#playing superpowers

[ohwrite]

Villain: for the last TIME Superhero STOP SENDING TEENAGE TRAINEES TO FIGHT ME

Superhero: what? can’t even beat a trainee hero?

Villain: No! It’s the fact that they are KIDS? Stop making CHILDREN fight someone who could VERY WELL MEAN THEM HARM

Superhero: mmmm I dunno someone sounds bitter that one of the trainees tripped them up the other day

Villain: MOTHERF- YOU SAW THAT??

[ohwrite]

!!!! :D

Villain who kills but won't harm kids

So the adult heroes send young kiddo heroes. And then this dangerous villain has these PJ heroes fighting them and is just lumped into this goofy cartoon world dynamics and fights against their will

Inspired by S&D Tier

@ohwrite's prompt about a sweet hero who will kill kinda fits too :)

[threewaysdivided]

compared to the other hero's in YJ how do you think Phantom stands up power wise. like Future Danny ripped the world apart and i know in some fanfiction that it is used as an indicator that he is high up there, but i'm interested in your thoughts.

This is an interesting question nonnie!

I generally agree with the idea that Phantom is in the upper-tier of crossover superhero powers, but I do have more specific thoughts so let’s break it down:

Danny’s power level

Just looking at the variety and strength of ghost-powers that Phantom displays in his show, I would put him in the higher rankings of most heroes when it comes to raw ability.  I alluded to this in my main DP x YJ Deathly Weapons fanfic, but to me Phantom shows signs of a pretty common power-scaling differential that happens when a solo-protagonist hero gets transplanted into an ensemble setting.  Within his own setting, Phantom had to be (or become) powerful enough to solve most problems/ fights all by himself – and some of those ghosts he ended up facing towards the end of his canon were impressively strong.  By comparison ensemble heroes are generally less-powerful because working as a collective means they don’t have the same need for aggressive self-sufficiency and also so that no one character upstages or outmodes the rest of the group from a writing perspective.

There’s also the nature of ghost powers.  Phantom needed to develop the raw strength to fill the role of solo combat heavy-hitter, but his base powers are versatile to the point of unsettling.  He has to physically fight against other ghosts because they have (and to some extent are immune to) the same abilities as him, but in a fight against other species he could potentially avoid, manipulate or exhaust an opponent with strategic use of invisibility/ intangibility/ overshadowing.

The back of Dinah’s neck prickled.  With flight to mask footsteps and intangibility rendering them undetectable by touch…  Nonthreatening as Phantom generally appeared, she was starting to understand why his kind had developed such an unsettling reputation.  The idea that a ghost could be present at any time - eavesdropping, spying, interfering - without any of them being the wiser was… disquieting to say the least. - Deathly Weapons, Chapter 17: Assessment

On top of that, he seems to be in a similar boat to Superman when it comes to physical weaknesses – he doesn’t have that many, and they’re often quite specific or hard-to-find.   The most easily-exploitable one is that Danny can run out of power, be slowly starved of ectoplasm or be knocked unconscious; all of which would forcibly revert him back to his weaker human state.  After that, he’s vulnerable to certain magics and ghostly-artefacts, which are more likely to be accessible to various DC/ Marvel heroes (although they might not know exactly which spells/items will be most effective or why).  Beyond those two, most of his weaknesses need to be specifically known about and actively sought out – anti-ecto-technology is obtainable but not mainstream, blood blossoms naturally repel/hurt ghosts but they seem to be rare in nature (or even extinct in the modern day) and then assuming you acknowledge Phantom Planet there’s ectoranium which is basically ghost-Kryptonite in rarity (and possibly even the same mineral in DP x DC settings depending on the crossover).  Much like with Superman, the most reliable ways to take down Phantom require actively knowing what he is and having prepared accordingly.

Based on those metrics, I want to place Phantom in the same power-band as Superman or the Martian Manhunter.  I’d consider their powers to be equivalent incomparibles – it’s hard to stack their abilities side-by-side and say one is objectively better than the others.  A no-holds-barred, knock-down drag-out fight between those three could get very nasty but it would be hard to confidently call a winner without knowing more about the external factors around them.

That said, I think the thing holding Danny back from being fully at that level is his experience: or rather his lack thereof.   Danny hasn’t had much formal training (except maybe some basic self-defence instruction from Maddie/Jack) and he doesn’t have a proper mentor either.  His personal experience mostly fits the narrow niche of direct open combat with other ghosts, mostly throughout Amity Park and surrounds (although occasionally in the Ghost Zone or further from town). 

Phantom has enough raw power and innate talent as a strategic lateral-thinker to get by, but I think that hyperspecialisation and lack of guidance would leave him with a lot of blind-spots.  His hand-to-hand is self-taught and probably missing a lot of best-practice basic techniques.  He’s also never had an experienced third party to observe him in the field and offer suggestions on alternative approaches to using his powers/ keep him from developing bad habits.  This is something Danny actually comments on in canon; he can take a long time to identify solutions (even obvious ones) that deviate too far from his default throw hands approach to fighting.  His powers could be more effectively deployed as a precision-instrument but a lack of coaching means he tends to falls back on using them as a blunt hammer because that was the pattern that came naturally when he was first starting out, and no-one was around to keep that habit from ingraining.

The place where you can see this lack of experience hurting him the most is in his lack of soft-skills.  Phantom didn’t have anyone to advise him on de-escalation, damage control, comforting civilians, interacting with authorities etc.  Add in the naturally-frightening nature of many ghosts and it was easy for him to fall into a public perception of being “the town menace”.  Danny is pretty decent at rallying both humans and ghosts (even erstwhile enemies) to his side in crisis situations but no-one has taught him how manage public relations outside of that.  He says it himself: he needs a PR agent.

On the other hand, Phantom’s heroics have inadvertently earned him a decent amount of potential political pull in the Ghost Zone.  He has enough positive rapport that some regular rogues will take his side or even actively seek him out for help in the right circumstances, and other more antagonistic ones have at least developed a degree of grudging respect.  There are several powerful ghosts that either have direct debts of gratitude to him/his team (Princess Dorothea, Pandora) or who hold him in high esteem for re-sealing Pariah Dark (The Far Frozen).  It’s possible that defeating Pariah might even have granted him a potential candidature/claim to an official position, and judging by the way the Observants and Clockwork pay attention to him, it seems that Phantom’s slow accumulation of power/influence isn’t going completely unnoticed.  However, again, Danny doesn’t have the awareness, experience or training needed to leverage that effectively – heck, he’s not even doing it on purpose.

With all that taken into account, I think Phantom would rank very highly in terms of overall potential, but at his current level he’d be in the lower ranks of the A-tier.  He could become a much more powerful figure with the right guidance but in his canonical state he’s underutilising or outright overlooking a lot of his most effective tools.

TUE Future/ “Dark Phantom”

The “Dark Phantom” presented in the TUE Bad-Future is interesting to me because while he’s a very powerful figure within that story, I don't think he’s a very good reflection of canon-Danny’s potential to do harm.

Gonna complain about The Ultimate Enemy for a bit: I’ve tag-muttered about this before but I’m one of the Phandom members who finds The Ultimate Enemy to be a frustratingly weak episode.  It has a potentially fascinating core premise (the “evil future/alternate self”) but the execution is so convoluted and driven by improbable contrivances that the whole ends up being far less than the sum of its parts.   

One of the biggest problems is that, rather than being a straight future/alternate version of Danny, “Dark Phantom” is actually a hybrid of Phantom and Plasmius’ worse sides.  He’s a distinct, separate entity which means he can’t work as an effective dark mirror to either of them.  (Compare and contrast the Justice League episode A Better World in which the Justice Lords acted as a dark mirror of what the actual Justice League members could become if they chose to abandon their morals and compassion in favour of seizing control and instating a totalitarian system of draconian crime prevention.)

The episode also tried to graft on a really mismatched moral of “don’t be a cheat”.  Rather than being a lesson on choices/ values/ power/ responsibility, Dark Phantom almost ends up being an offhand biproduct of Danny getting caught cheating on a freshman/sophomore-year career-aptitude test.  Instead of learning a lesson about himself/ his ideals/ his personal faults, Danny comes away from the episode with a cool new superpower after deciding not to cheat on the test after all.  Not exactly satisfying.

That mismatch and the convoluted levels of moon-logic required to make it fit severely undermine the idea that this version of Dark Phantom is “inevitable”.  There are too many steps that are too highly-specific and too easily-avoidable for the threat to feel real: Danny has to care enough about an early-highschool CAT to want to cheat, he has to somehow get the answers which he wasn’t intending to do in the canon timelineand only does as a result of Clockwork’s meddling, making it a self-fulfilling situation, he has to get caught using them, Mister Lancer has to hold the resulting parent-teacher meeting at Nasty Burger rather than a school office for some reason, the Nasty Burger Sauce has to 1. be dangerously explosive and 2. coincidentally explode while not only Danny’s parents but his friends and sister are inside, Danny has to be placed in Vlad’s custody rather than with his Aunt Alicia or closer family-friends, Danny has to ask Vlad to remove his Phantom-half and finally, Vlad himself has to agree to do it.  Take away any of those steps and this version of Dark Phantom doesn’t happen.  That’s not inevitable, it’s contrived.

But anyway, let’s look at Dark Phantom as his own entity:

One of the things that makes Dark Phantom much more potentially dangerous is that he combines Phantom’s raw power with Plasmius’ experience.  Like I was saying before, one of Danny’s biggest handicaps is that he lacks training/guidance and tends to underutilise his most effective abilities.  Vlad meanwhile has had years of relative freedom to practice and finesse a lower raw-power level; he’s much more skilled at advanced techniques like duplication and overshadowing (which he canonically used to force through his fortune-making business deals), as well as ecto-constructs.  Plasmius is also a lot more tactical and manipulative in how he applies their common powers.  Plus, the TUE version of Dark Phantom is a full-ghost, which means he doesn’t have a vulnerable mortal state that can be exploited as a weakness.

This is why I think it would be possible for TUE!Dark Phantom to successfully decimate other heroes in shared-universe crossover situations where ghosts aren’t common knowledge.  He’d be an unexpected, unknown enemy that the heroes have no effective way to fight (outside of a few magic users).  Combine that with many of the most powerful heroes being visible as public figures, and Dark Phantom having inherited Plasmius’ strategic/manipulative traits and it could be very easy for Dark Phantom to basically launch a premeditated paranormal blitzkrieg attack, using Plasmius’ skill with duplicates and overshadowing to subjugate any hero he couldn’t overwhelm with Phantom’s raw power level.  It would also make sense that Amity Park would become one of the remaining bastions in any TUE-style future, since having advanced knowledge of ghostly abilities and access to anti-ecto technology would tilt the balance more evenly and allow them to at least keep the danger out.

Mentally, it’s also worth noting that Dark Phantom is a lot more dangerous than either Phantom or Plasmius.  He’s basically the most toxic traits from both of them, removed from their more moderating/ compassionate instincts.  Based on the canonical explanation given, TUE!Danny had Phantom forcibly removed in attempt to remove the pain/ rage/ grief he was feeling over the death of his family.  This isn’t a model-hero-persona conceptualisation of Phantom a la Splitting Images; the TUE-version of his ghost half is a big ball of churning negative emotion.  And what are some of Danny’s toxic traits when it comes to negative emotions: he lashes out, falls into self-blame and self-destructs.  Then we add in Vlad’s toxic traits: he’s egocentric to the point of narcissism, he projects negative feelings/ blame onto others rather than accept responsibility for his own actions and he has a controlling/ sadistic streak.   

TUE’s Dark Phantom is the worst possible combination of an emotionally devastated teenager and an emotionally immature adult.  He’s a ball of pain and rage that blames the world for that pain, lashes out at it, feels worse for doing so and then blames the world for making him feel worse because he doesn’t have the emotional capacity to accept that he’s the one causing it.  Grief is love persevering but the feelings of love, connection and guilt that contextualise his pain were left in the human shells that remained of Danny and Vlad.  It’s possible that the Dark Phantom presented in TUE might not have the capacity to feel positive emotions or compassion.  He was never meant to exist as his own entity – he was an attempt to destroy Daniel Fenton’s negative emotions which went horribly wrong.  In some ways it seems like his reign of terror could be an angrier version of Dracula’s scheme from Netflix’s Castlevania or Haliax’s goal from the Kingkiller Chronicles – a drawn-out suicide note from an undead being who’s been dead inside for much longer, destroying whatever peace/happiness he encounters in revenge for being denied it himself, until such time as he either attains catharsis or finally ends the pain by destroying reality and himself along with it.  That’s the final thing that makes TUE’s Dark Phantom more dangerous than either Phantom or Plasmius – he has nothing to lose and no “better nature” or personal dreams that other heroes could try to appeal to.

So yeah, the TUE version of Dark Phantom could absolutely rip the world and other heroes apart, but I don’t think he’s a particularly good reflection of Danny’s capabilities in terms of either powers or personality.  There’s too much Vlad in the mix, and even then he represents such a narrow and extreme edge-case for each of their personalities that it’s barely representative at all.  At best he’s a warning for what these kinds of powers could be capable of in the wrong hands.

Meta-question: What is “power” in narrative?

Alright, now that I’ve (hopefully) answered the question, let’s finish with a self-indulgent thought exercise for extra credit.

There’s an anecdote which I’ve heard attributed to the Stan Lee, in which a fan apparently asked him “who would win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk?”  To which Stan apparently replied, “whoever the writer wants.”

While it can be fun to make tier-lists and try to rank how strong different heroes/villains/creatures are based on the rules of their respective universes, I think it can also be helpful to consider that– like all things in storytelling – power is a narrative device.  It’s a tool that the character(s) and storyteller(s) can use to create and solve problems.

A character can be extremely physically strong/ skilled/ knowledgeable/ influential in a specific area but how much narrative power they have depends on how well their abilities allow them to influence or resolve story problems.   And, as the omnipotent god(s) of the narrative, the storyteller(s) can choose whether to confront them with challenges that play to their existing strengths, or that force them to find other solutions.  What’s the best way to kill a vampire?

This is actually part of what makes Lex Luthor such an effective Superman villain.  Objectively most versions of Lex are just A Guy™ – on a physical level he doesn’t have anything close to Kal El’s Kryptonian strength or superpowers.  But he feels like a serious threat because he often comes after Superman in ways that Clark can’t easily steamroll with that brute strength.  Lex uses manipulation, money, influence, connections, politics, public opinion; Superman can’t physically fight him without playing into Luthor’s plans, and trying to face him in those other fields requires tools that Clark wasn’t handed as part of his Kryptonian heritage.  An invading alien army is objectively a bigger physical threat to Earth, but a competent Lex Luthor scheme feels more dangerous because – while we feel confident that Superman can beat down a legion of monsters – when it comes to the question of whether he can outwit Luthor, the outcome is a lot less certain.

Situational disempowerment is another of the ways a narrative can reign in an otherwise “overpowered” character: placing them in circumstances where they either aren’t given many opportunities to showcase their best strengths, or are kept from using them because the drawbacks/ risks/ consequences of using their abilities makes their power(s) a liability.  I’ve mentioned it before, but this is actually one of the tricks I’m personally using to keep Phantom’s massive powerset balanced against the other proteges in Deathly Weapons.  It’s also something I’ve been struggling with when it comes to Conner’s place in that story since the stealth-mission plot structure doesn’t allow as much room to highlight his core powers and personal strengths.   

Stories can create additional stakes for powerful characters by giving them emotional arcs which their powers can’t resolve.   For a published example, consider the series One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100.  Despite how high-ranked Saitama and Mob are within the power-scaling of their respective stories, those powers don’t kill the emotional stakes because the things they actually want/ need can only be gained through self-improvement or making connections in ways separate from their powers (and in some regards their power level actively gets in the way of that).  This is also something I’m doing with Danny’s main grief arc in DW.   

Final Conclusion time

In terms of physical strength and range of abilities, I think Phantom would be pretty near the top of the power-scale in most superhero crossovers.  While the Dark Phantom presented in TUE might not be a particularly good reflection of Danny’s specific potential, a crossover version of the TUE timeline offers a pretty good litmus-test for how dangerous a strong ghost could be in a given universe: the combination of power level, ability range and highly-specific/ inaccessible weak-points poses a strong strategic threat.

On the other hand, physical strength isn’t the only strength.  Phantom has a decent level of potential political sway as well, but he also lacks a lot of the soft skills and experience needed to make use of his toolset to its full ability.

Stepping back further, the answer to how powerful Danny is in a narrative sense is really just “however much the writer wants”.  Phantom’s narrative power depends on the kind of story he’s in and the challenges placed around him – there are as many ways to situationally nerf our ghost-boy as make him OP, all without needing to alter his on-paper powers.

[mamawasatesttube]

tired: the bats are so weird and creepy and everyone else is always so normal compared to them!

wired: impulse started fidgeting so hard he just started vibrating and clipped halfway through the floor and part of helen's foot before he realized what he was doing. this is just a normal tuesday

inspired: superman, superboy, and supergirl are sitting together in midair having a mild-mannered midwestern discussion as to which of their nonpowered combatant friends has the most fucked-up looking bones. several of said friends are in the room and really wish they wouldn't do this

[carlyraejepsans]

So weird that acknowledging a character is attractive must mean your sexualizing them

Like everybody can understand that hyperdeath asriel is described as hot amd move on but the moment you make an adult design for a frisk and make them attractive (and simply point it out) then you must be awful! Like your design isint even sexualized or nothing it's just an adult frisk it's not like ur drawing them half naked like some adult frisk designs.

Also love how all the post they used to call you out where incredibly removed from the context and they made it look like the other people's post where ones you made it's like they were manufacturing their own outrage.

oh, is that what they're doing now? that's nice.

you know what's funnier, i hate adult flowey with my soul and still i went to bat for them whenever people tried to pull the "it's creepy" card under my posts. i shut that shit down every single time, to the point i had people lash out at me. I'd heard that they'd been harassed and pedojacked over it and i genuinely felt bad for them, because that was horrible and they obviously didn't deserve that, no matter how much we disagreed.

like seriously do you have any idea how humiliating it is to hate something with full acknowledgement that it objectively does not matter and being like "but leave people who like it alone, i'm sure they're fine people" every time i expressed my dislike, because some people who agreed with me were incapable of being normal?

aaaand in the end they were the one who tried to paint me as the predator. honestly? I'm not surprised they misrepresented me so much. it was obvious from day one that they can't fucking read LMAOOOO

[ohwrite]

Oh hell yeah I fully endorse this

Snippet #12

Inspired by this post.

She wasn't trained for this. Scratch that, she wasn't prepared for this. The blood on her hands was slick and darker than the fake stuff they'd use to practice treating wounds at the agency. She sent the two youngest back to base but she could hear them following behind her as she searched for their target.

"Hang on," she whispered desperately to the child in her arms. "Just hang on. We'll find him. He has to be here somewhere."

And find him she did. Villain looked at the injured child, breaths shallow, chest rising and falling at a rapid pace. He looked at the desperate faces that stood before him. He looked at their leader, jaw set, as she held a comrade no older than herself and asked her enemy for help.

He could use this.

~

"You've got a good head on your shoulders." His voice was deep, tone dry, but there wasn't a hint of fear in any of their faces. When they'd first shown up to fight him a month ago he'd seen determination in their eyes. Now, they only looked tired.

He flicked his eyes to the oldest member of their little group. She looked like she wasn't used to compliments. She ducked her head but Villain could still see the smile. She was fighting to keep her composure.

Villain understood she was the leader of their little band of heroes. He didn't know why she came to him of all people for aid, but he wasn't about to waste this opportunity. He knew full well why he'd been forced into fighting children on a weekly bases. That didn't make him any less livid.

As he sat with them treating a twelve-year-old pint-sized hero, he decided to get some answers.

He turned back to their leader. Villain knew they had to be trained on this - they should know better than to answer questions from anyone but the heroes at the agency. But even so he hardly had to pry to get what he needed.

~

Tag List: @heroes-villains-side-blog @just-a-space-rabbit @ohwrite

Note: The adult heroes did, in fact, shit bricks the day Villain found their base.

[introspectivememories]

bear wears this every chance he gets and tim fucking hates it (but his cults anonymous group loves it so ha! suck on that timothy)

[innominaterifter]

You can get much farther with a kind word and a baton than you can with a kind word alone.

With a kind word, a baton, and a superpower, the field of possibilities expands exponentially.

[te4k3ttle]

People who can do muppets voice impressions I envy you so much

[ohwrite]

Tbh I’d be very confused and go “huh? Help with what? Are you okay-”

Hero x villain

Hero doesn't know villain is a teenager that became a villain because they were bored, villain does a great job at hiding their age that is until finals weeks come around villain is busy studying and completely forgets about their 'side job' hero thinks villain is planning something really bad instead villain is trying to figure out how to find x

[pushing500]

Fun fact: settlements sell up to four psytrainers per restock and you don't have to unlock the psycaster tree (or even level up at all with psycasts expanded) to use a psytrainer - Have fun pumping your psycaster full of money

While psycaster powers are very cool, I don't know if they're cool enough to warrant social interactions... Bleh.

Perhaps we'll see about going trading someday, but Mechi deliberately chose a home far away from everybody else, so it could be tricky to get somewhere to purchase psytrainers.

[ohwrite]

Heroine grasps the attacking Villainess’ arm, she makes eye contact with her nemesis and, in a flurry of movements, restrains her with only her arms. Villainess squeaks, looking up at the heroine who caught her with rose tinted cheeks.

“Holy shit…” She whispers, daring not to breathe.

Heroine laughs, smiling down at her, satisfied. “‘Bout time someone put you in your place huh?”

Villainess’ face lights up even brighter. She stammers, attempting to get a sentence out before her nemesis places a finger to her lips, shushing her.

“You’re much cuter flustered out of words, so be a dear and be quiet~”

The villain nods, and Heroine giggles. Dragging her away to her home rather than The Agency.

[weepinwriter]

“I will deny you death until you beg for it”

Here's my MC with his pet cat, Pixie! His name is Zhenya 'Zhen' Bogdanov. Though his enemies rather know him as 'Psikh Bogdanov'.

Because of his soft looks and polite demeanour Zhenya is often misunderstood to be a pushover by people who aren't very familiar with him. However for those who do, they know that he is anything but one. He's a softie around his family members and friends, but Zhenya's reputation as a ruthless individual sometimes far precedes his own family's. The people in the underworld often refer to him as a 'Psikh' (which basically means a madman or asshole in Russian) all because of his utter callousness when dealing with people and the extent of his ruthlessness. It is an unspoken rule in the underworld not to provoke him in case the 'nuclear bomb' goes off again. He looks up to his Grandfather and Uncle a lot (they're practically his role models) and he hopes to become the head of the Morozov family and bring it to new heights, although that might take a while considering he's busy with a rat (cough the killer cough) on the run. Plus despite his high ambitions Zhenya has a very bad habit of procrastinating things all the time if he doesn't find them interesting and running away frequently to hide in a cat cafe (psh the benefits of being a pampered kid i tell ya). Because of his strange obsession with cats and just felines in general, one can often see him cuddling on the couch with a shadow tiger (imagine instead of shadow hellhounds we have shadow tigers :D). Also he loves his pet ragdoll, Pixie with his whole being so to be given the chance to hold her should be considered an honour. The only ones who have been given this honour are Ash, Luka, and Rin.

Zhenya also likes reading books (though most of them are either horrifying fairy tales from the grimm brothers and the likes or manuals related to medieval torture methods, don't question him about it he'll simply call them necessary for scientific reasons, whatever they mean), trying out new kinda of foods (his favourites are the spicy and sour kind) and gatdening to a certain extent. Looking at his hobbies no one would believe that he is the heir of one of the biggest families in Elysium City (and that's exactly what he wants you to think). He's the living embodiment of 'looks like a cinnamon roll but could kill you'.

(psshhhhh sorry for the bad lighting tho! I hope you like him ^^ @vendetta-if )

[pxper-cranes]

Everyone who wrote off aetherdrift as just a wacky races filler set GO TO THE PLANESWALKERS GUIDE AND READ THAT SHIT BECAUSE IT SOUNDS SO FUCKING COOL

THERE ARE SHARK PEOPLE ON KALADESH, (Renamed to Aviskar)

AMONKHET HAS NEW GODS AND RIVAL FACTIONS

THERES FINALLY SOMETHING TO MURAGANDA! AND IT SOUNDS AWESOME

And theres word of tons of new planes and returning characters i did not expect to be so hyped for this set but just go read the planeswalkers guide they wrote so much for it the worldbuilding is so good

[phoenixcatch7]

Where's that one post that's like 'as an editor, you come to learn that there are actually very few bad ideas. However, there are a near infinite amount of bad executions' because you will find this is very true of reading fanfiction as well.

[cerealboxlore]

Whiz Kid Billy Batson and Lois Lane + the others

How come I haven't seen anything about Billy Batson interacting with the other journalists and reporters in the DC universe when it's the perfect opportunity to have the truth seekers in one room combining their skills/forces together?? I mean seriously, let the Whiz Kid Billy Batson HC meet with the others during some big journalist/reporter convention being held in Fawcett City, he has his own little radio show, let the boy speak his mind! Billy and Lois would have a blast together solving a cold case, interviewing superheroes together, and investigating the mystery behind who invited all these famous journalists and reporters to Fawcett city.

Make it be like a Knives Out scenario where someone extremely important and big suddenly bites the dust during the convention, and not only are the famous reporters and journalists there meant to solve the case, but they are also the suspects! The superheroes are away and can't help in this event, it's up to the non super powered allies to get to the bottom of this and save themselves!

Billy obviously can't transform into Captain Marvel due to the circumstances, but he's more than ready for a challenge to prove that Billy Batson is just as much a hero as his alter ego is.

Billy Batson, Lois Lane, Iris West, Jimmy Olsen, Viki Vale, Cat Grant (I'm going off the DC wiki for journalists and reporters). Put all these people in a room and all of your secrets will be in extreme danger.

Bonus points if Benoit Blanc is canon to the DC universe and was invited as a plus one to a guest of honor/VIP at the convention. I like this fruity southern detective man a lot. Him existing in the DC universe would just be hilarious and actually fit. Man solved a lot of famous cases, who's to say he's never solved a supervillain crime case or answered a few Riddles by the Riddle before (even though he thinks they're stupid). Let this man meet batman for crying out loud! (And let him play Among us with the other journalists/reporters-)

I got the idea based on the snippets of the fic being made by @wolfsbanesparks that involves Billy going through a mentorship program under Lois Lane.