Flight Simulation
Danny cringed as the thermos shot out of the mouth of the ghost weasel and hit the portal door's 'open' button. Him accidentally hitting buttons on the portal was going to be a thing now, apparently. Along, apparently, with disastrous consequences.
The surface of the portal rippled, then bulged ever so slightly before the swirling blue-green surface broke, disgorging a ghost. The ghost had green skin, mad scientist hair, eyes that seemed to have been replaced with glass rectangles, and… no legs? What–?
All thoughts about the ghost's legs or lack thereof were discarded as the ghost, instead of proceeding forward as expected, went up.
Danny felt his jaw drop. Sure, the Lunch Lady had hovered and floated meat around her, and Skulker had his jetpack, but this was different. This was someone actually flying. Defying gravity and moving around freely with no perceptible effort.
"Child!" crowed the ghost. "You have freed me, Technus, ghost master of science and electrical tech–"
"YOU CAN FLY?!"
Danny was so jealous he thought he might go insane.
"Well, yes, I–"
"THAT'S GARBAGE! THAT'S UNFAIR! HOW COME YOU GET TO FLY? I WANT TO FLY!" Danny thought he deserved to be able to fly after all the nonsense he'd been subjected to since he'd walked into the portal with the misguided desire to help his parents and walked out with the ability to turn into a ghost.
A flightless ghost.
"I…" said Technus, raising a gloved finger, "am a ghost?"
Danny, no longer caring if his dad came back and saw, transformed. "SO AM I!"
"Huh," said Technus.
Danny, the edges of his vision going green, put his hands in his hair. "I only get to fly in video games… so unfair… Mom won't let me get the good flight simulator… terrible graphics card… Doomed nerfed levitation… doesn't work right on the computer… can't get a flying license… won't even let me test drive the Speeder…" Danny realized that he'd started pacing and gesticulating during his rant, and also that he'd taken his eyes off the ghost.
He spun. Technus, however, was still there, regarding Danny with a somewhat quizzical expression. At least, Danny thought it was quizzical. Those glass-rectangle eyes were admittedly hard to read.
"Video… games?"
"Yeah," said Danny, "like on a computer? Aren't you supposed to be master of tech or something? Shouldn't you know what a video game is?"
The expression on Technus's face told Danny that he maybe shouldn't have said that.
"Excellent idea! Have you ever considered tutoring?"
"Tutoring? What?" asked Danny, thinking, for a moment, that Technus knew that Jazz was tutoring Dash upstairs and feeling displaced.
"As a TA!"
That ranked high on the list of the least sensical things Danny had ever been told. "I'm a C student."
"Ah, well, I must go master these video games you speak of! Farewell, ghost child!"
Technus flew up through the ceiling. Danny, not being able to fly, watched him uselessly.
"Crud."
.
Danny looked at the invitation to Dash's party and sighed, letting his head hit the table. Tucker poked him with a straw still in its wrapper.
"Are you okay? Just, I would have thought you'd be all over this." He flicked the invitation with the straw.
"Yeah," agreed Sam. "Not that we aren't glad you're not, but are you okay?"
Danny shrugged. "I'm just… worried. That ghost was more like Lunch Lady or Skulker than the animal ones we usually handle, plus, I can't fight him like the Lunch Lady. He can just fly away. He has air superiority."
"You couldn't fight Skulker like the Lunch Lady, either," said Tucker, gesturing with a fry.
"Let's be honest," said Danny. "You and Delilah beat Skulker. I was very much the damsel in distress."
"Well," said Tucker, preening, "if you insist on giving me the credit…"
"Don't your parents have long range weapons?" asked Sam.
"Eh," said Danny, lifting his head to make a face. "Sort of. Dad's aiming skills make any sort of accuracy sort of meaningless, and Mom likes her hand-to-hand weapons. There's some stuff that'll reach across a room alright, but nothing like a rifle."
"What about that stupid big thing?" asked Tucker.
"The bazooka?" asked Danny, doubtfully. "They're still working on that. Right now, they're still mostly focusing on capture and containment, but you know how they are."
They all stared at their food for a long minute. Danny shivered, as if to shake off the memory of his father chasing him through the halls of Casper High while the Lunch Lady raged outside.
"Anyway," said Sam, "maybe we should test out some more of the weapons we do have access to. That ghost'll show up eventually, right?"
"Probably," said Danny, not looking forward to it.
"I can keep an eye on things in the online gaming community, instead," said Tucker. "Make sure he isn't doing anything on there."
"Right," said Sam, "because that's such a hardship."
"We must all make sacrifices for the greater good," said Tucker, melodramatically.
Danny smiled and nodded, then sighed again, his eyes falling on the invitation once more. "I really wanted to go," he said. "I'm never going to get a chance like this again."
"Come on, look on the bright side," said Tucker. "You were never going to get the money to do the dress code, anyway."
"Yeah," said Sam. "Who makes a dress code for a high school house party anyway? Doesn't that sound insane to you?"
Danny picked at the napkin. "My bar for insane is pretty high."
Sam and Tucker exchanged glances, then shrugged. "Fair enough," they said.
.
"Hey, Danny," said Tucker.
"Yeah?" said Danny, standing on his tip-toes to reach the box on the top shelf in the shed. If only he could just fly up and reach it.
On the other hand, he was currently in a shed full of defunct ghost hunting equipment searching for something useful, so maybe it was a good thing he couldn't fly. He wouldn't be tempted to transform.
"What did you say that guy's name was?"
"Called himself Technus, master of electronics and tech, or something like that. Why?"
"Well, there's a guy in here with the username "Technus, ghost master of sci.""
"Just sci?"
"I guess the rest of his name was too long," said Tucker. "But he's apparently tearing up the online leaderboards on Flyboy 3."
Danny shot Tucker an incredulous look. "Are you serious?"
"Yeah," said Tucker, "and he seems to be picking up slang as he goes along… and he's really bad at it. Oh my gosh, this man should not have been left to talk to trolls, he has no idea what he's saying. Oh, that's foul."
Danny rested his head on the shelf in front of him. "I hate this. I hate that this is my life now. I hate the knowledge that this is the afterlife I have to look forward to."
"I don't know," said Tucker. "I'd say this is pretty mild, all things considered. Maybe he's a good ghost?"
Danny swallowed back the trained reaction, the one impressed on him by his parents, by repetition, despite his disbelief in their entire worldview. What did that make him?
He pushed the thought back, to the box of self-doubt he'd built in the back of his mind. But as he pushed, the thought snagged on something else and he paused.
"Hey, Tucker," said Danny.
"Oh, no," said Tucker.
"Tucker. Tucker. The only good ghost is a dead one, Tucker."
"No, man, that's horrible. Friendship revoked."
.
The shed was a bust, as far as functional, safe equipment went (Danny didn't want to recount how many times he'd been shocked; better him than Sam or Tucker). Danny also didn't have the cash handy to pay for Flyboy 3, or, frankly, an internet speed that would let him play competitively. This left one option with regards to Technus: Stalk him online.
Luckily, they were teenagers, and Tucker was, not to brag, a tech genius, so this was relatively easy. This did not help Danny's anxiety over a ghost being loose on the internet, and he fretted over it all week, even as he avoided Dash and his increasing aggression regarding the party.
(Danny was starting to get a bad feeling about missing the party. Would Dash consider it an insult if Danny didn't go? How much of a beating was Danny destined for come Monday?)
"Look," said Sam, on Friday. "I wouldn't usually do this, but my place has a pretty good gaming setup, and I can get Flyboy 3. You guys can come over tomorrow and we can do some surveillance. Make sure he isn't cursing people to death via a questionable airplane battle simulator."
"Oh," said Tucker, "that's what you've been hinting at all week."
"I haven't been hinting anything."
"Uh huh. Sure," said Tucker, his smile incredibly smug.
"You've been hinting at something?" asked Danny.
Tucker snickered and Sam rolled her eyes. She might have been blushing, but her makeup made it hard to tell.
"I haven't been hinting at anything. Just let me give you my address and show up, okay?"
.
Sam had given him the wrong address.
She must have. He didn't think it was on purpose, though he didn't know how someone, anyone, much less Sam could make a mistake with their address like this. It had to be a mistake. There was no way she lived here. This neighborhood was way too high income.
Danny felt inadequate just standing on the sidewalk. Even Dash didn't live in this neighborhood.
He reached the specific house indicated by the address, winced, and turned to leave… only to see Tucker walking up the street, shoulders hunched.
"You, too?" asked Danny.
"Yeah," said Tucker, looking enormously uncomfortable. "I think- Maybe we should go back and call her?"
"Yeah," said Danny. "That's probably a good idea. I think my place is closer."
Tucker nodded, "Yeah, let's–"
The front door of the mansion opened. "Good, you guys are here. Follow me before Mom and Dad change their minds."
"Oh," said Tucker. "That doesn't sound great. They know I'm going to be here, right? This isn't, like, a surprise thing?"
"They know you're going to be here and who you are," said Sam. "They've just been weird about me being goth. Also, I think they ran background checks on both of you."
"Yeah," said Tucker, climbing the steps and craning his head back. "That checks out. Man, Sam. You're loaded."
.
Flyboy 3 was fun. Really fun. Danny maybe should have expected this. It was a top of the line game, even though it wasn't the best actually simulating real-world planes and flight capability.
Climbing the leaderboards to a point where they could feasibly interact with Technus wasn't easy. Danny was somewhat chagrined to find that Sam was his match, and Tucker was even more chagrined to find out he wasn't.
"Now," said Sam, rotating the joystick easily, "if this was Doomed, I'd be kicking your butt, too, ghost boy."
Tucker looked up from his computer almost tearfully. "No," he said, "you two have the muscle and the cash, if you take tech from me, too, all I'll have left are my good looks."
"You're so dramatic. Just because I can play video games and type in a cheat code or two doesn't mean I can code. All I've got going for me is that my parents are rich."
"A modern day Tony Stark."
"No. Ew. Pay attention to your game, I can hear you crashing."
Danny snickered and hit the 'match' button again. He was getting closer to Technus, but, honestly, he was starting to relax, too. Maybe, just maybe, Technus was also just having fun.
The computer binged. Danny was matched with Technus.
The screen flickered, dissolved into static, then bulged, the surface forming a green face, eyes, and a pair of hands. Danny pushed backwards, hard, upending his chair. Sam and Tucker threw themselves away from their shared table as well.
"Ghost child!" said Technus, spreading his hands wide. "I have indeed mastered the art of the 'gaming,' and have become 'hip' and 'with it.' Now, I shall prove to you that I've got the eye of the tiger, and am a superior opponent!"
Technus seized Danny by the shoulders and dragged him into the computer screen.
The next thing Danny knew, he was in a cockpit branded with the Flyboy 3 logo. Outside, in front of him, was either a really good replica of Flyboy's 'Jungle' runway, or something far worse.
Judging by how Danny's life tended to play out, he'd put his money on 'worse."
Technus cackled in his ear, and Danny's hands flew up. He was wearing a helmet, complete with headphones.
"I wasn't sure if that would work!" Technus cackled some more. "So, ghost child, are you ready for a real fight?"
.
In retrospect, after he'd gotten out, what bothered Danny the most about the whole thing, more than getting sucked into a video game, was that he hadn't even been sucked into the actual computer. Technus had pulled him through the monitor, which, admittedly, was connected to the computer.
But in the moment, what bothered him the most was the g-force he experienced as he sharply banked away from Technus's gunfire.
Danny had yet to wing Technus at all, and, having to figure out the controls on the fly, he was at a distinct disadvantage. He'd managed to pull the plane into intangibility a few times, but that had left him breathing hard and seeing double, something he couldn't really afford. The plane was really too big for someone who could barely manage to take his friends through a wall with him.
His plane clipped off the top of one of the taller trees, sending branches to the ground, and Danny desperately tried to gain height before he realized the significance of what had just happened.
So, with him and Technus here, this world didn't entirely stick to the video game's rules. Danny had run into trees in the game before, and they had never taken any real damage. Of course, the game didn't have things like g-force or real correlation between animated controls and what the plane was doing, either, much less intangibility. But if Danny could do things he could do in the real world that he couldn't do in the game here… And if things from the game existed that didn't in the real world…
Danny punched in the Easter Egg code to release fireworks. Usually, this just resulted in a harmless, colorful firework animation around the planes, but here, well, fireworks were explosives, and they tended to be both bright and loud.
As expected, Technus veered off, and so did Danny. But Danny's veer had another purpose: bringing Technus into his sights. He fired.
The fireball in front of him was satisfying, the 'Victory!' screen even more so.
Danny abruptly found himself ejected from (sigh) the computer monitor.
"Danny!"
Dude!"
"Are you okay?" asked Sam and Tucker, finish the last at the same time and nearly colliding with each other as they ran for Danny.
"Um," said Danny.
"It seem that video games still have much to teach me about the funky fresh ways of the future," said Technus's voice, solemn but slightly raspy and still very loud through the speaker. "Until we meet again, ghost child!"
The computer screen returned to normal, displaying the 'Victory!' screen and Danny's ascent to the top 100 leaderboard for Flyboy 3.
"Oh no," said Danny, lacking the energy to get up. "We're going to have to deal with him again, aren't we?"