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ririblogsss · 1 month

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Danny the park crazy guy

Ok this follows Danny with him deciding he needs to get out of Amity Park cause he's parents are getting more and more obsessed with catching Phantom. And the plans he'd over heard were sending him into panic attacks. Not only that a new management was placed for the GIW, and with that they had become more brutal and accurate with their capturing. Danny couldn't make sure ghosts were safe and protect civilians, so Danny made a deal with Technus in exchange for most of the tech Danny has made in the past 6 months Technus has to hack into the portals that his parents and Vlad owned and permanently destroy them. Technus also made sure to wipe all the information on how to re-build the portal and planted a bug that will corrupt any file trying to mimic the portals code/mechanics.

At first Dannys plan was to play the part of the defenseless boy who just witnessed his parents whole life work go down the drain, and pretend that ghost never happened. He's parents were sad (understatement of the century) but they soon found something to hyper focus on, before becoming ecto-biologist, they were trying to find ways to make liquid that would dissolve plastic in a non-lethal and non-toxic way. So after 2 months of not doing anything and only staying in bed eating ice-cream and fudge its like a light bulb turned on onto of their heads, and Madeline and Jack went back to their old selves. They still had moments were they would gaze back at their projects with heartbroken eyes, and Danny could help but blame himself for his parents suffering.

Its like one day everything was close to normality (as normal as amity park could be) people weren't mentioning ghost in fear that one would appear out of spite. Classes went uninterrupted people were actually happy for that.

But then the GIW started making moves, as they were getting more and more restless with no ghost sightings in the last 6 months.

Then 3 months ago everything went to shit......

Danny could only explain it as if the Salem witch trials had started. But instead it was the 21st century and people were being accused of being / cooperating / aiding ghosts. The GIW had stormed into the town hall and had claimed that Amity park was in full quarantine. No one in no one out. Vlad was taken in for 'investigation' accused of working with the ghost because he never helped the GIW or offered funds, hence committing treason the US government.

After that People would be taken out of their homes and obligated to take tests to prove they weren't with the enemy, if they passed they went back to their homes traumatized. if they failed.... Well no one really knows, but one might guess from all the screaming.

Ironically. Dannys parents were the fist accused of cooperating with the enemy. The GIW stated that they seemed suspicious from the start as they never truly caught anything. he hadn't seen them since they were drugged and stuffed into the back of a van. Danny was thankful that Jazz (for collage) and Dani (traveling in Bangladesh) were out of Amity, but it wasn't like he could contact them and tell them what was happening.

The GIW had cut all contact to the rest of the word from Amity Park probably because what they were doing was considered illegal and definitely were crossing human rights.

Luckily Sams and Tuckers family were able to come to an agreement with the GIW so they could be exempted from the quarentine (buy themselves a way out). Unluckily Danny like most families didn't have those types of resources.

But Danny isn't a Fenton for nothing, craziness, gull and genius ran through his veins. So every morning when they were obligated out of their homes and made to sit on the grass of the park square while the agents searched for any 'evidence' in their homes. Danny would use his core to emit a frequency that only other ghost and some metas could hear. But that wasn't what Danny was communicating to no.

He was sending commands to all the animals he had befriended the last 15 years of his life. You see ever since Danny was a kid he loved how one could be able to domesticate any animal as long as you had food. So Danny when he was a kid applied The Operant conditioning to all the animals he crossed paths with.

A few weeks after his accident (death) when Danny was making his daily feeding times for the animals in exchange for trinkets and money he realized something. He could understand what the animals 'spoke' and the animals could understand him through the vibrations of his core. When he asked CW about it he only told him that ghost speak allowed him to communicate with anything and anyone if he had a close enough relationship towards them.

Basically this meant that Danny had hundreds if not thousands of animals (rats, street dogs and cats, pigeons, squirrels ect.. ) at his disposal. The only reason he never used them when fighting Ghosts was obvious he wasn't going to risk the life of his friends.

And right now his friends were making underground escape routes for all of the Amity Parkers. The plan was already being set in motion. Everyone knew their part.

One group would be distraction, a group of kids would scream and point in the opposite direction of the escape route and say they had seen a ghost and it was trying to hurt them. The GIW would be guided into a wooded area were they would be attacked by the more predatorial animals. Making them call for back up.

One group would composed of the most athletic adults / young adults would go into the main base of the GIW (check for survivors and help them get out).

Another group (the elderly) was in charge of checking that everyone was accounted for.

Mothers, would be evacuated first with their children, they would be the get away drivers. Different drivers would take different routs. Some left the country other the continent itself. Some when to larger cities for hiding amongst the crowd. But the main goal was stick to your family and preferably if you can go alone. The less people the less likely you are to getting caught.

And the teenagers from casper high, would ensure all their traces were lost making sure all phones and gadgets were left behind, as to avoid getting tracked down.

And that's how Amity Park became a dead town (pun intended) in less than 60 minutes.

This leads us to the present.

It had been 7 months since Danny had left Amity park. he hadn't seen anyone or contacted anyone from there since. The over all consensus was that everyone had to go no contact with one another as to not raise awareness as to why so many people from different places were constantly calling one another. Danny was certain that Jazz and Dani had been contacted by Sam and Tucker about the situation in Amity. What he wasn't sure of is if they knew he was out of Amity or even alive for that matter.

Danny was not dealing with what happened well. One of the guys who went into the Town Hall pulled him a aside for a second when they were evacuating to tell him. That he had seen both his parents bodies. They had not survived. Not many who were taken against their will into the Hall came out spared.

Danny was devastated with his parent untimely death, he only hoped they had a humane one.

So no Danny was not ok. he knew Jazz would criticize his copping methods. But if taking over a park in the middle of a crime riddled city was sooooo bad then why did he have the support of the Bats. (not the vigilantes the actual cave bats).

Danny had gotten to Gotham not too long ago (about 4 1/2) months, and decided that the GIW wouldn't dare on their life go into a city were the 'wolds greatest detective and most feared man live'. Danny made an abandoned building overlooking the park his own. he quickly became allies with the fauna there and soon his rein over the part began.

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It started slowly, honest to god not a single local though anything of the bony kid laughing his ass off as he oversaw birds and other critters alike help him build what looked like a greenhouse. They did what any Gothamite would do mind their own damn business and go on with their day.

It wasn't unlit the trees and torn plants started to build a wall like structure around the park that they started to think that the kid was going to be the next Poison Ivy. Worst of all they some have speculated seeing Pamela and Harley go in and out of the park... both smiling like proud parents. Some say that the kid was an ex Wayne kid that was sent into an asylum, and was kept quiet. Some speculate that the kids a meta that controls all animals. Some state they saw the kid talk to the animals and the animals actually listened and did word for word what he asked.

But Gothamites weren't that worried if they were honest. The kid (Danny as he was now known) brought more entertainment (of the good kind) to Gotham he fit right in. The only thing that made him stand out was his mid-western accent. When asked where he was from he would only stare at you while an animal (different every time mostly racoons) would chase you away. Other than that the kid was a sweetheart he would often bring the veggies and fruits he cultivates in the park to homeless shelters so that the residents would have a 'more nutritious and full diet'.

The kid would send animals to keep watch on kids and be alerted if any were at risk he would drop in and help in a very unusual way. And he always traded money for little things and bottle caps anything handmade (especially by kids) was infinitely rewarded with money and an automatic meal.

Danny was known as the Gotham parks crazy. But he was their crazy and no government (illegal) agency of a brigade of bats and birds was going to take him away from them.

(waaa this was way longer that expected I only wanted to write a sentence of local crazy Danny, and I just ended up writting mostly art other stuff)

#dpxdc #dc x dp #danny phantom #danny fenton

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batty-pham · 6 months

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DPxDC drabble

- Dead rat -

Danny wasn't sure he remembered what warmth felt like anymore.

Ice settled into his bones, his very core.

He relished when he could feel the faint impressions of warmth from outside, from the sun, a hug, a hot plate of non lethal food.

There wasn't any warmth here.

The buzzing florescent lights were no replacement for sunshine, no one was able to touch him through the glass, the food they gave him were cold mounds of grey... something.

Danny curled in on himself in the corner of the room as he glared at the scientists watching him through the glass.

He was nothing but an animal to them.

A project.

He wanted to escape, to be free, but he had lost a lot of ectoplasm before he ended up with them. He was drained and they were keeping him even more drained.

He was running.

He wasn't sure where he was going.

He just needed to get away.

And they found him.

God he is such a fuck up.

If he hadn't let it slip to his parents who he is- what he is, he wouldn't be here. He would be at home. With Tucker and Sam. With Jazz.

Not... wherever here is without any ectoplasm to heal his wounds.

His head snapped up from his knees when the door to his pristine white cell opened.

A man in a suit walked in, immediately flanked by what appeared to be body guards who eyed Danny with caution.

"I do apologize for the treatment of you so far, but I do believe we can make sure you have better... arrangements in the future. As long as the two of us are at an... understanding."

Danny stared at him in silence for a moment, h opened his mouth to speak, his brows furrowing when it took a moment to get his vocal chords to work, and when they did, they were scratchy from disuse. "Understanding?"

"yes, as I see it I can help you, and you can help me. In exchange I can get you out of this dingy little room and into a much better one, a proper bed and everything."

Danny's eyes narrowed "who are you?"

The man grinned, offering a hand to help the thin and fragile looking boy up, thinking that he had agreed. In his mind, who wouldn't? "Lex Luther."

Danny, using what little strength he had left, smacked his hand away, "not the first billionaire to offer that fruitloop." He hissed.

Danny didn't watch him as he stormed out, but he heard each and every footstep banging against his skull. Danny stared at his hand, wishing the warmth from the hardly a second of contact lingered a little bit longer.

#i know we love ou Vivisection angst here #but where's my “isolated in a room and put through random tests as if he is a rat in a maze” angst for danny #where's my “they treated him like an animal in a zoo”#dp x dc #dpxdc #dc x dp #dp x dc crossover #danny phantom #if danny had a nickel for every time a billionaire tried to manipulate him jnto obedience #he'd have two nickels #which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice #oops i made him TOUCH STARVED #batfamily #lex luthor

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gilbirda · 1 year

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DPxDC cheat sheet

So. I'm not a nitpicking person. I understand that mistakes can be made and typos are a thing and sometimes we are just not the kind of person that can make words work for a variety of reasons (dyslexia, for example).

This is not for that people.

This is for everyone who stumbled into this fandom by mistake and had learned things via osmosis and don't have the energy/time to check the source material for the "correct" thing.

Y'all are valid.

This is a cheat sheet of correct terms and fandom things that are not correct that I've seen in fics.

Disclaimer: while experimenting with canon is fun, this is just to lay down the rules of what's what so it can be the springboard of y'all's beautiful creations.

Given that some people just can't behave online: "If you don't have anything constructive to say, don't say anything." Did I say something wrong? You have resources better than this? You want to make a nitpick? Cool! More info to the mix — But come at me in a hurtful and insulting way and I'm blocking you on the spot.

[Will add more when I think more/have suggestions]

DP SIDE - Post "A Glitch in Time" Canon

Sam is Jewish

Sam is ultra-recyclo-vegetarian aka "doesn't eat anything with a face". Is not a real thing.

It's "Amity Park" not "Amity Ville".

Wes is fanon, same as Kyle. Info on Wes here

It's "Casper High", not "Caspar High".

Mr. Lancer doesn't have a canon name. Common fanon ones are William or Edward.

Ghost obsessions are canon. In AGIT, it's explained that ghosts have a purpose or drive. Danny's purpose is "protection" of both humans and ghosts.

Ghost cores are fanon-ish (there is a mention that Danny's ice powers come from his "core" temperature and is never addressed again, of course) (Episode is "Urban Jungle"). Then in the videogame there are different "types" of ghost powers and something about their cores? Very confusing.

Ghost speak is fanon. However, in AGIT, it's revealed that there's an ghost alphabet, and it's ancient form is based on sanskrit and tamil alphabets. Codex of Ghost alphabet.

Ghost Hunger is canon! In AGIT it's revealed that ghosts feed on emotions and thoughts to stay sapient. If they don't, they become feral with time. Halfas feed from their human side, remaining stable.

Danny is the bridge between the spirit world and living world - canon!

Danny beats the Ghost King Pariah Dark in combat, but faints and that fight is never addressed in the series again. Ghost King!Danny is fanon-ish so go ham with interpreting that. (Episode is "Reign Storm")

Tucker is the reincarnation?? (never stated in canon, but he does look alike) of a pharaoh named "Duul Aman" (Duulaman is also accepted as spelling). Said pharaoh never appears in the series as a ghost, just a picture. Who does appear is his (evil) right hand man, Hotep-Ra, who tries to manipulate Tucker (Episode is "King Tuck"). That Tucker gets cool magic from this event is fanon. But cool.

Sam gets possessed by Undergrowth via a vine straight into her spine (gross). Undergrowth calls her "his daughter" and she tries to lure Danny into "joining her to take over the world". (Episode is "Urban Jungle"). That Sam gets cool plant powers from this event is fanon. But cool.

The Fenton parents are never physically abusive - just comedically neglectful in the way parents are depicted in early 2000s cartoons. Incompetent, misguided, dumb... but they are shown to love their kids. The even accept Danny the 2 canon times they find out about him (Episodes "Reality Trip" and "Phantom Planet").

Jazz is never shown as "mature" in the sense that she had to parent Danny and be the responsible adult. She is comedically the "annoying and meddling older sister" from early 2000s cartoons. She wants to be considered an adult. She couldn't see Youngblood, who is a child ghost that cannot be seen by adults, and Danny had to push her into acting childish to make her see him.

Axiom labs is bought by Vlad's company "Vlad.co" not "DALV.co". DALV.co was the fake company that paid for Maddie and Danny to fly to a conference but stranded them in a forest where Vlad's cabin coincidentally was. (Episode "Maternal Instincts")

Dan is not older Danny. He is not even called "Dan" in canon, just "Dark Danny". He is Danny's ghost half, who killed his human half, ate/merged with Vlad's ghost side and then tried to kill Vlad's human side. Was losing his humanity what made him evil? Was it merging with the Bad Guy(tm) of the series? 🤷‍♀️ Take it as you will. (Episode is "The Ultimate Enemy")

Freakshow is NOT a clown. He is the ringmaster of a goth circus (called Circus Gothica). Danny's headcanoned fear of clowns can be traced back to the "circus" and clown-related imagery surrounding Freakshow's performances, but not directly BY Freakshow. (Episodes "Control Freaks" and "Reality Trip")

DC SIDE

Damian (not Damien or Demian) is never confirmed his religion. Fanon has accepted he is Muslim.

Bruce is from a Jewish family (Martha Wayne was Jewish), but he considers himself an atheist. Same with Kate Kane (Batwoman).

It's "Selina" Kyle, not "Selena" or "Salina".

It's "Talia" Al Ghul, not "Thalia".

It's "Jason", not "Jayson".

Damian is vegetarian, not vegan. It means he doesn't eat meat, but eats animal produces like eggs, milk, etc. He went vegetarian after rescuing Batcow from a slaughterhouse, he didn't arrive at the manor already being vegetarian.

Duke is NOT adopted. Bruce is fostering him temporarily and is more of a mentor to him than a father. Duke considers the others his siblings, though. EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DUKE: Part 1 | Part 2

Dick was not adopted as a kid, Dick was Bruce's ward. That term is not used anymore, though. Adoption happened later in Dick's adulthood.

It's Gotham, not "Gothem".

Cassandra IS adopted. Legally.

Cassandra's nickname is "Cass", not "Cassie". Cassie is the nickname of another character also named Cassandra (Cassandra Sandsmark, Wondergirl)

"Little Wing" is a canon nickname for Jason from Dick.

"Baby bird" or "Baby bat" are fanon-ish(?). Little Wing, Dickie, Dickie-bird... Canon! Jaylad is not canon, but Jaybird is canon! A GREAT post with receipts about all nicknames. ("Replacement" isn't canon btw).

Stephanie Brown was the 4th Robin. She is not adopted, and was part of the batfamily because she was dating Tim. She is still considered batfamily even if they are not dating anymore.

In Hush, when Jason comes back to Gotham, Jason puts a knife on Tim's throat, but barely leaves a cut. Tim's throat wasn't injured during the Titans Tower attack.

Cass is selectively mute because she wasn't taught any language beyond what she needed to predict people's movements. She doesn't know sign language. She doesn't know how to read and write (more recent comics show her reading a bit). But she could learn, with difficulty. Very in depth analysis of Cass' disability.

Jason's "Pit Madness" is fanon. Canon offers Ra's saying "the Pit alters the mind - could happen for a few days or for years, you never know" or something like that, and that's it. There is reason to believe that the Lazarus Pit can cloud judgement for a while but there is no voice in the back of the head or the Pit taking over.

Tim never expressed special interest in photography or in it as a hobby. Nor he is a coffee addict more than the other bats, who pull all nighters on the reg. He is actually addicted to energy drinks.

There are 2 main Conner/Kon-El/Superboy I portrayed in fics: Young Justice cartoon one (grumpy, same age as Dick, kind of an asshole, has daddy issues, wears black shirt and jeans, has a space motorcycle and a pet wolf) and 90s comics one (leather jacket, piercings, punny guy, same age as Tim, has a #nohomo relationship with Tim, kind of a himbo).

There are a few Ghost superheroes - Greta Hayes (Secret), she was in Tim's run as Young Justice's leader; and Boston Brand (Deadman), who is a member of Justice League Dark (with Constantine and Zatanna and Swamp Thing!). So the DC heroes are familiar with ghosts and ghost powers.

It's "rogues" gallery, not "rouge". Rouge means "red" in french.

Clark is never abusive to Conner, he just doesn't know what to do with him and chooses to ignore the problem; which, yeah, is mean, but not to the levels that fanon has taken it. And this is in the Young Justice cartoons, not across all depictions. In comics, they consider each other family and that's why Conner took a kryptonian name (Kon-El - of house of El, Kal's family)

The whole "No metas in Gotham" is not true. Batman understands that Gotham is very Fucked Up and that if you add metahumans and heroes with powers trying to do good to the mix it could make things worse. Outsiders don't understand Gotham and if they get jokerized or mind controlled, it will get ugly real quick. That's why Signal is cool beans! Duke is a gothamite through and through.

While is interesting that no one in the Batfam knows about Tim's missing spleen, is very probable that Alfred knows - post about this

Constantine is more powerful than it looks like. A post about interesting abilities.

Damian has a metal spine. Yeah I don't know how it works either. They used it as way for Talia to control Damian for a bit :(

Interesting links:

What's fanon in DP

Fan project for Ghost Speak, written and spoken form, and a ghost speak generator - post AGIT canon

Transcripts of all the Danny Phantom episodes

The whole DP series + the complementary comics + A Glitch in Time comic (if you are able to buy the AGIT comic please do 🙇‍♀️)

How to pronounce Ra's Al Ghul

BatPham ship names (updated regularly).

What are the canon ages of the Batfam?

In depth guide to everything Batman in one place (be prepared to go down the rabbit hole)

Fanon vs Canon Batfam edition

Superfam family tree

Interactive map of Gotham (Gotham Knights videogame)

Timeline of events (Batfam adoption order and ages when those events happen)

Map of Gotham (made based on various sources, with annotations (check the reblogs for more info))

The Titans Tower attack: Fanon vs Canon

This person has dedicated a lot of time to research receipts of Comic stuff so check out their masterlist

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Suggestions are welcome! Please be kind with each other and remember to have fun with this fandom!

#dpxdc cheat sheet #cheat sheet #dp #danny phantom #dc #batman dc #dpxdc #dp x dc #dc x dp #dp crossovers

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ominousvibez · 4 months

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random dp x dc writing

i suddenly had an idea for a new dp x dc crossover fic, here's a piece of it!

🦇

“So much for movie night.” Tucker complains.

Sam groans, stretching her legs as Danny gets up, and transforms. The rings come easily to him now, unlike they had just a little more than two years ago. Their ghost-hunting tech had merely been discarded to the side after their patrol before they settled for the movie night.

“You guys can stay here.” Danny says, pushing himself into the air. “I told Skulker and Technus to pass along the message to the other usuals, but maybe somebody else didn’t get the memo.” The Box Ghost surely hadn’t; but, then again, the Box Ghost doesn’t usually get any news from the Ghost Zone. Or maybe he does, and he doesn’t care. Either way, the cardboard-loving menace was stuck in thermosland right now, and Danny wasn’t going to let him out until after they found out if Amelia would survive INVASION OF THE KILLER TEACHERS III: SCHOOL’S OUT or if she would become another zombie student.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’ll make it quick.” Danny allows himself to turn invisible and intangible, and slingshots himself through the roof of Sam’s house and into the sky. The clouds that had been moving in during their patrol clouded Amity Park in a dreary autumn rain. Leaves that had begun to turn were blown off the trees by the wind, and a distant rumble of thunder echoes in the distance.

Once upon a time, the storm would’ve terrified Danny. It would bring too many bad memories, of electricity burning through his skin, killing him and bringing him to life at the same time. But now, as a flash of lightning hit the sky, he can’t deny the surge of energy and delight in his core.

Stupid electric core.

“Ah! Sir Phantom!”

It isn’t one of his usual rogues for once. Instead, it’s a familiar face, and an ally. He calms down a bit at the sight of Lady Dorothea. He’s still a little annoyed that his movie night is being interrupted, but at least it’s by another friend.

Plus, he’s sure Lady Dorothea, who’s working hard at modernizing her kingdom, probably wouldn’t understand what a movie night was, anyway.

“Hey, Dorothea!” Danny drops his shoulders. He keeps himself intangible, feeling the rain fall through him. Lady Dorothea is intangible as well. “Is everything okay? Does your brother need to get his ass kicked into next week again?”

“No, not quite.” Lady Dorothea sighs. “I do need your assistance, but it is not for kicking any asses this time. Something… else has happened.”

“Something else?”

Lady Dorothea nods. “Yes. A few cycles ago, a newly-formed ghost stumbled into the castle gardens. My head gardener, Montagu, had found him stumbling through the hedges, and our healers were able to stabilize him before he could have faded, but then…” She bites her thumbnail nervously. A roar of thunder echoes around them. “… Sir Phantom, I believe he may be a halfa.”

Danny blinks at her. “Sorry, what? Did you say there’s another halfa?”

“Yes, I did— Sir Phantom, as far as my kingdom has come with modernization, I do not believe we have the capabilities of assisting a halfa, let alone one so young. I, no, we need your help, as soon as you are able to.”

A new halfa. Danny’s brain feels like it’s melting and spinning at the same time. He’d never encountered this before. Was that what Danny had felt? The new Halfa, forming? Or, well, maybe transforming for the first time, or something. He felt like pop-rocks were bursting under his skin, and he could feel a few stray sparks shoot off from his hands.

A new halfa.

#dp x dc #dc x dp #danny phantom x dcu #ominouswriting #dpxdc #dcxdp #hehe who is a halfa now??#Guess you’ll just have to stick around and find out!#the gardener's name is a reference btw #to the lady who inspired a lot of interest in victorian flower language #idk i thought it was creative #and i thought instead of unnamed DC character being thrown to the far frozen and the yetis #what if they ended up somewhere else? and dorothea stood out to me #idk how royalty stuff works btw #winging it as i go #electric core au

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basilf1res · 1 year

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DP x DC - Jason Todd was once Danny Fenton

Danny Fenton Is Evolving! *do dodo dooo* Your Danny Fenton Has Evolved Into: Jason Todd

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(In this AU, Danny would’ve gotten his powers in middle school rather than high school - he would have just turned 12 at the time)

As a preteen (almost 13) Danny runs away from his parents who want to rip him apart.

Tucker recreates his identity as he rushes to Gotham.

That identity was Jason Todd. Similar events play out, and Danny begins to lose contact with Sam and Tucker. Before he cuts them off entirely to protect them, Tucker asks him to steal the wheels off the Batmobile for shits and giggles (the excuse was he could sell them for good money).

He could see Sam shaking her head at their stupidity, but she’d be laughing all the way.

Jason Todd is caught by the Bat himself, and as a result, he throws a tire iron at his head only to get picked up by the scruff and babied by the Waynes.

Danny gets thrown back into vigilantism as the second Robin. He’s rough on people because he’s only known how to fight ghosts, and ghosts aren’t as predictable as people.

He gets comfortable, he’s happy, he gets to connect to his human half more!

He gets into a fight with his dad Bruce. Danny, in a fit of anger, storms out of the cave only to fall right into the Joker’s hands and beaten to death at fifteen.

Or, rather, hit so hard he gets knocked out and sustains lethal wounds to the point his core stops his human bodily functions so it can focus on fixing the internal damage (stopping his heart, breathing, etc.).

He gets buried shortly after being found.

Jason Todd digs himself out of his grave after a few years.

Jason Todd hides from his father Batman and the League, the latter being oddly obsessed with getting their hands on him.

Danny Phantom takes up patrolling Crime Alley, Batman thinks he’s seeing the ghost of Jason Todd - and he’s not that far off really. It was only after the Joker threatened to kill Robin and Red Robin that he lost it.

Now he was standing in front of all of the Birds and Bats, Phantom form, guilt starting to tear at his core as a he looked over his family.

The was silence in the warehouse, other than the clanking sound of Danny dropping the crowbar that he used to break the arms and legs of his killer nemesis.

“Jay…?”

#dp x dc #dc x dp #danny phantom #jason todd #danny fenton is jason todd #fic prompt #fic writing is hard #take your soup you little shits #i don’t know #this came out of nowhere #this came to me randomly #this came to me at 2am #hahaha help

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phantomtwitch · 10 months

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Electric Core/No One Knows AU

I meant to post this for some event, but never got around to it. Since AO3 is functionally down at the moment, I figured I'd share it in case folks are looking for something to read. It's kind of similar to 'As the Ice Begins to Crack' in terms of vibes (or at least that's what I was aiming for - I want to write more AUs in that vein, and I might expand more on this at some point).

Enjoy!

Tucker knows it’s coming as soon as the air shifts.

The differences are subtle at first. A faint whiff of ozone, a slight chill to the air as the wind picks up and sweeps the fall leaves into spirals over the ground, and then the hairs on his arms stand on end. Then comes the low-pitched hum, the hiss that sounds like electricity running through high-voltage cables, peppered with the occasional burst of static and awful whining as the air grows heavy and thick, the sky darkening even when moments ago the sun shone brightly above them.

Sam freezes next to him, her fingers clutching her milkshake tightly as her eyes dart from side to side, looking for somewhere to hide until they land on an abandoned house nearby. “Come on,” she insists, tugging at his hand.

“Sam, there’s no way that place is safe, it’s been condemned for years–”

“--and being out here with Phantom is?” she interrupts, and Tucker scowls, knowing that she’s right, but moving from one dangerous spot to another isn’t ideal. There’s nowhere else close enough to go, though, or at least not anywhere they won’t risk getting struck once the lightning starts, and he follows her with a groan and an eye roll. They’re on the porch when the first lightning bolt strikes the pavement nearby, making it explode and sending shrapnel flying that barely misses him and Sam, and thunder roars, painfully loud and close. He slaps his hands over his ears, trying to block out what noise he can, but his ears are still ringing when it stops.

Sam forces one of the windows open and climbs through, with Tucker following shortly after. The house is empty and covered in heavy dust that makes Tucker sneeze as they disturb it, the air almost as oppressive inside as it was out, and in the corner he can see signs of something rotting that he doesn’t dare approach.

The two of them stand at the window even though they both know better. When a ghost that is more an embodiment of the storm than the kind of vague, intangible figure haunting ghost stories becomes a common fixture in town, endless safety lectures and drills become the norm. Knowing what to do in the event of a thunderstorm is the closest the teachers can get to explaining the safety precautions that are necessary when Phantom is about.

He’s only actually seen Phantom once before, when Sam begged him and Danny to go on a ghost hunting trip back in freshman year on Halloween. Tucker wasn’t terribly interested in ghosts, but he was too old for trick-or-treating and not popular enough to score an invite to any parties, so he agreed. Danny did, too, but bailed at the last minute, claiming he felt too tired and sick to go with them.

Tucker tries not to think about Danny too much. The three of them haven’t spoken in close to six months, at least, drifting further and further apart despite his and Sam’s best efforts to stay friends their first two years of high school together. Most days he’s barely in class anymore, and when he is Danny is constantly tucked away in a corner, curling in tightly on himself, careful to avoid getting too close to anyone. Dark circles constantly ring his eyes, his expression hollow and skin too pale. Sam asked Jazz once before she went off to college if Danny was seriously ill and she denied it, even as it was clear something about him had changed since high school started.

“Do you ever talk to Danny anymore?” he asks suddenly, and the shift in conversation as they peer out the window and wait for the elusive Phantom to make his appearance catches Sam off guard.

“No. Does anyone?” she says, her tone resigned as another loud peal of thunder echoes around them, and Tucker swears he sees the house shaking. They argued a few times about what to do and what else to try, never figuring out a way to reach him.

“I guess not.” He turns back to look outside, rubbing his arms as a figure blinks into existence on the road. The features are hard to make out, as always, because of the bright green lightning that flickers across his form, making it nearly impossible to stare at Phantom for too long. His hair looks wispy and white, his eyes swirling pools of green amidst a heavily shadowed face, and his form is hazy and more like smoke or dark clouds in the vague shape of a person, yet there’s an odd solidity in the way that he moves at times, as if by far heavier and present than he ought to be in this inhuman state.

The words that come out when Phantom speaks next aren’t any language humans can hope to imitate, but it’s clearly a form of communication, the ear piercing whine and buzzing reminding Tucker of standing beneath high-voltage wires even as it rises and lowers in pitch and the rhythms shift. There’s an echo to the words, a way it loops through the air as if constantly caught inside a tunnel no matter where Phantom appears, and his voice gets under Tucker’s skin, prickling like static beneath the surface and making him rub his arms more fiercely than before.

Another ghost roars back, his voice full of snarling and hissing, the sounds animalistic even as there’s a mechanical clicking that accompanies it, and Tucker recognizes it and winces as he spots the strange robotic ghost flying in mid-air, green flames cascading down his skull and back, completely unhampered by the rain that is now beginning to steadily fall. The Fentons call him Skulker. The hunter ghost is infamous, stalking his ‘prey’ throughout Amity Park, although what particular creature ends up being his prey in any given week is often impossible to know until it’s too late. Mostly what he hunts are other animals and ghosts, and for whatever reason, Phantom has long been one of his favored targets.

But the ghost stands little to no chance against Phantom.

“Maybe we should get away from the window,” suggests Tucker uneasily as a green blast extends from Phantom’s palm, swirling with crackling green lightning as it lashes out at Skulker, and sparking arcs of electricity dart from it, sparking against a stop sign and dancing across the pavement towards their hiding place. Though no one has ever seen Phantom directly attack a human before, his powers are wild and dangerous, the lightning barely controlled.

And Tucker’s all too aware that just because no one has ever witnessed Phantom attacking someone before doesn’t mean he wouldn’t do it.

“No, I want to watch,” whispers Sam stubbornly as she peers through the window, but her knuckles are white as she grips the window frame. Tucker barely suppresses a sigh as he remains firmly in place. The things he does for his best friend.

His only friend, a quiet voice whispers, but he ignores it.

The fight is brutal, the ghosts barely visible as they attack each other, but the evidence of their fight is everywhere as green fire spirals, intertwining with the lightning amidst the rain. “It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?” says Sam, the lights and shadows dancing in front of them, and he nods despite himself. It’s terrifying, inhuman. The Fentons’ say that ghosts are nothing more than imprints, echoes of post-human consciousness, but as he watches them fight Tucker realizes he’s never truly understood exactly what that means, if they’re spirits or souls or just the fading echoes given some unnatural life at the very moment of someone’s death.

“How do you think Phantom died?” he asks as Skulker slams into the pavement, the machinery smoking and his flames dwindling as the rain comes down harder, and Sam doesn’t answer, likely unable to hear him over the downpour and crackle of thunder. They watch as Phantom looms over Skulker, his indistinct form more monstrous than ever, and then he slams a fist into the machinery, his fingers sharp, black claws that spark as they dig through the metal frame and pull out a shimmering, shifting ghost, so tiny compared to the hulking frame encapsulating it.

The rain begins to slow and Tucker wonders for a moment what Phantom will do, if he will destroy the squirming helpless thing in his hands, but then there’s a soft whisper, the sounds that come from Phantom no longer sending chills down his spine but inviting comfort instead, of an odd sort of warmth and gentleness. The ghost–is it Skulker? Tucker isn’t sure–responds in a mewling, annoyed tone, but stops fighting back as Phantom pulls an odd soup like container from . . . Tucker isn’t sure, actually, just where Phantom pulls it from, but he flicks the cap open with practiced ease and sucks the small ghost inside.

“Isn’t that one of the Fentons’ inventions?” wonders Sam, and Tucker jolts as he realizes she’s right. He remembers seeing it once in one of the assemblies, but the device has rarely appeared in their arsenal since they created the portal guns to send the ghost back to their own dimension instead. “Think he stole it from them?”

“With the level of security they have around that place? Doubt it,” says Tucker. Though it’s been ages since he was last at the Fentons, their ghost security was aggressive enough that it would target sufficiently ecto contaminated humans by mistake, let alone a incredibly powerful ghost like Phantom. Tucker doubts they’ve downgraded their security since then, especially since the number of ghost attacks are only increasing. “Maybe he found it in the trash.”

“Maybe,” she hums, sounding doubtful, and it’s at that moment that the electric green eyes snap towards them, focusing intently, and although it’s too late both Sam and Tucker duck in a futile effort to hide.

“Shit,” hisses Tucker, and Sam shushes him, putting a finger to her lips, but it’s too late as the air in front of them crackles and flickers as a bolt of electricity impossibly strikes the floor in front of them, Phantom appearing within it, his arms wrapped around the thermos. He and Sam flinch as they curl in towards each other, Sam’s hand grasping his own tightly now as the two of them tremble, and he can barely stand to look at Phantom, the electricity arcing along his body too bright.

A hiss of static erupts, the same odd ghost speech as always, but this time Tucker understands it, hearing words within the noise even though that shouldn’t be possible. “You shouldn’t stay here,” says Phantom, the sparks around him diminishing, although now that Tucker can make out his features more clearly it’s almost worse as he opens his mouth to speak, sharp white fangs sparkling within.

“Well where else were we supposed to go with you out there fighting?” grumbles Sam, and Tucker stares at her in horror, unable to believe she would dare to speak to any ghost, let alone Phantom, that way. But the ghost lets out an odd sound, of echoing loops and trills and whirring, and it takes Tucker a second to realize he’s laughing.

“Fair. But this place is haunted,” he replies with a grin, “and the ghost that lives here doesn’t take kindly to intruders.”

“That’s–um–fine,” stutters Tucker, squeezing Sam’s hand tightly before she can utter another word as he forces himself to his feet. “We’ll, um, get going. And, um, thanks.”

The sparks stop running along his body, freezing at midpoints in a way that completely unnerves Tucker, as if the ghost is frozen in a photo instead of standing in front of them. “Thanks?” he repeats.

“For stopping the ghost?” he squeaks out. “And warning us about the, um, other ghost haunting this place?” His voice is so high that Tucker thinks he could sing soprano right now if Phantom asked.

Phantom continues to stare at him, saying nothing and remaining so still Tucker would swear he’s a statue, and eventually Tucker swallows as he grabs Sam’s hand and tries to pull her through the window, but she refuses to budge. “Sam,” he hisses, tugging again. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“Not yet,” she insists. “Phantom . . . Are you . . . do you have a place to go?”

“I’m not a lost puppy,” he says, the unnatural stillness rolling off him with a wave of sparks. “And I can’t be near humans for long anyway. It’s hard to control the electricity, and dying from electrocution is a terrible way to go.” There’s a noise behind the words, an echo of long, awful scream that makes Tucker shiver and instinctively realize then that Phantom is speaking from experience, and for the first time it occurs to him that the noises that comprise each ghost’s individual speech aren’t half as random as he believed.

It’s the sound of their death, echoing for eternity, never letting them or anyone else forget. “Is that . . .” asks Sam, wanting to confirm it.

“Yes,” he says simply, and then there’s the sound of something breaking upstairs, a window smashing and shattering, and static prickles against Tucker’s skin. “You should go.”

“Right. And, um, bye, I guess?” says Tucker awkwardly, and finally Sam follows him out the window and back out onto the street. Despite the sounds upstairs, there’s no broken glass outside beneath any of the windows above them, and as he glances back he can see Phantom’s eyes watching, considering them carefully, before another bolt strikes and he vanishes in a clap of thunder, leaving Sam and Tucker alone once more.

#danny phantom #dp fanfiction #electric core au #creepy Phantom #I do not know why I always do creepy Danny fics as a Tucker POV #but here we are again #¯\_(ツ)_/¯#my writing #look i just really like Tucker

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some-rotten-nest · 11 months

Text

Random DC/DP headcannons bc I can't sleep

Expect many typos

Danny hates storms, especially thunderstorms bc of the lighting cracking in the sky

Danny wears a power cuff like a bracelet that dampens his more violent powers bc he's scared of them (wail, large-scale ice like with undergrowth etc)

In one of his magazines, instead of bullets Jason keeps solid ectoplasm just in case, and so it's not conspicous

In his Phantom form Danny has a streak of black hair where his white usually is

Jason is fright knight (unless it's a Jason-Danny biologically related fic. Ghost Zone law says no one you share blood with (clones included) can become fright knight (but they can join the court and have other ranks))

Danny made a contingency plan against himself and with the help of a sibling (Cass most likely, though she did seem a bit sad) got it on the bat-computer. Password protected so Danny can't get into it. Bruce doesn't know and won't know until/if Danny goes bad. Bruce made a separate one for him.

Tim gets low and non-harmfil doses of ectoplasm in his coffee bc it is like a shit ton of caffeine for a living person. (Yes, some Amity Park drinks have ectoplasm in them too)

Danny asks Bruce, Tim and Lucius for help with Ghost King Shit TM

Duke has to squint when looking directly at ectoplasm (Danny's trying to find some solution but there isn't one)

Jason has a shadow core

Damian got extinct animals from Danny as a birthday gift multiple times (a dodo bird named Delilah, a messenger pigeon names Luke and a splendid posion frog named Ares)

To piss Bruce off, Jason got a pterodactyl he's named Flynn that he takes on patrol. Safe to safe, people get a hella more scared of Red Hood. Bruce hates it but Jason does actually love Flynn and Bruce can't bring himself to take Flynn awya

Danny made a patrol playlist for every member of the bat family and beyond bc he has one for when he goes out as Phantom (they all listen to their playlists and love them)

Before Danny was fully pulled into the family, he'd flinch at Dick's escrima sticks and still catches himself staring the weapon, his heart pounding

Danny found out Captain Marvel was a kid bc while on a mission with him, Captain Marvel pointed out that there was a pirate ship hovering above them and that Danny should probably deal with that. He'd, and any other Amity Parker that overhead, never laughed so badly in his entire life. Billy was never so scared & confused.

Bart and Danny are friends bc Dan had leveled most of the future before the Beatles took over what was left (I'm actually not that sure about Bart's backstory so feel free to correct me if something's wrong here)

Cass and Danny have staring contests alot. Sometimes the others think they've fallen asleep with their eyes open. They didn't.

Danny had a Twitter account for Phantom without Bruce knowing, but when Steph was trying to convince Bruce to let her have one she mentioned it and Danny had to delete it (he has an alt he now posts every embarrassing thing Batman does and has ever done)

Puns. So many puns between Dick & Danny.

Danny mumbles in his sleep

Crows flock to Danny like hungry tigers. Damian's envious but he gets to pet & feed them so it's mostly okay.

GW likes Jason and let's him borrow books whenever he wants to (also any destroyed book ends up with GW but that's a pretty common hc) but Jason has to swear not to give them to Danny. Not that Danny wants them.

Duke is helping Tucker out with studies and Tucker Duke with tech. Technus sometimes shows up too to help.

Johnny and Jason are dEAD bffs

Sam and Babs get on like a house on fire

Talia met Danny and they're actually friendly to each other. Sure, she's trying to trick Danny into giving her his throne, but Danny knew that and wasn't about to let that happen

Danny will randomly punch his siblings, smirk, then bow and say "my leige" and run away. The sibling now has the crown and is chasing to punch Danny back because honestly fuck that

Constantine is slightly terrified of Danny and Bruce uses it like a threat-- "John, if you don't answer, Danny will contact you." It works like a charm

When too excited, Danny and Jason will start talking in Ghost speech. It freaks everyone else but Damian and Cass out bc the same sounds came from the pits

Take, edit, have fun with whatever you want here. It's just bs that crawls around my brain for funsies and won't let me sleep.

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im-totally-not-an-alien-2 · 2 years

Text

Halloween prompts no. 8

Phantom parents had shot him with a blaster and while it was unusual for them to actually get a hit in, it didn't actually hurt. In fact it kinda tickled for a moment before the sensation faded entirely.

Phantom just shrugged it off and evaded them for the rest of the day. Only to wake up the next morning with his entire room frozen with his own ice. Lifting his blanket off of him caused it to shatter, the same happened with anything else he interacted with. After leaving his room via a shattered door, he came to the kitchen to find it empty save for the ice everywhere.

A terrible thought hit him. Shouldn't his sister be awake by now?

Floating back up the stairs after they made an uneasy cracking sound from his weight, he called for Jazz from outside her room. His gut filled with dread when she didn't answer. He repeated himself over and over, growing louder each time and no longer caring if he woke his parents up too. Part of him knew they wouldn't wake. Not anymore.

Finally, with tears in his eyes, he broke her door like his own and saw his sister in her bed. She was the same silvery blue as the rest of the house and looking for all the world like she was simply sleeping. His parents were the same. He saw from where thier door was left open. He had killed his own family in his sleep.

Beginning to hyperventilate, he raced out the front door, not caring what he broke on his way out, only to stop dead in his tracks when he saw what had happened outside.

Amity Park was frozen solid.

He saw a driver in a pickup with his face stuck in a look of terror directed at the ground. He saw a woman and her dog frozen in place where they must have tried to run.

The more he looked the more he realized it wasn't just his family. Tucker. Sam. Valerie. Everyone.

He transformed and flew around, darting from city to city in a wild state. It didn't matter where he went, everything was frozen. Everyone was dead. Part of him wanted to believe this was a dream. A sick nightmare of some sort. But he wasn't dreaming.

He had destroyed his entire world in less than five hours and didn't even remember doing it. Why didn't Clockwork stop him?! He froze (heh) in the sky, "Thats it! Clockwork!" He flew home from France as fast as he could and zoomed into the portal.

Clockwork wasn't much help though. Since Dan had forced that time medalian into Danny his core had slowly been absorbing it. So not only could Clockwork no longer rewind or undo anything Danny had done, he couldn't even see into his future anymore.

Dannys problems kept growing however as frost began to spread around him and turn into thick chunks of ice. Clockwork was force to attack Danny to make him flee in order to protect the timeliness he was too close to. Feeling hurt, guilty and betrayed Danny flew around the zone, gradually becoming less and less able to control his ice power until everything around him was white. The zone was in chaos as his ice spread everywhere with no sign of stopping.

Not knowing what to do, he floated backwards, watching in horror as his power consumed more people and unknowingly went through a portal. By the time he noticed it was too late and the ice was spreading in this world too and a massive snowstorm began building above him.

Danny wandered alone as Phantom for days, stealing what food and water he could from houses of ice. Silence, wind and snow became his only companions for weeks as he slowly explored the remains of this new world. Oh ancients. Had he destroyed two worlds?! He decided it should be only fitting he should be forced to wander this world for eternity as punishment.

Unbeknownst to him, the magic users of the DC world had banded together to create a force field that stopped his ice and storm from spreading any farther, but the death toll was already immeasurable. Batman stood at the edge of it in his white batsuit, wondering what kind of monster would do this.

----

Eventually the Justice League Dark infiltrated the icy landscape to find the source. The storm caused a total white out, the magic users found thier spells and whatnot failing more and more often and after a while they were separated from one another.

Batman was the one to find the source pinging on his radar and hurried towards it with a batarang at the ready. His plans changed pretty quickly when he saw the source was a sobbing child curled in the fetal position while leaning against a frozen tree. After startling the kid, Batman introduced himself. The kid didn't seem to recognize his name, but asked if he was real or not. Turns out the kid had been alone in the silence and whiteness long enough to begin hallucinating. Crap.

It took a while, but eventually Batman convinced "Phantom" that his suit would prevent him from being frozen by the kids powers and to let him pick him up and carry him around as they looked for a way out of the icelands. Phantom agreed to put on a power inhibiting collar and while it prevented him from freezing everything he touched and stopped the spreading of the ice, the storm above still raged.

Exiting the force field he met with his lost team and explained basically nothing about the boy that wasn't absolutely necessary. Danny knew it was to protect him, but...

The truth always comes out eventually. Still. It was probably best to keep quiet for now.

#danny phantom #fanfiction prompts #dp x dc #prompts #danny fenton #batman #i was originally going to have danny crying in the snowstorm only to Superman to talk with him a bit and try to calm him down #only for danny to take his hand aand accidentally feeze him solid and shatter him #the devastated look on dannys face #angst #tw: angst #tw:freezing #tw: death #tw: dog dies #the dog dies

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tourettesdog · 1 year

Text

Still Deeper

Based on the prompt “How deep is the Ghost Zone?” for Phic Phight!

For @aggressivelyclueless Word count: 3,055 AO3 Link

Danny often wondered how deep the Ghost Zone ran. When he let himself drift over the islands, watching the lap of ectoplasm tug at the purpled stones like the endless waves of a moonless ocean. When he drifted closer, feeling that pull that ached to tug him into the depths.

Settling down on one of the islands, Danny let his spectral tail dip where the ectoplasm grew heavy. It sent a shiver down his spine, not unlike a cold splash of water, freshly thawed in the spring.

He couldn’t help but compare it to the sea. Green and ghastly as it was, the similarities felt hauntingly close when great behemoths rose from the depths, too many eyes skirting what Danny could only call the surface, before sinking back down to the depths.

He tried to venture there once.

Shutting his eyes, Danny recalled that hapless voyage with a shudder. He’d tied a Fenton fishing line around his waist and trusted Sam and Tucker with the other end. They’d advised against it, knuckles whitening with fear for his safety as they held that thin thread with everything they had.

Danny offered a smile and a salute as he took the plunge.

Diving was easy. The ectoplasm did not fight him, rather welcoming him as he struck through the wash of green. That first layer was not too dissimilar to the surface itself, and by the time Danny glanced upwards he would not have been able to see the difference at all were it not for the sharpened bases of the islands striking downward.

He struck downward too, his tail flickering as he went.

If the surface of the Zone was air, this layer was a fog. It clung to Danny’s skin like mist, cold and hazy with the scent of petrichor heavy in his nostrils.

Blob ghosts trilled in the distance, their sounds echoing on and on in the open expanse. They darted towards Danny, a flock of bright green and brighter red eyes. He welcomed them with a pulse of his core and their trills redoubled with glee.

“Is everything okay?” Sam asked through the Fenton Phones, her tone as tense as the line around his waist.

“Everything’s fine, Sam,” Danny reassured as he held his hand out, letting one of the blob ghosts roll over his fingers. “There’s just some blob ghosts here.”

She wanted him to resurface, but Danny had more to see.

The blob ghosts stuck with him for a time, corkscrewing around his tail and settling in his hair like fat drops of rain. Danny hummed with their trills, finding a chorus of song answering his own.

The mist of the expanse began to densen, coalescing in a blanket of jade fog. It coiled around Danny as he met it, the chill it left on his skin buzzing.

The blob ghosts quieted as he swept his tail through the fog. They tentatively drifted to meet it, their own tails skirting just above the layer. Curiosity and unease mixed, pinging from their little forms with each warbling trill and chirp.

Tentatively, Danny sank his hand beneath the layer of fog, feeling that electric buzz shudder through his ectoplasm.

It wasn’t unpleasant. Strange and new, but no less unpleasant than the crackle of a distant storm.

With one last glance at the blob ghosts, sure they would not follow him down, Danny sank deeper into the abyss.

The cold sparks that danced across Danny’s face electrified his core, filling him with energy and nerve. The jade of the fog had faded into a strange sort of blue, not unlike the open atmosphere of the world the Zone paralleled.

Large, cloud-like structures rose up from the new depths, cyclical spirals that drifted slowly, as if caught in a current. Danny could spot rocks drifting along with them, some as vibrantly purple as the ones at the surface and others as jet-black as obsidian. He moved in an arc to meet one of the stones, finding it tumbled and rounded like the pebbles of a river.

A loud trill startled Danny from his thoughts. He spun around to find a large blob ghost winding towards him, a long tail flowing behind it. Its ectoplasm was as teal as Jazz’s eyes and its face pointed like the tapered snout of a sturgeon. It met Danny with beady magenta eyes, his own glow reflected in those bright orbs as it drifted around him. Its tail ghosted across his arms, curiosity brimming from its ectoplasm in one long, drawn-out trill that whistled and crackled at the end.

Danny returned it in kind with a chirp from his core, watching the ectoplasm ripple across the ghost’s back as it made one last spin around him.

Just as soon as it came, it was gone, tail flicking lazily as it threaded through the stones circling one of those cloud-like spires.

Danny wondered just how deep the spires went. He followed their spiral, finding more oddities amidst the collection of stones. There were odd items gathered in the current: old watches, faded photographs, and glistening jewelry. Trinkets lost to time— though how literally, Danny couldn’t say. He regarded a locket with an inscription so worn that he couldn’t read more than the letter ‘A’. It took everything in him not to reach out and touch it and see if something lay inside.

Something as innate as the hum of his core told him that he shouldn’t disturb their rest.

Rest… it was a funny word for a lump of old bronze and a rusted chain.

“Where are you?” came Tucker’s voice in his ear, the words oddly distant and ringed with static.

“I’m not sure,” Danny answered, still following the curve of the spire, giving distance to the items pulled towards it. “It almost looks like the sky here. It’s nice, honestly.”

Tucker hummed, his anxiety evident. “Just don’t go too far. There’s still plenty of line, but you need to turn back at the first sign of danger.”

Danny nodded, though they couldn’t see. “I know, Tuck. I’ll be careful,” he said.

The buzz hummed alongside his core as he dove still deeper.

The spires did not end, in a sense. They merely faded, drifting apart into a layer of rich white fog that mixed in swirls and rivulets with bright streaks of goldenrod. The static lingered most prominently there, as cold as the Far Frozen and as lively as a sparking wire. Danny hesitated before he met this fog, worried for a moment that the sparks would be more electrical and biting than the familiar caress of active ectoplasm. He brushed the tip of his tail through the swirls, watching as it melted outwards from the contact in jagged ripples.

His core pulsed with energy, a cold hum resonating with the fractals of ice that lingered in his own ectoplasm.

He readily dove through it, laughing as ice bloomed over his hands and in his hair, trailing off of him in powders of snow.

The channels of white fog faded altogether into that goldenrod yellow. It was denser than the green and blue had been, yet no less alive— in a way only ectoplasm could be. Danny tensed as he saw shadows in the distance, moving through the last fading reaches of the spires. It took him a moment to recognize them as ghosts, though he supposed he ought not be surprised.

They were like no ghosts that Danny had ever seen. More fish and mollusk than blob, with arching fins and tangling whiskers. They drifted in schools, watching him with too many eyes above too many teeth. Each was as different from the next, some more vapor and smoke than anything, and others as dense and sharp as horn.

They ignored Danny for the most part, continuing on their course, though some darted away as soon as their eyes met.

One approached, six eyes green and gleaming in the golden haze. Danny knew fear, his hand tensing on the line as it drew close. It was as large as he was, an awful thing that was more shark in the front and nautilus in the back, with a mouth that stretched from its snout to the horn of the shell.

It kept some distance and Danny let go of some of his fear, regarding the ghost with a tilt of his head that it copied— as much as it could with the stiffened, inorganic rigidity of something that may have never existed outside of this place.

Three of the eyes blinked and two long tendrils stretched out, brushing close to Danny’s face as the ghost let out a staccato of unearthly clicks.

The same curiosity as the blob ghost from the layer above, enough to mirror Danny’s own. He tried to return it in kind, finding a trickle of something neighboring on amusement when his core garbled the odd notes.

The creature went on its way, leaving a channel of rippling goldenrod in its wake. Sparks danced along its ectoplasm as it went and Danny watched as the green of the ghost's eyes faded into the mire around him.

More of those strange ghosts followed Danny, perhaps emboldened by the first. They ranged in size, some no larger than dimes and others enough to rival small whales. A ghost swam below Danny, all tentacles and eyes, like a jellyfish without its crown. Small fish-like ones flitted around his head, all teeth and sharp edges.

He kept his guard about him, ready to make good on his word and flee at the first sign of danger, but… found none amidst the odd assortment of ghosts. They almost danced, in a way, following currents he couldn’t feel in patterns he couldn’t see. Many of them dove downwards, fading to golden shadows in his periphery.

Danny followed one of them, tracing the trail it left in its wake, watching the flicker of its smoke-like tails as they wound and undulated with the ghost’s movement.

The goldenrod darkened into a rich sunset orange. The trail tunneled, the path wavering like sand pulled by the tide. Sparks crackled along Danny’s back, the space smelling of ozone and, strangely, of stone. The mute scent of a cavernous cave far below the soil, all rock and dripping water.

The ghost before him took a sharp dive downwards, the smoke of its tails stretching to faint wisps that tickled Danny’s nose. He scrunched up his eyelids, shaking the vapor from his face. His movement felt slow and stuttered, the air as dense as the mud-choked waters of a swamp.

When he opened his eyes again, Danny had to blink to make sure he was seeing things correctly. The rich sunset ombre of orange had gone, and in its place the sky bled red.

A red so absolute that it pressed on Danny’s eyes, warping the colors around him. It stained his gloves the same color, as rich and bloody as a weeping wound. The static had lessened from the lively buzz to something much more languid and rhythmic. The slow beats of a resting heart. The offbeat thumps of a timpani drum. The rumble of faroff thunder without so much as a spark of lightning to see.

Shadows hung in Danny’s periphery, blacker than the night. They formed strange structures not unlike tangled tree branches, only too geometric and sharp-edged to ever be something so organic. The ghost he had followed swam on, its blue ectoplasm now a rich purple in the red light. It coasted along, uncaring of the shift in pressure.

Danny tried to follow it, but paused when that energy squeezed at his core, pulsing like the heartbeat of something far too vast and far too old. It had pinpricks racing along his arms and to his chest, freezing his torso in a way that had nothing to do with the chill surrounding him and everything to do with the frantic, nervous humming of his core.

He shouldn’t be here. Wherever here was, it did not know the living. It hardly knew the dead, too uncaring of Danny’s fear in its vast wake.

Sounds echoed around him, the cracks of shattering glass and grinding stone joining the monotonous tune that squeezed at his chest. The air smelled strongly of iron, only worsening the awful likeness to fresh blood.

The ghost was nearly gone now, aiming towards one of the blackened structures with slow, languid flicks of its tails. Danny could just make out its eyes, too many luminous dots that raced along every inch of its form.

Just as it began to round the corner, the air seemed to shift. The space behind the structure rippled, a wall of red colliding with the ghost, opening into a vast, cavernous maw of blade-sharp teeth.

It swallowed the ghost whole, the rich purple ectoplasm disappearing into the void-dark belly of the beast.

Danny’s core could have shattered with how strongly it hummed, fear coursing through every inch of his being. He remained stockstill, hoping that the thing with too many teeth wouldn’t turn its attention on him.

Static crackled in his ears, the garble of voices unable to make it through the wall of interference.

A thousand eyes, each darker than shadow, turned to meet him.

The line tugged and Danny didn’t fight it. He welcomed the reminder of safety up above and turned sharply, throwing everything he had into rocketing upwards through the warped tunnels above.

The static rippled in his ears, a small nuisance compared to the heavy thunder of crashing glaciers and rumbling earth that chased behind. It brought its own static, too piercing and high for Danny to make sense of anything more than a cruel, twisted pitch that met his ears so sharply he was sure they bled.

Danny didn’t stop, his chest heaving with breaths he didn’t need as he shot through the electric buzz of goldenrod, this time finding no safety in its energetic embrace.

He could feel the creature behind him still. Its thrum of energy, the acidic bite of its breath. He didn’t dare spare a glance backwards, least of all when he felt something sharp rake along his tail, the world darkening as the thing that shadowed him drew too close.

Danny put everything he had into soaring upwards. Every last ounce of energy, every prayer. He ignored the fish-like ghosts as they peeled away, their cores sparking with a horrendous fear as Danny brought the thing that lurked in the bloody depths into their peaceful layer of gold.

Danny could have cried when he saw the goldenrod mix with white. Could have kissed the odd trinkets that danced around the spires, if disturbing their rest meant escaping the gnash of too many teeth.

Its presence lingered behind Danny far too long, his core stuttering with each rhythmic pulse of ancient, resonant ectoplasm. It knew no emotion he could recognize. Nothing he could understand past the desire to tear and bite and end.

Danny didn’t stop when the last deep thrums of the ghost’s core faded, sinking back to the depths far below. He kept going, tears pricking the corners of his eyes when he spotted the sharp stones of the islands overhead.

Danny shot out of the ectoplasmic sea and breathed like a man starved of air. His chest heaved, his arms shook. He landed on the nearest island, crumpling into a quivering heap.

He sobbed.

Danny hardly remembered when Sam and Tucker found him. They had been several islands away when he resurfaced, he was told.

They had almost gone down for him, they had said.

That memory lingered much more strongly— the fear tied to it as he looked at his friends with tear-stricken eyes and made them promise to never venture where he had gone.

Danny rolled on his side as he remembered the fear that had gripped at his core. How close he had come to finding himself in the belly of a beast, utterly lost to anything resembling home.

His hand ghosted along his hip, right over where the ghost’s teeth had scraped him, digging deep channels into his body that bled through layer upon layer of gauze.

More layers than he has dove.

The scars remained, just as much as that fear, and yet… as Danny flicked his tail through the dense waves of ectoplasm, part of him longed to delve still deeper.

~*~

A fish-like ghost, more shark and nautilus than any one thing, knew the red depths well. It often sank through the goldenrod tunnels to linger in the forests of blackened branches. It was quicker than most, able to dart away from the behemoths that stalked the open stretches and hummed discordant songs that spelled a death it didn’t know.

The black branches shot downwards into the familiar dusky stretches of its first home. Here the branches merged into colossal trunks that stretched too high and too low. It would hug the trunks, sinking deeper until the red faded into a cold silver rich with fragments of stone and drifting globules of ectoplasm.

The trunks branched out again if the ghost went deep enough. They formed massive roots, digging into shattered plains amidst glowing fronds, each clinging to the other. Small ghosts congregated on these expanses, finding shelter in the vast network of roots, and sustenance in what fell from the stretches above.

The behemoths, ancient as they were, did not always last. When they fell they would drift through the haze and into the silver, their weakened forms snagging on the roots and laying within the fronds. The last hums of their cores, if they still pulsed, rang like a dinner bell throughout the hallowed roots. The ghosts that lingered there would congregate, a symphony of cores welcoming a feast for the Ancients— perhaps even of them, if they could ever be so lucky to have one fall.

The plains were not endless, broken by great cracks that wove over the blackest black.

It didn’t know what lay below, only that it went still deeper.

#danny phantom #phanfic #fanfic #aggressivelyclueless #the ghost zone #eldritch ghosts #ghosts #the ghost zone is like the ocean #deep water tw #jic #phic phight #phic phight 2023 #dogfics

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accessibleaesthetics · 1 month

Text

Image-to-Text AI

I wanted to discuss image-to-text AI, what it's good at, what limitations it has, and how you can use it to help make accessibility easier.

How It Works

To demonstrate how this works, I'm going to use the image from this post.

This photo shows a sleeping kitten laying on desk beside a computer, in between the keyboard and the mouse. There is also a corner of a frame of some sort in the upper right corner of the image. Text displays in the center of the image and reads: my coworker got her new kitten to work and the little nugget was just too tuckered out from being adorable all day.

Image-To-Text AI

Image-to-text AI is basically the exact reverse of the famous (or infamous, depending who you ask) text-to-image AI that has taken the world by storm since early 2021. There are a ton of websites for this, some free, many not. For simplicity, I chose to use the image-to-text feature built into Microsoft Word.

When I paste an image into a Word document, the program automatically generates alt text for it using Microsoft's AI. You can view this alt text in the Alt Text panel when editing the document. It will add "Description automatically generated" to the end of the alt text for transparency though, so if you want to keep the alt text it made, make sure to delete that. You can also edit the alt text directly to make it more accurate.

Microsoft's AI came up with "A kitten sleeping on a desk text to a computer mouse." Honestly, not a bad description at all, except it's missing one important thing: the text overlaying the image. This is because Microsoft's image-to-text AI, like many AI of this kind, does not have the ability to transcribe text directly from the image. However, there is a technology that can.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Optical character recognition, or OCR, is a technology that dates back to the 1970s, possibly earlier depending on how you define it. While it's application and accuracy have grown extensively since then, the core function remains the same: recognizing text in an image and transcribing it into a true text format.

I took the photo from the previous section and put it into a Free Online OCR Image To Text Converter.

It recognized there was text on the image and transcribed it exactly. Very useful, but it doesn't give us any info about the actual image outside of that.

Limitations

Now, the examples I used above were kind of an ideal situation. AI is not as good with more complex images. For example, I tried putting in a screenshot of a tweet from nym™ (@aretteepls) with a photo of The Sphere at the Venetian Resort in Los Vegas. It is currently displaying a image of SpongeBob's face that fills the entire globe and glows very brightly, turning the night sky's clouds a tinge of yellow. Above the photo, the actual tweet says: The sky is turning yellow because of Spunch Bob.

Microsoft's image-to-text AI came up with "A screenshot of a phone." Defintely much less impressive than our first example, but AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. Things like "screenshot of a phone" or "screenshot of a computer" are not uncommon when AI recognizes that you're giving it a screenshot of something on a screen, but can't make heads or tails of what's in it beyond that. And once again, it has no OCR capabilities, so none of the text on the image is transcribed.

But even OCR isn't infallible. The output for this image from that same website I used earlier would be:

nym ,M @aretteepls The sky is turning yellow because of Spunch Bob

The trademark symbol is kind of faint on the screenshot, so the OCR struggled with making that out, transcribing it as "comma M" instead. The less clear the text is visually, the less accurate the OCR output is going to be.

What Do We Do With This?

AI is best when used in conjunction with human aid, and image-to-text AI is non exception. I think the best way forward with this technology is to use generated descriptions as a starting point, not a replacement for human-written ones. And of course, we need to be careful what programs you use to generate the descriptions, especially with art. Programs like Chat GPT have image-to-text functions, but there is no guarantee that an image you upload to it for that purpose will not be used to train it's text-to-image AI as well.

Unfortunately, the more ethically-sourced a training data base for AI is, the more limited it will be compared to it's less-ethically sourced counterparts.

But there are legal precedents being put in place around this, and many text-to-image AI programs now have explicit and detailed terms of service for what you can and can't do with its output, as well as what you should be uploading as input.

So, for the time being, be very cautious with how you use this technology especially when describing others' art. And even with your own art, read through terms and conditions before uploading your work to a website. I think the Microsoft Word one is fairly safe though.

I also think it would be great if someone developed a image-to-text AI that could incorporate OCR to make the end result more informative.

#ai #image-to-text ai #artifical intelligence #accessibility #long post

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puppetmaster13u · 9 days

Text

Prompt 283

Now Jason would like it known that there was no mpreg situation going on. He isn’t even sure where people got that idea in the first place. Sure, he had taken a few Cores from the goons-in-white who had dared to set up in his turf.

And sure maybe the excess energy from the pit (no wonder he’d been so irritable) was what said baby halfas (Okay, so they’re half human? Alright) had used to reform. And maybe the oldest is visibly less than a year old.

But there Was No Mpreg Situation! He is this close to shooting someone! It was annoying (and slightly amusing) when it was just his goons, but now the Bats have seemingly got it in their heads! Dear Gotham it’s a good thing he’s not planning on like, ever revealing who he is because he would never be able to live this rumor down.

[Winged Ghosts Au too, that seems to be getting lost in reblogs when it's just in the tags lol]

#DCxDP #DPxDC #Prompts #Winged Ghosts Au #Halfa Jason #Halfa Trio #Dad Hood #He is *This* close to pulling a heads in duffel bag 2 Electric Boogaloo #Hood’s Merry Men are concerned for their half-human teen-dad crime lord #Look if you tell someone there was no other parent they’re gonna ask questions #Crime Alley: This is our strange cryptid mom-person and we shall protect him #Star Core Jason #Space Core Danny #Life Core Sam #Storm Core Tucker #Jason was too panicked/sleep deprived when they first reformed to stop the initial rumors #Yes the tiny halfas can feed on his ecto as long as they’re close enough #He Was going to find them a good home but they’ve Bonded & he’s not sure if the GIW are still around #The goons are doing their best to keep the bats from their teen-mom crimelord #who when sleep deprived sometimes mutters about labs and beatings and warehouses and-#There are many misunderstandings

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vladdyissues · 3 months

Note

I guess, I'm too obsessed with Ghost King AU and cold-blooded Danny, so, I'd like to share some ideas of this theme with you:

• We can't say for sure what made ghosts change their minds and team up with Danny in the end of ep. "Reign Storm". Idk, is it a part of AU or just hc but I prefer thinking Vlad convinced them and his deal with Fright Knight meant FK helps them in Final Battle and Vlad helps him to get rid of the pumpkin curse.

• Danny was so terrified of his possibly death in the battle with Pariah, so, he accidentally eliminate his soul. I mean, that costume was real powerful thing and thanks to adrenaline Danny aimed to the core.

• Vlad was chosen by Observers to tutor young king for his new role. In 21 year Danny will be crowned.

• Now, Pompous pep! Vlad and Danny were still arguing first but soon became really close. Tucker was jealousy even before Danny realised his feelings to Vlad.

• Vlad could finally forgive Jack due to his friendship with Daniel, and Danny found a cozy shelter with hot chocolate on Christmas (I don't think grinch ghost accident cancel Jack and Maddie Christmas argue tradition)

• All 7 years Vlad was making nourishing lunch for Danny. Thx to that Dan grow up a handsome, strong and high man UwU (Sorry, Sam, your light salads can't do that)

• Danny announced the engagement of him and Vlad on the coronation. Yeah, for the entire Ghost Zone

(Jack knew all the time. Jack shippered them from the very beginning; so poor he wasn't invited)

• On the wedding there were flying platforms as dance floor. And wedding rings where you must drop your ectoplasm in your partner's ring. With these rings lovers can feel each other whereever they are.

• Sam must be sad but I'm happy for Vlad. He's such a perfect wife.

• Phantom the King will start the new era of peace between 2 worlds

("Well, maybe not all. But I certainly will," Vlad said.)

#asks #danny phantom #vlad masters #danny fenton #ghost king danny #ghost king au #pompous pep #hjbendergifs #meta #headcanons

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hannahmanderr · 11 months

Text

DannyMay Day 31 - Free Day

Words: 6,341

Summary: How do you convince someone to allow you to get yourself killed for them? (rewrite of a scene from "Reign Storm"; takes place a bit further down the timeline)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Danny brushed the flyaway strands of hair from Valerie’s sleeping face. The sight of the burns and bruises dotting her skin filled him with an array of emotions - rage, terror, anguish, drive - each of them their own force to be reckoned with. He inhaled shakily.

Tucker and Sam inched closer to him. He didn’t need to see their faces to know they were looking at each other with that worried glance that they thought he never noticed. They could recognize one of his spirals before it even happened at this point.

“Dude, you can’t blame yourself for this,” Tucker said in a gentle whisper. He placed a hand on Danny’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault.” Sam’s eyes echoed the sentiment.

Deep down, Danny knew his friends were right. They’d been over the whole guilt thing before, and logically, he knew he couldn’t pile all the blame on himself. “Maybe not,” he admitted, even as flashes of everything that had happened in the past few days fluttered across his mind - provoking Vlad, provoking the other ghosts, pulling the Soul Shredder from the football field… Each one taunted him, singing songs of his failures and shortcomings, whispering his fears of not being enough back at him.

And yet there was another voice too, a sweet soprano voice peering through the clouds, serenading him with a different set of memories.

“I think I might’ve finally figured out what these powers are for…”

“So even with everybody thinking you’re a bad ghost, you’re still gonna try to be the hero?”

“Well, somebody’s gotta. Hey, if not me, who’s gonna protect this town? Besides, it’s not like I can ignore a scream for help.”

They bled together in a dulcet harmony and wrapped around his core and made it resonate with a sudden burst of clarity, reminding him of his purpose and his reason why he even tried in the first place.

Just like that, he knew what he had to do.

He turned and looked Tucker dead in the eye. “But it is my responsibility,” he said, the sincerity and boldness firm in his voice.

Before either of them could say anything, he stood and transformed. As his core flared to life, the surge of power coursed through his veins and strengthened his resolve for what he was about to do. It was almost enough to quell the wave of fear beginning to wash over him.

Almost.

No. He couldn’t focus on that. Now was not the time. Shaking his head, he grabbed each of his friends’ wrists and shot upward, setting them on the roof in front of the short addition Dad had added to house their defense system mainframes.

“Tucker, I need you to get working on hacking into the ghost shield,” he instructed as he phased his hand through the door to jolt the lock out of place. “With it working overtime to cover such a big part of the city, I don’t know if it’s gonna be easier or harder.”

“You want to take it down?” Sam asked, visibly confused.

Danny shook his head. “Just temporarily. I’ll explain more in a minute.” Except would he? Could he bring himself to explain just how far his plan went? Could he trust the two of them to avoid panicking and keeping him from what he knew he needed to do?

First things first. Sighing, he said, “Get working on that. I’ll be right back, I gotta grab something.” Without further explanation, he dove through the roof again, making a beeline for the basement.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maddie’s brow furrowed lightly as she watched her husband’s sleeping form. She’d insisted on taking him up to bed a couple of hours ago after overworking himself trying to get the ghost shield’s range increased and alerting the town. Even in his sleep, his breathing was labored, and tremors from the nerve damage wracked his body.

Curse that sleazy rat of a man, Vlad! He’d been the one to persuade Jack to use the Ecto-Skeleton’s lower half in the first place. And that was after Jack had told him use of the incomplete Ecto-Skeleton could be fatal! She closed her eyes to keep from seething. If only Jack hadn’t given in to Vlad’s sweet talk…

But Jack was an honorable man, especially to the people he held dear. Of course he’d follow Vlad’s suggestion. He trusted the man he believed to be his best friend, and she knew he loved her enough to move heaven and earth for her, to lay his own life down to protect hers. His fierce loyalty was one of the things she loved most about him.

It was what inspired her to do what she was about to do.

Two floors down, in the basement, sat the Ecto-Skeleton that she’d finished only half an hour ago. Well, nearly finished. The work was hardly her best, what with it being a rush job, and she still had yet to perfect the neural receptors. The suit was far from being safe for use, but with the threat of this self-proclaimed ghost king looming over her town, she had little other choice.

She leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss into Jack’s forehead. “I love you so much,” she whispered before standing and leaving their room.

As she made her way downstairs, she peeked in her kids’ rooms. Jazz’s was dark and empty; Maddie figured she was still outside, helping keep panic from spreading. The thought made her smile. It was a job Jazz was born for, especially with her love of therapy and psychology.

Danny’s room had the light on, and Damon Gray’s girl, the one who’d been injured during the initial wave, was still on the ground, propped up on a beanbag chair. Oddly enough, though, her son and his friends were nowhere to be found. It was strange, considering she’d just told Sam and Tucker a few minutes ago that she’d seen Danny and Damon’s daughter up here a while ago (the initial sight of them both asleep in his room had set off her mom alarms, but given the fact that he was on his bed while she was on the floor and there were far bigger things to be concerned about, she let it slide).

Maddie sighed. There wasn’t time to hunt the three of them down. She’d have to cross her fingers and hope they were somewhere safe and out of trouble - perhaps helping Jazz.

Steeling herself, she shut Danny’s door and headed down the stairs. She dashed into the kitchen and opened the door to the lab only to run into Damon.

“Oh, my bad!” he said, catching her arm. “I know we wanted to monitor the shield and the probe as close as possible, but I haven’t seen Valerie in a bit and I want to make sure she’s okay. Is that alright if I go and check on her? I might ask if she wants anything for dinner while I’m at it.”

“Of course!” Maddie answered immediately. “Take as long as you need! Last time I saw her, she’d fallen asleep in Danny’s room. I’m not sure where he or Sam and Tucker went, but she seemed comfortable and safe.”

Damon’s form relaxed just slightly. “That’s good to know.” He sidled past her and towards the kitchen entry. “I’ll go check on her real fast and then be right back down there to help out.”

Maddie smiled. She hadn’t known Damon for long - less than 48 hours, really - but she could tell he was a good man with a heart of gold. The fact that he’d so readily thrown himself into assisting her and Jack warmed her heart.

It seemed like so many people in her life were of such a high caliber. She only hoped what she was about to do allowed her to even measure up just slightly.

“Help yourself to anything in the fridge,” she said, nodding towards it. “Just be careful of what’s in the containment box on the top shelf - trust me, that’s our secondary refrigeration storage unit.”

He let out a good-hearted chuckle. “Thanks so much, Maddie.” He turned to head up the stairs, leaving her in the kitchen alone with her thoughts. Such a good father, she thought to herself before beginning her descent into the basement lab.

The moment she stepped into the stairwell, she knew something was horribly wrong. The air was cold and sharp, so much so that she was certain she was seeing her breath mist in front of her. A heavy, thick presence filled the air, one of worry and fear. Someone was in the lab, muttering under their breath.

Somehow, she knew exactly who it was.

A careful, silent creep down the stairs proved her right. There, flitting around the Ecto-Skeleton and examining it, was Phantom. In her lab. In her house. Under a ghost shield that had thus far been proven to be impenetrable by any ghost, including the supposed king attacking the town and his knight.

Without taking her eyes off of him, she drew the pistol holstered to her belt and aimed it at him. “Make another move and I’ll shoot you,” she said, surprising herself with the darkness of her voice.

His back was to her when she spoke, but, following her order, he didn’t turn around. “M-Maddie,” he whispered, his voice heavy with dread. “Please, I’m - I promise this isn’t what it looks like.”

“Really? Because from where I stand, it looks like you’re in the middle of sabotaging the one hope anyone has of saving this town!”

“Sabot- Really?” He turned around to face her, but didn’t move closer. She gripped the trigger just a little tighter. “Even in the middle of the worst attack we’ve seen yet, you’re still bent on making me into the main problem?”

“Well, what am I supposed to think when I find you tampering with our weapons?” She did find his insistence to turn the situation into something revolving around him haughty and very typical for him in particular, but she held her tongue about the issue for now. Unlike him, she was focused on the real problem at hand.

Phantom huffed, a move that should’ve been impossible for a being without lungs. “I’m not tampering with it,” he said with strained patience. “I’m trying to figure out how to get in this thing. Or where the ‘on’ button is, or something.”

“And just what do you plan on doing with it?”’

“Seriously? What do you think I’m gonna do with it?” He threw his hands up in the air in exasperation. “I have to stop that guy!” he exclaimed, pointing up and vaguely out of the house.

“Even if I believed you,” she scoffed, “you have no right to invade our home and steal our invention to use for your own gain!”

Without warning, his face grew suddenly somber. Before Maddie’s eyes, he seemed to age years beyond his portrayed age. For the first time since discovering Phantom’s existence, she wondered if his teenage stature was a conscious choice or merely the body he’d had when he died.

That thought chilled her to the bone.

He lowered his gaze to the floor. “It isn’t for my own gain,” he said quietly. “It… I know you don’t believe me, but I really am doing this for you. For everyone.” Then in a near whisper, he said, “It’s my responsibility.”

Maddie narrowed her eyes as she pondered his words. The claim was the same as it had been since day one: he was trying to be the hero, the one good ghost in a sea of evil ones. He hadn’t wavered from that, except for a few times, which, admittedly, could be counted on one hand. At least he was consistent, if nothing else.

She just couldn’t make sense of it. The MO went against everything she and Jack understood about ghosts. If she were to accept his claimed intentions as true, it would mean dozens of theories, hundreds of hours of heated discussion and research, many attempts at creating basic behavioral profiles, they’d all be thrown out the window.

Not to mention the inherent danger of letting their guard down. Ghosts were notoriously tricky, and their ability to do things beyond human capabilities made them even more dangerous of a threat. Phantom especially was one who seemed harmless at first, but who had displayed impressive, terrifying power (and the potential to take it even further). He, like this ghost king, could probably raze the town in less than an hour if he really wanted to.

So… did he want to?

She studied his body language closer. His eyes were still fixed on a distant spot on the floor, and they were glassy as his own thoughts raced through his head. Though he seemed more serious, more battle-worn, he also seemed to be retreating into himself, making himself try and appear smaller than normal. It was hard to believe anyone who looked so solemn and resigned could be secretly plotting to wreak destruction.

“No one ever said it was your responsibility,” she said, matching his tone.

He smiled wryly. “I know,” he admitted with a one-shoulder shrug. “But it doesn’t make it any less true.”

Maddie sighed deeply and holstered her weapon, much to Phantom’s astonishment. She crossed the room and laid a hand on the cold titanium exterior of the Ecto-Skeleton. “It doesn’t matter if it’s your responsibility or not,” she said. Now was not the time to decide ground-breaking things about his true intentions. More important things were at hand. “You won’t be the one using this.”

He glanced up at her, then to the Ecto-Skeleton. His gaze flicked back and forth a few times, growing wider as the realization of her implications hit him. “No, no,” he breathed. She jolted when he caught her wrist; his touch was freezing, but unexpectedly gentle. “Mo… Maddie, you can’t! You saw what that thing did to… to Jack, you can’t seriously expect to go up against a ghost that powerful with that thing!”

She didn’t know how he knew what had happened to Jack, but frankly, she didn’t care at the moment. “It’s the only shot we have of defeating him,” she said soberly, pulling her wrist away. “I have to do it.”

“No one ever said it was your responsibility.” Of course he would stoop so low as to use her own words against her.

“Figures a ghost wouldn’t understand the concept of putting your life on the line for the ones you love,” she muttered. There wasn’t time for this nonsense!

His eyes became thunderous. “That’s just - I’ve…” he stuttered, accentuating it with a shout of exasperation. “Argh, you have no idea what I do and don’t understand! Are you telling me that’s what this is all about?”

“What, proving a factual point to you? I shouldn’t -”

“No, trying to be some self-sacrificial hero for everyone!” he shouted, spreading his arms. “Like why choose now of all the times to play the martyr?”

“It hasn’t been necessary until now!” She hoped her eyes were as piercing as she wanted them to be. Phantom’s inability to understand this only helped prove her and Jack right about his hero act being just that. The fall into familiar territory only marginally soothed her frayed nerves. “My family is in danger. I’m not just going to sit idly by and let them get hurt!”

He lowered his arms and regarded her with a stony expression. It was difficult not to flinch under his gaze, and she got the same aura of a battle-worn boy that had washed over him earlier. Her heart fluttered faster and faster.

She was nearing her breaking point of lashing out just to stop that piercing stare of his by the time he finally did something. Sighing, he hung his head low and, so very quietly, said, “I know.”

That… hadn’t been quite what she was expecting. “You know?”

“Yeah. I know. You’re always looking out for the people you care about. You’d never just leave them hanging.” He lifted his head and she found herself taken aback by the reverent, proud twinkle that had taken its place in his eyes. He smiled sadly. “It’s always been one of the things I admire most about you.”

Her mouth opened and twisted, but no words came out. Where did she even begin with a statement like that? The idea that he’d been watching her, possibly Jack too, closely enough to form some sort of attachment sent her heart dropping into her stomach, but it was quickly wrenched back into an anxious thump as she realized the implication of him holding admiration.

It should’ve been a distinctly human conception. Ghosts did not admire one another, they couldn’t. They were too proud of themselves and their own power to look into another and find something to emulate. Their individual powers and cores were their entire world.

So how was Phantom demonstrating the exact opposite of that?

She wanted to shout. She wanted to bang her fist against the Ecto-Skeleton. She wanted to stomp her foot and throw something. Why did he always have to do this? Waltz in and out of their lives, poking careless holes in their life’s work? It wasn’t fair! Before he’d shown his face, they’d never held a shadow of a doubt that their theories were true.

But now, though she could never admit it truly, he had forced her to second-guess herself. She couldn’t help but doubt everything she’d ever known as his otherworldly green eyes bore into her own.

She hated everything about it with every fiber of her being.

He raised his eyebrows in concern as she floundered for a response. “Sorry,” he mumbled sheepishly. “I didn’t - well, I did mean what I said, I just… didn’t mean to say it.”

Her own eyebrows frowned, but softly. “If you admire that about me,” she said slowly, not believing the words coming out of her own mouth, “then you understand why I have to do this.”

His smile faded in tandem with the twinkle in his eye. “I… I understand why you think you have to do this,” he admitted. “But it doesn’t change the fact that you can’t.”

“Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t do?” she snapped. This game of cat and mouse was growing on her last nerve, and with each minute that passed, she knew the ghost king grew closer to launching his final assault.

For some reason, it made her angrier that his face was one of solemnity again, not anger. Anger, she could deal with. Angry ghosts were easy.

Ghosts that supposedly admired humans and understood self-sacrifice weren’t.

He bit his lip. “I’m not - no, I’m not trying to… to tell you that you - you’re not allowed to think that way,” he tried to explain, stumbling over his words. “I know I can’t stop you from believing that, and - and that’s fine. I get it. I’m the same way, even if you don’t believe me. I just… What I’m trying to tell you is that you - you physically can’t do this.”

Her frown deepened now into one of perplexity. “Why not? The Ecto-Skeleton is right here. It’s the only thing that could possibly work against that ghost.”

“Sure, you could take it,” he said, “but I keep trying to tell you, you saw what that did to Jack, and that was only the bottom half! Do you really think you’ll be able to use the whole thing and be okay?”

Again, the question of how he knew these details crossed her mind, but she shoved them into the back of her mind. “It may still be glitchy,” she admitted. There was no sense lying to him about the issues with the neural interface; if he knew it had hurt Jack, he probably knew it was still highly dangerous. “But it’s what I keep trying to tell you: there isn’t another choice.”

“Maddie, please.” She could hear the frustration growing in his voice. “This isn’t - it’s not a choice that exists! You really think you’re gonna be able to take that thing and stop him?”

“I’ll stop him or I’ll die trying!” she bit out.

Phantom looked like her words had just punched him in the gut. “Yeah,” he said hollowly. “Yeah, you’ll try. And one way or another, you’ll end up dead, whether it’s the king or the suit that gets to you first, and then what? What’s supposed to happen?”

She didn’t answer. The way it played out in her head, she imagined the Ecto-Skeleton being enough to cripple the ghost king, at least to the point where someone else, even another ghost could come in and take care of the rest of him. The way Phantom phrased it, though, he made it sound like she’d barely make a dent in his defenses before she got killed.

And the worst part of it was that she was inclined to believe him. The suit’s pants really had sapped such a huge chunk of Jack’s energy in such a short period of time, and though she and Vlad had managed to remedy some of the interface’s complications, there hadn’t been nearly enough time to fix them all, and none of the three of them were quite as familiar with the level of programming knowledge necessary to fix them quickly.

In other words, with the top half of the suit, using the Ecto-Skeleton as a whole was just as dangerous as it had been with the bottom half alone. She knew this perfectly well. For her to use it - for any human to use it - was practically a death sentence.

And Phantom knew this too. He stared at her, hard and intense. “If you take the suit and go off to fight him,” he told her in a low voice, “you’ll die. And he won’t care. You’re just a puny little thing to him. You’d be nothing more than some annoying fly to take care of before he continues on his warpath. And then what?”

Still, she hesitated. She refused to admit he was right, even as he continued to speak. “You’d be handing this town, your family - everyone over to him if you take that thing. He’ll destroy it before someone else can use it against him, and then it’s game over. Especially if we’re right about it being the only chance.”

Though his face remained cloudy, there was something else behind his eyes that made them gleam with an anxious shine. Could he actually be… worried about her?

“Then what am I supposed to do?” she whispered. She couldn’t stand how her voice shook with fear and uncertainty. It was a vulnerability she couldn’t afford to expose, not now.

He straightened and turned to look at the Ecto-Skeleton. “I already told you,” he said, laying his hand next to hers on the suit. “You’re not gonna do anything. It’s gonna be me that takes it.”

“What?” She blinked once, twice as she tried to process what he said. “You’re going to use it?”

He drew in a shaky breath (again, something that should’ve been impossible for him to do) and nodded. “No human could ever have enough power to survive this thing long enough to fight off Pariah Dark.” His exhale was just as shaky. “But I’m no human.”

It was her turn to flick her gaze back and forth between him and the suit. “You can’t possibly expect-”

“Maddie.” He closed his eyes. “You’ve been watching and hunting me for a while now. You know my power, probably better than even me.”

He pressed his forehead against the metal and stilled. She watched him with a frown, but it was impossible to read him. For all that a ghost was supposed to be easy to understand, Phantom was the exact opposite.

“I don’t like to admit it,” he said quietly after a long moment. “I can’t… it’s not easy for me. I don’t like acknowledging what I’m capable of.”

In a flash, he opened his eyes and looked at her. There was a sort of desperation in his eyes that she couldn’t quite place. Just as quickly, he turned his eyes to the ground. “You know just as well as I do that I’m more powerful than I like to let on. We both know that I have a lot more power than just about any of the ghosts that show up around here. I… I’m the only one who even has a shot at stopping him.”

It was strange, hearing him so openly admit his power. He was probably telling the truth about not liking to acknowledge it; most ghosts loved to flaunt their power (the Wisconsin Ghost immediately came to mind), but Phantom tended to exercise restraint in that sense. Oh sure, he loved to mock his opponents and tease them when he was able to get one up on them, but things never escalated beyond battle banter.

But he was right. All of the measurements they’d taken of him, as marred by inaccuracies as they could be, put him at a level 7.3. The average level of the ghosts that attacked the town varied between 3.5 and 5.8. If he wanted to, he could take out those ghosts without breaking a sweat.

And yet he didn’t.

Nothing about him made sense.

“So you think you can actually beat him?” she asked. Normally, the question would’ve been laced with skepticism and venom, but at this point she was beyond it. Dealing with Phantom and his… eccentricities was exhausting, and that was on top of the fact that her husband was nearly bedridden at the moment, her kids were nowhere to be found, and an all-powerful ghost was about to descend on her town.

Yeah, she couldn’t bother to be scathing.

And, though she’d never admit it, as the conversation dragged on, she was beginning to become accustomed to his expressiveness. It was a sort of expressiveness that was human in the most uncanny way, and she couldn’t help but fall for it, even if it was an act. She found herself unwillingly believing his claims more and more, and it was having an effect on how she was viewing him.

To her, right now, he seemed less like the sassy trickster she and Jack had pegged him as, and he seemed less like the valiant hero he tried to be for the town. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was simply a scared boy who’d bitten off more than he could chew. It was too easy to forget the sheer power that pulsed underneath his skin.

And scared he looked. He folded his arms and gripped his biceps, tucking his chin towards his chest. His face was drawn tight in an anxious frown.

“You want the truth?” he asked so quietly, she almost missed it.

“Obviously.”

A tiny shudder rippled across his body. “I don’t know.” His fingers dug deeper into his arms as he kept his gaze fixed below him. “I don’t know.”

Whatever words she’d been preparing to say were ripped straight from her mouth, leaving her stunned and uneasy. Never before had Phantom allowed himself to be so… vulnerable in front of someone. Or admit doubt in his own ability. For him to do so now was unnerving for a number of reasons.

Thoughts and theories whirled around her head in a violent cyclone. The implications this show of vulnerability had…

No. She couldn’t let herself be distracted by that, not right now. There was something a little more immediate that needed to be addressed. “So wait, you won’t let me use the suit because you think I won’t be able to hold out, but you think you can use it even though you don’t even know you can hold out?”

“I at least have a better chance than you,” he said indignantly. Some of the fire in his eyes reignited, but the fear that remained betrayed him.

“But you’re not planning on coming back, are you?” she accused. “You don’t think…”

The words didn’t need to be said. They both knew exactly what she was alluding to.

He sighed, then set his jaw and looked her square in the eye. “I’ll go to whatever lengths I have to if it means you’ll be protected.”

All she could do was shake her head in disbelief. “Why?”

A weak laugh bubbled past his lips. “Like I told you,” he said with a crooked, feeble grin, “it’s one of the things I admire most about you.”

The two of them stood there (or floated, in Phantom’s case) for what seemed like an eternity, especially when the threat of the king loomed over their heads. She didn’t even want to try to tackle the subject of him holding her as a role model; with a brain that felt like it was full of static, she didn’t trust herself to try, either. As it was, she could barely process this situation.

Phantom. Clearly scared out of his mind. Ready to fight for the town to the point of fading. If she hadn’t been here experiencing it for herself, she’d never have believed it.

The fact that he hadn’t simply taken off yet baffled her further. There was only so much she could do to prevent him from leaving; they both knew that. So why not just take the Ecto-Skeleton and go?

He was waiting for something from her. Something physical, or the answer to some sort of question he hadn’t voiced out loud. It had to be the reason.

She suspected she knew what he was waiting for her to tell him.

“No,” she finally said, her voice hoarse. “I can’t let you.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Danny’s heart dropped as his mom spoke those words.

She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. What was she thinking? Wasn’t she supposed to hate him? Phantom, anyway? Shouldn’t she be perfectly fine with the idea of him meeting an early end to his afterlife?

At least more fine with the idea than he was?

“M-Maddie,” he said, stumbling over her name for the umpteenth time. Normally, he was so careful to make sure to call people by the names that the proper Danny would know. For Danny Fenton, his parents were Mom and Dad, but to Danny Phantom, they were Maddie and Jack. Something about this conversation, though, just kept leading him to slip ups.

Maybe it was the fact that he was talking about going off and offering himself up like a lamb to a slaughter in front of his mother of all people?

He shook his head. “I know you don’t trust me, but I won’t let you stop me.”

Would she have to push hard to keep him from going, though?

He’d been hoping to snag the Ecto-Skeleton and fly out of there before he had a chance to really think about what he was doing, but now, thanks to this conversation, he was starting to lose the same resolve he’d found up in his room. Most of what he was showing to Mom was a false mask of confidence at this point.

Speaking of Mom, she hadn’t reacted to his pushback yet. She was preoccupied with staring at a faint smudge of oil on the shiny metal of the suit. Without her hood, he could pick out the rampant emotion in her eyes that had been present this whole time, ever since she put the gun away. What she was thinking about, though, he had no idea. He didn’t have the same talent for reading people that Jazz did.

“It’s not a matter of trust,” she said eventually. She clenched her hand into a tight fist and averted her gaze even further. “It’s… you have to realize, I… I can’t…”

He felt his face soften in sympathy. “You can’t let someone else take the fall for you,” he finished for her. “I get it.”

She apparently hadn’t been expecting him to say that. Her eyes jerked up to meet his, and behind them, he could practically see the gears in her head churning faster and faster as she tried to make sense of it.

He didn’t blame her. He wasn’t even sure what he was saying anymore, he’d said so many things he would’ve never admitted in a million years at this point. Like telling her he admired her heroism? What was he thinking? After so many months of carefully guarding his secret, what on earth had possessed him to be so careless with this stuff?

Despite his own anxiety, he tried not to shy away from her intense gaze, as difficult as it was. Like worse than when Jazz was getting ready to serve him with a lecture.

The bottoms of her eyes scrunched up in absolute befuddlement. “Who even are you, Phantom?” she finally whispered.

His expression of sympathy relaxed even further into a frown weighed down by nearly a year of sleepless nights, sacrificed grades and relationships, and scrapes and bruises from being thrown into streets and buildings. “Just someone who wants to help.”

Mom narrowed her eyes further. He was really beginning to hate how he could not figure out for the life of him what was going on in her head. Frankly, he was still half-convinced she would pull out her gun again, shoot him, and take the suit anyway. Had telling her she wouldn’t change a thing against Pariah Dark been the right way to go? Would it just make her even more stubborn?

At least he knew what side of the family he got his stubbornness from.

It was also getting harder to resist the temptation to just grab the suit and run. After all, she really couldn’t do much in the way of stopping him, what with a handy thing called intangibility, and, with his courage waning by the minute, the idea seemed more and more plausible. Not to mention that as each second ticked by, the Ghost King grew closer to launching his final attack.

Time was running out.

Just when he thought he wouldn’t be able to take any more, Mom abruptly drew her fist away from the suit and stepped back. Her eyes were closed tight. “Go.”

He had to do a double take, he could hardly believe his ears. “Are you-”

“Just go, Phantom!” The tension in her jaw was visible and obvious. Even still, quieter than before, she added, “Before I change my mind.”

A single tear slipped from the corner of her shut eye, and Danny’s heart shattered.

This… this was all wrong. How could he do this to her? Ask her to allow her own son to go up and face almost-certain death? When she didn’t even know it was her son she was talking to? And then the fact that if he really didn’t return, she’d never know the truth…

In one shallow, shaky breath, he made another decision.

Carefully, he floated toward her and laid a gentle hand on her arm. “Thank you,” he said, pouring as much warmth, sincerity, and gravity into the two words as he could.

She cracked open her eyes to look at him, and then, before he lost the guts to do so and before she could stop him, he said, “You… you asked me who I am.”

This time, Mom opened her eyes fully and regarded him with confusion. Clearly, she’d been expecting him to bolt the minute she gave her permission. “Look, I already-”

“If I don’t - if something happens to me…” he interrupted, cursing the waver in his voice. The fluttering in his stomach was quickly becoming unbearable. “... you’ll find the answer in… in your son’s room, taped to the back of his bed.”

That definitely elicited a response from her. “What does - how…?” She couldn’t find the right question to ask as the emotion in her eyes suddenly turned to panic. Well, that was reasonable at least. He’d just confirmed some involvement of Danny Fenton.

He smiled weakly, apologetic and sheepish. “He’s fine, I promise. Just… yeah. Consider it… a failsafe.” One that he’d prepared months ago, after the incident with Freakshow. Nothing more than a letter explaining the truth. He’d hoped he’d never have to resort to using it, that he’d be able to tell Mom and Dad in person, but…

Her brow knitted together. It was agony, not being able to know what she was thinking. He could only hope she wasn’t about to turn on him for getting too close to her son.

“Well,” she said after what felt like an eternity. “Don’t make me need to use it.”

Without another word, she turned and walked towards the staircase. When she paused on the fourth or fifth step, he could only float there as she looked over her shoulder at him, one last time, her eyes wet and bloodshot.

The corners of her lips turned upward. “Give him hell, Phantom,” she said. And then she was gone, leaving Danny alone in the basement.

He watched where she disappeared up the stairs for a long moment. Somewhere in the back of his mind, it occurred to him that in terms of last words to hear from his mother, those were definitely not the ones he would’ve expected to hear.

He could live with that.

Huffing a short breath, he shook his head to clear it. He needed to focus. No more worrying about Mom and what she thought of him, or if she’d go and find the letter anyway, or why she even let him go in the end. No more dwelling on the fact that he was probably living the last minutes of his life.

It was go time.

He grabbed the Ecto-Skeleton by one of its arms and hoisted it into the air, phasing back up through the ceiling to meet back up with Sam and Tucker.

#danny phantom #dannymay #dannymay2023 #dannymay 2023 #danny fenton #maddie fenton #danny phantom maddie #danny phantom fanfic #hannah writes #reign storm #i love reign storm #but that scene where the adults just all slap each other a bit is kind of silly #this is how i'd want it to go down #long post

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