"Why have you been watching the news so much lately?"
Tucker, on the couch, craned his neck around to look at his mother, "Have you seen the crazy stuff going on around town lately?"
Angela Foley set her hands akimbo on her hips, "Of course I have! Don't talk to me that way."
Tucker suppressed a sigh. He didn't mean to set her off.
"It's all madness, I admit, but it's also scientifically explainable. Nothing supernatural about it," Angela seemed to not meet his eyes as she said this, like she was stubbornly sticking to a conviction she wasn't sure others agreed with, "Jack and Maddie are the ones trained to handle these things, aren't they? It'll blow over soon enough." Her son remembered how terrified she'd been when Technus had attacked and admired her current composure on the matter.
"Well..." Tucker couldn't deny the itching in his feet, "If it's fine with you, I think I'll just go out and take a walk."
"While this is happening?" Angela indicated the female ghost's mayhem on the television screen, "Are you out of your mind?"
"It's not like I'll go far."
"Tuckard D'Shon, no."
This was going to be difficult.
The compulsion to be out there somehow helping Danny was a burning flame in Tucker's gut which refused to go away. What help could he be, he thought desolately once again; he was useless, he had no ghost powers. Something else was stirring within as well, but he had no words for it...
Didn't this lady ever take a break?
Danny's blast of offensive ectoplasm incensed Desiree, she had reared up from her place plastered flatly on the ground to shriek at him, swiping with claw-like digits repeatedly. He was quick, he had to be, those things looked sharp and he didn't want to find out exactly how sharp they were. It crossed his mind that she must be really irrationally angry to not even consider blasting him in return, at the moment she was nearly animalistic with the need to dig her talons into him.
Over and over he avoided her and at some point he guessed he just grew tired. He tried to summon the feeling he'd experienced when he'd fired the ectoblast and found it was incredibly easy to do, the ectoplasm swelled around his clenched fists and he pointed them at her once he could have an opportunity, firing. The one sent from his left hand missed, but Desiree made an arrgh sound as his right hand blast straight into her shapely green-toned face. From behind his green-tinted goggles he thought he met her red eyes. They were flashing with swiftly forming hatred, her mouth twisted unpleasantly with dislike and he got the sense she believed there were a thousand better things she could be doing at that moment.
Too bad.
He'd spent too long gazing into her face, however, because the next thing he knew one of her arms had come down on his head lightning fast and he plummeted down a few feet from the force. Ghosts were hard-hitters. So was he, damn it! He glared up and saw her looking smug above him. One of his hands was holding his head and he was so surprised by the knock on the skull he simply bared his teeth at her.
Her full lips parted to say smoothly, "Gwaeryu eht hutherip?" Admiring my beauty?
His head reeled—the gibberish! The unknown language he sometimes broke into for no reason! She was speaking it! And he understood! She did it so easily, like it was second nature.
Then the meaning of the words struck him and his hackles rose, "Hutherip? Yek she cren khas!" Beauty? I don't see any! The words flowed angrily from his mouth. It sounded right to him, but a sort of condescension washed over Desiree. It came to his mind that compared to how she'd spoken, he'd sounded very plain and...despite having pieced the sentence together correctly as far as he could tell, he seemed like a little boy who hadn't yet picked up the proper dialect of adults.
She sneered, "Hah. Learn to speak, boy, then we shall talk."
"I think not," he shook off the burst of insecurity and in a second's time materialized a blast that hit her in the midsection. Her eyes went wide directly before it made contact as she realized her error: she had been so focused on mocking him for what she perceived as immaturity she'd forgotten he was fighting her. Or whatever. Who knew what had been going through her head. Danny could only make assumptions from what he witnessed.
Evidently she'd had enough of him by now because she snarled at him one last time, trying to make an escape. He rushed after her as she flew away and nearly caught her tail-like lower body, however, she did remember that she could make ectoblasts as well this time, as Danny discovered while he was sent sprawling backwards from a blast and just managing to stop himself from falling back-first into the grass ground of the recreational park below.
He cursed. He couldn't see her anymore.
Sam was oblivious to any of this happening, she was in her room contemplating the turns her life had taken. There was no TV in her room, so she couldn't see the news, which she didn't often watch anyway. Her grandma had left her alone after their conversation and she was thankful for it, lying on her side on her queen-sized bed decorated with various shades of black and purple. Her favorite colors.
She sneezed.
Was she getting a cold? She hoped not.
She stood up to get a tissue from the box sitting on one of her over-large bookshelves. She walked up to and glanced through her bedroom balcony, closed, at the cloudy day. The drapes obscured a lot of it but she could make out the wide rich-person-neighborhood street she'd always had a view of for as long as she could recall. She'd lived in this mansion her entire life.
She leaned against the glass.
She wondered how Tucker and Danny were doing.
Maybe she could watch some Dead Teacher IV to pass the time...
Tucker'd waited until his mom had been placated (his dad was at work, so he didn't need to worry about him) enough that she'd left him alone. Then, he'd promptly snuck out the front door of the house and proceeded to rush down the street to the town central park, where Danny surely must have been.
He would get hell from both of his parents for this, especially with the previous stunt he'd pulled when the Technus thing happened, but he didn't care right now. He was running much faster than he ever thought he could, with a vigor unfamiliar to him. It was almost unnatural.
Before he knew it he was in the sky, zooming through it towards the park, and for a minute he was perplexed. A strange sense came over him though, telling him he needn't worry. This was supposed to happen. He accepted it without knowing any better, all logic erased. He didn't even notice the verdant undertone his body was turning.
A flying car? Really?
Danny chased said airborne vehicle as it zigzagged between buildings. His chief concern was the screaming man in the driver's seat. He'd nearly reached the rolled-down window—essentially his plan was to intangibly yank the guy out of the car and place him safely on the sidewalk—when an echoing, not unknown voice cried, "Don't sweat this one, Danny! I'm on it!"
Danny screeched to a stop in the way only someone flying could, gaping. Tucker?!
Tucker was grabbing the car by a wheel and—flinging it! To the ground! The screams of the man inside were terrible. Danny was horrified and whisked at a speed which he hadn't known he'd possessed to latch onto the car and intangible-ize it before it could crash irreparably, carefully using his super-strength to put it on the Earth where it belonged. The person inside was without a doubt traumatized. Danny swallowed heavily as he tried to comprehend what just went down. He raised his head as his breath misted, indicated a floating, glowing Tucker Foley scowling at him, arms crossed.
"You just had to save the day, didn't you?"
"Tucker, what the hell?!"
"Hey, who cares?" Tucker shrugged back, his eyes were glazed over. "And guess what, I can actually be useful now!"
Danny shook his head. What was going on?
Had...had Desiree gotten to Tucker? How was he supposed to reverse this?
He searched for anything to say. "Tucker...I'm concerned—"
"Yeah, well, don't be," a sullen disappointment festered in the other boy's voice, "I can tell you don't like this just by lookin' at you. I don't care!" The last three words were spoken with such ferocity Danny flinched. He'd never heard Tucker talk in such a manner, and they'd known one another since preschool. "This town's big enough for more than one ghost boy." He rose higher upwards and, to Danny's amazement, zipped off into the distance at a rate Danny knew for a fact he personally couldn't fly at.
He stayed there, shaken.
Had he lost his best friend forever?
His ghostly form was already cold, but suddenly everything seemed chiller.