"We have a situation! Your parents are not answering, and Valerie's gear is busted since yesterday-" Something could be heard shattering against a hard surface and he finally yelled over the line: "Just come to my office!"
Ten minutes was the time it took her to fly to cross the town to the City Hall just to find it being a big ectoplasmic-mess, so big she had to open her way through by fighting shapeless —but not less dangerous— masses of ectoplasm and avoid people with red eyes trying to capture her. It was another ten-to-fifteen minutes until she reached the place where Tuck was.
"Tuck, you're fine!" She yelled as she came inside the Mayor's office and tried to close the door behind her without hurting any of the people being controlled. "What exactly is going on? What happened with all the security?"
"Don't know! They came out of nowhere, it's like they did something with the security system's powersource…" He responded with urgency as he frantically worked in a panel behind his cabinet; seconds later, the wooden door finally gave in and the semi-zombie City Hall personnel came in "I thought you said you got all the runaways back in the thermos!" Tuck yelled to the girl fighting mere feet away from him as he rewired the City Hall's anti-ghost system.
"I did! These most have come out from the portals..." She answered getting the attention of two overshadowed- s that were just about to jump over where the genius was.
"What portals?" Tuck asked, he barely got to register a: "I'll tell you later" above the noise of fighting, yelling, growling and screeching coming from the various ghosts; and came back to work even more frantically, given the amount of people flooding the office.
"Damn it". The fighting girl muttered, still unsure of what to do: fight the overshadowed people until the ghosts got out of them and apologize later? Or keep entertaining them until Tuck was done reactivating the MistyFenton? (Lovely name. The thing was, basically, an air humidifier that made the air unbearable for ghosts, and that was the only name Jack Fenton himself could come up with?). Ugh… better make sure before deciding anything.
"Eh, Mr. Mayor, I know you're under a lot of pressure already but… Are you done?!" She asked as sweetly as she could while keeping the red-eyed City-Hall-worker-zombies at bay.
"Almost...!" He interrupted himself after feeling a slight electric shock. Danielle tried her best to keep the overshadowed-people for longer without hurting them to no avail. They were getting closer and several other ghostly creatures tried to keep the techno-geek away from his current task.
"How about now…?!" The ghost girl insisted, just about to go with more strength.
"No!" The other responded, anger building up in him as he felt the pressure and ghosts trying to stop him and messing with his tools.
"Now?!" Insisted the girl, half conscious that keep asking every ten seconds wouldn't help quicken things up.
"Can you shut up for a minute, Danny?!" He yelled, barely aware of what he had said. Whatever, he would apologize as soon as this crisis ended. She would understand. Anyway, the cable work was done, now he had to re activate the system and…
Voilà!
"Danielle, ghost off!" The girl phased through the floor to get away from the current opponents surrounding her, and re-appeared beside the Major right before changing back to her human self. Some hissing sounds could be heard coming from a small panel next to the AC and a green mist filled the room, making the overshadowed people bend in pain and the present ghosts roar in agony.
In a matter of minutes, the City Hall's workers had their eyes back to their normal color and were released from the possession they had been in, all the while hordes of tiny gremlin-looking ghosts came out of them like wanting to run for cover. As every ghost in the place was weakened and/or panicking with the MistyFenton working, Danielle took a vacant termos from Tuck's toolbox and captured them.
"Woah… what happened?" Some intern was the first to ask after he came back to his senses.
"What happens is that you all will go home now while I call the cleaning service" Tuck assured them as calmly and composed as his exhausted mind let him. "James, Janice, would you please schedule a security reunion for tomorrow, please?"
After some more instructions were given (and several apologies too), every City Hall worker left for their homes, leaving Danielle and Tuck alone. The young politician let himself collapse against his comfy design-for-gamers desk chair (a bit bitten, scratched and covered in ectoplasmic-fluid stains).
"Are you okay?" The hero-in-training questioned as she poked his cheek.
"I'm too old for this…" He whined melodramatically. Danielle rolled her eyes, the day must have been already particularly stressful before the ghosts invaded the office. "My old bones are not as they used to, my brain is going numb. In the past, I could have reactivated the system in half the time… My memory is blurry..." He cut the drama and hurriedly said: "Oh, and sorry about-"
"It's fine" The girl interrupted, trying to ignore the awkward feeling inside of her. She repeated her personal mantra ("I'm not Danny's substitute. I'm not Danny's substitute"), inside her head a couple of times before continuing: "You were stressed, ghost invasion needed to be subjugated, time was against you, you were occupied with more important things than pronunciation. Say, Tuck, can you help me identify a ghost? I've never saw him before"
The technogeek sat straighter on his chair, attempting to shake off the exhaustion and lazy-feeling building in him, he turned on the computer and cracked his knuckles. He opened a database file filled with ghosts' info.
"How did it look like?" He asked as lethargic as one who has spent hours in front of a computer would.
"Big…? Muscly…? Red eyes and fangs like Vlad's, but with white flamy hair like Ember…" She started to vaguely describe her attacker. "Wait, I took a photo… Not the best quality, but I hope it works" She mused as she looked through her phone's memory for the partially distorted picture. "Have you seen this guy?"
The techno-geek glanced at the compact flip-phone's 128-per-160-pixel-screen. The image had been zoomed to the max, some things had been flattened and would better be identified in the default size of 640x480 photo-files usually had; but he could see a mass of color that had the proportions of a humanoid figure dressed in black and white, a familiar white cape and that flaming hair...
The geek's eyes opened with terror and incredulity. Adrenaline rushed through his veins and erase any trace of drowsiness he could of have left.
"No..." Tuck gasped and took the phone from the girl's hands. "No, no, no…" He muttered right at the beginning of a panic attack. "It's impossible! He's not supposed to be here!" He exclaimed as his mind floated into a dark cloud of thoughts:
Was this why they couldn't find Danny?
He turned into… that?
Why didn't he thought of it?
Why didn't he took precautions for ghosts like this one?
How could he be so stupid?!
"Tuck! Tuck, what is it? Who is this guy?" The girl called him and brought him back to the reality, where his body was visibly shaking and his breath was uneven. He took a deep breath at the time he said:
"Someone... that should not exist" Dani took those words and something inside felt wrong.
"Before, well, you…" he began "this guy appeared". Dani felt the shock pass her body like a high voltage.
"Another clone?"
"A clone is a way of calling him, but he isn't one" Tuck replied, trying to restart his own brain that had just stopped working.
"Then, who is he?" Danielle insisted. Tuck checked the security cameras in his PC and, after confirming there was nobody else in the building, he pressed a hand against his forehead. He really was feeling old.
"When we met Clockwork, he had come in order to test Danny, but also to make sure…" he looked back at the small picture in the phone's screen and felt a shiver climb down his spine. "...he, didn't happen". Silence. The geek tried to look somewhere else as memories came ot him. "That week we were supposed to take that big test that would decide our future"
"What test?" she questioned innocently. Tuck laughed, he had forgotten that had been the last year that thing was applied (changes in administration and it turned out to be an obsolete and useless resource).
"Doesn't exist anymore" he commented with a light chuckle " Now, the ting is Danny found the envelope with the answers after fighting a ghost. For us, there was a blur of a week. A ghost girl claiming to be the lunch lady and the Box Ghost's daughter appeared…"
"Ughh…"
"That's what your brother said" he commented and went back to the telling "then some scary ghost tried to kill the Fentons, Sam, and me; Danny came to the rescue, Clockwork turned back time to the time of the test, and presto! Danny returned the answers".
"Sounds like a normal Tuesday to me", she commented. Tuck rolled his eyes at that.
"We lived our lives as if nothing had really happened, until Danny's secret was revealed, then whatever-clockwork-did-to-our-memories sort of wore off and we remembered. Afterwards, Danny told us about… him." Tuck's fear went away to be replaced by a wave of sadness. "Apparently, in an alternative timeline, Danny didn't return the answers; thus, Mr. Lancer wanted to have a word with the Fentons, meeting place was the Nasty Burger. Alternative parents and Jazz went, and so did alternative me and Sam for moral support. Long story short: Danny was just in his way to meet with everyone when there was an explosion that killed us all in front of his eyes"
"No…" Dani looked horrified at the mere thought of it. She considered losing Danny had been painful beyond words, but losing mom, dad, Jazz, Sam and Tuck all at the same time? That would be devastating.
"Alternative Danny then went to live with Vlad. Turns out Vlad, who always wanted to have Danny as his son, really did care for him and wanted to help him overcome his grief. Vlad modified some Fenton Gauntlets in order to take Danny's pain away, alternative Danny accepted the offer and…"
"Wait, just… just… What modifications did he-? You know, how could the gauntlets do that? " Danielle interrupted.
"Don't know. I just know that Vlad's little experiment didn't go as expected; and ended up separating the ghost-half from the human-half. The ghost-half knew he was incomplete, attacked Vlad and took his ghost, half, absorbed him and took his powers. I think whatever negative emotions Danny's ghost-half might have had inside were a lot more intense than Vlad's long-years of accumulated resentment, because his consciousness remained while Vlad's disappeared"
"Ghost-Danny got rid of the human-half and left to become… him. Vlad stayed hidden ever since" Tuck searched for something in the database and showed the file to Dani. There was no photo, just a sketch portrait (done by Sam), a brief description of his powers; also, it was labeled as: "no immediate treat".
"The last time, our Danny got to beat him with a couple of Fenton inventions, he even overpowered him -that's when he found out he could use the Ghostly Wail- Danny weakened him enough to trap him inside the termos and gave it to Clockwork to keep, just in case he tried to come again to ensure his existence in the future".
"But, if he escaped... we are not safe". The girl trailed.
"Yes, and I'm not sure how to proceed. He can't ensure his existence now that our Danny is dead, but he still has an appetite for destruction" Panic started to build up inside him again and covered his face before letting out a muffled: "What are we gonna do now?"
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