#buttercup and bubbles die in human form in the explosion along with their dad robin and miss keane (who is a high school teacher here)

[inamindfarfaraway]

The Phantomphase Girls

The Danny Phantom crossover AU of The Powerpuff Girls that nobody asked for but has taken over my mind.

The city of Townsville is home to the fantastically brilliant inventor Professor Utonium, who is working on his magnum opus, a portal to the Ghost Zone. Most believe ghosts and their home dimension to be nothing more than folklore, but the Professor knows they’re real and sees great potential to improve the world in the properties of ectoplasm and the technology it makes possible. Also, he believes in that scientific ideal of knowledge being valuable for the sake of it.

His fourteen-year-old adopted fraternal triplets Blossom, Buttercup and Bubbles (that’s their birth order, meaning that’s the order they go in) have lived with him since they were infants. They’re accustomed to his eccentric inventions and helping him out in the lab. Therefore when the ghost portal seems to be a dud, Buttercup thinks little of daring Bubbles to enter it. Bubbles is too nervous and agrees only if her sisters accompany her. Blossom, eagerly examining their father’s most ambitious construction, accidentally hits a backup activation switch. The girls are killed changed by the portal ripping open through them - an agonizing experience that each will blame themselves for. They discover upon waking that they’re half-ghost, ectoplasm bonded to their DNA giving them ghostly forms and superpowers; meanwhile, the portal’s opening has unleashed many malevolent members of the Ghost Zone into their city. Well, the Professor raised them to be kind, altruistic and responsible. They know what they have to do. They have to stop all the ghosts that are coming through! They’re here to fight for me and you! And so, Townsville’s days are to be saved… thanks to the Phantomphase Girls!

Like in their original show, the girls don’t bother having secret identities. Everyone in Townsville knows they’re the local superheroes, as they can’t control their powers at first and quickly attract attention. This removes a lot of secret-keeping drama and allows their dad, teachers, classmates and all others that they interact with to take into account that they hold very demanding unpaid jobs out of the goodness of their hearts, but of course villains sometimes target the Professor and their friends. The girls wear light pink/green/blue, their respective ghost energy colours, with black and even less white accents. Their ghost forms wear their civilian outfits with the main colour and black inverted and the white turned silver, and their hair is white. Robin Snyder, their best friend and biggest fan, later prints their official logo, a swirling heart-shaped ghost portal, onto each of their tops in black with pink/green/blue swirls while they’re human.

Blossom has an ice core. It manifests passively as detecting the paranormal chill of nearby ghosts. She’s keen to scientifically determine the exact nature and capabilities of her ghost form, sharing the Professor’s intellectual drive, and masters her active cryokinesis pretty early on. Her eyes are uniquely affected, turning from brown to pink and glowing blue when using her ice powers. The team leader, she prefers to observe and analyze situations (so the eye thing suits her symbolically) and thoroughly plan before doing field work. She also understands the Professor’s ghost energy-related technology designed to aid their crusade against the dangerous ghosts and exploration of the Ghost Zone the best of the triplets and uses it the most frequently and effectively. Her main flaws are overconfidence and overachieving - she sets herself lofty goals and high expectations in both her civilian and superhero lives, wanting to do it all and grow up too fast, then brittly snapping when things don’t go perfectly.

Buttercup has an earth core. It manifests passively as her ectoplasmic body being naturally hard and firm as solid rock. This increases her strength and makes her the team’s heaviest hitter, a role she likes just fine with her aggression and love of adrenaline. It takes her the longest to gain her active elemental power, geokinesis, because she simply doesn’t consider the complications it adds to her straightforward fighting style necessary, and it requires the cocky, impatient girl to acknowledge her immediate powers aren’t always sufficient, wait and think about how to use her environment. Ordinary life has been boring her for years. So she finds true purpose and fulfilment in being a superhero - improving herself and helping people through her own merits and endless challenge - at the cost of letting her struggling grades and social life slip even further. Relating to her peers has never been easy for her, unlike her sisters, and now she feels still more isolated.

Bubbles has an air core. It manifests passively as super hearing, due to detecting sound waves in the air within a large radius; from there she learns to actively amplify sound waves in a new power, the ghostly wail, during a crisis and subsequently unlocks proper aerokinesis. Her blue hair scrunchies are transformed into translucent, faintly luminous rings of blue ectoplasm. Her pigtails are constantly blown upward by her ‘inner wind’ that doesn’t affect anything else. When she pushes her command of air to the limit, this inner wind dissipates her hair ties (which reassemble once she’s done) and fiercely whips her loosened hair. She definitely isn’t unwilling to use violence, but prefers to resolve problems diplomatically and keeps trying to befriend their enemies. She can be immature for her age, naive and overly trusting, and weak-willed in that occasionally she would rather maintain an unhappy or unhealthy peace than upset and argue with people.

Dick Hardly plays the role of Vlad Masters. University ‘friend’ of the girls’ father grown into a ruthless, heartless CEO? Objectifies the girls and wants to possess them for selfish reasons to the point of cloning them? Captures and tortures them to extract a particular aspect of their biology that will enable him to continue his cloning? Light hair in a ponytail? Come on! He’s a fire core half-ghost like Vlad, having taken a blast from a prototype ghost portal he and the Professor (read: the Professor with him taking the credit) built in university.

Mojo Jojo, Sedusa, Fuzzy Lumpkins, the Gangreen Gang, etc. and the generic monsters of the week are ghosts, either dead human souls or conceptual constructs and fauna of the Ghost Zone.

HIM is the oldest such Ghost Zone native, a primordial embodiment of evil. He rules a dark realm full of malicious spirits. And these three upstart little halfas who repel his minions and beat his twisted games… interest him. Basically, imagine if Pariah Dark was conscious and free in the Ghost Zone from the beginning of Danny Phantom. Yeah. Just be glad he’s mainly content to be a villain indirectly.

Princess Morbucks is the richest kid in Townsville and the haughty, spoiled rotten queen bee at Townsville High School. She’s consumed with envy toward the sisters’ fame and admiration by everyone and in her debut episode “Stuck Up, Up, and Away” has her father’s employees provide her with flashy imitation ecto-tech to attempt to earn a place on their team. They reject her for her lack of powers, but more importantly her lack of moral principles. Enraged, she decides that if she can’t join them, she’ll beat them. She becomes a rival ghost fighter and recurring antagonist bent on upstaging them. It would be easy to leave her the static character she is in canon. However, I can envision a slow burn redemption arc because although it’s based in spite and her massive ego, this Princess actually does good deeds. Protecting citizens, saving lives, being praised and respected for her deeds rather than her heritage or material possessions… feel weirdly good, given time. Between that and the greater threats of Mojo Jojo and HIM forcing her to cooperate with the PPG, she remains vain and petulant but gradually acquires moral restraint and compassion and becomes an antihero.

Brick, Butch and Boomer are unstable prototype clones of the PPG Dick creates in the episode “Kindred Spirits” (they aren’t younger like Danielle is). The plot goes similarly to Danny and Danielle’s plot there. Bubbles is willing to put their mysterious origins aside to make them comfortable, Blossom wants to believe they’re trustworthy but prioritizes answers and Buttercup doesn’t trust them at all. After they betray the girls and yet earn their sympathy for having Dick Hardly as a father, the boys’ loyalty is torn. They believe Dick loves them and his desires are inherently right, but he orders them to hurt the first people to treat them like people. The girls urge them to see that Dick will kill them once he no longer needs them. Despite hesitation, the boys cannot accept that. Meanwhile, the Professor notices his daughters are missing and tracks them to Dick’s lab. In the climax Dick has the PPG in containment chambers so he can sample their mid-transformation DNA to stabilize his perfect clones - who the boys are wrongly informed are them - and Professor Utonium breaks in to rescue the girls. His care and concern show the boys what true fatherly love is. At last they side against Dick and work together with the girls to defeat Dick and destroy the lab. The exertion is tragically too much for their molecular instability and they explode à la Bunny Utonium, leaving the technically victorious girls mourning their new friends. The guilt this causes them haunts them afterward, though the Professor assures them it wasn’t their fault.

In “The Boys Are Back in Town” a few months later, it’s revealed that HIM has resurrected the brothers to be his tools. He’s not only stabilized them, but altered their personalities to make them more instinctively cruel and sadistic and their cores to contrast and counter the PPG’s. Now Brick has a fire core and red ghostly eyes and ghost energy; Butch has a metal core (earth and metal are separate elements in Chinese tradition!) and his ghost body the tensile strength of ductile steel, rendering Buttercup’s ‘brute force at the problem until it stops being a problem’ strategy useless and forcing her to finally get the hang of her geokinesis; and Boomer has an electric core and his previously smooth hair spiky with static. And they have a collective title: the Rowdyraze Boys. Their logo is a red/green/blue and black ghost portal like the girls’, but shaped like a skull. Blaming the PPG for not stabilizing them and lashing out due to all their unprocessed trauma, they enthusiastically battle the girls, threaten people, wreck property and carry out HIM’s plans. The girls are as horrified as you’d expect. They, Bubbles most persistently, repeatedly reach out in friendship. The boys slowly recognize that they’re ensnared in another abusive parental relationship and take a stand against HIM. Trusting the girls again is a big step they aren’t ready for, so they travel the world to experience total freedom and pin down their own identities. Two years later they return to Townsville in peace and Sara Bellum adopts them.

@people_able_and_willing_to_make_fanart_of_this_please