It's Friday! Thank you to everyone who sent congratulations on Mortified's 200th chapter, and thank you to everyone who's read this far! The contents of the box will be revealed soon, but some of you have already guessed what's in it. :)
Thank you for reviewing!
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Chapter 201: Alive Bears
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Something beeped. Danny turned his attention to the control panel. "Oh, heck. Wes, they're cutting us off! If you've got something to say, do it now!"
"What? How? I thought this was run by satellites!"
"Well, no, and…" Danny briefly considered trying to explain just how the Ops Center broadcasting system worked and decided against it. "No, they've turned off power to the house, and they'd already cut the feed line from the portal. The dedicated ecto-generator hasn't had proper upkeep since forever aaaaand you don't care. Hurry up and say something before we lose powerful!"
"I don't know! Okay? I don't know what else to say! We need help before the GIW decides we're all too ghostly to live and bombs us, okay? We need-"
All the lights in the Ops Center went out, with the single exception of the ghost-green exit sign.
Wes cursed.
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The fight against the GIW forces at Fentonworks had been going quite well, all things considered. True, the GIW had both anti-ghost and anti-human weapons, and armor that shed common ectoblasts like water, and the citizens of Amity Park were, on occasion, armed with nothing more than fists and fear, but between the ghosts, the perfectly mundane shotguns, bats, and, in one case, an honest-to-goodness pitchfork, the citizens were doing a good job.
The Amity Park Police were in there, too, as was every veteran in Amity Park who could so much as shuffle forth with a walker, and a good number of animals. The GIW might have prepared for ghost bears, but they hadn't done a thing to prevent themselves from being mauled by alive bears. Alive bears who were a great deal more intelligent than they had any right to be.
Yes, people were dead, but, for the most part, they were people who had started off dead, or wearing white.
(Each exception sent a spike of grief through Danny's heart and core. He had known them. He had known all of them. Mr. Falluca. Tracy. Miss Jones from the candy store. Irving Burns. It hurt, and Danny promised that someday he would track down whoever was in charge of the GIW and make them pay.)
But Danny could hear the rumble of engines and the drone of jets. The GIW reinforcements would be here in minutes.
He pulled Wes out of the Ops Center, and dropped him, rather unceremoniously, on a nearby roof.
"Hey!" shouted Wes. "You can't leave me here! I have to get back into the fight!"
Danny had started flying away. "Be a sniper or something. You should be able to get a good shot. You have enough practice stalking me with your camera!"
"I don't have a gun!"
Danny groaned. Wes had a point. He cast around, then picked up a discarded ecto-rifle (at least, it looked like a rifle) with telekinesis, and tossed it to Wes.
"Don't get killed!" he warned. "Life would be boring without you!"
"You don't have a life, Fenton!"
With a rather grim smile, Danny flew up above the Ops Center and the 'door' that had opened above it to get a better look at the situation. Almost lazily, he dodged weapons fire from the ground, then, more urgently, from the sky.
The GIW was closing in. Fast.
He looked down. The humans and ghosts of Amity Park had done well, but they were tired, injured, and soon to be surrounded. They were piling into Fentonworks at an alarming rate, which would give them some protection, but there were simply too many people to fit into a single building, and they wouldn't be able to go in fast enough. Half the city had to be here, and a good number of people from the surrounding rural area and Elmerton, not counting the ghosts, who had drifted up into the air to a form a translucent layer over the humans on the ground.
Their own reinforcements were too far out. Danny felt along his connection to his haunt. They were waking, all the sleeping spirits that had come to rest in Amity Park over the years, but with the exception of a few eager souls (most of whom he had sent to do… something that he wasn't completely aware of, but was sure was important), they weren't ready to fight.
So, Danny had to do something. But what?
A shield around the crowd? It would have to be around the crowd, he couldn't keep track of individual shields for everyone, but he wouldn't be able to hold a shield that large by himself for very long. Especially once it came under attack.
But he wasn't alone, was he?
He called back all his duplicates, except the one with the box, and took a deep breath to center himself. First, the shield.
Way back, the first year he'd been half-ghost, his parents had installed shield projectors like little sprinklers all around the periphery of their property. Of course, that was before they had designed the bigger, less efficient, but more mobile, umbrella-type projectors.
Neither the sprinkler-type nor the umbrella-type shields were functional at the moment. The GIW had removed the umbrella-type completely, and the sprinkler-type projectors were no longer hooked up to a power source.
But they were driven into the ground of Amity Park. Danny was connected to Amity Park. He was, if he said so himself, one heck of a power source.
He nudged them, mentally, angling them so that they would cover all his people. A few GIW agents would get caught up in it, but Danny was pretty sure they could be handled. But if he missed someone… He had to be sure that his people could get through the shield. His awareness of his own body started to fade, and a part of him that would be revisiting all this later wondered how he even knew how to do this. He paid attention to his parents' work, but he was pretty sure they hadn't ever tried to make a shield that could distinguish friends from foes regardless of species.
When he was fairly certain he had managed that impossible feat (How did he keep doing things like this? How?), he came back to himself slightly and pushed.
Danny felt like he'd had all the air knocked out of him, except that in ghost form he didn't really need to breathe, so that simile lost something. Either way, he felt drained. The shield bubble encompassed more than a city block and faded at the top, since the shield projectors were aimed so far over. Danny licked his lips and redirected some of his energy to cover the weak point.
A bullet flattened itself against the shield, and Danny winced. He didn't know when it happened, but he was almost bent double in the air, his hands on his knees, his muscles trembling.
"I need help," he said, voice hoarse. As he did so, he noticed that it was much quieter than it had been a moment ago. Probably because he hadn't warned anyone about the shield. Not that he'd had time to.
He chanced a glance down. The ghosts were looking up at him with something like reverence. Was it because of the crown? That couldn't be why he was suddenly pulling off all this weird stuff, was it?
(A voice in the back of his head that sounded a lot like Clockwork informed him that it more likely to be because all the vastly powerful objects he had consumed only a few days ago. He ignored the voice. After all, he could take the crown off after all this. He couldn't un-eat stuff.)
(A voice in his head that sounded a lot like Jazz suggested that he was in denial.)
(Another Jazz-like voice opined that having all these voices in his head was probably a sign of stress, and possibly mental exhaustion, and that he should get that looked at.)
(A final voice snapped that he was really getting off task and that everyone should shut up and let him pay attention.)
Danny giggled, helplessly, then clapped his hands over his mouth. Apparently, a couple days of sleeping at Long Now was not enough to compensate for all the nonsense and pain he'd had to go through lately.
The wisps that lived in the park flew up to him. Their presence was a relief. But energy in and of itself was not the only thing he needed to maintain the shield.
Another ghost followed shortly after, a young woman, a cat twined around her shoulders. A pair of cowboys with ludicrously large hats. Mr. and Mrs. Holiday. A giant snake. All of them, until he was surrounded. He recognized them. He recognized all of them. They were his, and he had let them stay.
They were silent in a way only ghosts could be.
"I need help," Danny said again.
"What do you need, my lord?"
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Danny, or his duplicate, depending on perspective, entered the Ghost Zone, and stopped dead, surprised. It looked like the GIW had tried to build a base here, at the mouth of the portal, but had failed spectacularly. They must have been hit by a rockfall, or a meteor shower, or whatever it was called in the Ghost Zone. Danny had never had cause to ask.
On the other hand, maybe it had just been pummeled by furious ghosts. Whatever the cause, it was in ruins. Smoking ruins.
Danny ran a hand over a crumpled section of metal siding, momentarily curious as to how it would feel. He wrapped his hand around the box again and flew away. There might still be agents here, lying in wait for unexpecting ghosts.
Which was ironic. Usually one would expect ghosts to be the ones lying in wait.
The area he had always thought of as his ghostly backyard spread before him: vast, open spaces, stairways leading to nowhere, buildings dissolving into ectoplasmic goo, ominous floating purple doors, and Walker's neon-pink prison, just visible in the distance.
There was a reason it was generally called the Wastes. Or the Barrens, depending on the day of the week and who you were talking to. It was sort of a disaster. The wreckage from whatever the GIW had been trying to do would fit right in, as soon as it had been pushed off from the portal, something that Danny would do as soon as he had a chance.
The question now was, where could he go? Where would be safe? Where would the box be safe?
Long Now and Elysium were too far for him to reach while maintaining a duplicate, and he couldn't very well dismiss his duplicate when he was the one protecting everyone in Amity Park. It would go against everything that he stood for.
Ironically, the Far Frozen was the closest. But it was still too far.
He supposed… He supposed that he could go back through. The fighting inside the shield had mostly stopped. But, no. That was putting too many of his eggs in one basket.
He knew that even if he failed in protecting his people and the box's contents, he would survive. His human family, friends, and classmates were safe in the care of Libra. Clockwork and Ellie were in Elysium. The people of Harmony were depending on him. He would survive, and stay sane, for them.
But if he lost both, he would never truly recover. He would survive, but not live. Or half-live. Or after-live. Or whatever horribly awkward term he could drop off the end of his tongue.
One. Lose one, and he might. Eventually. Possibly. But not both.
It would hurt so much. He couldn't imagine it.
No, he couldn't go back.
He had a number of little hidey-holes (he had once called them Hades-holes, and Sam hadn't spoken to him for the rest of the day) strewn around the area, packed with supplies, in case he had a fight here, or if he had to leave Fentonworks suddenly. But they were disturbed frequently by other residents of the Wastes, and he hadn't checked them in Ancients knew how long.
Besides, they weren't meant for long-term hiding, only stopping briefly to avoid enemies and bandage wounds. They weren't suitable places to leave the box.
Of course, some might argue that the wall behind his closet in a house owned by ghost hunters wasn't exactly suitable either.
Walker's prison? That wasn't exactly Danny's first choice, but… it wasn't an impossible one, either. Walker was a nut, but he wasn't completely immoral. He had rule. Well, Rules. A whole book of them. That was sort of part of the problem, when it came to Walker…
Anyway, Danny could be reasonably certain he wouldn't destroy what was in the box.
Danny himself was another matter, and he wasn't going to leave the box in Walker's hands indefinitely. No.
What did that leave? Who else resided nearby?
Most of his usual enemies.
Which… Yeah. Not really who he wanted to see right now.
Unless they were in one of those 'time to be friendly for no perceptible reason' moods.
The Box Ghost? No, Lunch Lady was pregnant last he'd heard, and Danny didn't want to touch the implications of that with a ten-foot pole.
Poindexter? He wasn't even an enemy at this point, not really, but his lair was on the edge of the Time-Locked Lands. Danny wasn't sure where it was in its orbit at this time of year, but he didn't want to risk overextending himself and losing hold of one of his two bodies. Not if he had other options.
Heck, it might even be a good idea to just… Hang out. Float. Except that he felt horribly exposed, and he didn't know if or when Issitoq would try to jump him again.
Klemper? No. Klemper didn't have a lair, and the places he frequented weren't secure enough for Danny's liking.
Ember? He had no idea where in the Barrens she resided. She was from somewhere in here, he knew that, but he hadn't made note of her door's path through them. Same with Johnny and Kitty.
Skulker wasn't an option. The two of them had a healthy amount of mutual respect, but, no. Just no.
Technus? Technus did owe him, in Danny's reckoning. In many ways, this was all Technus's fault. Maybe Danny could guilt trip him.
Who else had a lair in the Wastes? Who else could he-?
Ancients, he was an idiot. A giant, blindingly stupid idiot. He, Danny, had a lair in the Wastes.
He even knew where it was.
Vaguely.
