image of a woman in white, lying on the ground in a spreading pool of blood. Jack and Maddie were about to leave, and Jazz would understand if he suddenly disappeared. Determined to reclaim his former good mood, Danny switched to his ghost form and went flying.
Everything was peaceful high above the ground. There was absolutely nothing wrong with anything. He sighed; it was so easy to fool himself into believing that. It would be easier if people on the ground would stop reminding him, but at least he could count on someone to arrive at a woefully inconvenient time to distract him. He grinned wryly as he dodged a plasma rifle blast.
"Angel, why are you still here?" he called, dropping lower to face her.
The vigilante revved her motorcycle impatiently. "Let's just say, I've got a new friend." She patted the little black box now strapped to the bike between its handlebars. "As long as I'm within ten feet of this baby, your new power can't touch me. Now, kiddo. I believe we have a race to finish."
Angel shot forward through an intangible ghost boy and turned slightly to fire her plasma gun at him. He ducked and tried to retaliate with telekinesis, but Angel had not been kidding. The attack slid away from her to throw a mailbox straight into the sky. Since there was no one around to be hurt by it, he simply let it fall.
The motorcycle sped through a red light; Danny stopped briefly to ensure that the car she cut off didn't crash. She fired; he returned fire. The shield that protected her only seemed to block telekinesis; maybe it was different than ghost energy? He and Angel both turned as a siren sounded behind them. Danny could almost feel her smirk.
He narrowed his eyes and thought at her, You are not going to attack him!
Angel actually flinched, and the boy mentally smacked himself. He had let his anger distract him and been too forceful. He could almost pity her now for the migraine she probably had.
Almost.
With considerably less force, he convinced the police officer to abandon the chase and threw another blast at Sweetheart's wheels. He was aiming to make Angel slow down and swerve so that he could catch her, but she seemed to realize this and just kept going. Her attacks were coming less and less frequently, and they were haphazardly aimed. She wasn't attacking; she was leading him somewhere. But where?
Normally, he tried to stay out of people's heads. Although he often overheard things, he never actually purposefully read anyone's mind except to tease his friends or sister. It was unethical, but so was endangering the lives of dozens of people on some stupid quest to avenge a motorcycle.
Although he couldn't quite focus like he needed to, he did catch a few stray thoughts. "What's Technus got to do with this?" he yelled to her.
Sweetheart swerved to a stop so abrupt that it toppled and rolled over on its rider a few times. Angel stumbled to her feet. He couldn't possibly have known what she was thinking. He couldn't. It wasn't possible.
"Yeah, actually, I do," was his self-satisfied response.
Angel actually started to shake, although he couldn't tell if it was rage or terror. Possibly, it was both. He had forgotten that her desire to be unknown was her biggest weakness. She had revealed her face to him in an effort to confront that weakness, but the knowledge that he could now root around in her mind was…
…was…what…?
Suddenly, all she could think about was a lot of loud gibberish. Danny cringed and tried to pull out of her mind and completely missed seeing her plasma rifle until the blast knocked him to the pavement. "Get out of my head!" she shrieked. A second blast just missed his left ear, and he threw up his ghost shield to intercept the third. Between the near-constant barrage of ectoplasmic energy and the sudden buzzing in his head, he failed to notice that Sweetheart was racing towards him until it almost hit him.
He launched straight into the sky and shook his head to clear it. The buzzing sounded like so much like desperate pleas for help; it was not originating from Angel's mind. He was grateful when it slowly faded while he and his opponent traded shots. Finally, she kicked against the ground and drove off for the direction she'd been heading in with Danny still in hot pursuit. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was flying into a trap, but he didn't have a choice. Angel needed to be stopped, and so did Technus if he was actually involved.
Wait, what was he thinking? It was Technus. Of course, he was involved; he probably built Angel's little black box.
The two enemies passed a crowd of screaming people running the other direction. Judging by the stray thoughts of panic shoved forcibly into his head, there was a large, mechanical thing ahead. There were also cars involved, which meant that it was either Kat or Technus. He sarcastically wondered which one.
"Finally!" yelled the ghost master of electrical technology as they arrived. A red shield sprang up around the city block, probably to keep Danny from escaping. Not worried in the slightest, the boy turned his attention to his surroundings.
Angel rolled to a stop next to something that looked like a Radio Shack had exploded all over an army tank inside a car factory. There were only three monitors, thankfully, and four speakers that Danny could see; however, there were satellite dishes galore. He seemed to have used a tank as the base, although where he had gotten it was destined to remain a mystery. The rest was made up mostly of car parts. Surrounding him was a small army of vaguely humanoid robots that had started out life as vehicles of various types.
"Okay, I'll admit it," Danny said. He gestured at the constructs that were easily twice his height and nodded. "That's impressive."
"Oh, you'll be more than impressed by the time I'm done with you," Technus gloated. "Go, my mechanical minions!"
Danny dodged Angel's attack as she drove by, then started blasting the "car-bots". They were tough, and all seemed to have come equipped with a little black box since telekinesis did nothing. They surrounded him, leaving him with only two directions for escape. He went intangible and dove into the ground only to bounce off with a new appreciation for his ghost form's ability to keep him from getting a broken nose or neck. Apparently, Technus' ghost shield extended across the ground as well.
Left with no alternative, the boy flew upwards and crashed headlong into a car-bot's outstretched hand. The repeated blows to the head were starting to make him very dizzy. He went intangible to no avail as a second bot slammed him into the ground and tried to stomp on him.
What happened to Technus? This plan was actually clever. In fact, it was downright good. And he had never actually chosen cars as the basis for his form before. Kat was going be pissed that he stole her idea.
"Dang it, Kat," he murmured as he just barely escaped being squashed for a second time. She and her father were still on good terms and spoke quite frequently. And, like her father, she often forgot to watch what she said when she had a good idea. Danny didn't think she had given Technus this idea on purpose, but he had no doubt that she was responsible. Cars were her thing.
Outside the circle of car-bots, Sweetheart idled to Technus, and its rider fancied that the engine's rumbling sounded as dejected as she felt. "You said I would finish him off," she reminded her ghostly partner.
"Eh?" Technus shrugged. "I lied. I do that sometimes."
"I don't like to be double crossed."
The ghost snickered and used his power to pull Sweetheart out from under Angel and fuse it with the rest of his machinery. "I am Technus!" he announced for the umpteenth time that day. "How are you going to stop me?"
With a wordless growl of rage, Angel aimed her plasma rifle at her betrayer and froze. She couldn't fire; she might hit Sweetheart. Laughing at her predicament, Technus rumbled away to fulfill whatever the next part of his plan was. Angel sank to her knees in despair until a piercing wail forced her into the fetal position, hands uselessly over her ears.
Danny had tried to blast the car-bots, but there were too many of them. He wanted to say he had taken worse beatings, but he was hard-pressed to think of any. His powers seemed to be completely useless. If they had come at him one at a time, he probably wouldn't have had any problems at all. Trying to focus on all of them at once had turned this battle into a massacre. Left with no other option that he could think of, he had screamed. As usual, the Ghostly Wail ended the fight in a matter of seconds. Now, if only he could something about the amount of power it took to use…
His last thought before fainting was that he was going to kill Kat for this.
A/N: Okay, I feel that I should apologize for the slow updates. I know every two days is still faster than most of the authors on this site, but I still feel bad making you wait that long. This season is always pretty hectic for me.The cold weather makes me want to stay in bed, and then I wind up frantically trying to get everything done. Sorry.