The cult of...Danny Fenton?
So! Way back when Danny first moved into his new neighborhood in Gotham, he had some trouble controlling his Powers. The different Types and Levels of Ectoplasm in the air when compared to Amity had thrown off his control.
He was used to being in places where his Ectoplasm meshed well with the Atmosphere, like a Water Balloon in a Pool, but in Gotham that analogy would be closer to a Water Balloon in the sewers. It was too different from what he was used to to fully control his Powers.
So it's understandable that he messed up a few times and his neighbors found out about his Abilities.
They took it well at first, Danny wasn't going to go Rogues or anything, and he never used them maliciously, but eventually they got curious.
They asked what his limits were, how he got them in the first place, and what the hell the Ghost Zone was. The answers "None Really", "I died and was reborn", and "A Collective of every Afterlife at once" did spark some interesting reactions from them.
Most importantly, a few of them joked about him being an Eldritch God that they needed to worship. He was good enough friends with them that at that point they felt comfortable pranking eachother, so they did just that.
Danny woke up one day on his birthday, and saw all of his friends and neighbors surrounding the makeshift Throne they had made and put him on while he was asleep. The entire day they chanted stuff like "The Great One requires Ms. Smiths Apple Pie for his day of birth!" And "The Great One Wishes for us to sing the Ritual Song! Happy Birthday to You! Happy Birth-"
After his birthday, they kept up the joke.
It didn't help that his powers had evolved Again! And now he could bestow abilities onto his friends. The jokes they made about their God granting them Supernatural Powers to rule the world with were insufferable.
Then, one day while he was just resting at home, watching a movie on his TV, he felt a Pull at his Core. The same kind of Pull whenever he was being summoned. But why would they summon hi- Oh Shit! It's Mr Jenkins Party today! He was supposed to meet them at the Warehouse they used for special events an Hour Ago!
He quickly accepted the Summoning, but was met with a suprising sight. His Neighbors all tied up in a pile to his right, a spilled table of party food to his left, and right in front of him, Batman and his Family watching him with wary eyes.
Slowly, he opened his mouth. "...so, did you come for the party or..."
4K notes
·
View notes
Shen Yuan who glitches in his transmigration, but the original Shen Qingqiu still dies of a qi deviation.
So the System still needs someone with narrative relevance to throw Luo Binghe into the Abyss. In a fit of desperation, it contrives circumstances after Shen Qingqiu's death to move Luo Binghe to An Ding Peak (not that difficult), and then the System makes Shang Qinghua be Luo Binghe's new scum master who casts him down.
Airplane's thrilled, really. Cultivators aren't supposed to get ulcers but damned if he doesn't come close to one anyway. Between Shen Qingqiu and then just a while later Liu Qingge both dying from qi deviations, and Shang Qinghua looking like a stiff breeze could take him out any day now, poor Mu Qingfang is also just about at his wits' end.
But it's not all bad news! On An Ding Peak, Luo Binghe actually finds himself surrounded by the kinds of people who are accustomed to being bullied by the rest of the sect. So they're pretty sympathetic to him, and it's easier for someone with basic laboring skills to advance on that peak too. His chores don't decrease too much, but he actually gets rewarded for doing them well, and no one tries to kick him out of the dorms or anything. Shang Qinghua doesn't either go out of his way to bully or praise Luo Binghe, correctly reasoning that his best shot at not getting a gruesome death is to just be a more forgettable bad guy than an abusive dirtbag or a heart-wrenching betrayal. He doesn't sabotage Luo Binghe's cultivation (no point, and it would just farm resentment later) but he also doesn't go out of his way to help him improve (not gonna arm his inevitable maybe-probably-murderer with better weapons!), so Luo Binghe's situation sees an overall improvement but not the zero-to-hero treatment he'd have got with Shen Yuan either.
When Shang Qinghua shoves Luo Binghe into the Abyss (he just full on picks him up and tosses him like a sack of beans, better to rip it off quick like a bandage), LBH is upset, but he's not especially surprised or dismayed about Shang Qinghua's part in it. Later on he'll be kind of confused, because he just assumed that of course the righteous sect cultivator would abhor the demon, but it turns out Shang Qinghua has been working for a demon since before Luo Binghe even came to the sect? But then it still kind of makes sense because a Heavenly Demon would definitely pose a risk to Mobei Jun and to Mobei Jun's rule. Shang Qinghua, he supposes, is just really loyal to his specific demon.
Luo Binghe's subsequent revenge quest is also somewhat mitigated by the Abyss actually not being that bad.
The Abyss is not actually that bad thanks to the glitched out Shen Yuan having been camping there for several years now.
So when Shen Yuan's transmigration failed it failed because he "woke up" during the process, realized where the System intended to put him, was like no way in goddamn hell am I being that guy about it, and actually kind of won the ensuing tug-of-war. The System couldn't put him in Shen Qingqiu but Shen Yuan didn't want to go back to his dead body either, so he ended up stuck in the nearest available space for lost interdimensional beings. Which was the Endless Abyss.
Luckily Shen Yuan's quasi-transmigrated imparted an equivalent cultivation level as Shen Jiu's to him, and the glitch made him able to sense and manipulate certain extra-dimensional energies, so he manifested as this weird godlike being able to manipulate and control aspects of the Abyss. So he set about transforming Airplane's Torment Nexus into a viable ecosystem (the current version would not be anything approaching sustainable were it not for divine/narrative intervention, and is constantly on the verge of destabilizing into unlivable ruin that would only be fit for some particularly hardy microorganisms).
It's still like, a monster land full of demonic creatures and terrifying phenomenon, but with Shen Yuan's assistance it becomes something more like a demonic wildlife reserve than a dimensional horror plane. Though it is still a dimensional horror plane, and Shen Yuan is its chief dimensional horror. He treats it sort of like those dungeon building or wildlife park sims, figuring out how to keep everything in balance while still preserving all the interesting parts. A lot of the extreme survival issues of the Abyss are more of a result of it being environmentally unstable than a result of its actual denizens, and once he smooths out a lot of the messy dimensional edges and creates stable vents for the fluctuating energy run-off, the demonic inhabits start behaving less like horror movie monsters and more like animals. They're still wild and dangerous and prone to killing one another, but also more cautious, and able to access enough stable resources that they can even start to be picky about what they pursue.
Turns out that a lot of creatures in the Abyss actually don't like fighting and dying and being brutally injured on a regular basis, even if they can heal from it!
Shen Yuan has even discovered that some like chin scritches (he's not terribly worried about habituating them to people, given how rarely any people actually access the Abyss, but also because he's not really all that people-ish himself these days).
This means that one of Luo Binghe's first encounters with the horrible creatures of the Abyss, is in fact a pack of wolf-like monsters thoroughly avoiding an actual fight with him. In fact most of the denizens of the Abyss just avoid him. They can smell the Heavenly Demon energy rolling off of him, and given the current abundance of alternatives to dealing with that, virtually none of the monsters actually choose to challenge him. There are still a few that will go after anything that's bleeding, but that problem stops once Luo Binghe's physiology heals his wounds, which takes like... a couple hours, max.
Despite the stories he's heard, Luo Binghe is relieved to find that the Abyss is not quite so terrible as all that. Normal survival skills suffice for seeing him through much of it. He's able to hunt for food, scavenge for tools, and even finds potable water fairly easily. After a few weeks, he also comes across a ruin which seems to be inhabited.
The being inhabiting it is plainly a god, although he demurs and refutes such assertions whenever Binghe is too frank. He's a strange being, at turns looking like some queer approximation of a human, at other times blinking and winking in and out of existence, in patterns of strange lights and oddly geometrical fire. But he's surprisingly not hostile, letting Binghe rest in his residence, and even directing him towards points of interest. Accompanying him, too, though he seems to think that Binghe doesn't notice the odd almost spiderweb-like patterns that appear on things which he's influencing. The god calls himself The Peerless One, or at least that's what Luo Binghe infers from some writings on the ruin. The Peerless One offers instruction, seemingly without thinking about it, and gets flustered at being addressed by title, so Binghe also begins to refer to him as Shizun after a while.
2K notes
·
View notes
Danny commits to the Bit a bit too hard...
So! For the first few weeks after his accident, whenever Danny would try to help the people of Amity Park, he would be treated as a Villain.
No matter if he had just defeated the Big Bad of the Week or saved a Cat from a tree, everybody in town only saw him as a Monster or Villain to he feared and hunted down. Danny was really getting sick of trying to get them on his side, until Sam made a suggestion.
"Why not just...play into it?" She said, barely looking up from painting her nails.
It was just an offhand suggestion, but it stuck with Danny. Why shouldn't he lean into it? The people of Amity Park already saw Ghosts as Evil, and they already assumed he was in cahoots with the Ghosts attacking the town. Why shouldn't he just...play into it?
So he does just that.
From that day on, whenever Phantom was spotted he would dramatically monologue about his Evil Plans, or claim that another Rogues attack on the City was his own act of terror.
Box Ghost destroys the towns Warehouses? It was on his orders.
Ember mind controls masses of Teenagers? All part of his Plans somehow.
Every Adult in Town is kidnapped by Young Blood? Danny gave them over to a friend as a Gift.
He crafts an identity for himself as the most Vile and Horrible Ghost that has ever attacked the City, using his own infamy to cement his legend even more firmly. The town only sees a Monsterous Villain, who has eveded capture near effortlessly for months on end, who constantly attacks their City and gets away with it.
Of course he still needs an excuse for how his plans keep getting stopped, and he gets it when his girlfriend Valerie becomes the Red Huntress. Before that, he just claimed infighting or the Fentons getting lucky, but Valerie becoming the Town's Hero meant he had a plausible excuse for how he kept getting "Foiled".
Val was suspicious, because she was not as involved as Phantom painted her to be, but in the end she had no proof of him faking his defeats. And she couldn't come up with any explanations for why he would do that in the first place. I mean, who would fake being a Supervillain? It had to he something else.
This did come back to bite him a while later, when the Justice League decided that enough was enough, and dispatched Justice League Dark to recruit Red Huntress and help Deal with him.
Coincidentally, that was the same day Pariah Dark attacked the Mortal Realm and sucked Amity Park into the Ghost Zone.
And honestly? Danny had spent over a Year proclaiming himself as a Villain who commanded Ghosts to attack the Human Realm, and he had heard about the Right of Conquest being Absolute in the Ghost Zone, so why not make it official? Why not overthrow the Ghost King, become the Ghost King, and cement his identity as a Villain while also forbidding Ghosts from entering the Human Realm without his permission?
He may have gotten a bit carried away and forgotten that the Villain thing was a disguise...but hey! He was still preventing Ghost Attacks! ...mostly. That's got to count for something right?
He may have let the Bit run a bit too far...
...
Check the tags for more context!
2K notes
·
View notes