There was something lingering in the backwoods behind his mansion in Amity Park. Normally, Vlad Masters wouldn't think anything of it. Late at night it was common to catch glimpses of wandering packs of ghost animals, many of which he'd created to serve as guard-dogs from his own laboratories – it was common to see four-headed rabbits chased by hungry chimeric-clawed abominations in the flickering trees. His pets acted as a living moat, keeping anything that didn't belong, off his property and manicured golfing lawn, from other ghosts to simple chittering squirrels.
But now, something had entered that couldn't be handled.
The signs started as any other day.
Masters had been looking forward to his biweekly swim in his outside crystal swimming pool. He'd just popped a new bottle of champagne, pouring a glass before going outside, planning to tan a few minutes before beginning his swimming laps.
Then he looked at the pool. It was piled high with every shape of animal – numerous toxic, flickering bodies reduced the water to a sewage of green sludge. He'd almost stepped bare-footed into a colony of mangled rabbits, splattered like expired spinach casserole across expensive tile. A red bird wing almost fell into his drink when he stood underneath the patio – a flock of living-sparrows had been caught up in the carnage, making for the unpleasant smell of decay. At least with ecto-entities, the smell produced was more akin to disinfectant. The entire outside area smelled like a morgue.
Masters had been so disgusted that he'd left his glass and new champagne entirely untouched. He desired a stronger drink to address such a mess.
Only a week or so passed since then, and bodies continued to be spotted, impaled on tree-tops – whatever it was was getting comfy in his woods – the bodies multiplied by the day – his ghost pets began spilling into his yard.
It was obvious the culprit was another ghost – animalistic in nature, gathered by how the others were each killed in brutal maulings.
His default-security cameras picked up no activity from the entity, but his ecto-sensitive devices painted a clearer picture.
A large saber-cat had had its throat lacerated to shreds, a breath away from decapitation. A crushed bear fused with seven still-screaming goat heads, had had their belly gored and emptied of mock ecto-guts.
It was very likely one of his pets had gone rouge against the others. It would have to be culled before it got too bold and started damaging his mansion and destroyed the ecosystem of the woods permanently.
Masters had retreated to one of his more sophisticated laboratories, fitted with computers for the job. He scrolled through his database of known 'living' and active laboratory experiments, hands clasped in contemplation.
According to his cameras, his rouge pet had a red aura with aquamarine innards – a clear sign of disease and distress in a ghost – to radiate red when a center aura was a different color spoke of absolute, uncontrolled aggression. It was the equivalent of a rabid animal and would have to be put down quickly.
'I don't recall creating any animal of this phenotypical profile,' he thought.
Its shape was humanoid, walking upright like a werewolf – reminiscent of the ghost Wulf, but the data profile didn't match.
Lime green ectoplasm had been used exclusively for all his experiments. It was ectoplasm in its purest, most common and densest form – which infused subjects with immense strength, with the trade off of limiting intelligence.
But his rabid culprit did not have lime green ectoplasm – the cameras displayed a core of aquamarine, a cold vibrating center. It was possible the creature was evolving into something Masters hadn't anticipated, but it was more likely to be an entirely new, unpredictable interloper.
He would have to be on his toes. It might be smarter than he gave it credit for.
'Things just can't stay peaceful around me, can they?' Masters glanced at an old dissection table, stained green from years of use. 'Of course I do invite trouble.'
A large plasma rifle curved perfectly around Vlad's hands.
He transformed into Plasmius, feeling the rifle battery hum against charged, pink embers which laced his fingertips.
An inconvenience or not, he smiled, deciding he needed the exercise anyhow.
"That could have gone better." Dani tossed her phone aside, into the snow. Her wounded hands gloved in suspiciously expensive suede.
A bandaged, charred hand plucked it up, brushed it off, and gently placed it inside her travel bag.
"I'd think you'd treat your electronics with a bit more reverence – especially, if it's the only thing enabling you to speak to friends on your trips." Vlad was a shadow of his former self, covered head to toe in soot and scabbed blood – he was bandaged so heavily, he looked like a mummy. Only the top of his head and face had been left uncovered, showing wild, greasy white hair – and his blue eyes had turned grey and bloodshot.
"As if, I only use the thing to call Danny, like, once a month. I don't have friends." Dani waved a hand, getting up and walking away, "Plus, the stupid thing made me butt-dial Danny, and now he's gonna see you." Vlad frowned, watching as Dani stomped away deeper into the woods – obviously she was upset, as to why though, escaped him. He'd been just about to light a campfire, with wood he'd clawed from a dead tree, the pile corralled into place by a ring of rocks gathered by Dani.
Vlad would normally wander the town, but after the anomaly that was the Nasty Burger last night, he wanted to see what else had changed about Amity before being so free with his explorations.
The whole ordeal reminded him of a wacky GIW scheme.
'I never imagined getting fired would be like this,' he mused, massaging his blackened, almost fried hands.
Vlad needed to lay low for the meantime and having a campout had been a fun idea – but he was missing a vital component, and that was food.
"Little girl, I'll be right back! I need to go shopping for you and your friend!" he could only hope she heard him, the last thing he wanted to do was to leave her in the snow with an unlit fire. He'd make it quick. "Be right back," he called again.
Danny felt the blood of her fingertips pool and quiver beneath her – feeling the familiar mocking of frostbite against her undead skin.
Her hands where intact, but blood was everywhere, a delicious carmine as she dug her hands deeper. She was elbow deep in a deer, a young one with bones yet unfused, each easily crushed into a satisfying pink pudding or stew.
She was skinning it carelessly, not bothering to field-dress properly, nor to hang the corpse cleanly from a tree to be gutted. The pelt was to be riddled with holes, but Danny didn't care, taking the skin had merely been a courtesy. Perhaps it was lack of variety in her diet, by living on a mountain cabin on high, which possessed her – but she found the organ meats of heart, liver, and even a nibble of fatty, grass-stuffed intestines desirable. The brain, considered a delicacy, was to be saved for tanning. The head was cleanly decapitated with her trusty axe and tied around her waist. She deposited her carvings in a sling against her chest, made of deer skin a few months old.
It had been a while since she'd been whisked away from her cabin home. She felt a bundle squirm against her back, and reluctantly, she took it off to give it its share early. The last thing she wanted was for it to start crying, which scared all the prey and gave away her position. She was so tired of the crying, so tired of the fighting.
Happy, baby-red eyes peered up at her, reaching upwards with hands the shade of robin eggshells. It had vampiric fangs and ears, with snow-fire hair.
A baby had been left on her doorstep.
And there was no longer any doorstep.
A tiny sliver of deer meat was deposited between its needle teeth, cut so finely, it looked like it was suckling on a bolt-clipping of red velvet. It looked like a vampire, and ate like one too.
Eventually the deer was reduced to the remnants only scavengers would want. She moved quickly, but soundlessly against the snow, hovering just barely from the surface – flying forward with arms spread, her body at ease, as if she were ice skating – kicking up a cloud of frost in her wake.
Then Danny came to a tree, looping the trunk a few times as if in a performance, before spinning to a controlled stop. The first time she'd done the trick, she earned a concussion, after headbutting the thick trunk. It had been the painful inspiration necessary for her latest, completed project.
She tapped the bark with the back of her axe, jutting a piece upward from the rest. With the flick of a gnarly fingernail, she slung the heavy bark over, revealing the tree's unfortunate carved out center, the innards scarred with intense-scented sap which masked the smell of gore.
Danny had no idea how long it'd been since she'd been dragged from her cabin, but it had been long enough for her to craft herself a new home. It was cozy, just enough to keep her sane. Layer upon layer of perpetually frozen animal pelts lined the internal structure of the trunk – each painstakingly hunted, skinned, and tanned by Danny – a labor that had kept her busy for weeks, but now that it was complete, she wasn't sure what to do with herself.
She found comfort in one of the few avenues available – she daydreamed; building a mental illusion to believe she was still in her cabin atop a mountain pinnacle – but the air pressure did not crush her lungs, the elevation just barely above sea-level, the snow too scarce and polluted, and the forest ground was too soft and welcoming in contrast to the jagged waves of stone she was used to slinking around, like a frozen snake with a sticking belly.
A tea kettle began whining and hissing, reluctantly drawing her scattered attention into addressing her unpleasant reality. The kettle had been conjured through a union of impossibly dense ice and uncooked clay – creating a vacuum chamber – the closed insulated vessel allowing Danny to boil water at room temperature. The pressure exerted on the surface of the water had been quickly increased, and it boiled as any other campfire kettle. The steam produced from the microfractures along the weakening surface made the entire trunk smell like dirty grease, as the kettle held a cursed pate of pine needles and animal fat – the smell was reminiscent of Vlad, whenever he left and returned into her space in his greasy Nasty Burger uniform.
Whatever possessed Vlad to get a job in the first place, continued to allude Danny. Why bother with a thing like money when a simple invisible hand could swipe whatever was needed from any store shelving of her choosing?
Vlad was just that type of man, she reasoned, weirdly honest even if he would not hesitate to kill a man. Vlad liked doing things, apparently – simultaneously mundane and crazy things.
The thought of him made her smile, briefly, before remembering she had no idea where he or herself, was.
Though the tree-trunk had no window, nor a visible entrance, Danny felt terribly exposed. It was a small mercy she had been stranded in a forest, an environment she knew how to navigate and to hide in. A hot sandy desert might as well have been the second death of her. She needed a lot of water to thrive. The snow which dotted the woods was her dwindling lifeline.
Taking the kettle, she poured the contents into a choppy, wooden cup. The fat clung to the sides as it quickly cooled against her frosty hand and she scraped the white sludge from the wood by her teeth and fingernails. The grease was a familiar comfort on her tongue.
Save for the bitter pine nettles, the tea tasted like her blood. Her own ecto-ice had been melted into the kettle and so she was cannibalizing herself as a cave cricket did with its leg. Typically she made her teas with the ectoplasm of other ghosts, but the ones she found haunting the woods didn't suit her palate. The chimeric animals tasted rancid, diseased, and largely unnatural – it was clear every single one hadn't been a creation of Mother Nature and had died artificially, and so every instinct in her had screamed to not consume their cursed, wicked bodies. The only thing she dared take from the creatures were their hard-fused, off-white cores, which resembled intense diamonds. All the cores sat suspended in a frozen clay jar, happily forgotten in a corner, to be addressed on another unfortunate day.
Of course, Vlad wouldn't have given a damn; Danny could easily see him chewing the sweet licorice-ears off every multiheaded rabbit he saw, like a kid in a candy store.
How she missed him. He'd know how to get them out of this mess.
Eventually, the kettle and cup emptied, and in the still-hollow tree trunk, Danny's attention was forced to linger on what she'd been happy to ignore.
Her thoughts shifted dangerously onto the child cradled against her back. She had thought it sleeping, surprised it hadn't started crying when the kettle whistled; but when the sling was shifted into her arms, curious stern eyes peered up at her – as if it knew the severity of the situation they were in, lost like a skinny bear awoken too early from hibernation, buried like ancient skeletons no one would ever uncover before the heat-death of the sun.
Perhaps she was being dramatic. Isolation tended to do weird things to people after all, but she was happy to be always alone, and the baby was unfortunate company she had to host.
'What would Vlad do?' She thought.
'Vlad would want to name the little brat…' Danny frowned at her conclusion. She refused to name it even though it'd been in her care for weeks, half expecting and hoping the ghost would return, snatching the infant away from her, screaming, "Surprise, I just needed a babysitter! Hardy har har!" And then she'd kill em' both, washing her hands of the whole fiasco.
'No need to get attached,' she reasoned. The ghost could come back any day now, as if the whole situation had been a prank. The medallion tied around her neck was tucked away, dutifully ignored under folds of various animal tails: squirrel, raccoon, and even fox. It was woven so tight around her neck, there was a chance she couldn't breath if she'd been living. Of course, the first thing she'd tried was to take it off, but it was fused to her skin…
It was an ugly thing.
Just like the brat that never left her side.
Danny did not like holding a child.
It made wielding an axe impossible, when surprised by a murder of ichor-crows when the baby was cradled against her chest.
It made her irrationally corner herself against a rockslide when she should've fled, when an antlered rabid moose-bear charged her – all to protect her backside and the brat.
She never planned on being a mother, and couldn't see herself bonding with a child she hadn't birthed herself – not like she'd want to do such a thing either. Could she even? Being dead and all? Danny hoped she never found out the answer, there was comfort in the ambiguity.
Danny angrily pushed the kettle aside, the hot clay piece rolling away like a discarded toy, but remained intact. The baby was placed onto the smooth wooden surface, the trunk had been once-upon-a-time carved away like a shredded roast by Danny's clawing, twitching ire.
'Name him,' Vlad mentally chastised. Danny's teeth clenched further, feeling as if Vlad was breathing down her neck when he clearly wasn't around…
He wasn't around…right? Danny stood rigid from her seat, a surface also carved from trunk.
She was going stir crazy huddled up in a tree, like a fat squirrel trapped with a store of too many nuts.
A hanging decoration of pigeon feathers met her fingers, callous palms combing the soft mass in leu of patting the baby's flickering snow-fire hair.
'Don't get attached,' she admonished. Feathers scattered to the floor, frozen into tiny, snapped icicles against her clenched fist.
"I'm not naming you!" She hissed. The baby just looked at her, as if she was crazy.