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scarletsaphire · 1 year ago

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TUCKER DANNY JACK AND SKULKER

"Ok, you're gonna need to run me through this one more time," Tucker said, trailing after Danny towards the Fentonwork's lab.

"You remember that Skulker is like, a tiny little blob thing in a mech suit, right?" Danny asked.

"Of course! How could I forget, I still have the pictures."

"Well," Danny said. "Apparently, if he gets hit hard enough in like, five different specific spots, he can't pilot the mech suit anymore? Like it just doesn't move."

"And let me guess," Tucker said. "You hit him hard enough in those five specific spots and now, he's what? Sitting on the table in the lab?" Danny scratched the back of his neck sheepishly. Tucker sighed. "I don't know why you think I can fix him. Like, I appreciate the confidence in me, I am pretty great, but there's a big difference between building a computer and fixing a whole guy."

Tucker's feet hit metal as they made their way through the door into the basement. Sure enough, as soon as they made it to the bottom, Tucker saw Skulker. Or rather, Skulker's empty, broken suit. "Jesus, dude, did you put him through a garbage disposal or something?"

"That is, in fact, a thing that happened," Skulker's real, high pitched voice came from Tucker's left. "It was right after I threw him into the sewer!"

"And I stand by my decision," Danny said. He made his way over to where Skulker floated and lifted himself onto the only clear spot on Jack's desk. "Have you ever seen the sewers? They stink. Almost as bad as your aim."

"You insufferable whelp, just wait until my suit is operational, and I'll show you aim!"

"Nuh uh, you agreed one month no hunting if I fixed it up," Danny said.

"Of course," Skulker said. "Every great hunter knows that you don't hunt in off season."

"Hey now, I don't see you trying to fix this, so why do you get to make the deal?" Tucker protested while gathering together tools. The Fenton's lab was a mess, as it always was, but Tucker had puttered around there enough with Danny to know the not quite organized chaos. "What am I gonna get out of it?"

"Um. A theoretical month of extra time with your best friend?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of an all expenses paid round trip on the Phantom Express to that Tech EXPO happening in a few weeks," Tucker said. "You remember the one."

"Dude, that place is like, 500 miles away!" Danny argued. "It'll take ages to get there if I carry you."

"It will not. We've clocked your flight speed at well over 150, it'll just be a few hours."

"I don't know if you know this, but carrying someone for a few hours while flying a hundred miles an hour isn't what most people would describe as easy."

"You're not most people," Tucker said. "But if you don't want my technological expertise, I'll just be on my way. I'm sure you'll figure out how to get this together." He turned to walk back towards the stairs.

Danny groaned. "Fine. But you're paying for my ticket."

Tucker turned back around with a smirk, cracking his knuckles. "Deal. Now, sit back, relax, and watch the master at work."

---

It ended up being only Danny who was sitting back and relaxing. As Tucker had predicted, a giant ghostly robot mech suit was, in fact, very different to anything Tucker had worked with before. Skulker knew much more about it than he did, so the ghost had taken to hovering over Tucker's shoulder, directing his work and shouting threats at Danny. And occasionally Tucker. (He was somewhere between creeped out and flattered that Skulker thought he was worthy to insult, if not fully hunt. That was one of the details he was never going to mention anywhere within a hundred miles of Jazz.)

"Could you grab me that laser wrench thing?" Tucker asked. "The one your parents use for small scale ectoplasm constructs."

Danny grabbed one of the many tools off of Jack's desk. "This one?" Tucker glanced over quickly, not willing to take his eyes off of the suit when he was quite literally elbow deep in machinery.

"No, the other one. I think it glows purple sometimes?" Danny made a noise of acknowledgement before holding up a similar looking device. "That's the one."

"Hey Jellybean, go long," Danny said before tossing the device at Skulker. Tucker couldn't help snorting at the indignant squeak Skulker made when he caught the device.

"One day, ghost child, I will have your head hanging from my wall, and you will never be able to fling around childish insults ever again," he grumbled, passing the device to Tucker.

"Yea, I've heard that before. Maybe one day you'll be able to actually follow through on your threats."

Tucker already knew what Skulker was going to say, or at least had a pretty good guess. Despite how frequently they threw each other through buildings, Danny and Skulker were friends, at least in a ghostly sense. He'd heard their banter both in and out of combat enough to let the comments fade into background noise, focusing instead on fixing the part he needed the tool for.

This part of the suit was delicate, to say the least. Skulker's suit fed almost entirely on ambient ectoplasm, whether that be excess produced by Skulker himself or by the environment he was in. This part was a regulator of that energy, allowing for the suit to store excess power for use later, like when he was blasting twenty seven different missiles and a laser canon at Danny. If Tucker fucked it up, there was a lot of different things that could happen, all of them bad with a capital B, and most of them ending in some kind of explosion. Minor explosions, admittedly, and ones that would take a while to build up, especially outside of the ghost zone, but an explosion nonetheless.

Luckily for Tucker, the system was pretty simple. A couple of wires and a designated compartment that held the filtered ectoplasm. All Tucker needed to do was reconnect the wire here, seal off the leak there, and-

Tucker jumped as the door to the basement slammed open, followed by loud heavy footsteps. He pulled the tool out of the cavity in Skulker's arm quickly, throwing the tool to the other side of the room, and spun around to try and hide Skulker's suit from Jack. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Danny doing the same for actual Skulker, despite the fact that Skulker had gone invisible.

"Danny boy!" Jack called from the stairs, still out of view. "I thought I heard you and your friends down here!" Jack's head poked out from the top of the stairs. Tucker met his eyes, watched as it flicked from his face, to Danny, to Skulker's suit. Tucker covered his ears preemptively. "GHOST" Jack bellowed, grabbing an ecto-blaster from wherever he stored them on his hazmat suit, and opening fire towards Tucker.

It was lucky that Jack's aim was so bad; Tucker might've gotten better at dodging ectoblasts, but at such a close range, there was no way he'd get out of the way in time. And ectorays stung, and the residue it left never came out. Instead the ectoblasts hit against the back wall, leaving a green, smoldering mark.

"Dad, stop!" Danny called, dashing towards Jack a little too quickly.

"Danny, what are you doing? There's a ghost in our basement!" Jack shouted, but he didn't fire the ecto-blaster again. Not with Danny so close.

"A ghost that is completely and totally still with both me and Tucker down here?" Danny asked. Jack narrowed his eyes, visibly processing the information. Then his features lit up and he grabbed Danny in a bear hug. "Ok uh what are we doing now."

"You caught the ghost, isn't that right Danny-boy!" Jack said, not putting Danny down. "That's that one ghost hunter that's always showing up to try and hunt down the ghost boy. as if he would ever be able to catch the ghost before we could." Tucker saw Skulker reappear over Jack's shoulder, small mouth opened to protest, before Danny's hand clamped around him. He couldn't see Danny's face at this angle, but the faint green glow indicated that Danny was using his Scary Eyes. It worked.

Danny let go of Skulker just as Jack set him down. "Uh, yea! It uh. Wasn't too hard?"

"Wasn't to hard!" Jack said. "We've been trying to track this ghost down for nearly as long as the ghost boy! For you to catch him, why, you must be some ghost hunting prodigy! C'mon, let's check out your catch!" Jack practically dragged Danny over to the suit, and Tucker reproached at his insistent waving. He couldn't see very well around the brick wall that was jack Fenton, but he was able to see enough. Enough to make him duck under Jack's arm to get a closer look, and start swearing.

"Is everything ok, Tuck?" Danny asked.

"Of course it is!" Jack answered in his place. "I'm sure he's just realizing how incredible this all is!"

"We might have a code potato," Tucker whispered so just Danny could hear. "Definitely gonna need help to fix it."

Danny's face sharpened in the way it always did when he was dealing with superhero stuff. "Hey, Dad, do you think we could get something to eat first? All that ghost hunting really works up an appetite."

"You bet it does! You go get something to eat, but science waits for no man! I need to make sure the ghost is secured for experimentation later. Don't want to risk him blowing up the house!" Jack reached out to grab the arm connected to the panel Tucker had been working on.

"Stop!" Tucker shouted, throwing his whole weight into Jack's arm to push it out of the way.

"What has gotten into you two?" Jack asked, brows knitting back together. "I feel like I'm missing something..."

Tucker met Danny's eyes. It had taken a long time, for them to be able to communicate just with a look, but over the years of near death (or post death, in Danny's case) situations, they'd gotten pretty good at it. Danny's ghost based empathy thing helped. Danny knew that Tucker was being very serious, life and death kind of situation. He could probably guess by Tucker's reaction to Jack that this was something incredibly delicate. Danny also knew that the game plan was still up to him; it was his secret, his half-life on the line.

"Dad, do you trust me?"

Jack turned his confused expression to Danny. "Of course I do, son."

"Then I need you to promise me something. You won't ask questions, you won't start a fight, and you won't get in the way," Danny said.

"Danny," Jack said slowly. "I don't understand. What do you-"

Danny cut him off. "Just promise me. Please?"

Jack was silent for a moment, before he nodded. "I promise."

"Tuck, what's going on?"

"I nicked the regulator when he came downstairs," Tucker said, adjusting slightly to the side so Danny could see. "It could be nothing, or it could be a very volatile explosion waiting to happen."

"Definitely an explosion," Skulker said, materializing above the suit. "That's a nasty one." Jack yelped in surprise, but put his hands over his mouth to silence it.

"How do we fix it?" Tucker asked. "I'm assuming we can't just throw it back into the ghost zone and be done with the problem."

"That's probably the worst thing you could do," Skulker said. "Unless your goal is to blow up the realms."

"Been there, done that, already stopped it from happening," Danny said. "What else do you got?"

"Could we try to reroute it somehow?" Tucker asked. "There's gotta be more of them in here somewhere, right?"

"There is, but they are located in distant locations. There would be no point of having them in the same area," Skulker said. "If you connected them, my suit would be completely unusable."

"Yea, but it would solve the literal ticking time bomb, wouldn't it?" Tucker asked.

"Perhaps," Skulker said. "But I wouldn't be able to get it back to my lair, and I would rather not have the whelp stinking the place up again."

"And yet you keep trying to get me there," Danny retorted.

"Yes, as a pelt. Not as you," Skulker said.

"Danno, what's going on?" Jack said, his voice significantly higher than it normally was.

"No questions," Danny replied. "I'll explain after. So, reconnecting to a different regulator is a no go. What about shutting down the power input in general."

"Impossible," Skulker scoffed, the sound odd in his tiny jelly bean voice. "If you could just shut it down that would be a massive overlook."

"You don't have any kind of shut down switch at all?" Tucker asked. "It seems like your style."

"Please, I'm not Technus."

Danny and Tucker laughed. "True that. So shutting it down won't work either. I'm not even going to bother suggesting letting it explode in an explosion proof place, so I'm out of ideas."

"I'm pretty much out too," Tucker said, staring into the hole in the side of the suit. "I'll keep thinking."

It was Jack who spoke next. "You're looking for a regulator for... ectoenergy?"

The three others turned to look at Jack. "Yea," Tucker said slowly. "It needs to hold filtered ectoplasm from the surroundings, and be able to expend it. Without exploding."

"Without exploding when I don't want it to!" Skulker amended.

"I could do without that," Danny mumbled.

"And it needs to fit in there?" Jack asked, gesturing to the suit. Tucker nodded. "Some of our ectoblasters have a regulator that functions like that. Would that work?" He was looking at Tucker, who looked at Skulker.

Skulker was thinking. "It may work temporarily, at least long enough for me to get back to the lair and fix it properly."

"What blaster is that in?" Danny asked.

"The bigger ones, but not as big as the Fenton Bazooka. Any of those should work," Jack said, and Danny ran off to grab the weapons. "You are...comfortable working with these types of things?" Jack asked Tucker after a moment of awkward silence.

"Not really," Tucker replied with a shrug much more nonchalant than he felt. "I know enough, and Skulker isn't a bad teacher, at least when it comes to this."

"So you're... Skulker?" Jack said to Skulker.

"I am Skulker, the greatest hunter the ghost zone has ever seen!" Skulker said.

"Wait, I thought this ghost was the greatest hunter?" Jack gestured to the suit.

"I built it as a tool to use during my hunts!"

Tucker could see the gears turning in Jack's head, but any other questions were cut off by Danny running back downstairs, a number of different weapons cradled in his arms. "Will any of these work?" he asked, setting them on the floor in a crash.

Jack nodded, and grabbed one from the pile. "This one will work." He dismantled it expertly, and removed a small piece. "If you hook this up to the regulator it should work." He held it out to Tucker, who took it with a nod.

"On it," he said. Tucker worked in tense silence, with Skulker hovering above him, and Jack and Danny a few steps behind. Finally, he wiped the nervous sweat off his brow, and resealed the whole on Skulker's suit. "That should do it. Give it a spin?"

Skulker climbed back into the face hatch, letting it seal around him. The display came to life, and Skulker rose to his fake feet. "It's rather stiff, but nothing that I won't be able to fix!" he said, back to his regular voice. "I do not believe this is worth a month without hunting, whelp."

"Two weeks and I'll do something nice for Ember," Danny replied smoothly.

"Deal. I will see you in two weeks, ghost child!" he called, and began to make his way to the portal.

"I'll cherish every minute I get to go without seeing your ugly mug," Danny called back. "Seriously, you got to decide how you look and you chose that?"

Skulker's retort was washed away by the whirring of the ghost portal. His departure left Jack, Tucker, and Danny standing in the basement without a possible life threatening situation to mediate the conversation.

"I guess I owe you an explanation," Danny said.

"You do," Jack said. "But it can wait until I've made some fudge. I think we'll need it for this conversation."

#danny phantom #danny phantom fanfiction #ask game #danny fenton #tucker foley #skulker #jack fenton

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