Oneshots, etc.

Ghastly Phantoms AU

A/N: I had a friend of mine (Number1miraculousfan, I would say go read his stuff if you like Legend of Zelda angst, but he kinda deleted most of it) give me a basic AU concept to write, and word-for-word, typos included, this is what he gave me: "EVERYONE IS A SPIRIT EXCEPT FOR ONE GUY. HE CQN SEE THEM, BUT NO ONE CAN SEE HIM. MO ONE." I'll be honest, I don't know what that last part means.

Anyway, this is the result. It's a perfect example of how quickly things escalate in my brain.

Warning: Gore, body horror, death, and, once again, the literal apocalypse.

Seriously, heed the warnings for this one. There's some pretty graphic descriptions.

Ritchie hissed in annoyance as his shirt caught on a rusted nail for the fourth time in the past minute. Abandoned buildings were annoying to raid to begin with, but this one seemed especially set on giving him tetanus.

An echoey, gurgling laugh came from behind him, and he sighed.

"Hi, Lucas." He turned around to see the ghost floating upside down in the ceiling right next to his shoulder. Lucas smiled - a little too wide, but not nearly as far as some of the others - as water ran from his eyes, mouth and nostrils, defying gravity by dripping onto the cracked plaster above.

"This place is going to collapse soon." He chuckled, rising back through the roof and onto the floor above.

"Greeeeat." Ritchie drawled, wondering idly what the others were doing if the'd managed to interact with the world enough to destroy a block of flats, before remembering he didn't care. It wouldn't do anything to him anyway.

When he finally got the door open without being stabbed, (Why was it covered in nails, anyway? The lock worked just fine.) he found himself in a blood-stained bathroom. He wrinkled his nose at the rotting corpse in the bathtub as he stepped past it, towards the cabinet. Whoever it had been was long gone, so no new ghost would be haunting him this time, thankfully.

The cabinet was empty except for a few bandages, moth eaten and unusable. Ritchie scowled and shut the doors with a click. Nothing useful here. The pipes were too rusted to have any drinkable water, and the knife in the corpse's skull was brittle and old, disgusting to eat with and unusable in a fight. Not that he got into many of those at the moment.

Letting out a long sigh, Ritchie left the dusty apartment and headed up the stairs to where the ghosts were when he left them. Predictably, it was empty.

"MARCO!" He called out into the halls in front of him, and waited for a response. Faintly, he heard a "POLO!" in one of the apartments to the right. He stomped over to it, watching the dust his boots kicked up swirl in the air.

The door was ajar, so he pushed it open and was met with the sight of Kit trying to stuff one of David's detached arms into a vent on one of the walls. David himself seethed quietly in the corner next to Lucas, who appeared to have detached David's lower jaw, and was now waving it around and fiddling with the teeth. Mario was standing next to the doorway with Inmo and Kay, all three of them snickering.

The arm Kit was messing with was missing its hand - which appeared to be nestled contentedly in the plants growing out of Mario's ribcage - but was putting up a good fight as it spread ice along her own arms, putting out the bone-white flames that flickered across her body.

"Why. Just why." Ritchie asked, not expecting a proper answer.

"It's TOO HOT in here! We need the air con to work! But this idiot-" Kit turned to glare at David, who looked very smug for the situation he was in. "-Won't let us!"