"First off: how do you know about Plasmius in the first place?"
"It came to me in a dream last night."
"Fair enough; are you really sure you want to know?"
"Dad, are you trying to avoid the subject? What's so bad about this guy that you don't want to talk about him?"
"Nothing…at least not anymore. It's just that Plasmius is…complicated. It could take a few hours for me to totally explain it properly."
"It's okay, we've got time. Jaime and I woke up about three hours ago; we're not going to fall asleep any time soon."
"Fine, fine…I guess I'll start at the beginning, then. The story of Plasmius begins when your grandparents were in college. That's like, the 1980's, for reference. Dad's college roommate was a guy by the name of Vlad Masters. The two of them were inseparable, and they were lab partners along with your grandma. Unfortunately, both of them had a crush on her but they were both too afraid to wreck their friendship with each other over it. One day, the three of them were working in the lab on an early version of the Fenton Portal; they called it the Proto-Portal. Vlad was leaned over it, looking at something, when my dad threw the switches and activated it. Vlad was hit in the face with a huge amount of ghost energy, and as a result he had developed a serious case of ecto-acne."
"But what does this have to do with a ghost named Plasmius?" Harry asked.
"You'll see in a second, stop being so impatient. Anyway, Vlad was hospitalized for a couple of years because of the acne, and during that time my parents started dating and eventually they got married. Vlad was really pissed about this because he believed that my dad had purposely engineered the lab accident so that Vlad would be out of the way and he could make his move on my mom. Vlad swore vengeance, and when he discovered that the accident had made him half ghost, just like me and just like both of you, he plotted to use his powers to kill my dad and win over my mom."
"Whoa…that guy totally needs to get a cat," Jaime noted. Danny roared with laughter.
"See, that's what I kept telling him, but he'd never listen to me…anyway, Vlad used his powers to amass an enormous amount of wealth and power both on earth and in the Ghost Zone, and he called his ghost form Vlad Plasmius."
"Is he powerful?"
"Are you joking? He has all of our powers, and twenty more years of experience using them than I do. The first time we fought, at my parents' college reunion, he beat me in about five seconds flat, trapped me in this cube-thing that neutralized my powers, and offered for me to join him and become his apprentice."
"And you declined."
"Of course I declined! I'm not evil, right?"
"I'm guessing that he wouldn't leave you alone after that, right?" Harry asked.
"Nope. Plasmius doesn't give up that easily. A few months after the reunion, he created a fake scientific body called the Dalv Group and invited my mom and I to a weekend-long science symposium. Then, one of his ghostly servants forced us out of the plane and made us parachute right outside of his mountain retreat. He used a ghost bear to separate me from my mom and shocked me with the Plasmius Maximus, which short-circuited my powers for three hours. Then, he sent an army of ghost animals after my mom, as well as a second army after my dad, who was at home at the time. Fortunately, both of them beat back all of the ghosts without too much trouble. I tricked him into wearing a belt that shocks any ghost that comes into direct contact with whoever is wearing it, so that it weakened him enough for me to beat him. After that I shocked him with his own Plasmius Maximus and convinced the ghost animals to chase him instead of me."
"How did he survive a thing like that?"
"Honestly? To this day I still haven't figured it out."
"But he still wouldn't give up, I'd imagine."
"Nope. A month after that, he put a million dollar bounty on my head and then hired the worlds best-known ghost hunters to Amity Park to find me and hunt me down."
"Why would he hire people and then put a bounty on you? That makes no sense!"
"I guess he wanted to give them even more incentive after they were already on the payroll. Anyway, the majority of these guys were so incompetent I bet either of you could take them down easily. And you've had your powers for all of 24 hours, mind you."
"Why would he do something like that when he already knew that it wouldn't work?"
"So that he could keep my parents distracted enough to disassemble our Fenton Portal and steal it. He needed ours because he'd forgotten to change the ecto-filtrator on his own portal and it blew up and took his castle with it."
"And you managed to beat him back into the Ghost Zone?"
"Actually, no. My dad did that."
"Wait a minute, grandpa Fenton did that? No way!"
"Way. Never underestimate your grandpa when he's fighting for his family." Harry and Jaime each gave low whistles. They never knew Grandpa Jack was competent enough to catch a ghost at all, let alone Plasmius!
"But that doesn't come close to the time he freed the Ghost King."
"What?"
"Have you ever heard of the time the King of All Ghosts sucked our town into the Ghost Zone?"
"I heard someone mention it once. Why?"
"The reason it happened was that Vlad had the Ring of Rage, which gave the wearer unlimited power when used in conjunction with the Crown of Fire. However, to get the crown, he had to take it from the king's head. So, he used his Skeleton Key to unlock the Sarcophagus of Forever Sleep and freed the Ghost King, an enormous ghost named Pariah Dark. What Vlad didn't expect was for Pariah to be strong enough to beat him with one move. Pariah beat the crap out of Vlad, conquered the Ghost Zone, sucked Amity into the Ghost Zone, and almost took over the world."
"And I bet you ended up being the one that had to stop him, right?"
"Of course. But I wasn't powerful enough on my own. I needed to take an invention that my parents had been working on, the Fenton Exo-Skeleton. It increases a person's power a hundredfold, but taps directly into their central nervous system and drains their energy so using it can be fatal. I used the suit at beat him, but the battle almost killed me; the suit was down to 2 efficiency when I blacked out."
"How did you get out?"
"Vlad took me out of the suit, hid the thing, brought me back to my family and became a hero, and later on stole the suit and hid it in his secret lab."
"That snake!"
"Ya think? But that's not the worst thing he's done. I think that for the record, what made me the most angry was when he infected your mom and Tucker with ecto-acne." They stared at him in shock.
"Why would he stoop to something that low?"
"Because he was having a relapse and he figured that if their fate was the same as his own, I would be more inclined to search for a cure."
"Did you find one?"
"Your mom is acne free, isn't she?"
"True. So where is Vlad now?"
"Now? I'm not afraid of Vlad and his plots anymore. I believe that he's turned good."
"Are you kidding? After all he's done to you?"
"When your mom and I had just started dating, in our senior year of high school, we were invited to the Box Ghost and the Lunch Lady's wedding. At the party, Vlad told us that he was done chasing after my mom because he finally realized that it wouldn't do any good. Since then, he's married a ghost named Saphira and they're living in his castle in Wisconsin."
"So, did you and mom get a little action in during the after-party, if you know what I mean?" Jaime asked slyly.
"No, we did not lose our virginity to each other in the Specter Speeder right after the party, we swear!" Danny and Sam shouted at the same time.
"Eew, gross, now I won't be able to fall asleep tonight with those images going through my mind!" Harry wailed.
"Enough whining, you two should get to bed, it's a quarter after eleven." The kids sighed and dragged their feet upstairs.
"That was your first time too?" Sam asked once their children had entered their won rooms.
"Yeah," he replied. "Who else would I have lost it to?" she shrugged.
"I don't know, but you were really good considering it was your first time." he blushed.
"Thanks. So were you." Now it was her turn to blush.
"What are we doing blushing? We've done it since then. We've had two children together, for chrissake!" He asked.
"So many years of denying how we really felt must have scarred us more deeply than we had hoped."
"Well, we'll have to remedy that, now won't we?"
"How do you me-" she was cut off by his lips mashing against hers. She leaned into his kiss and simultaneously opened her mouth, allowing his tongue to explore its interior. She ran her tongue along the side of his and they promptly began to wrestle for supremacy. It was unclear who had won by the time they needed to stop for air.
"Did that…make up…for years…of denial?" he panted.
"It's…a start," she replied, and they threw themselves at each other once more.
To be honest, when I started writing this I thought that it would be longer. I mean, come on, Plasmius? I feel as though 1600 words just doesn't do him justice, but I guess it'll have to do.
HAPPY SECOND ANNIVERSARY, DANNY!