"I shouldn't have to keep telling you to pass me the crisps!"
A scrawny vulture-ghost held a bulging chip bag away from the other two sitting alongside it on a concrete wall, which lined the parking lot for Amity Park's only mall. It wasn't the most popular place in town, if the lack of cars was any indication.
"Damnit Tuff, hand it over!" A heavy wing smacked Tuff over the head, and his black shutter shade sunglasses bounced off his head. He dropped the chips without hesitation to grab his sunglasses midair with an outstretched claw.
"Ahhhhhhhhhaaaaurrraaaaaggghhh!" The other two buzzards, Ruff and Buff, screeched in dismay as chips peppered the ground.
Tuff, no stranger to the moods of his peers, fled in terror, flapping away with a fetid gust of wind conjured by his very own rotten ecto-feathers.
Ruff's hooked beak pecked at Tuff's bald head, protected only by a red fez hat each vulture wore. Buff went for his kneecaps and legs, grabbing hold of the smaller limbs with larger talons. Tuff was body slammed into the ground, overwhelmed by Buff's speed and momentum. Dirty asphalt coated his feathers, along with the chip bag he had dropped.
"Those crisps where all mine yah fats!" Tuff bounced upwards, wings raised like blades as he caught up to the fuming Ruff and Buff. He sucked in a deep breath from his twisted, finchlike beak.
"Arrck!" An unholy, oily smattering of half-digested chips, and whatever else the bird dared to had eaten coated Ruff and Buff like a demonic confetti.
The two unfortunate victims of the vomit assault hovered stock-still, too gobsmacked to remain furious.
"You know, you're gross Tuff," said Buff.
"Can't believe I wanted those chips after yah slobbered all over em'! You can find your own way back into the Zone, yah rat!" Ruff screeched, turning tail.
"Yeah, we don't wanna see yah yah chip-chucker!" Buff followed Ruff, both disappearing over a bend of clouds.
Tuff sat silently on the concrete wall, briefly considering consuming the chips now aquatinted with asphalt – they glittered like gold coins; but he clicked his beak irritably, concluding he was not as desperately hungry as his obsessively gluttonous companions, Ruff and Buff. Those two already ate their own bag of chips, and never let him eat his own share at his desired pace.
Most days it was easy to say, he hated Ruff and Buff.
"At least I have the day to myself for once," mumbled Tuff. And it was true, he hadn't been away from his friends for years, perhaps a decade or more.
"I'll have to make this day count for sure!"
Before Tuff had chased Ruff and Buff off, they had hatched a plan to track down Vlad Plasmius's so-called "secret mystery prey-ghost," that he'd blabbered on about for what seemed like hours, promising em' all a big hunt and feast at the end.
But all the fool did was shoot rabbit for hours. The rabbits had been delicious sure, but he couldn't help but feel cheated of his time regardless.
It had been a big brag which ended up being a buncha hooey. Who were the greater fools? Vlad Plasmius with his pink toy gun? Or the vulture chumps that had gorged themselves on easily a hundred plus rabbits, when each tasted like a clump of gumballs?
But a big think after the hunt-flop, the trio had concluded, they wouldn't be the greater fools if they hunted the "prey-ghost" themselves.
So Tuff, Ruff, and Buff had to show the newbie-hunter Vlad how "real hunting" was done, to cement the fact Plasmius might not be worth listening to the next time, and the next after.
They always got roped into plans that fell through, their precious time in the Zone always being rudely interrupted, and Tuff had had enough!
But now with Ruff and Buff gone, scrawny ol' Tuff would have to bring the "prey-ghost" down by himself. Of course, he was no fool, he'd show everyone that he knew how "real hunting," was done, alone!
'No biggie,' he told himself, he'd just have to get creative, but inside he was sweating up a storm.
His prey-ghost was right inside that shopping mall.
And it smelled big, gamey, and mad.
Danny hadn't done a thing to tip off security, or so she thought, as she wandered visibly around in the parking lot; until she felt the tip of something sharp hovering above the spine in her neck.
She whirled around, pushing backwards onto flat concrete, the surface cracking under her feet when she sent out a red ectoblast at the threat behind her. The red ball missed its mark, scorching a black crater into the ground, and it bounced uselessly like a skipping stone until it fizzled out completely.
And then her back ignited in fire, claws ripping like worms, deep into her new t-shirt and unprotected shoulders. With a nasty smack from her attacker she was sent to her knees, instinctively curling into a ball to shield her baby, whom was now crying.
Then the baby disappeared, crawling into her belly-space along with everything else she'd stolen and hoarded over the years. She held sharper things insider herself than just an axe, but she had no time to hope the baby would be alright – fresh pain dug into her skin, making her incredibly lucid.
Her breathing became as raw as her backside. Black feathers assaulted her vision, a massive wing was beating against her like a leather belt, the appendage snapping back as harshly as a wooden paddle.
Under the flurry of whippings, she considered escaping, to get running, but a life of conflict had instilled in her a defense-of-offense. What was wrong with another fight? She would simply add it to the list.
Furious, Danny snarled before retreating from the beating wings, phasing through concrete and asphalt, lurking within the hard surfaces like a worm, before phasing into a random car above her – one fortunately parked, empty.
However, the inside was filthy, littered with layers of fast food wrappers and containers. The disgusting scene caught her off guard, her attacker kicked her again and again, sending her careening through the windshield, and she only had the presence of mind to raise her arms in front of her forehead before her teeth clicked against asphalt. The laminated windshield severed into two huge shattered-pieces of glass, ripping away into the meat of her legs, glass sticking out from her calves like countless, bloodied scales.
Without hesitation, she ripped out the two hugest pieces of glass, each ten-times wider than her bleeding hands. She raised them like shields against her sides.
She felt claws dig into her scalp and rake down her back like a parade of maggots - finally, the pain focused her senses and summoned a thin peppering of icicle-needles atop her head and hair. Frost coalesced around her like armor, gathering into layer upon layer of icicle-spikes, shooting out in all directions from her mortal but impossibly cold body. Her skin and hair turned white under a flurry of summoned snow, and she took on the appearance of a golem as the ice layers grew impossibly thicker around her limbs, like a pollen-laden bee.
Throughout the entire transformation, the attacker didn't cease in their attacks, their flailing racking claws clattered uselessly against hard ice, and Danny could barely make out the lashing green-black silhouette from beyond the blizzard of her vision. The pieces of windshield raised above her head, the shattered fragments reinforced into great cleavers of ice. Clipping what she could perceive as the paddling wing of her attacker was enough to send it crumpling to the ground, and she watched through fogged vision as it rolled against the frozen ground in agony, as she cleaved the green burning shadow again and again.
And again.
Over and over it squirmed, feathers fluttering higher and higher, left and right as her cleavers bit deeper, over and over into the screaming shadow.
Eventually, her vision cleared and blinking away frozen tears revealed a green-gore of black feathers, each dripping acid, smelling of rotten eggs and expired chicken. Some type of bird was beaten to a pulp underneath her ice-armor feet and had it been smaller, she would've dismissed it as any other animal - but this one had a curved neck covered in serrated feathers akin to dragon scales and delicious-sweet ectoplasm leaked a smoking antifreeze onto crackling-cold asphalt.
Slowly, methodically, the snow evaporated, collecting back into Danny's body into water and blood as if nothing had ever happened - but the parking lot would never be the same again. A dozen parked cars had been crushed underneath her panicked, flaying ice golem limbs. Her cold eyes looked over the destroyed scene, mood detached and robotic.
"There's no way I didn't kill someone," she muttered. A dozen bodies or so could easily be hidden by the scattered wrecks and snow, if the sounds of screaming people where any indication.
The baby chose then to make his appearance, climbing out of Danny's belly like a kangeroo joey. It was terrified, taking in the screaming people with wide tearful eyes. His silver ghost-tail lashed behind him like an irritated cat.
Danny was surprised when the baby clung to the back of her head, his tail coiling around her neck like an endless string. His small trembling hands grabbed desperately at Danny's black hair, as if he'd fall without holding on.
Danny hissed, the baby touching wounds open along her scalp and back.
But there was nothing to be done about it, save for shoving the child back into her gut-pouch, so she resigned herself to the pain.
People where still screaming.
The parking lot was still cluttered.
And so Danny decided that removing evidence was better than doing nothing; e specially if there were bodies to collect.
Danny bent down to collect the broken glass licking against her palms. The large pieces she'd used as cleavers slipped into her eldritch belly painlessly, as if made out of jelly.
Slowly.
Methodically.
Danny gathered her prizes. Huge claws of ice spread across her small dainty hands, making her feel like she had huge flippers instead of anything dexterous and useful – yet the tips were dense enough to carve metal like flesh, albeit slowly.
She stole the tires off every wreck she saw, and rendered cars from their metal frames like animals from their skin.
The baby atop her head watched in fascination as tire and scrap disappeared into her body
The taste of tire was a misplaced delicacy, the dirty rubber as exotic as octopus ink.
Metal and paint where much more boring, the equivalent of unseasoned rice and citrus peels.
And the glass was like chewing ice.
And Danny didn't bother to salvage the car seats or the interiors beyond car metal and speaker wires.
Who'd want to eat or touch something, which always held people's butts?
And the taste of a car engine was better left unsaid.
Perhaps it took hours, or a mere handful of minutes, but by the time Danny was done, the parking lot had been stripped of its cars.
Amity's people had watched in horror as a giant ghostly, white-black eldritch abomination made a buffet out of their pulverized cars.
But it was still a happy day, as not one body had been found amongst the car wreckage.
Save for one.
As an after thought, Danny peeled the bird-ghost from its frozen crater, and it was perfectly stiff and chilled to her tastes.
The ghost-bird slipped in just as easily as the tires, metal, and glass into her eldritch stomach – a green portal had erupted from her belly and there with an audible, quiet splash when it fell in, like a coin tossed into a well. Unlike the majority of her possessions stashed inside, ghosts tended to take more conscious effort to absorb. She shivered, eyeing a mob of Amity's people from the corner of her eyes, which had gathered and continued to grow as people spilled out from the mall.
Word moved fast throughout Amity, especially concerning ghosts.
Danny would've felt rejuvenated by the bird's ectoplasm if she hadn't been face to face with a thousand-strong scared and angry mob of people, who were each booing and screaming at the top of their lungs.
And she suspected all of that attention was directed at her.
No oh, she didn't like that, so she disappeared like any self-respecting ghost.
Now invisible she made her escape, almost face-planting as she skittered across unevenly frozen ground in her new tennis shoes. She didn't fly as she fled, as that was simply not her style, but she came to a familiar tree line all the same - grounded and lightheaded as she trampled through snow-covered bushes, collecting branches as she retreated back the way she came.
It was sometime before the screams of Amity's people faded from her mind.