#plot bunny

The rest of the town gradually begins to see it and slowly change how they treat Danny and "Phantom". Nobody says anything, they just change how they behave. Slowly phasing out the bullying, extending due dates on assignments, redo's on tests, discounts when he eats out or extra appetizers on the house.

He is the towns secret hero so they will try to protect him since they already failed him once by letting him die. How else would he be able to turn into a ghost hero if not because he died at least once. He dies every time he does hero business and gets shot at by his parents so the town adults have become very protective.

When the Justice league shows up they give them the runaround because Phantom hid as soon as he registered who the visitors were. They leave after giving some autographs (the towns folks collected them for Danny/Phantom from the alien heroes because they know how much he likes space) but then the Bats come into town and the town is surprised when the Bats immediately identify Phantom as Danny. The natural ecto camouflage doesn't work on them since all of their deaths and/or contact with the pits made them liminal.

"We don't want to fight heroes-"

Batman correcting them mid speech. "Vigilantes."

"-but we will if you want to hurt Phantom." Adults armed with anything and everything from novels to pitchforks.

"This is all a misunderstanding, we came here to check in on him and offer a fellowship for young heroes." Red Robin who has a crush on Phantom for his determination and on Danny for his engineering and would definitely like to see more of him.

Dani brandishing a spear Pandora gave her just for these occasions "The red one wants to marry Phantom! get em!"

The business in question is more of a cheat since being king of the infinite Realms means he is fluent in any language to exist. Safe, dead, or extinct the status of a language doesn't matter to him. With Technus's help he sets up and online portal where people can submit pictures or copies of stuff for him to translate at a premium price. He refuses to take any money from the fruit loop and the money he learns will go towards his clone's schooling when she gets to that point. Right now she is using it for her travels and sending them postcards.

People who claim his translations as their own get black listed with a huge fee coming out of their bank account for the breach of contract. He is trying to keep his business on the down low so those breakthroughs that get on the news are not what he is looking for. His main demographic is rich snobs with private art collections. What Danny doesn't know is that his main customers are the Justice League.

There are some clues but he kinda ignores them. Like when a document submitted is a summoning ritual he sends back a partial translation since the summoning is not good (there are worst beings they could summon but it will still be a hassle) however revealing knowledge of the banishment is harmless.

Gotham cultists hate him because they know he can translate the whole document/book but all of their attempts to trace the sage of tongues (trying to give invisobill kinda vibes) they find a dead end. They try submitting from different computers, locations, routers, anything, but just end up giving Danny more money lol

The Justice League is almost in tears because the jusyice league dark could not agree on the translation of the banishment ritual and everything they tried before had failed.

His favorite translations are the stories that give alien vibes. They talk about certain structures (he thinks it might be structures) as if they are common knowledge. Unknown to him those are Kryptonian fairy tales that Lois submitted. She didn't want to give Jon a funny accent so Clark can read them in Kryptonian while she does the English.

Duke having a hard time with an assignment, sends an inquiry asking if he offers homework help (he wouldn't be using it for career advancement which is against the terms of service BUT he would be claiming it for points so he asked) and that is how Tim finds out about this sketchy website that can translate anything. Danny feels the sincerity and sleep deprivation in the inquiry so he replies back "I admire your courage and will do you a solid but only if your promise to sleep a minimum of 8 hours. I'll know if you don't and snitch so go to sleep 😴" The translation is attached and already in the format his teacher requested.

Steph: How is he gonna know?

Duke: Idk but he is a life saver!

Tim: Duke, did you just sell your soul for a homework assignment?

Duke: Let me sleep and then we'll see what happens 🥱

Tim is driven crazy because he needs to know who is behind the website. And also because Constantine was kinda in the area and said no. Duke has his soul even if he doesn't sleep, lucky bugger.

Robin is having none of this. None.

She likes Eddie just fine, but she is not interested in playing DnD or hanging out with a bunch of smelly boys in a dank room. It's one of the things she likes best about Steve, how fastidious he is. She never has to worry if he's washed his hands after using the bathroom. She once watched Eddief eat funions out of a bag he found on the bleachers.

But Steve is lonely and sad when she's at school. The two of them are still looking for a job that will hire them both, so Steve spends most of the afternoons alone. Eddie skips most of his classes anyway. As far as she's concerned, it's a match made in heaven.

Robin tells Eddie to meet her at the diner after school to make her a character. He's honestly pretty stoked, Robin is cool and he was starting to think she would never join.

Steve Harrington pops up out of nowhere and rustles Dustin’s hat, “who you calling a loser, Henderson?”

Eddie stares, glares, tries to talking himself out of flight and into fight. Harrington had in the past been more of a do-nothing stander-by but if this was him deciding to take a more active roll in his arrogant bullying, Eddie wouldn’t let him get away with starting with his freshmen.

To his surprise Dustin just rolls his eyes and makes room for Harrington at the table beside him. “You. Absolutely you, Steve.”

Somehow Steve Harrington is the friend. And he sits with them with his neatly packed lunch like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and Eddie, for once, spends lunch saying nothing.

Steve pulls him aside when they all break for class. “If this is too weird I can find somewhere else to eat. I know I haven’t always been - “

Eddie cannot believe he turns out to be such a sucker for the earnest charms that make up Steve Harrington. “No such thing as too weird for Hawkins High’s resident freak. You’re a super senior loser now, aren’t you? We belong together, big boy.”

Shen Yuan in the not-too-distant future plays an immersive virtual reality MMO, a revolutionary one of its kind that offers unprecedented customization options, called YGGDRASIL. While the basic game inclines itself most strongly to western fantasy TTRPG tropes, it's so flexible that players can create a wide range of fantasy archetypes.

Shen Yuan ended up falling in with, and eventually taking over, a guild that was focused on xianxia tropes and workshopping character classes and race types to create them. The guild had pretty strict rules on what players could do racially and aesthetically to fit in -- stuff like secret dragons and demons and aesthetically-swapped paladins were in, elves were allowed as long as the character lore steered more towards nature spirits and less towards tolkien, and undead were taken on a case-by-case basis.

Over the course of several years, the Cang Qiong guild rose to prominence on their server as one of the strongest good-aligned roleplay groups, to the point of even having some dedicated copycats and rivals. The original twelve founding members each built a different segment of the guild's base, styling it as a mountain range with twelve peaks, and a lot of energy was poured into constructing NPCs to defend the peaks from the frequent incursions of rival player factions.

But over time, other games like YGGDRASIL started to appear and pulled players in. Some were more complementary to the eastern fantasy genre, some had better immersive features or superior tech, more hype, and etc. Other plays began to filter out as different aspects of their lives took over and they started families, got too busy with work, found other hobbies, and so on.

Twelve years after its launch, YGGDRASIL announced rather unceremoniously that it would be shutting the game down, with everything on it destined for the deletion bin. By then, the only players left in Cang Qiong guild were Shen Yuan and Xiang Fei, the latter only ever logging on occasionally to goof around and build extra NPCs for his novel ideas, while Shen Yuan kept maintaining the guild out of nostalgia and a firm belief that the game would be getting some kind of renewed interest any day now.

Accordingly, Shen Yuan was pissed to learn it was just going to be shut down, without even any word of a possible YGGDRASIL 2 or if players would get any bonuses for carrying over their accounts.

Shen Yuan decides to stay online until the last possible moment as the server goes dark. Xiang Fei joins him and nearly has to log off to go to sleep and get up in time for work in the morning, but decides to tough it out for his bro. As Shen Yuan laments, the two gather up all the major NPCs in the sect, head for the peak lords hall on Cang Qiong, and arrange the "Peak Lord" NPCs around the table with them. The NPCs can't talk, but each was styled as the lord and defender of a different peak and as brethren of a united sect, deferring only to their ancestral masters and creators, the godlike players of the setting.

Shen Yuan also insists on bringing along Luo Binghe, the secret demon emperor and trump card for the sect's defenses. Binghe was, in Shen Yuan's opinion, the pinnacle of Xiang Fei's creativity. Though with the appearance of a humble (read: ridiculously beautiful) disciple, in reality Binghe was a top level max skill demon lord, who had taken so many resources and quests to bulk out that it was ridiculous. His programming was fussy, to the point where he had once gone on a rampage and wiped out the actual guild players -- sort of the last interesting thing to have happened before another more popular game was released, and their guild activity plummeted.

Xiang Fei had often teased Shen Yuan about liking Binghe so much, especially since, in his opinion, he was a less interesting secret demon than the one defending his home peak of An Ding. As a final gesture, Xiang Fei reprograms Binghe to be a disciple of Qing Jing (Shen Yuan's peak) in specific, and chuckling to himself deletes the line about him being a playboy and replaces it with a line that says he's madly in love with Shen Qingqiu (SY's avatar).

As the players and their NPCs sit around the table, the game servers go dark. Shen Yuan closes his eyes, braces for the forced log-out...

Then feels himself draw a lungful of cool mountain air, instead.

Ensue Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua freaking out as they realize that they've apparently transmigrated into some sort of reality based on their game. At first the other "Peak Lords" (the NPCs who have suddenly come to life) are confused as to why their sect brothers are acting so erratically, but then they go out and discover that their entire mountain range has seemingly been displaced from its geographical location in YGGDRASIL, to some unfamiliar spot in a totally different world.

Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua double freak out because not only have they somehow become real in the context of the game, they've also brought their mountain range wholesale to yet another fantasy world?!

Shang Qinghua takes some of the other peak lords and goes to check on the actual peaks, to confirm if the other NPCs have come to life and that everything from the guild has made the inexplicable transfer. Shen Qingqiu sets out to check the surrounding area, while tentatively agreeing to let Liu Qingge, Yue Qingyuan, and Qi Qingqi go check in other directions. Luo Binghe ends up insisting on accompanying him, much to Shen Qingqiu's bewilderment, but he just ends up going with it. Outside the unfamiliar world is in its night cycle. Most of the exterior wards are still functional, although they've lost some of the alert arrays from the further outposts. Shen Qingqiu flies up for as high of an aerial view as he can get, surveying the situation, and musing that it really does seem that they've been transported to a totally new world. Also, using all his cool cultivator/class abilities is even more exciting in the flesh.

Anyway, Shen Qingqiu warns Luo Binghe that this unknown world could also contain unknowable threats, they don't know how their respective abilities would stack up here, etc etc, and Luo Binghe privately vows to bring this world to heel and lay its treasures safely at his shizun's feet.

Additional thoughts under the cut:

Plot Bunny!

Shane gets injured, so badly injured that he has to quit hockey, before 2008 and therefore never meets Ilya at World Junors.

Shane decides that since he can't play hockey, he'll write about hockey. He goes to university, gets a degree in Journalism, becomes a sports journalist.

To Simon, Grace is speaking the equivalent of Shakespearean English. Not to mention, Simon’s language is probably some sort of pidgin of English and other language(s).

Imagine, you’ve been stuck in a murder submarine for god-knows how long, and you’re finally saved— but this saviour is speaking a dead language. One you’ve had very little exposure to, due to a likely limited education. Sure, some things are understandable, but the majority is gibberish.