Doomed
Chapter XCI
A visible wisp of air escaped Danny's mouth as he exhaled and a shiver ran up his spine. Someone shouted very close behind him and the teenager spun around, expecting to see some kind of ghost attack. Thankfully, it was just a very angry human being.
"Oh my GOD!" Kwan shouted. "We've been waiting out here for six hours! Will they open the doors already?!"
"I know, dude!" Dash agreed behind him. "And it's so c-cold out here! Why can't they let us inside?!"
"If this isn't as good as they say it is, I'm gonna be so mad," Danny added.
Kwan, Dash, Sam, Tucker, and all of the thirty or so others that heard Danny's blasphemous remark gasped in unison. But instead of Dash, it was Tucker that grabbed Danny by the front of his coat and shook him violently. Danny swore he saw tears…
"Don't even JOKE about that!" Tucker cried. "You saw the footage! This is going to be the most fricking extreme MMORPGFPS that EVER EXISTED!"
"Nay, the most extreme experience in existence!" shouted an anonymous person from within the crowd.
"Guys, I swear, this will be more extreme than anything that you can possibly imagine!"
"Better than SEX!"
"The DEMO was better than sex!"
"Why did you bring that mayonnaise here?! What? Oh yeah, SO MUCH FREAKING BETTER THAN SEX!"
"Since there's probably three of you out of the other two hundred or so that have actually had sex, let's try not to ruin the experience for everyone else, ok?"
Danny, Tucker and a few others laughed at Sam's declaration. While Sam was among the rest of the two hundred who were still "innocent", she was a female and, thusly, had female body parts. None of the others in line dared to challenge her.
"BUT THIS GAME IS STILL GOING TO BE SO FRICKING EXTREME!" Kwan bellowed.
The crowd erupted in shouts of approval and agreement, each individual trying to shout over the rest about the level of extremeness that DOOMED II: BACK FOR GORE would contain.
Like most others in the line, Danny had reserved and paid off, in full, his copy of the revolutionary videogame. His copy had been held for him since before he was endowed with his ghost powers, as were Sam and Tucker's copies. Was it a bit extraneous to dish out seventy U.S. dollars for a game (one hundred for the Bouncie Studios™ Limited Collector's Edition, which was what Danny had reserved)? Not at all.
The shouts continued to grow louder and louder, dripping with enthusiasm and excitement. A barely audible jingle, however, brought all noise to a standstill. A short, chubby man stuck his head out the door with a nervous grin.
"Uh, hiya folks. Just a bit bad news for you-"
Danny thought the crowd would become a mob and slaughter the man where he stood, but they wanted to hear his bad news before acting out.
"-well it seems that, while you were all shouting, the clock already struck midnight. It's five after, so you can-"
The man didn't bother to finish his sentence as the wave of human bodies surged for the door. Danny grabbed Tucker and Sam's forearms to prevent getting separated as he was almost carried into the Game Pause. Being fifth in line, he managed to retrieve his copy and squeeze through the crowded door. Once outside, he held his copy up and smiled as the crowd before him roared their congratulations, adoration, jealousy, and discontent with the temperature on the very chilly, very early Saturday morning. Danny waited for Sam and Tucker and led them into an alley.
"Alright. I'll drop you guys off as fast as possible," Danny said as he transformed into Phantom using the electroplasmic method. The surge of electricity washed over his body, hiding Danny Fenton within the molecular structure of Phantom; Amity Park's ghostly super hero. "Use the Fenton Phones I gave you the other day so we can all talk to each other while we're making our characters. The second you're done, log on so we can start the co-op campaign. If we play continuously, we'll have it done by tonight."
"Granted that we alternate eating, napping, showering, and bathroom breaks so at least two people are playing at once," Tucker threw in as Phantom tore through the freezing cold sky above Amity Park.
The local Game Pause was on the far side of down town Amity Park from the trio's houses. Phantom flying at top speed on a ridiculously cold night was not making his friend's very happy, especially since they didn't share Phantom's dulled sense of temperature.
"Care to slow down?" Sam hissed through clenched teeth. "Or at least go intangible?"
"Oh, sure thing, Sam," Danny mumbled.
As he turned intangible, he realized a fraction of a second too late that he hadn't made their copies of DOOMED II intangible. The three plastic bags fell through their owners' hands and sped towards the ground.
"NOOOOOOO!!"Phantom cried. He spun around, setting Sam and Tucker on a building as he hurtled down after the three boxes. To his horror, he saw that the winds had spread the boxes too far for him to catch them all. "Why can't I be in three places at once!?"
Suddenly, his sides felt as if they had turned to jello and he found himself looking at the world with three sets of eyes.
"What the-"
"Go for your copy," the Teutonic accented voice of Tempest said coolly as it sped off after Sam's copy of the game.
"We will retrieve the others," Phantom recognized the other voice as belonging Folium, although it was much deeper and menacing than he would have expected.
Deciding that DOOMED II was more important than his doppelganger's voice patterns, Phantom followed the transparent plastic bag that held his overpriced copy of the game and whisked it out of the air just before it could dash upon the roof of a building. He pulled up, barely avoiding another skyscraper, and made for the open skies where his others were waiting for him.
"That went well," Tempest remarked as he examined the contents of Sam's bag.
"Indeed," Folium added. "But maybe next time you could pay more attention to what you're doing?"
"Sorry?" Phantom gaped at his two others in astonishment.
They looked just like him. Even though the voices were tied to his powers somehow, his copies didn't look like advancements on his current body. More like a step in another direction. Tempest's hair was pointed straight up and crackled with electricity. His fingers ended in points, and his eyes glowed a neon blue color. His body was a similar build to Phantom's own; slim and athletic. Folium, on the other hand, was much more muscular. His eyes faintly gave off a dull green glimmer. His hair was even more unruly than Phantom's own, and had only two clawed fingers and a thumb on each hand.
"Yes, you can duplicate yourself," Tempest answered Phantom's question before he could ask it. "As long as we reside in your mind, you can easily make two copies of yourself. We will control those two."
"But we cannot do anything unless it is your will," Folium grumbled. "So do not worry about a sudden spike in the death toll when you are forced to divide your consciousness."
"Wow," Phantom said absently as he looked between the two. "This is so cool!"
"Rain is approaching," Tempest reported, sniffing the air. "two minutes out, and its going to pour. I suggest we merge and get Sam and Tucker home."
"I agree," Folium looked to the sky. "A little rain might do us some good, though."
Phantom placed a hand on each copy's shoulder and focused on absorbing them. The two dissipated into green clouds of ectoplasmic mist and fazed into his body. Phantom grinned triumphantly and sped off for the building where he had dropped Sam and Tucker.
"Here you go, and here you go," he said as he tossed his friends their respective games upon his return. "Sorry about that, but we need to skedaddle. Rain's coming, and we sure don't want to be here when it hits."
Phantom collected his friends into his arms and turned intangible, making sure the games were in the same state of being before taking to the skies.
"I didn't know you could spin off copies of yourself," Tucker commented as they approached the suburbs. "When did you learn that trick?"
"Just now. I had some help from the inside," Phantom answered.
"I see. That explains why they had their own look."
"Yeah. It was sweet. But not nearly as sweet as this game is gonna be," Phantom fazed into Tucker's room and set him down on his bed. "Remember, Fenton Phones!" Phantom shouted before blasting back up through his ceiling.
"That was funny, what you said back at the Game Pause," Phantom said to Sam as raindrops began to fall from the sky.
"I thought so," she answered slyly. "That's why I said it."
"You really think sex is more extreme than DOOMED II?"
"I wouldn't know, now would I?"
"I think you would," Phantom smirked.
"And how, may I ask, would you come to that conclusion?"
"Well there was that one time at your house when your dad made you invite all those snobby prep kids to your pool party, and you snuck off into the back room with whatsisface and-"
"If you finish that sentence, I will kill you," Sam growled.
"Ah-HA! So I'm right!"
"Nothing happened. He tried to kiss me and I slapped him across the face. Didn't you notice that he wasn't there for the rest of the night?"
"No, I was consumed by jealousy and rage. I went ghost and destroyed half the town."
Sam cocked an eyebrow. "This was two months before you even got your powers."
"I know, but I still did it. That's how mad I was."
Sam blushed, but didn't have to worry about Phantom seeing it, since she was intangible.
"Well I'm touched that you would go ghost before actually getting ghost powers because you thought I was doing it with some guy in a closet," she pecked the ghost boy on the cheek. "I really am."
Funny thing about intangibility; you can actually be touched by another person or object that is also intangible. So Sam's friendly kiss was, in actuality, tangible. Quite so, really, because Phantom felt his emotions explode from within his body and the two silver-green rings slid over his body. Danny gasped seeing that he had reverted back to human form and quickly changed back before the two could plummet to their deaths.
"Sorry, sorry!" Phantom apologized. "Power spike."
"Power spike?" Sam asked suspiciously. "I thought you got over losing control. Is something wrong?"
"You kissed me. I'm mid-puberty, overflowing with ectoplasmic testosterone and teen angst, I just discovered a new power, I just got a new game that I've been squealing about for months, and you just kissed me." The two remained silent as Phantom closed in on Sam's house. "I am fine."
"It was a friendly kiss," Sam said defensively. "Besides, you're a fine one to talk."
"Touché," Phantom replied as he entered Sam's room through the wall. "I'll see you online! Don't wait up! Fenton PHONES!"
Sam rolled her eyes as the ghost boy sped through her roof and into the freezing rain that now was drenching the entire town. The Goth girl grabbed a pen from her computer desk and used it to cut through the shrink wrap around the game case since she was too distracted to hunt for scissors. As she opened the case, she thought about the events that had transpired only moments ago. Did she really have that much of an effect on Danny that a kiss on the cheek could short out his powers? Apparently so; it had just happened. She grinned as she began to install the game on her computer. Maybe there was hope for her yet.
Plasmius stared wide-eyed at the footage that was playing before her; her bad mood already worsening. Her copy of Technus, which had been steadily fading ever since the original was incarcerated, vanished without a trace several evenings before. When rumors of Technus reappearing in the Ghost Zone reached her pointed ears, she knew he had betrayed her. When she heard he had been spotted with Walker, she became infuriated.
But his turncoat nature was something Plasmius had anticipated. She never wanted to become too reliant on the ghost master of technology, so she uploaded his intelligence into her computer systems. Inadvertently, she had succeeded in doing what was strictly science fiction for years; she had created a working, functioning Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps the trick was using an actual intelligence to build upon . . . but whatever the secret was, the hybrid cared very little about it.
Her attention was focused on the three tanks that held strange ghost creatures inside them. The first two were duds; unable to effectively use the technological modifications made to their bodies. As most of their bodily functions were routed into the modifications, the ghosts had quickly perished. The third, however, had taken another approach. Rather than rejecting the technology as its "brothers" had, or allowing its body to run on them, the third specimen absorbed the tech and fused with it.
Plasmius had been delighted, having created the perfect fusion of organic and machine components. Her enthusiasm was boosted when the ghost began exhibiting more abilities based on Phantom's regenerative DNA. This specimen was able to assimilate any kind of matter, even other living creatures, into its biomass.
Plasmius wanted to explore the possibility of Daniel having similar powers, but she never got the chance. As she stared at the three cages, she saw that all three of them were empty. After her Technus AI program had replayed the footage of her only functioning creation absorbing its two dead roommates an escaping via binary cloud, Plasmius could think of only one person it could possibly be heading to.
Daniel Fenton.
To Be Continued
A/N: I like the weekly updates. Gives me time to think and do other stuff. So there's what Tempest and Folium look like in their duplicate forms. I like how they look in my mind. I think I'll like how they look on paper better once I get around to drawing them.
As for DOOMED II: Back for Gore, I wasn't sure if I referenced DOOMED somewhere in my story. And since this is over 200,000 words long contained in 90 chapters, I didn't feel like "skimming through" to see if I did or not. So think of it this way; DOOMED is like Halo. The first one was good, but it didn't really garner a colossal fan base until the second installment. That's why everyone was TOTALLY FREAKING OUT at the midnight release. And I thought about flexing my profanity muscle, but decided not to. Let's just say "fricking" was not the first word that came to my mind. But I digress.
I hope you Danny/Sam shippers liked the fluff, because it's hardcore Danny/Valerie for the rest of the chapter. Is that foreshadowing a possible future lemon? Think of it this way, I was worried about something being too controversial, wasn't I? So yeah . . . sleep on that.
Thanks to all my reviewers, especially Dragonflamecrystal, Fulcon, TPcrazy, darkness over day, Thunderstorm101, darkbunny92, and Coppa-Cola.
And sorry if this arc's title seems a little tacky, but I think it will make sense in a broader sense later on. At least I hope it will.
HAPPY MOTHERS' DAY!