Angst Enjoyer

Jason has plans A-Q written, charted, and optimized.

Danny's primary combat strategy is 'Punch it until it stops moving'.

I recently received the Gorillaz almanac and it included an illustration of Noodle reading her own book, and I couldn't stop thinking that I needed to do this

(read more added to prevent spoilers for anyone)

here's my pdf version of fair game

compressed file from mega - link

compressed file from google drive - link

FYI all of theses files, even the compressed ones, are too big for mega or google to display so I recommend downloading the file to whatever device you're using.

Please support Gabriela Epstein and this graphic novel by buying a physical copy if you can!

He decided he wanted to be a little bit silly with it.

Now, all across reality, occultists and demons and anyone who was in-the-know on the Infinite Realms was privy to the knowledge of the new king.

King Phantom, The Child Killer

Meaning: The Child who killed the last king, the child who can and will kill to defend his people- and his people was Everyone In Reality. He was the King of All. He will not allow anyone to come to harm, and he will not allow anyone to conduct that harm.

Danny knows very well what people will assume his title means.

He’s counting on it.

Every so often a zealous megalomaniac decides they need the Ghost King to give them power, and what would the Child Killer want?

A child to kill.

He would never be able to stop people from trying to summon him, but he could control what they tried to offer to him. He could guarantee that only those who summon him were scum.

Anyone who chose to offer a living breathing child to what they assumed was a malevolent god of destruction and murder clearly wasn’t worth the breath it would take to ask “what do you want from me?”

So whenever Danny arrives to his summonings, faced with one or more innocent terrified faces, he wordlessly wraps them safely in a blanket made of stars..

Covering their eyes as he smites everyone in the room, leaving behind scorched earth and shadows of men who really Didn’t Have Any Idea Who. They. Were. Fucking. With.

When the Justice League catches wind of a dangerous entity called The Child Killer who slaughters cultists and disappears with the child sacrifices, they decide they don’t need any more information. Digging would waste time, and time was everything when a child was missing.

What they didn’t know was that Danny was feeding the children, clothing them, healing them- of course he would like to bring them home, but they don’t have any.

Each child was trafficked out of foster care by the cultists, or was being abused by their parent who was a cultist.

Even if they had never been taken into the circle, they would have surely died.

And no “hero” would have ever known.

No. Danny would not be returning the children, not unless they asked for it. Not unless they could come up with a safe place for them to go.

The form he's stuck in is a merman form. But it's not, like, a typical merman form.

He'd been trying to see if he could reshape his ecto while he was in human form, and he had! But he'd also gotten overenthusiastic in experimenting, added too many features unique to his ghost form, and now he can't shift into either form.

Human or ghost.

He's stuck.

He's stuck as a merman with his human features, his ghost-form eye color (it glows), his human form hair (tinted with glowing green-ish white), deep blue scales on his tail that fade into that seem glowing greenish white, and fully functional gills.

He also cannot use his ghost powers. He knows that they're there, but for some reason his current form will not allow their usage. Maybe...maybe he's using too much ghost energy to keep up the transformation?

Regardless, he got captured by some sleezeball and thrown into a traveling freakshow. Highly illegal, and he's slowly losing hope that he'll be able to escape, because he just. Can't. Shift. Back!

Then the sleezeball makes a stupid mistake; he puts the freakshow up in Metropolis.

Danny goes to sleep one day closer to a mental breakdown.

Aquaman's mouth was opening and closing like he was trying to speak, but Danny actually couldn't hear anything through the glass. He tried to signal that, even tried to talk himself to get the point across, and it seemed to work. He seemed to get it and found the opening at the top of the tank.

Danny came up to him so he wouldn't try to get into the water, and sure enough, Aquaman frowned in disgust at the state of Danny's water. He looked at Danny and said something in a language Danny didn't recognize.

"Sorry, I don't know what that means?"

"I see." Aquaman's face fell in utter devastation. "That's alright. We'll get you out of here and back to the ocean in no time."

Danny tilted his head to the side. "I'm not from the ocean?"

Aquaman looked Danny up and down, from his hair to his tail and seemed to notice something off. "No?"

"Pulled him out of Lake Eerie." Slzeeze personified shouted from where Superman had him. "That means he ain't yours, king of the ocean, so you can't take him!"

Superman twisted the guy's arm to shut him up, which Danny appreciated.

"Ah of course! The Great Lake Tribes." Aquaman nodded, "That's why you didn't understand Atlantean. I was worried you'd been captive your whole life."

Danny kinda shrugged and maybe cringed, because that was kinda debatable. He wasn't part of some merfolk lake tribe, and he had technically been captive almost the entire time he's been stuck as a merman.

Danny never confirmed he was from the lake-folk, he simply never said otherwise and Arthur could see the look on his face at the assumption. So, he sent Kaldur to the Great Lakes ahead of them to ask around. Arthur doesn't expect there to be a missing person matching Danny in the least; he questioned it the moment it was even implied. Bioluminescence is a rare trait, less than a fraction of a percent in the ocean people, and he's personally never heard of it manifesting in a lake-folk. Erie is the smallest and shallowest of the Great Lakes therefore having the smallest population and it would be easy to notice someone missing, bioluminescent or not, there would be public record of it. That bastard Benedict Showenhower lied about where he got Danny, likely to hide that he actually got the adolescent from, uhg, "fish" trafficking.

Danny doesn't talk much about anything before being "caught" by Showenhower. He mentioned that his parents were scientists, but didn't say what kind. What names he gave for his friends and family were all human names. even Arthur recognized they're not lake-folk. Arthur doesn't point any of it out, he wants to wait for the right moment, when Danny's strong enough to talk about a life he's trying so hard to hide.

And when Kaldur came with his report, of course it confirmed their suspicions. He and Arthur sat on the lip of Danny's pool with the boy bobbing in the water, a courtesy so he can hear them. ...Danny knows no underwater language.

"No one has been bioluminescent in the Great Lakes for eight generations." Kaldur simply stated. "And there are no other missing person reports that match Danny's age."

Danny sank slightly in the water, the action of a child caught in a lie.

Arthur spoke softly, "Danny, do you know for certain where you came from?"

"We're not upset or angry at being lied to." Kaldur added, "You won't be in any trouble, we just want to help get you home."

Danny flinched for some reason, he looked like he was bout to dive. Yes, they were faster than him, but this isn't something they could chase him down and make him talk about.

"I can't." Danny's voice was so quiet, they wouldn't have heard it if not for the echo surface water causes.

"Can't?" Arthur prompted and Danny started sobbing.

"I'm not- I was human-" His words were hard to make out, but Arthur got enough of them. "parent's big experiment" "illegal but fun" "stuck like this" "can't go home or they'll kill me".

Arthur knew it would be bad, but he didn't think it was this bad. Many humans have tried to make artificial merfolk for their own selfish desires. It is as illegal as illegal gets, both on land and in water and almost always ended in death. Arthur dropped into the water and pulled Danny into a tight hug and promised no one was ever going to hurt him again.

I can't stop thinking about ghost cannibalism.

Or more specifically, I can't stop thinking about it being normal and acceptable for ghosts to eat each other, because ectoplasm is ectoplasm- so theres never been a stigma. It's just part of the culture. You take a chunk out of an opponent's arm, they heal, everyone goes home.

The only problem arises when you go for the core, in which case you're dealing in a murder charge unless you have a very good reason to completely erase someone from continued reality.

Danny worked this out early, because he was lucky enough that his first real ghost fight was against a woman dedicated to teenagers receiving proper nutrition.

While she'd been trying to force feed kids week old mystery meat, she'd simultaneously been trying desperately to convince Danny to take a chunk out of her actual arm, not the weird meat one- telling him how he must be absolutely starving.

He was.

Which was why he didn't ask any question and just let his new fangs take control, and soon the Lunch Lady's entire arm was gone.

He started panicking, but she tells him she's fine, she'll heal little ghostling, you just stay here and digest while I get back to work-

-and Danny sucked her up into the thermos.

Hoo boy.

Cut to that night in his parent's basement, a nice chat with her over some mildly contaminated ham sandwiches, and she was willing to answer all his questions.

Cut to years later, and Danny Fenton is visiting Sam Manson in Gotham City. She moved to try and get a job as one of Ivy's goons, and so far it seemed to be going well- something about making her girlfriend laugh.

He's walking down the street, when out of nowhere he gets jumped by some random brick wall of a man in leather- and Danny is Phantom now, because no human is this strong naturally, and now they're rolling into a dirty alley and getting stuck with broken glass.

The guy is straddling him, kinda hot honestly, but then Phantom looks him in the eye.

It was like staring into a bioluminescent swamp, murky and cold, but so nearly blinding to him in the dark. His face was twitching oh so subtly, sweating and panting like he had run a marathon and was resisting collapse.

Ohhh he knows that look. Damn, he knew that the ectoplasm in Gotham was gross, but so gross that some locals were rejecting it to the point of starvation? Because why else would this guy, clearly top of the food chain, be so hungry?

Phantom respected personal choice, but this was honestly unhealthy. But if he wouldn't take any from here..

"Hey man, it's cool- it's cool, look," and Phantom holds up his hand, reaching towards the man's face.

He flinched back, shoving Phantom back down and slamming his head into the hard dirt.

Phantom hisses, throwing his hand back out to retaliate, but oddly enough things work out on their own.

Because the brick wall straddling him decided, instead of deflecting the blow and let go of the man he had pinned, he'd just bite into Phantom's wrist.

And his blunt teeth sunk in.

Phantom sighed with relief, feeling his energy flow away and into this guy who absolutely needed it more than him.

After a full arm, he slowed down. Boy does life come full circle, Phantom thinks.

After half of his other arm, Phantom thinks he should have called an Uber first.

After the second half, Phantom remembers he can use the voice feature on his phone to call Sam after this.

After half a leg, he decides an Uber would have asked way too many questions anyway.

After the second half, the man was unconscious and satiated. This was good, because Phantom was getting tired himself.

The ghost lay in the alley, one leg and three stumps. It wouldn't be the first time, but it would be the first time he'd forgotten to get a ride first.

"Alright, mystery man." he rolled and wiggled himself until his phone came out of his pocket,

"You just sleep that off, and I'll get us home. Siri, call Sam."

"There's no one named Cam in your contacts."

"Fuck- no, call Sam!"

"Calling Ram Auto Sales-"

He puts funny little hats on himself, sometimes some little paper accessories (he doesn't want to put any kind of adhesive in his bones, that's just asking for damage- so no stickers, sadly).

Everyone he works with fully assumes it's just a prop skull.

Danny Fenton works at the Daily Planet in a corner where Clark Kent doesn't really frequent.

One day, he has to drop of some paperwork for Mr Fenton- who he's never met despite working together for the past two years, “shit just happens in a big office like that I guess” he says (though Clark swears he’s never heard a heartbeat or any kind of breathing from that office)- and Clark drops everything he's holding when he sees a child's skull on the desk, decorated with a festive pink ribbon patterned with different fruits.

Clark knows exactly what real bone pores look like, and he knows his enhanced sight isn't lying to him. It's either the best fake in this or any universe, or his coworker has a real human child's skull on his desk.