Summonings
Ever since Danny Phantom became the Ghost King, he’s had to deal with an endless amount of crap. An eternity of it, actually, and it was constantly causing him unending amount of existential crises and stress.
First, there was the paperwork. Pariah Dark, the incompetent asshole, had left him decades worth of bureaucracy to painfully sift through. He ended up hiring some ghosts with paperwork obsessions to sort some of that out. Who knew ruling the infinite realms would require this much paperwork? He’s lucky each section of the underworld had their own systems to report to their own rulers who, in turn, report to him.
Secondly, there were the Observers. And other ghosts, like his own rogues, but they were the main issues. Eyeball menaces. They protested his appointment, something he actually agreed with. Putting a fifteen year old on the throne is rarely a smart decision. But the Infinite Realm values strength, the only type of currency that matters in the land of the gods and the dead. Danny? Phantom? He’s got strength in spades. With only a few months of being a ghost, Danny had managed to defeat Pariah Dark, who had cowered gods and struck fear into the hearts of ghost heroes.
But Danny hasn’t quite realized the significance of that yet, too focused on the realization that he was about to be in charge of the infinite realms. The Observants, since his reluctant and extremely limited coronation, has been up his ass about doing things the “proper way.”
Danny’s main problem lies with the ridiculous amount of paperwork though. It’s fine. Tedious. But fine.
But if he gets one more fifteen page essay style complaint form about some guy named Constantine, Danny might seriously reconsider donning Dan’s ruthlessness and offing the guy himself. Perhaps grab the man by his shoulders and shake him like a rag doll and ask who the fuck told him it was a good idea to sell his soul out like that? Danny eventually just sent out Skulker to hunt down the contracts and trade minor services for them. He owns most of the soul now, and perhaps he’ll hunt this guy down and force him to do paperwork.
Regardless, paperwork was just often tedious. He’s worked out a system for himself. The halfa, true to his teenage form, had better things to be doing. His homework, for one. Hanging out with his friends and logging in hours for Doomed 2 would be another. But no, he’s here, twirling a pen as he glared down at a stack of forms for a zone expansion. What the fuck does Zeus want to expand his zone for? The current share space of the sky domain is literally a perfect balance with respect towards the other gods. For the love of- Danny slams down a red ‘REJECTED’ stamp on top of the stack. His hair flickers wildly in annoyance, the iced over Crown floating above his head emitting concerning levels of frost. To anyone else but himself, of course.
He then feels a soft tug on his core.
Right. The third most annoying thing about becoming King: the fucking summoning. Danny taps his pen against his lips, clicking it against his fangs, as he considers the summoning circle that calls him. Huh. Desperation. Mildly bloody. Fear. Resignation- ah, fuck it, it’s not like he’s too enthusiastic about staying to do work with the Observers poking around. He takes the summoning, allowing his regalia to overtake his normal hazmat-clad form, and approves the summoning.
Oh hey, Danny thinks he recognizes that ugly ass trenchcoat.
—-
John Constantine has had more than enough practice summoning things that would give people nightmares. But there are things he normally refuses to touch, refuses to even entertain the idea of trying. As usual, desperation made John its bitch and the Justice League’s battered and bruised faces tugged on his shriveled heart.
He’s going to summon something from the Infinite Realms. Oh, but he wasn’t just summoning any old ghost. No, he thought, I’m just going to summon the one being that’s guaranteed to be able to crush our universe without breaking a sweat. Bollocks.
“Is it ready?”
“Untwist your pants, spooky,” John snaps, wishing he had a crate of whiskey he could down. “We’re trying to summon the Ghost King, not your average demon.”
“What do we know about him?” Batman’s gravelly voice demanded.
“Powerful enough to take us all out without even breaking a sweat. Defeated the bloody tyrant who ruled over the Realms last I heard.”
“That’s it?”
“You could ask Deadman, but I heard he’s on the outs with the Infinite Realms on the fact that he’s made of pure magic, not ectoplasm.”
“There’s no guarantee the king will work with us.” Zatanna says, pressing her fingertips together tiredly. She had been at the forefront of the battle and had paid the price for it. “But he’s supposedly more benevolent than his predecessor… and we’re out of options.”
“Hm.”
“Just make sure to shut up and let me do the talking.”
“Hn.”
John rolls his eyes and takes a fortifying breath, something that does not go unnoticed by the League. They all tense up, preparing themselves for a battle. Another one, seeing as they all got their ass kicked by a ghost only ten hours ago. The League is spread thin, running interference to distract the ghost in question and evacuating civilians.
John Constantine started chanting, the glow of his magic lighting up the circle as he spills his blood into the circle.
He waits, heart in his throat, for the summoning to work.
“Is it supposed to take-” Red Robin asks, only to cut himself off as the circle flares once more. Power pulsates outwards from the circle. Frost crackles on the frost resistant floors, spreading outwards as a green portal rips open the fabric of time and space. Long, spindly imitations of a hand grabs the edges of space and pulls, heaving the rest of his celestial body out of the tear in reality. John does not look away. He can not look away, not from the eerie green pallor of the King, not from his torrential white wisps of hair, not from the black-hole like material of his outfit, not from the nebulas and beginnings and endings tailored onto the King’s cape. John could not look away from the ice crown that floated like a bastion of power above the king’s head.
His mouth is dry. What price will he have to pay to save the world? What price will this being demand of him, of the Justice League, to save the world?
John desperately needs that drink.
—-
Oh! He’s in his home dimension! His core purrs at coming home, at the close proximity to his first haunt.
He was expecting cultists, or even the Winchesters again, but this is nice.
The Justice League- summoning him. Sam and Tucker are going to flip when they hear about this.
They’ve been staring at him in silence for a bit now. It was getting awkward.
“Why have you summoned me?” He asks, softening his tone. By their winces, he didn’t get it as well as he thought. Danny grimaces. At the first sign of discomfort though, the man in the trenchcoat- is that fucking Constantine?!- launches into a nerve filled tirade.
“Your, uh, Majesty.” He starts. “One of… One of your subjects is wreaking havoc on the world. We would be extremely grateful if… if you could reign him in?”
Danny’s face sours, only to quickly clear his expression as he realized how much even a small hint of displeasure causes the jumpiness in Constantine and the others.
“To do that, I will have to make a contract with you, seeing as you’ve summoned me.” Danny drawls, letting his overly long digits wave at the summoning circle in question. He could break it, of course, but Danny’s bored and trying to draw this out. He’s not saying he’d take a batch of cookies as payment but that’s exactly what he’s saying.
“The price… you could always have my soul?”
Danny pauses. “Your… soul?”
Oh, he did not say what he just said.
“Yes. My soul.”
Oh, he did.
Fuck it. Danny’s flashbacks of suffering through the reports pushes green into his irises and urgency to his action.
He breaks out of the circle, hands lunging and gripping Constantine’s jaw tightly. Danny ignores the shouts of alarm as he allows the thrown weapons to pass through him.
John Constantine is panicking now, struggling in the air as Danny lifts him an inch off the floor in agitation.
Good.
“Your soul, little wizard? The one you’ve split eight ways till the thirtieth of February? The one that caused,” he tightens his grip, no doubt bruising the man. “An insane amount of paperwork that I’ve had to suffer through. Your soul, John Constantine?”
Danny hisses his name. The man makes a warbling noise that Danny takes as acknowledgement. Danny bats away the weak spell Zatanna sends at him with a hand.
“You’ll find that I am in the possession of most of your soul contracts. To simply put,” he grins, teeth made of dying stars on display. “I own your soul. My soul, now.”
He drops the wizard who collapses onto his knees to stare up at him in horror, eyes flicking between the circle that was meant to contain him and Danny, who is very much not contained. He crouches down- something necessary but disjointed as he’s not used to this taller form- and speaks to Constantine in a slow, dead serious, drawl.
“If you ever sell your soul again, you and I are going to have issues. Is that clear, John Constantine?”
“Uh- yeah, yes, yes, your majesty.”
Patting his cheek condescendingly, Danny gets up and sighs, stress relieved. He’s starting to feel bad, though, so he allows his form to ripple back to his normal teenage Phantom self.
“Well, it’s not like anyone will buy it, since they know they’ll have to go against me.” He chirps, flipping 180 from his terror inducing eldritch voice. “So, what’ll you pay me to get rid of whatever ghost you’ve got?”
“…. Nothing?”
Red Robin holds out a bag, eyebags betraying his exhaustion. “I’ve got fifty dollars and a bag of cookies.”
Phantom beams at him. “Throw in a couple of autographs and you’ve got a deal.”
“That’s- yeah, okay.” Red Robin says, inching forward cautiously to hand him the bag.
“Great. I’ll be back for them later. You can call me Phantom. ‘Your Majesty’ gets annoying after a while.”
“Thank- thank you for your mercy, Your- Phantom.” Wonder Woman says.
“Sure. Make sure this idiot doesn’t make any more deals with demons while I’m out, yeah?”
With that, Danny Phantom grabs the bag of cookies and fifty dollars and flies through the wall to do his job.
John slams his head onto the space station floor.
“Fuck.”
—-
Danny: lol I’ll do it for the shits and giggles
Constantine and the League: he’s terrifying, a bastion of pure power and authority
Red Robin, Young “we commit war crimes bc it gets shit done” Justice leader and fellow gremlin: he’d probably do it for cookies. I would.
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i reread all of chobits recently as insp for my next TT book and every time i think about some aspect of it all i want to do is rip it open and tear it apart and go "why?". it brings up so many concepts and scenarios within the premise of "what if computers looked like pretty girls" but it doesn't want to commit to saying anything about it or take its own world seriously.
i have a lot to say about chobits. arguably i have more to say about chobits than even chobits wants to say about chobits.
chobits is about sex except it isn't about sex at all. chi's power switch is in her vagina. we're shown images of chi doing sexy things, she gets tricked into doing a strip tease, and two separate men try to finger her and she does her Do Not Touch Me There magic powers thing, and we eventually learn every time she resets from the power button, her memories are erased, so you can't have sex with her without deleting her.
but we never unpack why her reset button is in her vagina, or why it's so important that nobody can ever touch her, or why people's personal computers were built with vaginas in the first place (we never have it confirmed that all persocoms have them, but that two separate men try to touch her there imply it's expected). why do the personal computers shaped like women have vaginas if not to fuck them. as a product, it is expected that you will fuck them*.
*i assume, because the comic never says so!
the man who invented persocoms is the same person who built chi and her sister, and he built them to be daughters for his wife. he put the reset button in chi's vagina. we never find out why. we never get a HINT of why. he built the chobits so they could feel and fall in love, but also built them so they could never fuck. you can extrapolate a reason why a man might build his daughter-androids that way, but the series itself never touches it, and never makes any sort of point about it. it's just presented as an immutable fact that chi can't fuck without it deleting her, as if it was born of happenstance and not a person's choice.
what does that actually say about anything? what is it trying to say about sex? is it about the commodification of female bodies, how once they're used up sexually they're worthless? that if you can't love somebody without fucking them, what good is your love? that love without sex is okay (but also a huge burden and sacrifice a man must accept for the sake of someone else's happiness?)
what does it want to say! chobits is about sex, but it doesn't want to commit to any specific message about sex.
and that's just ONE issue i have with it. there are so many things chobits wants to be about but won't say anything about. it wants to be about the persocoms replacing human connections, we constantly get told 'gee people hang out with persocoms a lot', chitose publishes a whole inexplicable book series about people preferring persocomes to humans. it's to the degree that a prominent character's husband gets So wrapped up in (presumably) fucking his android that he locks his actual wife out of the house, having just straight up forgotten she exists. we don't have anything to say about it though. she falls in love with a new man. the people who hang out with their persocoms too much are all background characters in crowds. we never look at how the rise in persocoms has affected society as a whole.
it wants to be about grief, in the story about the man who marries a persocom and has to watch her slowly degrade until she can't remember him anymore, or the kid whose older sister died and he tried to replace her with a persocom who he dresses up/treats as a maid and lives alone with despite being omega orphaned and 11 years old. but then it's fine. the man who married a persocom gets in a relationship with a high school girl 20 years younger than him (CLAMP!). it's fine! the boy who tried to replace his older sister just accepts that the persocom replacement won't replace her. still treats/dresses her up like a maid and lives alone. is she his legal guardian. i don't know. don't worry about it.
and it wants to be about women, because everything about the story is about women, all the persocoms are women, all the tragedies are wrapped up in the death of a woman, or a woman's heartbreak, or a woman's feelings. but it has fucking nothing to say about women beside look how pretty they are. my boobs are E cup, sempai :) teehee
it makes me insane.
friend @amphiaria put it best as "Unfortunately the story is uninterested in itself" and i can never forgive it for being so aesthetically good, giving us the best design for an android (the ear things are Perfect) and then being So Fucking Bad.
in conclusion:
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