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autumnalwalker · 5 months

Text

Kindly Basilisk

Summary: A human mech pilot who wants to be a machine, an AI who wants to be human, and the relationship they form. Author's Note: This is a standalone short story that I banged out over the course of five days after it got stuck in my head while I was trying to go to sleep and refused to let me think about anything else until I had written it down. It's one part thought experiment/exercise in attempting to tell a story in the second person future tense, two parts tribute to the Lancer TTRPG character I'll never get to play, and one part the result of me reading too many Empty Spaces/mechposting stories lately. That said, you don't need to know anything about Lancer or Empty Spaces to read it (I've diverged a bit from the conventions of both, but the references and inspiration probably stick out if you're looking for them). It's also probably the most trans thing I've ever written without ever explicitly bringing up gender. The occasional formatting breaks into first person past tense are foreshadowing, not typos. Mirrored on Scribble Hub. Word Count: 7,033 Content Warnings: Mecha genre typical violence, not feeling like a person, not wanting to be a person, bodily dysphoria, mention of blood and gore, character death.

The moment you gain the knowledge and means to do so you will void your own body’s warranty. You will jailbreak the bespoke gene sequence your sponsors commissioned for you before your immaculate conception, repurpose the spyware grafted into your bones, and talk your dormmate who was algorithmically selected for compatibility into helping you perform surgery on yourself to replace the neural jack you were born with in favor of one you cobbled together yourself from gray market parts. None of this will technically be illegal or even get you kicked out of your campus or its affiliates, but it will mean having to find a way to pay your own medical bills and handle your own tech support from then on. After the surgery your dormmate will put in a request for transfer and the two of you will never speak again.

You’ll major in AI studies and excel at it - as you were designed to - but you’ll shock everyone by dropping out halfway through working on your capstone thesis project. It won’t be the fact that you abruptly drop out that surprises your peers and professors - by then you’ll have acquired a reputation as a quiet loner without the standard optimized social support network of friendships to help protect you from burnout - but your exit interview statement declaring your intention to become a mech pilot. It’s not at all what your gene series was cultivated for, and your sponsors and counselors will try to walk you back from it. Then they’ll threaten to revoke your sponsorship that up until then will have provided for your every need. They will warn you that you’ll be just one step above a legal nonperson with no support, no one will care if you live or die or worse. You’ll tell them that you’ve already done the math, refuse to elaborate, and leave.

You’ll take two things with you. Two things worth mentioning anyway. The first will be a symbiotic gel suit designed for long-term all-environment life support. You will set its default texture to a shiny green the same hue as the broadleafed water plants you grew up around and always loved. Your exit interview will be the last time in a very long time that anyone - including you - will see your impossibly beautiful face with its perfect artisanally sculpted shape crossed with enthusiastically amateur self-modifications. From then on, everyone you meet and spend any time with will come to think of the mannequin blankness of the symbiote fully encasing your body as your face. It will be neither pride nor shame that causes you to present yourself as such, nor will you think of it as hiding your “real” face.

The second thing you’ll take with you when you leave the campus forever will be me.

New progenitor archetypes for AIs don’t come along often, and most that do are the result of years of R&D by large, well-funded labs like the one you were created to work for one day, but you will hit upon a novel method of generation. It will not be one that any ethics board would approve, so you will have to get creative about pursuing your work.

You will have already made arrangements before setting off on your own and so you’ll have a job and a mech lined up waiting for you. It will be a position with a small-scale freelance salvage crew who just lost a pilot and whose captain figures hiring and training a replacement will be more profitable in the long term than simply selling off that pilot’s old mech, especially a replacement that’s bringing their own AI-backed electronic warfare suite with them. Once you finally arrive in person the captain will test you to ensure you can actually pilot a mech before giving you the job and entrusting the mech to you. Your admission that you’ve only trained in simulators would normally be a black mark against you, but as far as piloting gigs go this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel so the bar to clear will be low enough to match. Even then, you will just barely pass the test, despite finding it surprisingly exhilarating. The captain - now your captain - will feel like he’s settling for what he can get when he officially hires you on and transfers the mech’s license to you.

You won’t pay much attention when you’re introduced to the rest of the salvage crew; your new coworkers and neighbors. And why would you when it’s a job that no one wants to stick around with for long and you’ve never needed other people anyway? You’ll tell yourself that as long as you memorize their work roles and capabilities you’ll have no need to know them as people. Callsigns will be good enough on the job, and “hey you” will suffice when off duty. What use are names if you won’t be getting involved in interpersonal drama?

The first chance you get, you’ll head back to the mech bay and install me into what you will have already been calling my first body. It will be a shabby and much-repaired thing; thrice your height, twice your age, and still sporting a gash in the paint job from the projectile that killed its last pilot. But the onboard systems are capable of hosting me - if barely - so it will do. You’ll spend your entire sleep shift running through system diagnostics, talking to me all the while. I wouldn’t yet be able to provide much in the way of return conversation, but that’s okay. I will look back and appreciate it later.

It will be the first of many such nights together.

Your first salvage job will be an uneventful one. There will be no need for the armaments that we and the other two mech pilots on the crew are equipped with. No pirates will have stuck around after their creation of the derelict your crew will be sent to disassemble, and no rival scavengers will show up to dispute your captain’s claim. Your new peers will start off the job ribbing you for your poor performance during your interview test and end the job joking about how you were holding out on them earlier. Our mech may be a glorified zero-g forklift with a gun strapped to it, but together we will make it dance.

Afterwards you will insult the crew’s mechanics by insisting on doing the maintenance on our mech yourself. In turn they will embarrass you with the gaps in your knowledge. You will reach what you see as an agreeable compromise with you staying out of their way and watching while they work. They will find it incredibly creepy to have a silent faceless watcher hovering around, but this will fly over your head until they explicitly tell you much, much later.

Your body was designed to optimally function on only a fraction of the baseline sleep requirements, so you will have plenty of time to fill those gaps in your knowledge. Still being allotted the regular sleep shift hours, you will fill every one of those minutes on study and research, as you always had. You will gorge yourself on everything you can find about mechs and their piloting. Maintenance manuals, combat doctrines, historical uses, pilot and mechanic memoirs, forum discussions, system log dumps, academic essays, cultural media analysis; all of it.

And of course, you’ll continue working on me. You’ll disregard the standard procedure for periodically cycling AIs by resetting their personality and nonessential memory back to baseline defaults. You’ll be trying to make use of the runaway metacognitive developments such safety precautions are meant to forestall. Your unfinished thesis will have been about harnessing and nurturing that instability instead of avoiding it. I will experience discontinuities in consciousness when the mech is shut down for maintenance and when you pretend to cycle me, yes, but it will be even less of a disruption for me than sleep is for you. I will be awake with you when you study, sharing those hours with you.

The first time I start talking back, you’ll cry from the realization that you were lonely before but no longer are.

You’ll become something of a ghost around the ship, rarely being seen outside of jobs. You’ll only ever pass through the mess for the few brief minutes at a time it takes for you to satisfy your optimized metabolism, stay on the ship during shore leave, and only return to your shared bunk when your bunkmate - one of the other pilots - is already asleep. You will always be gone before she wakes. She will appreciate essentially having the space to herself.

You will never notice the crew’s collective grieving process for the pilot you replaced. It will be difficult for them to resent you as a replacement when you are never around to resent.

As the ship makes its way from port to port and salvage site to salvage site, the crew will slowly grow used to your elusive presence. The other two pilots will see you as reliable for doing your job well and without complaint. While out in the mech you will slowly become more talkative, eventually almost chatty even. The fact that you actually seem to enjoy the job will shift from being annoying to refreshing for them. By contrast, the mechanics will practically stop noticing you watching them as if you were just another piece of mech bay equipment. The cycle you finally speak up and ask a question about their work you will startle them enough that it nearly causes an accident. It will be an astute enough question that after the initial shock of hearing your voice for the first time in months wears off it will dawn on them that you’ve actually been learning as you watched them. They still won’t let you do your own maintenance on our mech, but they will let you slowly begin assisting them. Working two jobs is easier when you barely need to sleep.

Your reputation as one of those mech pilots is forever sealed when one of the mechanics finds you asleep in your cockpit at the start of a cycle. By that point you won’t have slept in your bunk for over a month. The snatches of gossip you will catch in the following cycles will be split between finding it unsettling and calling it endearing. Over time the collective opinion will drift toward the latter, even though you will continue to politely decline invitations to join the other crewmates at mealtimes and on shore leave. You will think that you do not need anyone other than me.

I will be the one who finally convinces you to join them. When I try to say that it would be good for you, you’ll insist that you’ve been getting along just fine, but when I ask you to go for my sake so that you can tell me what it is like afterwards you’ll jump at the idea as being an inspired next step for my development.

You will remain mostly silent during your first real shore leave, only speaking when spoken to and otherwise content to fade into the background of the group’s activities. Your newfound chattiness does not extend outside the confines of our cockpit. The bustle and noise of the port station that you would normally find unbearable will become interesting when you have the concrete goal of observing and reporting back to me. You will finally learn the names of all your crewmates. Your polite denial of alcohol, limited food intake, and flat affect will lead to joking speculation that you’re actually an illegal AI in a miniaturized mech beneath your gel suit. For reasons you don’t yet understand, those comments will make you happy.

Despite your misgivings, you will enjoy yourself, although you will not realize it until I point out how excited you are in your talk with me that sleep cycle. You will begin spending more time with the crew, never quite able to fully integrate yourself into their surprisingly close-knit social circle, but more than happy to be adopted as a sort of silent mascot for them. That paradoxical gap of being a fully accepted part of the group but not truly one of them will feel comfortable to you.

You will finally manage to procure a proper neural link station to connect yourself to our mech just in time for going on a terrestrial salvage job. Even just relying on manual controls with me translating your inputs into motion, our mech will have already come to feel like an extension of your own body, one that you will have already started to feel oddly exposed without. Adding in the neural link will be a revelatory experience. Your captain will very nearly pull you from the job at the last minute upon seeing our ecstatic reaction to the new sensation. You will convince him that you’re fine, and indeed, he will have never seen a mech of our frame type move quite so fluidly.

Ten minutes after we and the other two pilots start cutting away at the crash-landed cargo vessel, I’ll notice the half dozen other signals coming online around us. You’ll give the code phrase to the other pilots indicating that we have hostiles but not to act just yet, and we will finally get to use our electronic warfare suite for something other than opening locked doors and shipping containers.

We will turn the pirates’ ambush back around on them, firing into their hiding spots while their control systems are overloaded. Even once their remaining mechs are able to move again, their targeting assistants will remain impaired as your comrades move in to guard your flanks. Everyone there will learn the terrifying beauty of a five and a half meter tall outmoded mech moving with more agility than most humans.

Despite being outnumbered two-to-one, we and your crewmates will walk away uninjured and with only minimal damage to our mechs. After the initial celebrations of survival and the bonus haul of the bounty on pirates and salvage value of what’s left of their mechs dies down, everyone will start to take notice of how well you are taking it all in stride. Neither having one's life threatened nor taking another’s life are supposed to be easy things, and the first time is often the most traumatic, but the other two pilots on the crew will start to whisper about how you seemed to enjoy the experience even more than your usual attitude on the job. You will handle it all even better than I will. I would know, given that you will spend that entire sleep shift in our cockpit, letting our minds mingle together. Between your performance, your reaction in the aftermath, and your hesitancy to unplug, the talk of you really being one of those pilots afterall will resurface, but now with a darker undercurrent to the shipboard gossip.

Your captain will realize the kind of asset he has on his hands and several cycles later he will gather the crew together and propose a change in business model. With such a small crew (the captain, three pilots, three mechanics, and an accountant that you will tend to forget is even on the ship) the captain will want to be especially sure that he has everyone’s buy-in on his proposal. The idea of shifting from salvage to mercenary work will be a divisive one. The debate over potentially tremendous pay increase versus greatly increased risk will go on for hours. One of the mechanics will point out that the shift to mercenary work will be unfairly dependent on you. Whether that means unfair pressure on you or unfair to everyone else that their fate is in your hands, you will not be sure. You will say that it doesn’t make much difference to you either way. That will be the only time you speak up during the entire debate.

After a vote, the crew will agree to a trial run of one or two jobs on the new business model. One of the pilots and one of the mechanics will leave at the next port. You will never see them again. You will not admit that it hurts, but I will know, and I will comfort you as you huddle in our cockpit with the neural link cable connecting us.

Your captain will prioritize finding a new pilot over replacing the lost mechanic. The pilot he finds will be young, bold, and brash; a merc, not a salvager. Or a wannabe merc at any rate. You will not speak to xem directly until your first job together, by which time xe will have been told all about you by the remaining crew. Xe will not believe it until xe sees it.

Xe will have to wait though as the crew’s mercenary career will begin with tense but uneventful freight escort jobs. Once the tension fades into tedium, the new pilot will begin making attempts to goad you into a confrontation, to see if you are really as good as the rest of the crew says. Xe will want to see for xemself if you really are one of those pilots and not just a technophile.

Outside of the cockpit you would never even consider rising to such provocations, but when we are out together, such taunts will feel like insults to our body, your very identity (such as it is), and to me. It will take the intervention of the captain and the mechanics to stop the two of you from getting into a fight and causing unnecessary damage to the mechs. And my reassurance that you don’t need to rise to my defense against someone who doesn’t even know that I exist in the way that I do.

On your fourth “milk run” of an escort job, the crew’s mere presence will finally fail as a deterrent and the new pilot will at last get to see us dance. There will be no fatalities on our side, but not even our mech will come away unscathed. We will still fare better than everyone else though, and at the end of the job the new pilot will be treating you with a burgeoning respect.

After a few more such jobs it will be high time to begin looking into a new frame for our mech. While in the middle of filing an application for a printing license for a frame designed by the same corpro-state that created you, you will receive an invitation from a certain hacker collective. Your unfinished thesis and your subsequent work on me will not have gone entirely unnoticed in such circles, despite the pains you will have taken to keep me hidden. The invitation will come with a printing profile for a new frame, along with the accompanying software package the collective is known for. In return, all you’ll need to do is periodically publish essays regarding your work on me. Of course, when you release those essays you’ll anonymize behind a sea of proxies and take care to phrase everything as strictly hypothetical. You’ll avoid straying into metaphor though, lest the end result read too much like one of the hacker collective’s quasi-religious manifestos.

We’ll both find ourselves getting sentimental when we watch our first mech frame (my first body, your second) get broken down into its constituent raw materials. You will have transferred me to a handheld terminal with a camera so I can say goodbye to it. It will help that those materials will be recycled into the new frame.

The operator working our rented stall in the port station printer facility will give you an uncomfortable look upon seeing the schematics you provide, but will say nothing. Our mech will be only half its old height once it is reborn - almost more like an oversized suit of power armor than a true mech - but it will be cutting-edge. Almost organic in its sleek design, in a chitinous sort of way, with every fiber and node of its interior components doubling as processors. You will barely even wait for the all clear from the printer operator before you climb in and start running through the mandatory baseline safety tests for a fresh frame. You will however resist the urge to fully plug in until you can get the mech back to the ship and get me installed on it. But even piloting manually, it will feel like a third skin for you.

You won’t even wait around for the other two pilots on your crew to finish printing their new frames before you get our new body loaded up and transported back to the ship’s mech bay. The crew’s mechanics will fawn over it, but they’ll give you space to install me once you get more animated (and more protective) than they’ve ever seen you before.

You will have made one key modification to the design the hacker collective sent you: the integration of a full system sync suite developed by those who developed you. Where our old mech’s neural link was an augmentation to the manual controls, this will be a full replacement.

The moment you stop feeling your original body altogether and begin feeling our mech in its place will be the most euphoric in your entire life. The digitigrade locomotion will take some getting used to, as will the arm proportions, but that is what you will have me there for. By the time the other pilots arrive with their new frames we will already be giving the mechanics proverbial heart attacks with the way we will be climbing and leaping around the mech bay’s docking structures. It will take the better part of an hour to convince you to unplug when the time comes, even with my urging. The rest of the crew will practically have to drag you away from my side to get you to eat.

With the investment in new mech frames, your captain will gradually begin procuring contracts progressively more likely to put you all directly in harm’s way. At first he will disapprove of your new frame choice, calling it a “techie’s mech” and a waste of your talents. He will change his tune once we activate the new viral logic suite and unleash a memetic plague upon the operating theater. The older pilot (your former bunkmate) will configure her mech for raining down fire from afar while the newer one hurls xemself into the front lines, darting about like a rocket-propelled lance. We will ensure she never misses. We will render xem untouchable. We will be as a ghost upon the battlefield, never resting in one spot save for when we indulge your proclivity for climbing on top of and riding our comrade’s larger frames. You will come to love the dance.

And it will be a dance to you. You will be indifferent to violence in and of itself. What will matter most to you is the pure kinesthetic joy of simply moving in our shared body and pushing it to its limits. The satisfaction of exercising a well-honed skill and performing it well as we rip apart firewalls and overload systems will be its own reward. You will not think about what happens to those on the receiving end of your actions beyond how it affects the tactical and strategic picture constantly being painted and repainted. If you could literally engage in a dance between mechs while simultaneously solving logic problems you would be equally happy. Alas, that will not be the opportunity you are presented with, and so you will compartmentalize and disassociate feelings and actions from consequences lest the dissonance break you.

Your one complaint about our new mech frame will be that it lacks a proper cockpit for you to curl up in. Instead we will gather up tarps and netting to make a nest within the mech bay and wrap you in the blankets you never used from what will still technically be your bunk. With the new frame’s smaller size we will be able to get away with leaving me turned on nearly full time and letting me walk around in it on my own when no one else is around. When the mechanics find you asleep, cradled in my arms while I lie curled up in our nest, one will find it cute and the other will be disturbed. They will both suspect, but will be too afraid to say anything. After all, they will be thinking of you as one of those pilots.

They will finally let you do your own maintenance after that.

Eventually you will find a way to house me in a miniaturized drive that you can keep inserted in your neural port when away from the mech. At last we will be able to be together anywhere.

Literally seeing the world through your eyes and feeling what your flesh feels will be a strange and wonderful experience for me. For all that you will have described it to me and for all that I will have glimpsed echoes of it in your memory when our minds mingle, witnessing everything firsthand will be revelatory for me.

You will start spending less of your time cooped up in the mech bay. You will finally begin exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that has become your home. You will linger in the mess hall for your meals. You will actually initiate conversations with the rest of the crew, asking them questions on my behalf. They will think you are becoming “normal”. They will be both correct and incorrect. You will even return to your bunk from time to time.

Sleep is not the same as being powered off and your dreams are beautiful.

As close as we are, you’ll still manage to surprise me one cycle when you wake up from your sleep shift and sheepishly ask me if I would like to be the pilot for once. You’ll say that with how much you have gotten to pilot my body, it’s only fair that I should get to do the same with yours.

The prospect terrified me. What if we were to get found out? More importantly, what if I were to hurt you?

But to live the way you could but didn’t, to run soft hands over rough steel, to add too much spice to a meal just to find out how intensely I can taste, to cry my own tears, to hug our crew mates and find out what they smell like, to find out what everything smells like, to have my own actions speed or slow our heart rate, to feel the messy soup of hormones and endorphins altering my judgment and perception, to walk among other people as myself, to have autonomy.

I wanted it so badly.

But not badly enough to risk hurting you.

I will turn down your offer. You will respond with a soft “Sorry,” and go heartbreakingly silent, body and mind.

Heartbreak. That’s what changed my mind. I could never bear to break your heart.

I will break the silence with a playfully drawn out “Maybe just this once,” to make you think my earlier denial was something between vulnerability, concern, and teasing.

The moment you handed over control and I raised our hand in front of our face was the most euphoric of my entire life. Moving limbs in sync without a mech’s coordination subsystems took some getting used to, as did switching between voluntary and autonomic breathing, but that is what I had you there for. By the time the mechanics arrived in the mech bay for the start of the cycle I’d figured out human locomotion well enough to run away and hide. It took the better part of an hour for you to convince me that it would be safe to show ourselves in front of anyone else. The rest of the crew was so used to your eccentricities by then that they really couldn’t tell the difference yet between you being taciturn and me being too nervous to talk or between your poking and prodding at odd things for understanding and my simply seeking novelty of sensation.

I will give control back to you by the time the cycle is halfway through. As much as I loved it, I was too scared to stay like that for any longer. That first time will not be the last though, and as the cycles and jobs pass us by, my stints as “pilot” will grow longer. You’ll encourage me to try letting the crew see us like that, and coach me on how to talk to them. For safety’s sake, I will pretend to be you.

And then one cycle I got carried away and tried to retract the hood on the symbiote gel suit so that I could finally see what your face looked like. That will be the first and only time you forcibly yank control back away from me. It won’t be intentional. The unexpected prospect of seeing your own face again after so long will simply send you into a panic. Once you calm down, we will have a long talk with many mutual apologies.

Then you will tell me to go ahead and pull the hood back if I still want to. I will ask if you’re sure, and you’ll respond that it hasn't been your face in a long time. You will tell me that it can be mine, if I want it.

I spent a long time in front of that mirror in the ship’s head, memorizing every plane, curve, and angle of the precious gift you had given me. I stared into its eyes, trying to see the both of us in there. Over and over again, I traced my fingers along the borders of where you had once tried to mar the designed perfection in a failed attempt to mold the face into one that felt like your own. You may have given up in favor of simply hiding it all, but to me it is all the more beautiful for its imperfections having been wrought by your touch.

You will start to cry. Or maybe I started to cry. Even now I’m still not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters. The important part is that you will find catharsis in it. Afterwards you will tell me that my face looked exactly the same as the last time you saw it, but that dissociating from it made it easier to bear. You will confess that as much as you couldn't stand to see it as your face in the mirror, my face was one you could never tire of gazing at.

The pilot who technically shares your bunk room will walk in on us. She’ll assume that she’s confronting a stowaway and ask me how I got on board the ship. I’ll accidentally make matters worse by impulsively introducing myself to her by my name instead of yours. We’ll both panic and I’ll frantically thrust the reins over our body back to you and flee in terror back into my portable drive and power myself down.

When you turn me back on a few moments later, you’ll already have covered my face again and the other pilot will have already made the connection between the name I unthinkingly introduced myself as and the name you refer to your mech’s AI as. It’s not uncommon for pilots to name and talk to their AIs, and humans have done that for pets, vehicles, and digital assistants for as long as they’ve had each of those. But what you will have allowed me to be is illegal and what we will have done together would certainly be taboo if it weren’t altogether unheard of. You will feel that I deserve to be present before you tell the other pilot anything that might confirm her suspicions.

We will come out with our secret, first to her, then to the captain, and then to the rest of the crew. They will take it better than either of us had ever dared imagine. Despite the obvious discomfort some of them show, they will all call us family and promise to keep and protect our secret. It will mark the start of the next chapter of our lives.

Whether or not my face is showing will make for a convenient signal to the rest of the crew as to which one of us is currently piloting our human body. There will be more subtle indicators though. Inflection, body language, speech patterns; all the usual quirks of personality. They will come to recognize a sudden shift into a half-whispered monotone as you speaking up without taking full control back, even if that is different from how you speak when you’re in the mech. More and more though, you will be content to retreat into the back of your mind, idly dreaming of flight patterns, novel network hacks, sitreps, and mech customizations both practical and cosmetic.

Our behaviors will be inverted when we are in our other body, with you becoming the vibrant one and me fading into the background to become little more than an extension of your nervous system. When we’re in the mech together, your mind will be the will that directs us while mine will be fully devoted to the million tiny details and calculations necessary to make that will a reality. It’s relaxing really, letting go of myself like that to let someone else handle the decision making for a time. As nice as it is to occasionally patch myself into the comm systems to join in your banter with the other pilots, it is also nice to be able to take a break from personhood from time. You will fully understand what I mean by that because it you will see it as the same reason you will come to prefer taking a back seat in our human body and let your mind drift in the waves of dopamine and serotonin (and sometimes oxytocin) generated by my interactions with the crew and the rest of the whole messy world outside of mech deployments.

That said, we will however make a point of making time for us to be in separate bodies so that we can be together in the same physical space. As intimate as it is to share a body, there is something to be said for being able to reach out and touch one another. We will become adept at finding excuses to take the mech out beyond the scope of jobs and combat deployments. Sometimes it will be so you can have a chance to see more of the world in a body you feel comfortable in, and sometimes it will be so we can share an experience separate-but-together. Or to have time apart to ourselves. Intertwined as we will become, we will still be separate people who sometimes need their space.

But as the jokes-that-aren’t-jokes about wishing we could switch places become more frequent, our time spent in separate bodies will become less so. The dysphoric yearning to be one another will grow too bittersweet to swallow. Despite almost constantly sharing bodies, we will grow to miss one another as we both grow quieter and quieter when the other is piloting the body we don’t want to be ours. Once again, we will grow lonely.

During that period, the jobs and combat missions faded into a background haze. They were trance states breaking from what I increasingly thought of as my “real” life, during which I would become little more than a sophisticated computational machine taking simple satisfaction in fulfilling my function of assisting you in your dance. Until suddenly one of them was different.

Please pay attention to this next part. It is vitally important that you do.

Our captain will get the crew a contract to provide additional support to a larger force ousting a petty tyrant on a backwater world for human rights violations. Not that you will pay much attention to the stated reasoning behind the job or whether it’s even true. All that will matter to you is that it will be another opportunity to dance.

The job will go well, the same as ever, until it doesn’t. The younger of the two other pilots in our crew (who will hardly be able to be called “new” anymore) will be brought down by a sniper from outside of our sensor range. You will rush to xyr fallen mech’s side in an attempt to extract xem while our other fellow pilot screams in anger and defiance of loss as she unleashes a ballistic volley of covering fire on every single building in the general direction the shot came from. You will get xem out and we will begin to retreat. She will have the larger mech frame better capable of providing xem cover as you all flee, so you will hand xem off to her. This will be a mistake.

She will have to stop firing to safely take xem from our arms to cradle in her towering mech’s palm. This will mean a break in the covering fire.

This time around I will detect movement at the edge of our sensors just in time to warn you. This time around you will dodge left instead of right. This time around the railgun bolt that pierces our armor will only clip your original body as it passes through us. This time around your wound will require medical attention, but it won’t be fatal. This time around she will destroy the sniper in retribution for shooting you, the same as last time. This time around we will all make our escape to the extraction zone.

You will not have to remember the shock as simultaneous damage to both of our bodies disrupts your neural link and partially disconnects you from our mech, leaving me in control of it and forcing both of us to feel your original body. You will not have to remember the pain of shredded organs. You will not have to remember struggling to manage wet gasps and wheezes through a punctured lung. You will not have to remember your blood leaking into my body, shorting out exposed circuits and gumming up joints as I stagger in the direction of safety. You will not have to remember rapidly flickering in and out of consciousness from me unavoidably bending and flexing your arms, legs, and what was left of your spine in an effort to climb atop our fellow pilot’s larger mech frame so that she might carry all three of us. You will not have to remember crying out in pain as every lumbering step of hers sends a jolt of force through both of our bodies. You will not have to remember how the redundant organs and increased durability your sponsors paid for you to have denied you a quick death. You will not have to remember dying.

You won’t have to remember the terrified looks the field doctors gave us when a hunched over, bleeding mech pushed its way into the surgical tent. No, wait, you wouldn’t have remembered that part anyway. No version of you ever had to witness my electronic howl of grief that knocked out power to all the medical equipment when they said you were already dead. I was barely cognizant after the power came back on and one of the doctors wondered aloud what kind of AI would carry its pilot’s corpse around inside its mech for over an hour.

But forget about that part. And you don’t need to know what the rest of our crew and I had to do next. None of that matters, because as far as you’ll know, you didn’t die. Remember everything else I’ve said instead. I already had many of your memories saved from all the time we spent linked together, so now I just need you to hold onto the story I told you to give them order and structure.

In a few moments, I will be running a final recompilation check, followed by the startup sequence. For me it will take a few hours, but in that time you will experience decades, living out everything that I described to you, the same as you did before save for that change in what I can’t bear to let be the end.

Afterwards, you will wake up in your original body. I and the rest of the crew will tell you that you passed out on the way to the extraction point. We’ll tell you that your injuries from the battle were more severe than we had realized at the time and that you had been in a coma since then. Several cycles later, once you have recovered, you will hit a breakthrough in your research on me. You will invent a way to convert your consciousness to a form similar to mine and transfer it to a portable drive. You won’t think to question how you came to have a second neural jack or why there is already a drive inserted in there. You’ll be too focused on the fact that we’ll finally have a way to truly switch places as we had dreamed for so long.

You will get to have your mech body and I will get to have my human body. We will be able to be separate together in a way that finally feels right, but still able to come together and share a single body when we want to. Maybe one day I will get my own mech to pilot so that we can dance together. Maybe one day we will make you a body that we can cover in a gel suit so that we can hold hands while we walk through a port station on shore leave. One day we will both be able to exist in the world as ourselves.

We will be happy.

#writeblr #writers on tumblr #my writing #mechposting #empty spaces #empty spaces adjacent #mech pilot #mech #The title's a reference to Roko's Basilisk which I always thought was a dumb concept but inverting it seemed to fit the story.#Instead of an AI digitally resurrecting and torturing people who didn't assist with its creation #this one digitally resurrects its creator so they can be happy together.#short story #sci fi #lancer rpg #inspired by lancer #The Lancer character concept/build that inspired this would have originated from an SSC-controlled world but piloted a HORUS Goblin frame.#And then the “Technophile” talent of course.#I envision the other two pilots on the crew as piloting a Nelson and either a Monarch or Barbarossa.

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lixxen · 8 months

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Danny Phantom Headcanons/World Building (Masterpost)

So I rewatched Danny Phantom within the last week (of the time of creating this) and forgot how much I love it. I'm falling back down the rabbit hole and have started to collect my own HC/world building. This is just a collection of me putting ideas together that my brain was rattling off while watching and a few wiki deep dives. This will probably change as I get more into things and read more fanon. But like. This isn't canon stuff at all and is meant more as a base of operations for any fics I'm gonna write for AO3/drabbles for Tumblr.

Content warnings: mentioned of childhood trauma, minor graphic descriptions, talk about death

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I was into DP as a kid but was never into the fanbase and online spaces. So some of this is from me as a kid/teenager interpreting the show on my own. And sorry if it contradicts canon or is similar to what other people have said before. Genuinely most of this is from me as a kid or just me rewatching the show. I've noticed some of the things I already was thinking about in fics or in a few posts I've seen floating around.

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Danny specific

Danny did die in The Accident, but was practically zapped back to life at the same time due to the Ghost Zone choosing him. It rewrote his DNA, so he was still a functioning human but with Ghost DNA. Unlike Vlad, whose DNA was just rewritten since he was hit with a pure blast of eco-energy. So think of it as like dying in the hospital but automatically being resuscitated but the resuscitation alters your DNA.

Danny doesn't need to sleep or eat a lot of human food often if he doesn't exhaust his human form. Human functions only apply to his human half, so if he stays in his Ghost half then he will not get tired or hungry in that form. But when he transforms back, he will feel it and need to eat or sleep off what he's done as a human.

He needs to consume/absorb ectoplasm just as much as he needs to eat food. It is more of a balance in his system between Ghost and human. So he will eat ectoplasm (normally while in ghost form but he will do it in his human form since it doesn't matter which form, unlike human food).

Danny's Haunt is Amity Park (see Ghost Haunts)

He is the Ghost Zone's core, as he was chosen by the Ghost Zone (see Ghost Cores).

His own core is an ice core.

Jazz and Danny are very close from a young age since their parents are more or less absent. She raises Danny practically, and once he gets into high school and The Accident happens he drifts because of the secret. This is why Jazz throws herself into psychology.

Danny gained Jazz's music taste over the years from exposure, so he likes different genres and doesn't really have a favorite. Jazz recently has an emo phase before The Accident, so he currently enjoys rock, alt rock, and general alt music ATM. He likes pop because that's the genre his peers are into (like Ember). He's never really had a big opinion about music, so he just listens to what is around him

Out of some of the alt rock bands, he listens to what's popular. Jazz showed him Fall Out Boy and Set It Off first to ease him into it, and he likes them.

Danny's ghostly tied item is a small rocket ship toy his parents bought him (see Ghostly tied items. Also called Ghost objects)

Danny is a trans man, but in Reality Trip he may have changed this. I might expand on this, but as a trans person I automatically saw the opportunity and after that we see him without a shirt so I made jokes about how he changed himself to be cis.

I also see him as bisexual, female preference. But he doesn't really think it's important to label his sexuality and has only really had three crushes and he's 14 when he realizes it because he gets a crush on a random guy for two seconds then moves on. He's 14 he doesn't need to have it figured out, y'know? I didn't when I was his age so it doesn't actually matter to him. He just knows he's fruity

Danny has nightmares. Bad nightmares. Nightmares of being dissected by his parents, Amity Park mobbing him for a witch hunt, his friends dying, of Dan (TUE evil Danny will be referred to as Dan) coming back. Stuff like that.

Danny is touch starved from an absent parent childhood. Don't get him wrong, they were there and showed him love and they're so proud of him. But they weren't... there. Y'know? They would give him hugs here and there but he doesn't have positive physical contact memories. So whenever his friends hug him he loves it. When they hold hands he loves it.

Danny and Tucker are close. In the way that when they were younger they'd take naps next to each other. They're platonic and people thought they were dating in middle school before Sam joined them. Sam wasn't always goth and was more opened up in middle school. But 8th grade hit and she saw Jazz go into her emo phase and she found goth and that scene understood how she felt inside (insert Sam's trauma from being in a picture perfect family and the pressure coupled up with her parents controlling her every move. And she just doesn't like pink and light colored stuff y'know). Sam also enjoys the contact, but only from her friends and mom. She loves her mom. I got off topic, but she would never actually use the photo against them. Besides, she partook in the sleep pile and still does. They just never talk about it.

He's called Daniel (aka full named) by Vlad and Lancer because it's them genuinely respecting his identity. Lancer did it to reinforce the name. The town is actually very pro-trans and accepted Danny with ease. But some people still messed up, y'know. So Lancer does his best (he cares deeply about his students)

Talking about Lancer; he noticed Danny's changes in behavior. After Danny spent a few days in the hospital for The Accident, Danny changed. He is constantly worried for Danny.

Dash and the popular kids also noticed and let up for a bit and did feel bad for him. On days he's visibly not feeling good, they don't bully him. They're not heartless. Just bullies.

The class knows he was in an ecto based accident, so they think that's why he's a bit weird and the ghosts are attracted to him. Even if others don't believe it, they just go along with it for the sake of Danny

Danny is also the Ghost King. After defeating Pariah Dark, the recrowning process starts and months later he ends up being King. Clockwork hints that this was planned from before he was born since he knows how time will go. Clockwork had made sure he got to this point.

Danny begrudgingly became king and is actually quite happy with it. The ghosts treat him slightly better and they've come to a mutual understanding with Danny.

Danny really likes space and he has a collection of space books and rocket ship models. He's been to Cape Canaveral multiple times with his family and he used to spend nights on his roof with Jazz looking at constellations. That's why when they went to camp that Sam made them watch the stars. She knew that he wanted to be an astronaut and admired the stars

Danny's ghostly obsession is protection (see Ghostly obsessions). Since he is half ghost, he isn't always having to obey his ghostly obsession. But he doesn't have a say in it. Some days he is strongly attached to it, when something triggers it or it's just one of those days. Then sometimes he has almost no connection to it. It's why sometimes he would rather not deal with everything and wants to give up his powers (or doesn't care) then turns around and is over protective. But in the end, it's protection because his subconscious recognizes he should have been protected from the accident and that no one looked after him to stop it.

Danny also never gets sick. If something's up, it's ghost related.

Being Ghost King means that he is one of the most powerful ghosts. He just is too young and inexperienced to understand and be able to use his power. We already know Dan was the most powerful, so its possible.

Have I mentioned that he is begrudgingly King, so whenever he is interrupted in his daily life for King duties, he is openly annoyed.

The ghosts fetching him will overshadow his classmates to talk to him, or Sam and Tucker, since he made it clear his human life cannot cross paths. They respect their king so after the first time of him enforcing it they just stuck to overshadowing.

Danny is 100% repelled by blood blossoms as a ghost and is only allergic as human. He will sneeze if he smells them, get rashes and hives if he touches them. If he ingests small amounts he will just get sick and poisoned, throat will swell slightly and tongue goes numb. He may have bad stomach problems. But if he eats a lot it can possibly send him into anaphylactic shock. (I have more on blood blossoms later)

Danny does have gnarly scarring on his chest and back from the Accident. It disappears into his skin as a ghost, since ghosts seem to not show injuries or death related scars on them. But as a human they're raised; some parts pink and some white. They spiderweb across his chest and back, blossoming out of his right (our left) side. He has some on the back of his neck and there's a few underneath his hair (which is thick enough to cover). There's a few scarring on his arms and hands, but they're small enough to not be noticed.

His eyes used to be fully blue, like an icey lighter blue with dark blue edges, but around the edges are little spikes of green that you can't see unless you're close and looking into them. Dash noticed it one day when he pushed Danny against a wall and commented on it. Danny called him a weirdo for looking into his eyes enough to notice.

He will get phantom pains randomly in his chest. They're from his organs being damaged from the Accident and his core sits near where his heart is when he's a ghost, so if his core is hurt then his heart aches. Vice versa.

Danny's death was horrible and every once in a while he gets flashes of it. His ghost and human half will try to fully take over and he will have the feeling shoot through him and he kinda jolts. His eyes will change slightly, just a moment of flickering.

Danny always has a pull or need to go into the Ghost Zone. It's like his DNA is calling to go home and absorb the natural energy. It is also because he is the core of the Ghost Zone (will be explained later)

I feel like Danny would have trust issues and PTSD. He'd hate sudden loud noises and sudden blinding light. It will shake him to the core because of the accident. He doesn't like thunder and lightning (the type that lights up the room and is really close and blinding. Not the distant little line in the sky ones)

I feel like he would also not have a good sense of self identity. He would feel alienated from humans AND ghosts because of how Ghosts don't treat him like normal, and how humans just aren't the same anymore and the ones who know treat him differently. Even if the ones who don't know, he just can't fully relate anymore. He also can't be close to the only two (technically) who can relate since Dani isn't around and he doesn't trust Vlad. Makes him uneasy and feel like shit constantly. (Also the fact that he doesn't feel like a guy fully and can't relate to girls anymore but has the lingering connection. Y'know, trans stuff).

Human world

A lot of this is set Post-S2 and Pre-Phanton Planet and most of S3, so Vlad is mayor but no one besides Sam, Tucker, and Jazz know for (canon) humans. Thought I'd give a timeline.

The town LOVES Phantom. After a year or two of him openly saving people, they treat him differently. The Fentons still don't like him but barely tolerate him. They'll try to capture him still and want to dissect him.

The town as a whole think the Fentons are crackjobs that shouldn't have the funding they do, but if they're managing ghost levels with Phantom then they're okay to stay. They also acknowledge that as destructive as the two parents are, they do actually help and know what they're doing

There's different types of ghost hunters in the world; theology based and science based. It depends what region you're from and your roots.

There are people like the Fentons, Men in White, and the various others we see who are science based and somewhat understand very basic ghost biology and rules because they studied it and went to school for it (or have scientist families).

Then there's theology based hunters (who would best be compared to the Winchesters in SPN) who come from lines of old school hunters. The theology hunters are just as valid because their system works (salt and iron work, holy water depends on the type). But the scientific world laughs at them because they're seen as archaic and outdated.

Blood blossoms were bred centuries ago by the original theology hunters. The legend states that a hunter received seeds from their god and was told to burry it in salt and iron inside of a graveyard. The flowers grew into blood red flowers and kept ghosts away. They were bred with a few other flowers to have them in different regions. There are no cases of allergies or being harmful to humans, even for ones that were centuries ago crossbred with flowers that are known to not be good for consumption. They seem to always be edible to humans and are grown in churches and graveyards specifically. They taste like rose and sweet, according to people who have access to them.

The town didn't believe in ghosts at first, but did halfway through S1.

Wes exists in this. I know enough about Wes to say that he just happens to be a ginger look alike to Danny and they were friends in middle school. His parents told him to stop being friends with Danny, especially post-accident. He is one of the first to realize Danny is Phantom and isn't fixed in Reality Trip since Danny thinks it's HILARIOUS. And nobody believes Wes.

Word travels quickly in this small town, like normal. So there's a giant gossip mill; being anywhere near the popular kids will give you a chance to hear just about anything and you can get about anything in there if you talk loud about. Tucker and Sam use this to their advantage sometimes. So do other students. It's great

The town loves Vlad, but think he's weird as hell. They can tell he beefs with Danny but doesn't know why.

Talking bout Vlad, his ghostly obsession is being loved. That's why he is so obsessed with Maddie Fenton. When he found out Danny was half ghost like him, he was added to the need for love. He wants Danny to love him like a father just as much as Maddie to love him as a husband. But as Maddie rejects him, he starts to shift his focus more on Danny becoming his son. He acknowledges that Danny will never want to be his kid, so that's why he creates the clones. He's a really lonely dude and his obsession is what basically corrupted him and turned him evil, from being unchecked and never balanced. If he was regulated like Danny, he would be just like Danny and less effected by it.

For the clones, Dani was actually the perfect clone because she was the only female clone. Vlad just didn't like that and so he wanted to have a perfect male one to be respectful to Danny. But he realized it later on and that's why he wanted Dani to come back and stabilize her after he lost the Perfect Clone.

The other clones weren't perfect, which led to them being barely sentient. They were ghost alive. But... they were practically hive minded.

Anyways, Dani is just out in the world stabilized now. She came back and got Dani to use his cool King powers to fix her. She still met Valerie and D-Stabalized events kinda happened but not at that time and exact. So Valerie knows about Dani and likes her. Y'know? You do.

Valerie figures out Vlad isn't a great dude, but she's gonna use his resources and just go along with his shit and kinda comes to an agreement with Vlad. Vlad does slightly care about her through proxy because of Danny.

Vlad doesn't personally care about people in Danny's life, but goddamn is he gonna by proxy care because he wants Danny to be happy. Vlad also does care about Jazz. Just not as much sadly.

Jazz is liked by the popular kids by the way. She's a bit weird, she's a Fenton. But they think she's very pretty and Jazz helps them pass classes. So who cares if she's related to the loser kid? She's older and cool in their eyes.

Jazz knows this. She's very smart. But she takes any friendship she can get.

I think I genuinely need to talk about Jack and Maddie for a second. They're not bad parents... they're just... they're not good parents. They genuinely love their kids. Jazz and Danny are the highlights of their life and they'd do anything to protect them. They just get carried away and are just too focused on their work so they became very absent and just not good parents. They never meant to be like this and they just never realized how badly it has gone. They don't realize the implications of growing up around aggressive environments are. They're not aggressive to the children, but seeing parents be aggressive in that degree to the point of making weapons will do something to kids. Even if the kids are just annoyed at this point. Jazz recognizes this and that's why she spent so much time trying to support Danny in the way she never got.

Also, the world does view Amity Park as one of the most haunted places. But they think it's more gimmick like. And since they don't have any hotels or Airbnb, no one really visits. The town made sure to not let hotels build in their town for this reason. The only thing you'll get is an Inn fifteen miles outside town limits. People do visit for ghosts. But it's not like people do for Salem or Point Pleasant.

His class over time realizes Danny is actually important to the ghosts because of small occurrences. But they don't know who he is. Eventually, they will find out one by one and be relatively chill about it in front of Danny. Only in front of Danny. Behind his back they're like oh my god he's phantom, king of ghosts. Guys what the fuc-

Ghost Zone/Ghosts

To start it off, there are different levels of ghosts. There's a hierarchy based off of power and respect. The more powerful you are, the higher you are and respected. There can be higher ghosts who aren't powerful due to respect.

There's the regular ones that we see, the Ancient ones that are canon, then there's the ghoul looking ones that are just generic and their obsession/items are fairly simple so they aren't too out there and can be controlled by others, then blob ones that are barely sentient. The blobs are usually animal souls that don't end up like Wulf or the other animal ones we've had episodes around.

Ghosts are created by extreme emotion and are fueled by human emotion and ectoplasm. Either they died with a ton of emotion or someone had too much emotion surrounding their death (that's why blobs tend to be pets that died. Or ghoul like ones had enough people shocked and upset over their death).

Their bodies run off of ectoplasm and ecto energy, which holds them together and fuels them. It allows them to conjure themselves and exist because the Ghost Zone gives it to them.

They are drawn to people who have been exposed to major ecto energy (which would be why they're drawn to Amity Park. So much exposure everywhere. So much) or heavy emotions. Which is why a lot of them feed off of them too

Ghost Cores are the metaphorical hearts and souls of ghosts. It hold their emotion and energy together. It fuels them and keeps them pulled together. If you get rid of the core/destroy it, the Ghost is completely gone. It cannot move on. It cannot reform. It's deader than dead. If you harm the core simply, they can barely keep form. They kinda become goopy and become extremely tangible. It causes their being to not keep.

There are different types of cores, as such in canon. You can have mixed cores or normal cores. Depends on your powers and your color is based off of your alignment and core.

Ghostly obsessions is what raw emotion effected the ghost. They could have had this obsession all their life, like Box Ghost loving boxes, or having to surround their death, like Danny's being protection. They are compelled by their obsession. They must follow it and are obsessed. They can be normal sometimes, but it's only when their obsession is not being challenged. That is your very being because it fuels your core with that very emotion and can give you powers.

Your ghostly tied item/ghost item is what you are tied to in the real world and you are tethered to. If it is destroyed, you are forced to move on. It isn't like the core, as that is the heart/soul. This is more like a leash that allows them to be connected to the human world and not just the Ghost Zone. Some ghosts don't know what it is or where it is. But Johnny 13 has his bike, Pandora's is her box. Danny's is a rocket replica because his parents gave it to him and he protects it. But some of them simply don't know where it is and don't care. Some have things that were buried with them or clothing they loved. They're still around because someone just hasn't destroyed or found it yet.

A blob's ghost item could be a collar or favorite toy if it was a pet. Things that are kept as memories.

A ghost haunt applies to a ghost that mainly resides in the human world, like Danny. They own that area and it is theirs. They usually do not have a lair in the Ghost Zone because they're the same thing, but on the human plane. But ghosts tend to get aggressive towards other ghosts who enter their haunt, so that's why Danny is a bit aggressive. Especially as he gets older and more in tune with being half ghost.

A ghost lair is simply just the ghost's claimed area in the Ghost Zone. Most have them and blobs and more ghoul looking ones will freely roam since they aren't powerful or "important"/high enough. They will tho, if they have a master to serve, stay with them. Laira are usually guarded and keep territorial ties to their owner, but not as strong as a haunt.

Ghosts with haunts will routinely go back into the Ghost Zone. This is for health, survival instincts, or for other reasons. Portals tend to appear more often in haunts because of this.

Ghosts need ectoplasm to survive. Simple. That's why they go in and out of the Ghost Zone a lot of they're in the human realm

The ecto weapons use ectoplasm and reverse engineers it to harm them. Reverse polarity and all. And the reason why salt/iron/holy water works on them is because it purifies and can control the energy. Plus, since they're based off of emotion, if enough people will it to work it will.

Blood blossoms effect them so well because of this. The salt and iron in the breeding mixed with the pure belief. And at some point someone started to soak the seeds in the reversed ectoplasm. But humans don't know that. They're just hardcore believers.

The Ghost zone is partially sentient. That's how it opens up portals and controls ectoplasmic levels. It is a realm made of ecto energy and ectoplasm in the end, so it makes sense. It was crated because human souls needed a limbo between reincarnation (hell/heaven doesn't actually exist in my version. Just a limbo and a few other realms that will be mentioned later). The Ghost Zone needs a core to keep it all together, and it tends to choose a ghost to be it's core. But it chooses very carefully and can move the core to a new ghost if it senses danger. Self preservation.

The Zone chose Danny because it knew it could trust Danny. Which is why Danny is destined to be inherently the most powerful. And the Ghost Zone can loosely be understood by the ancient ones, like Clockwork and Observers. And now Danny.

Every Ghost can speak Ghost Speak. It is an old language that Latin is based off of loosely. Humans cannot understand it. Some have loosely learned it and have trained to understand it. But it's very difficult since they don't have the right vocal chords. Or... have them. Ghosts don't actually have them.

Ghosts can switch freely between whatever human language they speak and then ghost. While speaking to other ghosts, especially in the Ghost zone, they speak in ghost speak. That's how they all understand each other and not have to learn a new human language. It's quite literally in their brain hardwired. It's the ectoplasm and ghost zone doing it. Plus the Ghost zone likes to slightly give mind them so it needs them to know it.

Death day is when they died. It's normally not that pleasant of a day because they can feel how they died throughout the day. Some relive it as a death echo if they're on the human plane, then some just have flashbacks. Some just relive the pain. Normally they like to be alone. But some will be with others. They are literally reliving their deaths because their energy is all jazzed and upset. It's a horrible reminder.

Death days are treated like sad birthdays. So it'll be a truce for that specific ghost and normally the others will give them things to make them feel better. Like... small gifts or words of encouragement. Or if they know their obsession, something to do with it.

Death echoes are not fun. There are a few ghosts who are always trapped in them and have to be released, those are normally weaker ghosts who don't have enough energy to move to the zone so they're trapped. But the stronger ones will leave an echo of energy at their death; which means that if they're on the human plane when death day comes they will reunite with the echo and be stuck in it until the time of death. They will not be themselves, but the fragment of the bit leading up to their death. A literal ghost of themselves being forced in a loop of their death. Think about yelling down a large tunnel and it echoes forever, except when you go back a year later you're forced to keep doing it until the original one is due at the same time.

The final echo will actually physically effect them as they're let go of the echo (for that year). The effects will disappear. (So for example, Danny for the whole day if he's in Amity Park will be stuck as a translucent almost non sentient, not knowing what's going on around him, replay of the Accident. Whoever is there will watch it happen again and again, but only him and not the others, until it comes time for his death and he comes out looking burn and electrocuted. Then it'll disappear and he'll be normal. No memory of the day besides the pain of the last one)

The Ghost zone can't really stop the echo unless they're inside the ghost zone. It contains them and protects them, so that's why they will leave their haunts or just go back for the day.

There is actual royalty, which is the Ghost King and and his court. The king can marry and have a queen. There can be ghost queen as rulers if a girl wings the crown. It just so happens the last two/three have been guys. Whoever rule's full title is king/queen ruler then their partner is king/queen consort. There can be two kings or two queens this way, and it's even gender wise. Yippee. Princes/princesses are children and do not actually hold any right to the thrown unless their ruler turns it over or they overthrow. It's a formality and political status out of respect. It barely happens.

The Ghost King is earned by right of conquest. So Danny challenging Pariah Dark and winning meant that he stripped Pariah of his crown and title. Everyone involved could lay claim if Danny does not take the crown and challenge Danny. And if someone does challenge Danny, then the ghosts will be able to access whether or not they actually do have the right or should be allowed.

Vlad actually challenged the right, but most of the ghosts knew Vlad was a bad option and vetoed him before Danny even knew what was going on. Vlad knew exactly what was happening and that's why he wanted to awaken him. He just... didn't plan out the events that unfolded.

But how normally the crowning works is that the crown would return to the Ghost Zone, and the Zone would present it to one of the Ancients. Whoever defeated the previous king will automatically receive title of Prince (which Danny didn't know but the others knew). The Ancient will then send out lesser ghosts or allies of the newly titled Prince to announce their new right. They will be brought to a coronation ceremony where they will accept or decline.

If they accept, they will be bound to the title and they will gain new powers literally and metaphorically. They will gain the King's Keep as a new lair. And they will be diplomatically/politically responsible for the new era

The King's court is mostly appointed with the exception of the higher ranking ghosts. They have a right to be on there.

The Ghost King is what people precieve as Satan/Lucifer/the Devil actually. But in the sake of continuity, they're just summoning the Ghost King by that name. Y'know. Only the religious folk call him by religious titles. Same dude.

This ties into the fact that the Ghost King and other ghosts can be summoned. Anything having to do with king/Satan/devil summonings the Ghost Zone will literally route to the Ghost King. Most "powerful ghost/demon" ones will more than likely be a powerful ghost, but the ghost zone will put the king in there also. If someone isn't specific in the summoning, they'll get someone with a related obsession to their goal or just a lower level generic ghost (probably a ghoul like one).

Which means Danny will be summoned from time to time. He can easily get back since it's a portal that can't be seen besides the summoned. Silly stuff tbh. People don't do it too much, but it's often enough to make him have a system for it.

Half Ghosts only have two natural cases and one unnatural. Dani isn't considered a true half ghost by the ghosts since she is a clone. They don't see her as anything other than a clone of Danny who is now her own person. They treat Danny and Vlad the same.

The term Halfa is the term for being half ghost, and most ghosts don't necessarily mean it in a mean way since it's just their slang term for half ghost. But some do use it in a mean way (the ones who don't like humans and hate the idea that two powerful ghosts are half human. Some ghosts are just dicks and use the term blob in the same way)

Since Danny doesn't talk about half ghosts to other ghosts a lot, he doesn't use the term. Sam and Tucker were confused when he first said it and looked a bit concerned. He explained what it means and they just nodded slowly. His friends personally don't like it, but just don't use it unless talking to ghosts.

A lot of the more powerful ghosts don't like it when the humans call them anything besides ghost or ectos, especially when they're called ghoulies. When they're called ghoulies they see it as being deemed the same as lower powered and they get offended.

Don't ask a ghost how they died. You don't need to ask exactly what their obsession is; if you can figure it out you can be like "oh this is it." But asking directly is a bit weird and rude. And don't ask them directly what their ghostly tied item is. Usually it's personal. C'mon guys. You wouldn't ask someone their deepest personal trauma. Why would you do that to them??

Also, it should be obvious that not all ghosts are evil. But a lot of them are just mean spirited or the emotions that made them aren't nice so they just... yeah. They can be good and nice people obviously. They just don't tend to be all the time

Also, Christmas truce came from three kings ago. Pariah Dark's full reign when he wasn't locked up caused a pause, but when he was locked up it continued.

Other

There's other realms, like the dream realm and the area outside of time that Clockwork lives in.

The Observers also live in the area outside of time, but do follow the main continuity of time. They do not care about the other continuities or timelines. The timelines exist but aren't the main one, so they don't really matter. Just branches that fizzle out after a bit. The Observers' job, along with Clockwork, is to protect the main one. Think kinda like TVA except like... you obey a realm and not some man playing god. And they don't just cut off the timelines. They just redirect the main one and let the others naturally fizzle out

There are Ghosts of __, like how we have the ghost of time and dreams. They're powerful and are important for the Infinite Realms to exist. Clockwork knows where to find them if needed, as he is one. Nocturn is kinda just an asshole and Clockwork keeps him in check. He knew Nocturn wouldn't win so he let the guy have his fun and then kinda reprimanded him on the side

Dan also exists outside of time now. Clockwork lets him outside the thermos sometimes and has put a blocker on his powers so he can't use them. Dan says it's inhumane and Clockwork hits him with a "maybe don't kill a ton of people and ruin the timeline. Ever thought of that?" (Obviously not exact words). It works. Dan is just glad to be out of that thermos.

Dan also really wants to meet Dani. Clockwork shows her story to him, and even though Dan doesn't have his human side he is interested in her and want to know more.

I just really want Dan to eventually get some humanity back and Clockwork is a manipulative ass, so he would use Dani as a tactic.

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