Pits
A Danny Phantom FanFiction by Cordria
Page 10
I just sat there, my arms crossed, firmly in ghost mode, floating a few feet off the ground.
You're being…
I tamped down on the voices, refusing to acknowledge their existence. "I'm not going to fight anymore." It was a quiet mantra that I whispered to myself every so often. "I'm not going to fight anymore."
Eyes fixed on a particularly ugly stone in my cell's floor, I bit my lip and fought to keep the voices from resurfacing. I had made my decision and I wasn't going to be swayed. "I'm not going to fight anymore."
You're going to die…
I growled softly, snapping my eyes shut and forcing the voice back into the depths of my mind. I didn't want to be talked out of this. "I'm not going to fight anymore."
It wasn't because of the Box Ghost. That ghost had been annoying and – at least if my theory on the ghost lights was correct – he didn't 'die' in our fight since I hadn't acquired a new light this morning. He wasn't the reason I had finally snapped; he was just the last straw… the one that broke the camel's back.
"I'm not going to fight anymore." It was a soft promise that sent a tiny thrill through my mind every time I said it aloud. Conviction, pride, passion, a feeling of 'rightness'… This must be what Gandhi felt all the time, I thought.
…petulant… filtered into my head.
I refused to be drawn into an argument with my two other 'selves'. I might be a little crazy but I hadn't reached the point where I was willing to fight with the voices in my head. "I'm not going to fight anymore." Not even in my own mind.
"I'm not going to fight anymore."
Slipping over to my cot, I settled down on the hard surface, crossing my arms carefully, locking away the voices in my head. I snorted softly, fighting to keep from laughing as that thought flickered into my mind again. I was refusing to talk to the voices in my head.
"Where's Jazz when you need her?" I asked the empty room with a small smile. "She'd have a field day with this. She'd probably say I was developing split personalities or something."
I closed my eyes and leaned back against the wall, letting the smile stay on my face as the voices stayed quiet. "I'm not going to fight anymore," I whispered one last time, letting the power of that statement ring through me. I was the teenage half-ghost version of Martin Luther King Jr. I was Rosa Parks, refusing to give up my rights. I was Patrick Henry, ready to die for what I believed in with my one life to give.
I shifted a little on the hard cot and something poked at me from under the thin blanket. Floating up into the air a little, I reached through the blanket and grabbed the offending poker. I dropped back onto my bed and stared down at Walker's knife. I'd forgotten all about it, having stuffed it under the blanket right before the guards had led me off to fight the Box Ghost.
For the first time in all the time I'd been in the Pits, I really got to see it. It had been a nice knife at one point, sharp edges and an artistic handle. It was pretty basic though – simple wood and steel with some small engravings. The only thing that seemed out of place on the streamlined weapon was an ungainly jewel stuck onto the butt of the knife. I scratched at the dried blood on the jewel with my overgrown fingernail. It was a beautiful deep-sea blue, with some kind of golden symbol inside of it.
A bit more scraping and some spit later, the jewel was pretty clean. I held it up to the ghost lights, squinting at the golden thing locked inside the crystal. It looked like a tiny, golden seahorse. Curiosity sated, I let my hands fall back into my lap and I studied the odd knife.
What was I going to do with it?
I didn't want Walker to have it back, that much was for sure. Walker needed to suffer a little for what he was putting everybody through, so I needed to hide it. My eyes flickered around the small cell. There really wasn't much for hiding places. He'd search the cot the second I was dead, so that wouldn't work. The hole in the corner that served as the bathroom was a possibility since there wasn't anything else, but that would also be searched pretty quickly.
Drifting over to the hole, I hesitated, holding the knife in my hands and looking around the room for another option. There were so many questions about this thing, I didn't really want to put it some place I wouldn't be able to get it back. What if I needed it later?
"What later?" I asked sourly, holding the knife out over the hole, "I'm not going to fight anymore, remember?"
But yet, I couldn't let go. Something was tickling at the back of my head. A better option? I turned in the air, letting my eyes flicker over the empty cell. Cot, blanket, stones, mortar, door, stones, mortar, stones, a few more stones, and… My eyes fixed on a small stone next to the door. It was almost perfectly square and had an odd black dot in the middle. "Perfect."
Over all the times I'd gotten bored in this cell, I'd managed to poke and pry at every single one of the 1,986 (or 1,983) stones in the walls, floor, and ceiling in the vain hope that they'd be loose enough to create an escape hole or something. Every single stone had been stuck tight, except for one: a squarish stone by the door with a black dot in the middle. It must have been loosened by an earlier prisoner since there was a pretty nice hole behind the stone. One just big enough for a certain knife that needed some place to hide.
Settling the knife into its new home and making sure the stone didn't look like it'd been moved, I repeated myself one last time before sitting back on the cot to waste the rest of my day.
"Perfect."
My overall experience in the Pits is easily summarized: insanely long bouts of mind-numbing boredom combined with short spurts of mind-blowing terror and adrenaline. I've sung every single nursery rhyme I know a few hundred times, made horrible attempts at some of my favorite songs, and even learned how to sing the alphabet in reverse without screwing up. Of course, I usually spend a large part of my day sleeping. When there isn't anything else to do, sleeping usually sounds pretty good.
However, today I was determined to not sleep, which deprived me of one of my better ways of passing time. I didn't want to sleep because they showed up when I closed my eyes. I didn't want to talk to those bits of personality that were trying to take over my head. They would just try to talk me out of my decision to not fight again.
And I'm not going to fight anymore.
I was currently humming to myself, tapping my foot distractedly against the leg of the cot. It was an odd tune, especially when combined with my hollow, echoing voice. An eerie reverberation was building in my cell, a soulless sound that sent shivers down my back. It was a haunting melody filled with all of my pain, love, loss, and happiness. I had fit words to my tune a while ago.
"Despite the rain… despite the pain," I sang softly as the echoes of my humming slowly died away. "Your hand in mine, and we'll stand tall." I could picture my family as I whispered the song to myself; Sam and Tucker right next to them.
I started humming again. As the lingering melody floated through the air, I knocked my heel against the wood leg of my cot in time to the beat. Thump-thump, thump, thump-thump, thump…
Then, just for something different, I tapped the blades on my arms together. It was still extremely weird – I could feel the blades touch each other, not unlike tapping my fingernails together – but it was a sensation that I was slowly getting used to. The sound of the star-silver blades rang through the echoing hum like a soft church bell tolling the death of a saint in a moonlight graveyard.
It was, without a single doubt, extremely creepy.
Not enough to stop me from my haunting little lullaby, however. If anything, it interested me enough to get me to continue. I kept humming, reveling in the fact that all the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck were standing up and small shivers were running down my spine. I tapped the blades together in an eerie beat. It was the perfect show of exactly how I was feeling… melancholy, tired, and given-up.
I was so entranced by the ghostly song that it took a while to notice what was going on. Above my head, the ghost lights were all hovering, bobbing and swaying in time to the music. They seemed to be riveted to the tune, waiting for something.
It was like something out of a movie – a song suited for a graveyard, sung by a ghost, surrounded by death, firefly-like spirits dancing around in the darkness. Beautifully eerie and otherworldly.
Just then, the door slammed open and Walker stormed in. The ghost lights flickered and swooped to the farthest corners of my cell and I blinked at him. Energy was rolling off of the enraged warden in almost painful waves. He glared at me as the remnants of my hummed tune drifted into oblivion. "I know he's here."
I didn't answer, I just stared at him. I'd never seen the warden so incredibly angry before. His raisin eyes had swollen with power until they were literally glowing and sparking with energy. Walker himself had increased in size until he had to crouch to get through the tall door leading into my cell. Fury flashed around him and I surreptitiously pushed myself back a bit. I found my voice just long enough for one word: "Who?"
"LJ. That sneaky little thief. He's here and you're hiding him."
The name slipped into my head like I'd heard it somewhere before but I couldn't remember where. He must have seen my confusion because Walker reached out and flipped my cot over. I went intangible just long enough to not get squashed and continued to hover in the air as Walker riffled through my small room. "He's got to be here," Walker mumbled as he stalked from one end of the room to the other. "He's behind all this and he stole my knife. He stole my knife. Why would he know to steal my knife?"
Knife? It took some work to keep my face from showing my sudden interest in what he was muttering about.
Walker's fingers tightened around his stick-like cane and he swung it through the air. As I ducked to prevent myself from being whapped in the head, Walker grabbed the front of my shirt. "Where is it? Where is he? What is his plan?" His eyes were bursting with energy, flickering insanely from me to the empty room and then back to me.
"I don't know," I said softly.
"One must speak up when spoken to!" Walker gave me a sharp shake and tossed me against a wall. "Of course you know. You're probably in on this. It's not going to work, you know." He stalked after me and pinned me to the floor with the end of his stick. "This place is mine, you hear me Punk? It's been mine for longer than you've been alive – and no dirty little ghost is going to steal it away from me. And don't think I don't know what you were up to with that last fight. It's not going to work. I'm going to find my key and things are going to go back to the way they were. Those stupid rebels aren't going to win. I'm the law, I'm the authority, and I will win."
He jabbed me once in the ribs for each of those last three words to emphasize his point before turning and slamming his way out of my cell, vanishing as quickly as he had appeared. I rubbed at my chest where the stick had poked me and stared at the closed door, completely and totally confused. I felt like someone had just yanked a rug out from under my feet – I was missing something. The ghost lights were huddled in the corners casting their spectral light down on the (once again) broken cot. It was lying where Walker had thrown it in three distinct pieces. I really only knew two things: one, that Walker really wanted his knife back; and two, Walker was going crazy looking for his knife.
In the end, though, it didn't really matter much. I wasn't going to fight anymore, so I didn't really need to worry about some insane warden and his crazy chase for a bloody knife. I leaned back against the wall and hummed softly for a moment, trying to sort out my head. The tune just wasn't working now – you really need to be in a melancholy mood to pull of that kind of eerie tune and I wasn't in that kind of mood any more. I got up, slowly picked up the burned scrunchie and crumpled photograph that had been under my pillow, and brought the blanket and pillow back over to a spot by the wall.
Then – with nothing better to do as another long session of 'mind-numbing boredom' set in – I sat down and theorized about what had thrown Walker over the edge, who this LJ was, and what was so important about his knife. When the silence got to be too much, I told my craziest theories to the ghost lights that were once again dancing around my ceiling.
Not that they answered. I'm not sure what I would have done if they had started talking to me too. But yet it would have been nice to get some answers for once.
A forever amount of time later, I was slumped against the wall, knees drawn up to my chest, staring blurrily at the other side of the room. I'd never actually fallen sleep while in ghost mode – it'd never even occurred to me to wonder whether or not I could sleep as a ghost. I didn't have a heart beat, Hell, I didn't even have a real brain if you wanted to get down to it… just a mess of gooey ectoplasmic energy that had some kind of function to it. Could I sleep? Would I dream? Would I turn human the minute I dropped off?
The thoughts buzzing around in my head were droning like a hive of bees. A hive of bees that was a million miles away. I kept jerking upwards, my eyes flashing open, whenever an odd falling sensation swept through me. I wasn't going to fall asleep. They were always there when I fell asleep and I didn't want to talk to them.
Between my rapid blinking and fighting to stay awake, I noticed one of the ghost lights drift down through the air to hover right in front of me. They had never left the ceiling before, but I was too tired to really care. The tiny green light flickered and flashed in front of me. For a brief moment, I could have sworn that the light had been wearing an odd hooded cape and carrying a scythe – but that couldn't be. It was just a light.
My arms were resting on my knees, those star-silver blades glittering in the light. Slowly the ghost light dropped closer and closer to me. "I wish I could just go home," I rasped softly. I needed a drink of water, but the bucket of water was officially too far away for me to get now.
The light merely flickered and drifted a little bit closer.
It was nice to have someone that was going to listen to me talk. "I wanted to see my family one last time, you know? I just wish I could tell them goodbye." My eyes drifted closed. It took too much energy to keep them open when, really, there was nothing to look at. I figured I wasn't in any more danger of falling asleep with my eyes open than with my eyes closed.
"I'm going to die here." I laughed tiredly. "And I never got to say goodbye. I never got to find out if Sam and Tucker are okay. I wish I could see them again." A sigh slid through me as I let my head fall backwards against the cool stone. "I even wish I could go to school again."
My breathing was slow and steady, the rock wall a bit too comfortable. I shifted, just a little, and let myself relax. "It's too bad I can't sleep, it'd be a really good way to pass the time." I wasn't entirely sure my words were still coherent.
"Whadda-you-think?" I slurred, opening one eyes to study the light that was dancing an inch from the tip of my blade. "Any stories to tell? You don't happen to grant wishes, do you?"
The light reached out. Almost in slow motion I watched the tiny thread of eerily glowing plasma sneak closer to the tip of the blade attached to my right arm. My brain tried to kick into gear, telling my arm to move out of the way, but I was too late. The thread touched my blade.
My mind exploded.
When the bright light cleared, I raised a hand to my head and groaned. I was dizzy beyond compare. Remaining sitting was actually a challenge with the ground dipping and swooping around me. Focusing on the ground, I waited for the world to settle down.
I blinked, staring closer at the floor. Rather than the rough-cut stones I had been expecting, it was a clean and shiny linoleum floor. A familiar-looking linoleum floor.
My head jerked up, my breath catching in my throat. The table was there, the chairs were there, every possessed and tricked out appliance was perched on the overfilled countertops. Despite the still-undulating ground, I pushed myself to my feet. "Mom?" I whispered. The kitchen was empty as I struggled to remain standing. "Dad?"
It was too good to be true, I figured as I stared around at my family's kitchen. This is some kind of trick, some kind of new torture… Taking a step forwards, I silently cursed Walker. It's going to be a cold day in Hell before he gets that knife back after this trick.
I stumbled up to the table, weaving on my feet. The table was filled with papers and news clippings: maps of the Ghost Zone, maps of Amity Park, stories about my disappearance. I took a shuddering breath when I saw a piece about how Phantom had vanished as well. Why would she cut that out?
Leaning closer I read a bit of it. "Resident ghost hero Danny Phantom hasn't been seen in nearly five weeks. While there are many theories about the location of the town's most famous spook, most of the speculation in recent days has been about the sudden down-swing in the number of spectral invaders. In the past three weeks, there have only been two calls placed to the local haunt-line. Normally, there would be two or more a day. Many people assume the disappearance of our teen ghost many have something to do with the lack of hauntings."
Five weeks? I blinked in surprise and reached out to pick up the clipping. I've been gone for five weeks already? Before my fingers could touch the paper, the back door knob jiggled. I froze, watching in trepidation as the green-splattered door swung open.
"Mom!" I cried before I realized I was still in ghost mode. I held perfectly still, my gaze flickering from her face to the ectogun in her hands. Mom turned away from me and dropped the gun on the counter, groaning and reaching out to open a cabinet.
"Mom? Mrs. Fenton?" I stepped away from the table, watching as she got out a glass and filled it with water. "Hello?"
She walked past me with her water glass and dropped down onto a kitchen chair with a sigh. After taking a drink, she riffled through the papers on the table and spread out a large map of the Ghost Zone. "Danny," she finally said.
"What?"
"Danny, where are you?" She was gazing down at the map, trailing her fingers over the badly drawn images of the Ghost Zone.
"I'm right here," I whispered, but I was getting a really bad feeling. My stomach clenched as I walked up next to her. Passing my hand in front of her eyes didn't even get her to blink. I unsteadily paced back and forth in the small kitchen, my mind beginning to throb. The light that came through the windows danced through a small prism and cascaded onto the white linoleum in a rainbow of color. Every time I walked through the broken beam of light, the colors on the floor would shift a little as I passed.
I crouched down in the light from the window, staring down at the steadily shifting light on the floor. When I was in the way of the light, the reds would drift into purple and back, the greens would become bluish, the yellow would stain a deep orange. I was like a spectral prism. It took a moment for my aching head to figure out what I was staring at. Or, rather, not staring at.
My hand touched the floor, the unbroken stream of light making the blades on my arm glow with all the colors of the sunset. But, despite hovering just above the ground, my hand cast no shadow on the floor. My whole body was lacking a shadow.
Then, just to make sure I was right, I walked over to the table and tried to pick up one of the pieces of paper. My fingers slid right through the paper like it wasn't even there.
"AH!" I snarled, stalking away from the table. I was still dizzy and unsteady, so my stalk wasn't nearly as fuming angry as I wanted it to be. "I'm not even really here, am I? So what, am I dead?" I twisted on my mom, who was sitting obliviously at the table. "Did I finally die and now I'm stuck here?" I stared at her, frustration making me curl my fingers into fists.
"Why am I even asking you! You can't hear me!" I slammed my hand down on the table, forgetting for a moment that I couldn't touch it. My hand passed straight through it, overbalancing me for a second. The papers on the table twitched, but that was it.
I dropped down onto the floor, propping my chin up with my hand, and fumed. Here I was – home – and not able to do a thing about it. Nobody could hear me, nobody could touch me, nobody could even know I was there. I wasn't even sure I was still alive. I just sat there, cross-legged, watching my mother scribble notes onto pieces of paper.
"MADDIE!" my father boomed from somewhere else in the house. I nearly levitated at the sudden sound. Crashes and bangs filled the quiet air as Dad tripped his way down the stairs from the Ops Center.
He burst into the kitchen with all the grace of a dog on ice. "It's done!" he shouted gleefully as he set the invention onto the table, stepping through me in the process. I floated up off the ground and out of the way. It didn't really hurt when he put his foot through my stomach, but it was really disconcerting.
"What does it do?" Mom asked quietly, picking up the bizarre-looking thing. It looked like a mixture of a blender, a small remote airplane, and the box of miscellaneous wires I never did remember to clean up from the garage. Knowing my dad, it probably was made of those things.
Dad reached over and flicked a switch. Lights burst into life all over the small invention and the two propellers spun into life. "It's an automatic ghost seeker." He pointed to a small opening in the nose of the plane. "It can 'smell' a ghost's ectosignature and then it follows the smell like a hunting dog." Pride colored his voice as he described how it worked. "It can even be programmed to follow a specific ghost."
I wasn't following, but Mom sure seemed to be. She was nodding her head and a grin was growing on her face. "So all we have to do is program in Danny's ectosignature and this will follow him?"
I fell out of the air at this. "What?" I gasped as I pulled myself out of the ground, forgetting that they couldn't hear me.
"Exactly! We just need a copy of his ectosignature…" he trailed off as the lights on the tiny plane began to blink and an odd noise floated through the air. "Look! It's found a ghost. There must be one nearby to trigger it like this." Dad pulled it out of Mom's hands and set it on the table.
I drifted closer and studied it. The whining alarm grew louder.
"The ghost is getting nearer," my dad exclaimed as he pulled a small ectogun out of his belt and began to charge it. Mom followed suit, grabbing the gun she had left on the counter earlier.
"Me?" I asked stupidly, waving my hand through the plane. "Is it me doing it?"
The annoying whine continued to grow and I looked around the kitchen. Mom and Dad were back-to-back, watching the walls and entry points carefully. "Is it me? Answer me!" I screamed, knowing that it really wouldn't do any good.
"It's here," Mom whispered when the alarm suddenly shut off and began to beep in a fingernails-on-chalkboard tone.
All three of us were staring at the outside wall when the ghost popped its head through. I stared at it in amazement as the ghost drifted towards the recyclables, apparently not noticing the two tensed ghost hunters in the room.
"Spook!" Dad bellowed, sending a shot sizzling through the air in front of the specter. "Touch the cardboard and you'll face the fury of a Fenton Ectogun!"
The ghost swiveled and glared at them, raising his hands in a futile attempt to look scary. "Beware!" he shouted, "I am the Box Ghost! I will rescue my cardboard minions for your plastic container of doom!"
Mom wasn't nearly as nice as my dad. She blasted the Box Ghost out of the air and strode up to him as he was attempting to pick himself up off the ground. Mom calmly trained the ectogun on his forehead. "Where is my son?"
At which point the scene disintegrated around me like the static on an old-fashioned television set and I found myself staring blankly at the walls of my cell again.
The ghost light – a lot dimmer than usual – drifted just beyond the end of my blade, slowly retracting that filament of light. I watched as the green flicker began to float upwards, the other lights racing around the first like a miniature carrousel. Apparently, whatever had just happened was extremely exciting for them.
I didn't even question it anymore. I barely even cared if it was real or not. I just laid down on the ground, still in ghost mode, and stared up at them as four of the lights danced and cavorted and the dimmer fifth light slunk from corner to corner. "Thanks," I whispered up at them, "Thank you for letting me see my family one last time."
My eyes fell closed and I lost the battle with sleep. Thankfully, it was dark and dreamless.
"Get up," the guard snarled as soon as the door slammed open.
I pushed myself off the ground and floated into the air, noting distantly that, yes – I could sleep in ghost mode. Blinking at the guard, I dropped onto my feet and waited for him to say something. Sure enough, he snapped at me and reached towards the shocking control on his belt. "You know you need to be human when we walk through the halls."
A wash of silver light later and my human weight settled onto the souls of my feet. Being human had always been like wearing an old, warm, heavy leather jacket. I told Sam this once and her reaction had been so weird that it had never been mentioned again, but it really was like shrugging into a time-worn jacket. The whole cell dimmed around me as my human eyes struggled to adapt to the darkness of the cell. My human body shivered against the onslaught of sudden cold.
"Let's go," the guard muttered as he held the door open for me. I was immediately surrounded by guards when I stepped through the entrance, but none of them made a move to grab me. It's a nice change, I thought as we set off down the dismal corridor, I'm not being dragged this time.
Studying the dimly glowing guard to my left, I let a small, tired smile cross my face. The guard would glance at me and then quickly look away. I couldn't tell if he was afraid of me or in awe. Both emotions I could easily picture on his face – and both were equally depressing. He might be afraid I was going to kill him, or he looked up to me like some kind of hero.
I snorted at the thought, causing the guards I could see to flinch and reach towards their remotes. I'm no hero – not anymore. I'm a murderer.
We were nearly to the door that lead to Former's office when something unusual happened. A rather plain wooden door on the right opened just a crack. The room beyond the door was brightly lit, casting a shadow on the figure that was peering out at us. A Black kid, probably about my age, with odd blue eyes and hair done in patterned cornrows.
"Mica!" one of the guards snapped and the door instantly shut, leaving us alone in the corridor again.
Two doors later, I was herded into Former's office. He looked up at me, studied the way I was standing, and slowly shook his head after the guards left. "I told you before," he said slowly with a sad tone, "I've seen too many people give up before they even go out there to fight." He settled back in his chair. "I know what death looks like."
"So?" I asked softly.
He watched me for a few seconds. "The ghost's name is Shiva. She's got a nasty punch and has won five fights. Rumor says don't stand still and don't mess with her hair."
I nodded absently, picking at the dirt under my overgrown fingernails. I needed to do something about that. But then I realized I wasn't planning on winning this fight and just shrugged the thought away. It wouldn't matter soon.
"It was nice meeting you, Danny Phantom," he said softly as the door to the pit swung open, letting in the sounds of the reveling crowd. "Here's hoping you have a better life in the next one."
"Bye," I whispered, knowing he probably couldn't hear me. I walked out of the book-filled room and strode towards the deadly sands of the pits, my heart slamming in my chest and my breathing loud in my ears, even over the roaring crowd.
It grew a bit quieter when I actually stepped onto the sand. Glancing up with a tired expression, I noticed a lot of the ghosts in the crowd were quiet and watching me as I walked, unassisted for once, to the starting point. There was an odd tension in the crowd, the whole arena seeming to flutter with a distant vibe. The ghosts were studying me – truly seeing me it felt like – watching me come to a stand still and wait for the inevitable end.
Ghosts can't die. I remembered my own naive proclamation ten fights ago. Ghosts are immortal, there isn't a way to kill them.
How many other people thought the same as me? That ghosts couldn't die? I let my eyes drop to the ground, trying to relax. I wonder how many ghosts have forgotten that humans can die?
A few cheers rose from the crowd and I glanced up. An incredibly tall, female ghost with knee-length red and purple hair was striding into the pit. Her body was pushing the limits of the Pit uniform, stretching the seams as she turned her red eyes on me. Her eyes glittered like rubies lost in a sea of molten lava.
Beyond her, the spectral crowd was leaning forwards, watching the fight, holding their breath. Do they care? My hands had formed themselves into fists, but I forced them to relax. They're not supposed to be able to. Walker's controlling them. I closed my eyes for a moment and Walker's visit earlier flooded into my mind. Unless he's lost his key and he's losing control. Then maybe they'd care.
The shield snapped into life above us and Shiva stormed across the Pit. Her hair flowed around her like fluid fire; crimson lightning danced around her form.
"I'm not going to fight anymore," I whispered into the air. The words felt dead now, devoid of all the life and promise they had held before. I licked my lips, fighting to keep from backing away from the ghost as she neared. "I'm not going to fight anymore," I repeated, but my resolve was cracking and splintering under pressure.
"I'm not going to fight anymore." I closed my eyes tightly, fingers snapping into tight fists at my sides, muscles tensing to keep myself from moving. This is it. I'm done.
Fabric rustled just beyond my hearing. Lightning crackled and energy fizzled against my hair. Two voices from deep in my mind struggled to get me to listen, clawed at my resolve, tried to get me to move – to fight – to anything. I just pushed them away and waited.
Finally I couldn't wait anymore. One eye flickered open, but all I could see was ruby-red energy surrounding a fist inches from my nose. It barely even registered before everything went black.
The young woman shifted on the cot, glancing from the notebook up towards the door. "That's it," she said, "the knife has GOT to be the key. That's why Walker is so desperate about getting it back." Setting the notebook on the bench, she limped across the cell and touched the door. Her fingers trailed off to the side of the wood then down a bit, settling on an almost-square brick with a small black dot in the middle. "Would it still…"
She dug her broken fingernails into the edges of the rough-hewn stone and worked it out of the wall. It was cold and heavy, but it came. She set the freed stone on the ground and hesitated, staring into the dark hole. Then she slowly reached her fingers in to the hole, feeling around.
Just as she was about to give up, her fingers closed around a thin piece of cold metal…
--o.o--o.o--o.o--o.o--o.o--o.o--
Special bonus section:
Specter spun on her heel, a foot flicking out in a deft snap-kick that sent the pith helmet rolling across the sandy pit floor. She pushed off the ground and zipped up into the air, brushing a few strands of her white hair out of her eyes and focusing on the ghost that had been trying a sneak attack. Rather than continuing with his attack – like she had been expecting – the ghost was chasing after his helmet.
She shook her head in disbelief at the odd ghost before turning her attention back to the other two creatures in the pit with her. The annoying one that looked like he came from a bad war reenactment was cowering behind a large and powerful looking elephant. It was quickly becoming apparent that her initial assessment of the danger this group of ghosts posed had been extremely overrated.
A knife sparkled into existence between her fingers as she stared her opponents down. The elephant first, she decided, relegating the other two ghosts to 'barely worth noticing' for now. The large creature took a step backwards and narrowed its eyes.
Specter attacked silently, swirling out of the sky like a crazy top, slashing at the most sensitive parts of the elephant. Ears were slashed into ribbons, eyes poked and jabbed, trunk sliced and cut. Dropping onto the creature's back, Specter turned around to survey the damage with a small smile. Her attack had been flawless; father would have been proud.
She stood on the elephant's back as it screamed and trumpeted in terror and pain. Gooey ectoplasm splattered from the creature's ripped and torn face, but Specter just continued to smile. She was a ghost hunter – a slayer of the highest quality – and this pathetic excuse for a ghost didn't stand a chance. All spectral creatures would fall before her; none deserved to continue their twisted version of life.
In her hand, the electric knife grew and expanded into a long, heavy sword. She grasped the pommel carefully, angling the blade out before her. The blinded elephant bucked suddenly, but Specter kept her balance, the sword swinging powerfully through the air and slicing through the thick skin of the she-elephant's neck.
Her smile transformed into a horrifying grin as she floated above the evaporating remains of her first opponent. The war general and the safari ghost stared at her in horror, pressing themselves against the walls of the pit. Around them the crowd screamed and hollered in delight.
Specter's sword shrunk into a small throwing blade, delicately balanced with soft engravings on the handle. She had been designed to fight. She had been created to destroy.
These two didn't stand a chance.