YES! The Saturdays show up in this chapter! ( briefly :'( ) Zak stays around for good in Chapter 7 :D
I hope you enjoy the read!
Oh, BTW. This whole story is told from Danny's POV.
I called Jazz to let her know I'd be gone for a while longer. She wasn't buying it, so I told her I was fighting a ghost, and that calmed her down.
"Hey, I'm gonna be out later than I said." "No! It's dangerous at night!"
"Hey, I'm gonna go pick a fight with an evil monster." "Tell me about it when you get back!"
Sometimes, Jazz's logic made no sense.
Speaking of evil monsters, I was expecting the ghost to be attacking the civilians, but it looked the other way around. A kid around my age with a hairdo straight out of an anime and an older, oddly-familiar-looking dude were rallying the poor thing around.
"Danny!" The faint voice was in my head. It was distorted, although that could've just been the wind in my ears. One thing for sure, it was a female voice. I'd already hung up the phone, so it wasn't Jazz. Didn't sound like her, anyways.
Telepathy?
That was new. I was still hovering above the ghost, out of sight, so I assumed she was just looking for me from the start.
My reputation precedes me.
"Special delivery from bee-hind," I yelled as I swooped in from – you can fill in the rest.
The creature (I wasn't sure it was a ghost, at that point) went flying into one of the trees, compliments of yours truly.
I flew over to the pair that were attacking it.
"'bee-hind'? Dude, the guy's a scorpion." The anime character shifted his onslaught to me.
Of course, I'd known that, but I didn't know any good scorpion puns, so I went with a bee one. "Really? Huh. I guess that explains the tail." I had a good comeback though, so I played dumb.
"Good to see you again, Fenton." It was that older guy. He looked like he could be some sort of super-soldier. He had the scar to back it up.
Oh, I've seen him before. At Lake Eerie.
When my dad and I went fishing at the fog-engulfed swamp known as Lake Eerie, there was a well-built man in an orange and black jump suit and black and white hair there. He had a pet lizard thing, which wasn't here today.
"Right back at you, I guess." I had to look at my hands to make sure I was still a ghost.
He knows me?
"Let me show you how it's done!" the kid pulled out a…bamboo…sword…thing?
"Hey, purple-breath! You look a little stung up. Too much tail? Try a bit of claw!"
The physical attack was almost as good as the verbal.
Purple-breath swung its tail and pushed the kid flying into a boulder, which conveniently was just within hearing range for me to taunt him.
"Should I be taking notes," I scoffed.
The creature's grunt was more scrapping than the voice I heard in my head earlier: more fitting of a scorpion, though that seemed to be the least of our concerns.
"Now boys, can't you two get along?" The super-soldier didn't seem to mind that I was tormenting whom he treated as his son.
The kid looked up at me and did a passive aggressive pout, which disgusted me surprisingly more than if it were Jazz that had done it. He turned to where the scorpion was, emphasis on was. "Wait, where's the Dingonek?"
Assuming Dingonek was the name of the saber-toothed scorpion, the kid was right. She had vanished into a purple portal, after all the effort she put into dragging me out.
"I beamed it back to Congo Basin while you two were chatting," answered the father.
"Aww, man! Well, that ends that tail."
I'll admit that one made me smirk. Only a little, though.
I took a second look at the dad, then turned to the kid. I knew the dad, kinda, but I'd never seen him before. "Who are – oh, you're the kid who let all those things loose in NYC 4 months ago." I changed back into my human form, which didn't surprise the kid in the least.
"Cryptids, and that was technically Rani Nagi's fault. You're the guy who let that weather spirit rampage across Earth!"
"Ghost, and that was technically Vlad's fault."
"I'm Zak." Zak swung his arm around me, and turned to his dad. "Yeah, I think we can get along."
My neck still hurt from that encounter with the ceiling.