Here's my piece for the first day of Phantasy Phest- Fantasy Eldritch AU @phantasycentral
Danny stares up at the building. It's nondescript, just some random office building in Chicago.
Or, so one would think.
He takes the last few steps to the door, raises his hand, and knocks.
Truth be told, some random, nondescript office building in uptown Chicago wasn't exactly what he was imagining when he agreed to go to the Conclave.
He sticks his hands in his pockets and stares up at the door, waiting to be let in.
Becoming the King of Ghosts wasn't something that he had planned on. Finish middle school, go to high school, go to college for something STEM related and get his master's degree or go to one of the NASA pilot schools, and be an astronaut. That had been the plan.
And then... zap, and ghosts were real and also his problem.
Danny sighs and knocks again.
"You know, if you don't let me in I'll just phase through the door," he calls.
He's in his human form right now, which is probably why they're ignoring him. Though, it is his first time at the Conclave, and the first time a ghost has been to one in a very long time.
The door opens soundlessly; no one stands there. Alright, he can appreciate the creepy aesthetic.
He strides in through the door, head held high. As he crosses the boundary, he lets his transformation wash over him. His steps lighten as his hair does, gravity and color both bleeding from him. The faint chill and weight of his crown settles over his head and his shoulders become just a tad bit heavier as his cloak manifests out of the aether, the fabric-but-not flaring out behind him as he walks.
The inside of the building is nothing like the outside. The plain, ordinary facade outside is carried over for about seven or eight steps before he comes upon a shimmering barrier. Stepping through it feels like walking through a cool mist, faint popping spreading over his skin from the magic in it.
Past that point, the interior design matches up better to his imagination of the locale of the Conclave. It looks like the inside of an old castle, the dingy grey linoleum switching to a warm, wooden floor covered in a blood red carpet. The walls are stone instead of the off-white painted drywall, stretching high up to thick, wooden beams that bracket the tall, arched ceiling. Torches are positioned at regular intervals on the walls, burning with a pale purple flame; heavy and dark metal chandeliers hang from the ceiling, that same pale purple flame burning there instead of any candles.
He continues to walk down the red carpet—ha—to the massive, sweeping staircase at the end of the hall. The thing is made out of what looks like the same stone as the walls and the carpet continues up the stairs to the large, arched double doors.
Honestly, if it wasn't for his innate sense of space, he'd think that the magic barrier was a teleportation spell. As it was, it was only thanks to just that that he knew this was a sort of pocket dimension. He was in the same general area relative to where the building was, but slightly... to the left? Tilted. A little liminal, which he liked. He wasn't too familiar with the living's magic, but even he could tell that this was an impressive feat.
Danny finishes his ascent, finally standing in front of the double doors. They're similar to the chandeliers in that they're made out of that same dark metal. It couldn't be iron, though.
He opens the doors with a push of his telekinesis and strides through. A massive, circular table seating eleven greets him, the marble covered by a black runner and topped with more of those silver light candles in an intricate candle holder.
"Hello," he greets the assorted eleven mildly. "You have me at a disadvantage. My name is Danny Phantom. You all are...?"
Oh, some of them bristle at that. He can taste their irritation and incredulity. If he came back to another Conclave, they'd get to know very fast that he wasn't one to be respectful unless it was earned. Yes, these people were the rulers of their respective species. No, Danny didn't give a shit.
Surprisingly, one's threshold for respect and the like tended to shift after getting into fistfights with gods at the tender age of fourteen.
The woman at the head of the table speaks up first, raising her chin. "I am Queen Adelaide of the Witches. We tend to the this hall that hosts the Conclave, and bid you welcome to our table."
Her purple eyes flick over to look to the man next to her. He's thin-boned and almost waifish, reminding Danny of a hummingbird. His ears are also long and come to a point, but the feathers that sprout from his brows and wrap around his temples to mix into his hair strike out elf.
"I am King Ashok of the Avians."
Danny inclines his head to him. Just as before, though, the next person starts to talk almost immediately afterwards. He's tall, even sitting, with broad shoulders. His face is long, and his thick, bushy sideburns stretch down to his chin.
"King Bedwyr of the Werecreatures. I represent all the Were tribes."
It makes sense, since his eyes are also an inhuman amber gold. A werewolf, perhaps? Or a werebear? Danny dips his head once more. He's not too well-versed in were politics, since the Dead tribes are fiercely independent and territorial. Wulf was a bit of an outlier in that regard.
"Welcome, Phantom," the next woman says with a smile. It's sharp, though, and the lack of a title before his name is quite telling. "I am Myrto, Queen of the Sirens."
Ahh, alright.
"It's a pleasure to meet you," he returns, just as mildly as his greeting. "I've always enjoyed talking with Queen Peisinoe when visiting her domain in the Realms. She's told me many stories about her time amongst the living. She and Lady Pandora are some of my dearest friends."
It becomes a little difficult to hold onto his mild smile as her eyes widen slightly and her face twists like she's bitten into a lemon, though.
He might be young, but he's been dealing with ghost politics for a while now. He can recognize the snub and return fire just as well as any of these people.
Peisinoe had told him how bratty the current Siren Queen was, though, so he's not too surprised.
"'ello!" The next woman, a chubby and red-cheeked lady with long, brown hair and a fur coat smiles at him. "I'm the Queen of the Selkies. Just call me Boann, though, King Phantom."
"Call me Danny, then," he returns, smile growing and morphing into something a little more genuine.
"I am King Celal of the mer. I represent all from under the water. It is a pleasure to meet the keeper of the Below Deeps."
Right. In the mers' religion, that's their afterlife. It's a pretty cool area, even if Danny doesn't often go. He makes the water too cold for some of the people living there.
"Well met, King Phantom." The next man looks similar to King [Avian], but without the feathers and with longer ears. His hair's long and thin and his skin is almost unhealthily pale. "I am the Erlkönig, the Elf King. You may call me Eadric."
"Well met."
"I'm Enitan, King Under the Mountains. Nice to meet ya!" The dwarf king is taller than Danny would've imagined, but the impressive, braided strawberry blond beard he's sporting fits right in.
The next person starts to talk even as Danny's still nodding at the Dwarf King.
"I am Verner, King of the Dragons." The man's eyes are like liquid gold and slitted like a cat's. Faint golden scales trail across his pronounced cheekbones up to and across his forehead, though it's harder to see them there thanks to the King's blond bangs.
"I am Doroteia, Queen of the Nymphs," the final woman says. She wouldn't look out of place in the Realms with her green skin and plant matter hair, vines and leaves cascading down her back.
"And finally, I am Ciprian, King of the Vampires." The last man says. He sits next to the Witch Queen, on the side opposite to the Avian King. They almost look like siblings, with the same pale skin—though Adelaide's was paler—and long dark hair. The only other distinguishing mark between them was the Vampire King's blood red eyes and more angular features.
"Thank you all for the welcome," Danny says, nodding to everyone in general.
He floats forward from the doors to the table, not putting on the pretense of walking. There's one open space there, but no chair.
Danny stops a short distance from the table. The others' chairs look standard and not like they'd brought or made them, so it wasn't a test of any kind.
Hm. Well...
"Queen Adelaide, you bid me welcome to your table. Was that merely a platitude?" He asks, perfectly and unnaturally still.
Tsk, tsk. Offering hospitality and then not being hospitable was quite the dangerous business—she of all people would know, keeping an elf in her council.
"Phantom," Adelaide starts, a pretty smile gracing her face despite the snub she just dealt, "You are the first of your kind in centuries to grace our halls. Please forgive us, of course, for being..." she trails off slightly, a tilting head cascading dark hair off her shoulder. "Hesitant."
"Oh?" Danny fishes.
"You wear an oversized crown, child," Verner butts in, chin high and draconic pride very clearly showing through. "More to that, you look human. What proof is there that you are whom you say you are?"
Ah. Ah.
Danny takes a breath. Then, he... relaxes. The boundaries between living and dead, thin that they already are in him, dissolve down to the merest atom, a whisper of a breath on knife's edge. Power whips about him with enough force to tousle his hair and toss the ends of his cloak about even as it shifts, lengthens, the night sky growing from his shoulders. His form unspools from his remnants of mortality, growing and bathing the space in him. Nebulae dance around the edges of the room, a starlight glow emanating from his form. The chill of deep space is contained easily enough, massing with the inexorable pull of gravity that makes up the dark of his chest and limbs. His crown floats over his head, burning the cold blue of ice planets, spikes of the stuff climbing in delicate spires. Small satellites orbit his crown—four of them, all different colors.
For all that Danny was starstuff, his eyes always were of the Realms. Green, green like the air and the earth and the everything that made up the Realms. Pure ectoplasmic green burns in his eyes, bright enough to be supernovae in their own right.
"Is this what you imagined? Am I properly monstrous now?" Danny asks, voice echoing throughout the room. He watches the Were King's fur raise, the Avian King's feathers ruffle. "I maintain a visage of humanity by my own liking, but I am so much more than just that."
He lets his form drift just a little more, his chest and arms whisping out like his legs until he's more or less a star-studded amorphous mass with a head on top. Even that, though, is... Other. His mouth is too large, he knows, and his eyes too deep and too many, all contained within his sockets, irises many and varied as stars in the sky.
His crown burns cold over his head, hanging in the air.
"I am the Shield of the After, Protector of the Beyond. I am the One Between, the Balance, the Shepard, and the Guiding Star. The Tyrant-Killer. Deathless and Lifeless. I am the High King of the Infinite Realms."
As much as he had raged against taking the crown—all he was trying to do was protect his town, after all—he couldn't help but admit to himself that he... kinda liked it. Not the power, of course. That he could do without. All that paperwork? The bowing and scraping? Nah.
But the fact that he was able to do these things, to be these things... to help the dead as much as the living... it soothed something in him, fulfilled him in a way that being the protector of Amity did.
"I accepted the invitation to this Conclave with the hope of improving relations between the Living and the Dead. I did not come to be ridiculed and doubted, especially by mere mortals such as yourselves."
He can see the various Rulers' breaths misting in the air, the temperature dropping father by the second. Space was cold, after all. Danny very graciously doesn't allow the oxygen and atmosphere to vacate as it would in actual space.
Mostly.
He doesn't want to kill them, after all, just... give them a little scare.
The edges of the room waver, the witches' spellwork trembling under his presence. He extends what may have once been a hand but now resembled more of a tendril, or perhaps a bit of a galactic swirl, towards the nearest surface.
It happens to be the table.
It takes laughably little energy to shore up the witches' spellwork, the space growing more defined in an instant.
Pettily, he also adds a chair to the weave. It's just barely bigger than the others' chairs, made from ice and upholstered in neon green fabric.
He positions his form above the chair and beings the annoying process of reeling himself back into something manageable and humanoid, gravity increasing and compounding until the black of his body folds onto itself, defined edges forming once more. He reels the stars back into himself, tucking plenty inside his cloak. The chill, however, doesn't completely disappear.
Danny's head is the last thing to come back to normal, growing smaller and less mindbendingly awful and settling in its proper position on his neck. His eyes don't quite go back to normal either, though. He keeps the depth and the multiplicity, since he's been complimented on their fear-inducing properties many a time.
"Now, may we begin?" Danny asks politely, voice merely ethereal instead of booming and all-encompassing.
Pale, the Witch Queen just nods.
---
"So, how was it?" Sam asks him later, fastballing a chocolate chip muffin directly at his forehead as he walks in through the door.
"Did the vampires sparkle?" Tucker yells his question from further into their shared home.
Danny snorts, snatching the muffin from where he'd instinctively made it bob in the air, held inches away from his skin. "The vampire didn't sparkle, Tuck. And it was pretty fun! I got to go full abomination!"
"Hell yeah." Sam holds her hand up and he returns the high five. "Whatever they did, they deserved it."
Danny laughs as he drops onto their couch. "Yeah, they're not going to make that mistake again any time soon."
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Best of Marvel: Week of October 2nd, 2019
Runner Up: Ghost Rider #1 (Legacy #237) - Ed Brisson, Aaron Kuder, Jason Keith and Joe Caramagna
The Riders roar again!
After months of teasing and anticipation, we finally have a new series centered around Danny Ketch, Johnny Blaze and their constant conflict with the forces that stand against them in Hell.
With Mephisto locked away in his Las Vegas prison (which also makes his appearances in other recent stories very confusing), Johnny Blaze has been crowned the new King of Hell and has inherited all that comes with the position. He's required to torture souls, oversee the operations in Hell and ensure that demons never escape which seems to be the most common occurrence as some do NOT respect Blaze.
One such breakout results in Blaze having to leave Hell for a bit to hunt down the escaped demons and to do that, he tries to enlist the help of his brother, Danny Ketch. Ketch, having gone through the ringer while watching another Rider get murdered by Carnage, has decided to do his best to stay away from the horrid life of being a Rider unless the urge for Vengeance becomes too powerful for him to take. One such evening brings him back to help his brother defeat a wandering demon, but declining his offer to hunt them down.
Danny laments becoming the Rider at his mother's funeral, the lack of stable relationships he's been able to maintain and the life of death and destruction he'll never escape. He visits his mother's grave and, of course, his mother's spirit comes with a warning about Johnny Blaze. As it turns out, the once semi-noble Blaze has let hell corrupt his soul and only Danny (and to a lesser extent Robbie Reyes in the Avengers) can stop him.
Aaron Kuder has been a hit or miss artist to me in the past, so I'm glad to say that his art was a stellar hit on this first awesome issue. While a lot of backgrounds lacked the gory details that other depictions of hell have had this far, that's more than made up for by the detail on characters like Johnny Blaze and Danny Ketch as well as the various demons they encounter through the issue.
Johnny and Danny look very similar as Riders, but they do have some things that differentiate themselves from the other. Johnny is shown to have fiery horns above his head, symbolizing his crown as King of Hell, silver gauntlets and a grey outline for a chest plate(?), similar to the rectangle that used to adorn his leather jacket. Danny, of course, still maintains a spiked leather jacket and spiked gauntlets in Rider form.
The fight visuals are something else entirely, consisting of stylish motorcycle combat with flames shooting out of the back of Danny’s bike as well as his chain waving through the air as if it had a life of its own. Jason Keith on the colors was an amazing choice as the entire story feels like it came out of the mid 90s grunge era. There are badass dark reds, bright oranges and yellows as well as very dark inks to show just how dark the Ghost Rider story is. Kuder does his best to bring the cool back to Ghost Rider, though did it ever really leave?
There’s also this slight feeling of dread as a new villain emerges and with Mephisto musing of change on the horizon and the final page stinger, there’s this feeling that something big is coming for the Ghost Riders. In much the same way we had a revival for Venom post Space Knight, this series is likely to be that amazing set up for bigger and badder things.
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Luisita walks to Seniors Champ title
#PHnews: Luisita walks to Seniors Champ title
BAGUIO CITY – It was virtually a walk in the park for former champion Luisita Golf and Country Club which won by an eye popping 50 points for the premiere Fil Seniors Championship crown here on Monday.
A hero came forward by the name of Danny Cruz who broke par with 36 points to lead Luisita to a closing round of 130 and 515 total.
Chino Raymundo and the long-hitting Eddie Bagtas, heroes in the first two days, assembled 32 points each, while Benjie Sumulong had 30, and Day 2 hero Rodel Mangulabnan matched his day one production of 29 and did not count.
Bagtas also took the individual top honors with 134 points, a five-point victory over Danny Cruz.
Manila Southwoods shot its second straight 117 in the four-day tournament to finish with 465, while John Hay fired 108 and still managed to hold off erstwhile champion Megafiber which shot a closing 115.
John Hay netted 441 and three ahead of last year’s biggest upset maker Megafiber.
Luisita buried the ghost of last year’s defeat and came back stronger this year, while vowing not to repeat the same mistake last year.
From an opening lead of five, it went up to 18 then in its most dominant game yet, Luisita scored a tournament best 136 in the third to make it a 37-point cushion with a round to go.
And it was double sweet as the Am squad took the title by the hairline.
Trailing by three after the third round after a bad start at BCC, the Tarlac-based squad assembled 97 for a 425 total which was enough to win the crown with Dugong Bughaw closing out with 93 and a 424 total.
Edmund Yee paced Luisita with 29, Raffy Garcia, Chito Laureta and Demy Saclot counted with 25, 22 and 21, respectively, for the team.
Noel Marcellano, which help outshut Luisita 97-87 on day three, led Dugong Bughaw with 26, Wilfredo Princesa had a 24, while Miguel Morada and Rommie Valdez added 23 and 20 for the team.
Summit Point Golf and Country Club took third honors after finishing with 96 and 415 aggregate.
Okinawa Golf Team had the luxury to take it slow on the last day with a 13-shot lead, but still managed a 105 and 409 total for an 11-point victory in Seniors Fil A.
Mamala Bay had the best flight score of 107 and 398 to overtake Hotel Bahia Subic for the runner-up honors after the latter fired 93 points for 390.
Camp John Hay also took it lightly in the last two days to still manage 89 points for 401 aggregate and 47-point victory in Seniors Am A.
B & Y Utopia rallied from third spot to second place after closing with and 84 and 354 total, a seven-shot edge over Alpha Phi Omega Golfers Club, which closed with a 74 and 347.
Teerifics had top podium in Seniors Fil B after an 89 for 356, six shots off Team McDer 1 which closed with an 88 and 350.
Fil-Am Golf of Florida took third honors with 337 after a 90. (PNA)
***
References:
* Philippine News Agency. "Luisita walks to Seniors Champ title." Philippine News Agency. https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1088314 (accessed December 10, 2019 at 05:00AM UTC+14).
* Philippine News Agency. "Luisita walks to Seniors Champ title." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1088314 (archived).
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