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The son of Hades can feel the beginnings of a headache forming. "…you realize that makes no sense, right?" –he asks, exasperated. "You can't be half alive, and you certainly can't be half dead. You can be alive, or dead, and there's nothing in between."
"What about people in a coma?" –Ellie tilts her head.
"They're alive until the body shuts down."
"What about an unborn fetus?" –Valerie raises an eyebrow.
"The soul gets grafted on when you're born."
Valerie snorts. "That's gonna get some folks up in arms."
Nico pinches the bridge of his nose. "Look; I can literally feel your soul inside your body right now." –he tells Ellie. "By definition, you can't be dead."
Ellie sneers. "I mean, that's not stopping me from being able to walk through walls, disappear, and fly." –she says. "You've met my human half, and you're looking at my ghost half. I don't know what you want me to tell you."
"'How' would be a good start." –he drawls.
The half-ghost hybrid puts her palms up in surrender. "Alright, but you better keep an open mind." –she says. "I don't want any more of this 'impossible freak of nature' talk. I already have a complex about it."
Nico sighs. "I'll try, but I make no promises. What you're saying kinda goes against everything I've learned as Prince of the Underworld."
"I guess that's fair." –Ellie mutters. "So…you seemed to already know about Danny Phantom, back in the bus. But do you know about Plasmius?"
He thinks back to Phantom's dossier. "Vaguely."
"There's only three half-ghost hybrids in existence." –Ellie begins. "Danny's one of them, and obviously, so am I. Plasmius is the last one – or was, until he died six years ago."
Nico frowns. "I'm assuming it has something to do with the Phantom's disappearance."
Ellie hums. "Danny retired afterwards, yeah." –she says. "But the important bit here is that Plasmius was…"
"Nuts?" –Valerie suggests.
"I guess that's the nicest way to put it." –Ellie shrugs. "He used his powers to make himself a few pennies short of a billionaire – overshadowed people, haunted and drove his enemies insane…I'm pretty sure he even killed some of the more bothersome obstacles in his way. You can imagine how easy it was for him to get away with it, considering all the abilities we have."
Nico scowls. "Sounds like someone the Furies would give their full attention to. Maybe even someone they'd design a special punishment for, like Tantalus."
"Is that the guy who has to keep pushing a boulder uphill only for it to roll back down every time?" –Ellie tilts her head.
"No, that's Sisyphus. His sentence got commuted ages ago. Tantalus is the guy who chopped up his kids and served them to the gods for dinner. Nasty piece of work. Can't ever reach the food and drink he's surrounded by in his personalized pit of punishment." –he shrugs. "Served as our camp counselor for a spell."
Valerie blinks. "…yikes."
"The hell do you mean, 'camp counselor'?" –Ellie wonders, then shakes her head. "Nevermind. At any rate, Plasmius got to be his evil self for a pretty long time with no one to oppose him. And then Danny went and got himself zapped by an artificial ghost portal."
"Danny's parents, Jack and Maddie Fenton, are the foremost paranormal researchers in the world." –Valerie supplies. "They're the ones who've invented most of our ghost-hunting tech, and the only people on Earth with access to a man-made portal to the Ghost Zone, which they designed and built all by themselves. They were also best friends with Vlad Masters – Plasmius' human half, who was in love with Danny's mom, in turn. He got his powers in a lab accident, when they were all in college, because their first portal prototype malfunctioned."
Nico crosses his arms, deep in thought. None of this explains how someone can possibly be half-ghost, but he's getting a pretty good picture of this whole drama. "I'm assuming the second portal malfunctioned, too?"
Valerie snorts. "Nope. Danny turned it on from the inside, like an idiot."
"So, now there's a second hybrid, who just so happens to be the son of the woman he loved." –Ellie sums up. "Plasmius became obsessed with Danny. He was already insane, but now he had these delusions of getting Jack out of the picture, getting together with Maddie, and taking Danny for his son and…apprentice in evil, I guess?"
The demigod narrows his eyes. "…so, like, what's with Amity Park and cartoonishly evil people?"
"Maybe the ambient ectoplasm does have a few side effects." –Valerie smirks.
"No kidding." –Nico says, then turns to Ellie. "So, where do you come in? Are you Danny's younger sister?"
"I'm his clone." –she corrects him. The word seems to pain her, a little. "The most stable one Plasmius created."
The silence that hangs over the small apartment is sobering; Nico knows about cloning, of course – even if the concept hadn't been making the rounds by the 30s, finding out humanity had successfully cloned a few animals had been part of his crash course on everything he'd missed while him and Bianca had been hidden away from the world. Something doesn't add up, though. "I'm…admittedly a little out of the loop." –Nico says. "But shouldn't you be a boy, if you're a clone of him?"
Valerie raises her eyebrow. "Aren't you, like, fifteen? This shouldn't be news to you, or anyone with access to the Internet."
"I'm seventeen." –Nico grumbles. "I was also born in 1932. Time shenanigans, you understand. Needless to say, I've missed a lot."
Valerie groans. "We're gonna be unpacking stuff like this all day, aren't we?"
"I'm only a clone in the physical sense." –Ellie tries to explain. She looks questioningly to Valerie, who answers the unspoken question with a reassuring nod. "Everything else…Danny and I are different people. Different personalities, tastes, mindsets…different identities. He didn't match the body he was born with. I did."
"...oh." –he says. This, he actually knows about; there's a girl in the Aphrodite cabin in a similar, if opposite situation. It confused him then, too, until Will ever-so-patiently sat him down and explained what being transgender was all about.
"I hope that's not a problem for you." –Valerie says. He doesn't miss the protective edge to her words.
He shakes his head. "No, not at all. I'm still adjusting to the twenty-first century, so this is admittedly still a little new to me, but there's no reason for me to think of it as a problem. It'd be rather hypocritical of me if I did." –he says.
The girls look at each other, then back at him, expectantly. He swallows his – diminished, but ever-present – fear of saying it out loud. "I'm gay. I have a boyfriend." –he clarifies.
"Doesn't stop some people." –Valerie notes, bitter. "But I'll take your word for it, di Angelo."
"Anyway…" –Ellie continues. "Since Danny wouldn't get with the program, Plasmius eventually tried to clone himself a son from Danny's DNA."
"Y'know, as you do." –Valerie interjects, sarcastically.
Ellie snorts. "He kept getting it wrong, though – all of us were unstable to some degree, the others much more so than me. We never did find out exactly why; maybe the process itself was flawed, or maybe the source material he was using was corrupted. Maybe it was the fact that Plasmius kept trying to create a son, and a more powerful one than Danny, at that, so he messed with the 'recipe', so to speak. I'm probably the only one he didn't modify."
Nico hums. "But you were still unstable?"
"When I used my powers, yeah. I'd start breaking down into raw ectoplasm." –she recalls, haunted by the memory. "Personally, I don't think he used enough power when he created me. Sustaining an artificial ghost portal takes an enormous amount of energy – enough to tear open a rift in three-dimensional space, and enough to instantly rewrite and combine a human's entire genome with ecto-DNA, apparently. Using my powers for more than a couple seconds felt like a starving man's stomach starting to consume itself."
Ellie looks at her hands. "Danny and I managed to stop Plasmius. And then he used one of his parents' inventions to fix me – I won't ever break down again. But that also means my powers are stunted; they won't grow like his and Plasmius did, with age. I'm stuck at the level I was at back then." –she admits. "I won't ever be able to harness my elemental core, perform a Ghostly Wail, or make more than a single duplicate of myself."
Nico hums, sympathetic. It's hard to say whether he's been cursed or blessed, having all the power he does as a child of one of the Big Three, but he knows there's many demigods who become disillusioned when they realize some of their fellow demigods are much more powerful than they are. Which is valid, even if he personally considers them lucky for usually not being subject to the more apocalyptic side of the demigod questing spectrum. "That's what you meant, isn't it?" –he asks Valerie. "About the ghosts not respecting Ellie as much as they did Danny?"
Valerie hums affirmatively. "They keep poking at her because they think they might beat her someday. They won't, but there's no convincing some of them. It's hard to reason with most ghosts in the first place, since their driving obsession usually clouds all judgement."
"And if that wasn't enough, the Guys in White will never let me forget that I was at their blown-up headquarters." –Ellie laments. "Even though it wasn't me who did it."
The son of Hades ponders his new findings. "Well, I still think there's something more to the beings you think of as ghosts. Like the fact that they apparently have DNA, which tells me they must be living organisms – how else would they have genes to pass down?" –he reasons. "But the important thing is, we're on more or less equal footing, now."
"...which means you should tell us why you're here, yeah?" –Valerie says.
"I guess so." –he mutters. "I'm supposed to find the Phantom and offer him a place on a team." –he says.
Ellie frowns. "A team? What kind of team?"
"The Avengers kind." –Nico retorts. "A team of superpowered individuals meant to protect mankind from threats of a magical nature, led by Earth's Sorcerer Supreme."
Minor thing; I know Sisyphus is very much still being punished in the Percy Jackson series, but I've hyper-fixated on Hades (the indie game from Supergiant) lately and I can't help myself. I'm not about to replace every PJO thing with Hades canon, but you'll probably see more changes in this vein. Highly recommend this game and its portrayal of Greek mythology!
Also, I am so very glad to take this small opportunity to spite Butch Hartman and confirm that, yes, Danny is a trans man in this universe! Seriously, though - and not that I should need to justify it, but - there's a horrific shortage of trans superheroes in both DC and Marvel comics, and those that do exist would be very hard to introduce to this crossover universe as it exists, timeline and setting-wise. Danny being trans is a very popular headcanon, and for good reason, so I took the opportunity to represent the trans community in one of the most beloved superhero icons of our time! Like Valerie said, I hope that's not a problem. If it is, there's a great many stories out there with regular, canon Danny.
As always, thank you for your attention! Make sure to comment or message me if you have any questions about this story. Look me up on Twitter as Darthkvzn or Tumblr as darthkvznblogs if you'd like - and on Ko-fi, as Darthkvzn, if you like what I do and have a buck to spare.
Until next time!