It started as an extra credit assignment from Mr. Lancer. Help out with setting up at some sort of hero memorial gala thing, make up for—well. Danny isn’t even sure WHICH assignment or grade at this point, if he was being honest. He needed the help regardless.
The bonus was that after he helped set up in this garden venue, he was free to go home or attend himself. Upon finding out that there would be hero cosplays, Tucker not only volunteered himself and Sam to join, but also had INSISTED they all dress in costume. Sam only agreed if she got to be ‘stabby Robin’, which led to Danny also being a Robin when her first cosplay sets came in as the wrong Robin.
Waste not want not, and Danny found himself as either Robin one or Robin two, he isn’t sure and—frankly, there wasn’t much difference in the costumes as far as he could tell. Tucker still laughed at the pixie boots as he donned his own Signal costume.
There’d been some double takes at Danny throughout the evening, which really only encouraged him to mess with people a little. He can’t sneak in and out like one of the Gotham heroes, but he can turn invisible, which was much easier to pull off. He even got Brucie Wayne looking like he’d seen a ghost! Highlight of the evening, really.
Which led to the lowlight of the evening.
They weren’t in Gotham, rather a neighboring town, in an attempt to avoid the usual Gotham Rogues. Considering this was still a Wayne Enterprises affair, it was maybe unavoidable. The Joker had decided to show his ugly face.
And also about fifty freaking ghosts, invisible to everyone else but making a giant racket in Danny’s ears. Not to mention a handful of armed goons.
Danny had been trying to carefully sneak back to his friends and bail them out, or at least get them to cover before showing up as Phantom. Human enemies weren’t his specialty, but like he’d really let anyone else get hurt by a guy that had a haunting that intense going on. Amity Park was special in that regard—haunting a person as a ghost on the living side was actually quite difficult, so to have dozens of people successfully do so? It meant his actual kill count was exponentially higher.
Unfortunately, Danny is a Fenton, which meant Fenton Luck.
“Oh?” Joker grinned. “Didn’t I kill you before? Quite a place to show up in a dead man’s clothes. Or are you just a fanboy?”
Danny scowled. He did not want to fight Joker while wearing honest to goodness tights, but he’d done far dumber for far less good reasons than keeping a madman’s attention on him. Time to distract until he either got a plan or got bailed out by-hopefully-another hero. “I got better. Your unwaking dead send their regards, by the way. Quite loudly, too.”
Joker cackled, and Danny was honestly unimpressed. Sure, it wasn’t a pleasant laugh, quite spine-chilling. But Danny was also a horror movie fanatic, a horror movie creature himself, and had met Freakshow. Did this guy even have any powers? Not to underestimate him, but—actually.
Danny could see a bit of what he can best describe as murky ectoplasm. Basically, ectoplasm that had fermented while on the Living Side. Everyone had at least a little by the time they grew into adults, since ectoplasm was some kind of biological messenger or… something? It was something in the environment that all living beings used, but it was also somewhat produced internally…. He thinks. He hadn’t paid as much attention as he should have to that lecture.
He did know this though. Ectoplasm kind of was like a nutrient, cycling through the body and the ecosystem with several different sources of getting it. ‘Living’ ectoplasm got cycled out naturally, but ‘dead’ ectoplasm had a much harder time leaving, and can build up, causing nasty side effects. The body didn’t know the difference, so when around the dead—cemeteries, funerals, cadavers, and so on—it all gets picked up regardless. Humans stored a lot of it naturally, more so than any other species, but that meant that it took that much longer for the murkier ‘dead’ ectoplasm to be able to DO anything to someone before it DID get filtered out.
One way to get more of that ‘murk’ quickly was to consume another living thing. Eating meat or eating plants wouldn’t cut it—both were the usual bulk sources of ‘living’ ectoplasm—unless it was rotten. Option two was cannibalism.
Danny didn’t think the Joker was a cannibal, but looking at his levels of dead ectoplasm… that had to be affecting the Clown Prince Of Long Monologues That Danny Was Not Listening To. Something something Waynes something something terror something something deranged laughter.
What if he just… took it out? That much had to be affecting Joker’s mind. Heck, not even just Joker—Danny could see a couple of others with concerning levels of their own in the room, and that could end badly. If the ectoplasm in Joker could, say, cause a subconscious hive mind, or otherwise interact with the other higher leveled people, it’d go from bad to worse for everyone.
One way to find out. And hey, he was already wearing a mask, so…
Danny, ignoring whatever ultimatum Joker was spewing as he gestured wildly at one of the statues, reached into Joker’s neck, into his spinal column, and pulled out stringy, almost-seaweed-like strands of corrupted ectoplasm.
Joker looked at him. Danny looked at the Joker. They both looked at the whatever the hell Danny had in his hands.
“Are those my blood vessels?”
Joker leapt back, completely and uncharacteristically surprised, and toppled over his own feet. His head smacked against a marble table, covered in velvet and finger foods but no less solid for it.
Danny waited for him to get back up, to start screaming or going back to that monologue.
One of the goons, wearing a full face mask and eyeing Danny warily all the while, stepped over to the Joker.
“Boss?” she poked him lightly in the shoulder.
Very hesitant in her movements, she pulled one of her gloves off and held it against his mouth, then against his pulse.
She stood, pulled her glove back on, and said in a very clear tone, “Uh oh.”
“What do you mean ‘uh oh’?” A different goon in a hat asked.
“Can’t get paid if the man is dead, which means the Goonion is going to have to bail—cause we’re totally getting arrested.”
Danny didn’t know who shouted, but he can hear the thunderous roar of Joker’s ghosts cheering. He winces, and accidentally clamps too hard on the gross ectoplasm in his hands.
The damn stuff splattered, and in an attempt to purify it before it can get into anyone else’s system, Danny tried to both burn it with an ecto blast and freeze it with ice at the same time.
It became a sort of mist, floating in the air and taking up far more volume as a gas than as a—was ectoplasm a solid or a liquid? He had no idea, but he did notice the effect it had immediately.
The ghosts were visible to the other gala guests.
Danny was still the only one to hear them, but the crying and cheers from the dead were plainly visible to the living.
Someone was trying to talk to him, but the ghosts were just too loud.
With a snap, because Danny had accidentally helped kill a man just now and was rather frayed from it, he turned to the ghosts. “I get it, I did the thing you wanted, now would you go?! I only have limited time here myself you know! Go party in the afterlife, please!”
For the first time in Danny’s lif-er, existence, the ghosts listened, shimmering away slowly with happy tears running down their faces.
It’s just as well, since the doors now burst open, the police coming just in time to see actual spirits wave goodbye and a far few shouting complaints about competency as they leave.
There’s only so much nonsense Danny can take for the evening, so he let invisibility fade over him as the guests look over to the police squad now standing dumbfounded in the doorway. It takes mere seconds to grab Sam and Tucker and get out, running through the halls with intangibility until he can see the night sky, and then running further after until he’s satisfied.
“Dude,” Tucker said as he panted. “You couldn’t have just flown us home?”
Danny glared. “Ah, yes, I’ll just go ghost in the middle of a ballroom. Excellent choice. My powers are weaker as human, you know.”
Sam started to laugh in a rather incredulous manner, which is something Danny actually IS wary of when hearing. “No lost love here, but I can’t believe a “Robin” just killed the Joker.”
Danny glances back down again.
…. Well. It’s a good thing this Robin was already retired, right?
Surely this won’t have any long reaching consequences.
