Chapter Text
When Skulker woke up, every single part of him was numb aside from his head, which throbbed in pure agony. The event that preceded his blackout was a mystery to him, but whatever it was, it must have damaged his suit's pain receptors. Dazed and disoriented, he took in his surroundings. It was a large lab; one he had visited several times in the past, albeit a lot greener than he remembered. It didn't take long for him to register that this was because he was submerged in a glass tank filled with highly-concentrated ectoplasm.
He was about to let the fatigue take over and drift off back to sleep, but was suddenly alerted by a loud voice, one that wasn’t exactly the most comforting to wake up to when you had symptoms of head trauma.
“Excellent! You’re awake at last!”
The upgraded form of Nicolai Technus stood proudly before him with a cunning smile on his face. Skulker groggily blinked and grunted.
“What’s going on? Why am I-” He stopped when he heard his own voice, his real voice. Thanks to him floating at eye level with the other much taller ghost, Skulker hadn’t registered that his true form was on full display. Looking down at himself, he saw that his small green body was covered in bruises and deep gashes. He could faintly spot globs of his own ectoplasm out of the corner of his eye that hadn't reconstituted properly onto the rest of his body.
“Give me back my suit!” he demanded.
“Is that any way to talk to your rescuer?” Technus replied, putting his hands on his hips and raising an eyebrow.
Skulker slapped both of his hands against the glass, not in the mood for banter.
“DO IT!”
“Very well.”
Technus snapped his fingers. Pieces of broken machinery with exposed wiring and circuitry and shreds of black and camo fabric were summoned and hovered in the air. Skulker was about to protest Technus's apparent dillydallying by showing him a bunch of garbage, until he found himself gazing into the hollow eyes of his disembodied metal head. The realisation shut him up immediately.
“This is everything I could recover from the scene,” Technus explained. He walked over to a piece of the suit’s upper torso with a hole ripped into the chest cavity, examined it closely and stroked his chin. “Such calculated damage! The ghost child must have thrown everything at you for you to destabilise like that.”
Skulker's memories of recent events began to come back to him. The ghost child...no. He had matured past that moniker. Barring the new features he’d suddenly acquired a few years back, he was quickly growing into a muscular adult build and even spoke differently now. If it weren’t for the logo emblazoned on his chest, one could be forgiven for mistaking him as a brand new ghost.
This only made him more desirable as a target for Skulker. Phantom’s newly formed brutality made him more akin to the prehistoric behemoths in his collection; those he had no other option but to cage due to their power and resilience making them impossible to skin. However, it was chasing this thrill without regarding the worst that proved to be his undoing.
“You have the capacity to give me my voice box back, don’t you?”
The technopath huffed, waved over Skulker’s empty head and rooted around in it. If Technus catered to his insecurities as well as his wounds, then maybe he’d eventually listen to what he had to say. He floated the small device out and melded it to the speaker at the base of the tank. Skulker cleared his throat to test if it worked.
“Better,” he said, hearing his regular baritone and feeling somewhat like his old self again. He then pointed to the pieces of his shredded exoskeleton. “This is no grave matter. As soon as I am healed, I’ll have it rebuilt in less than a week!”
“Eh. Not likely.”
“Hmm?”
Technus pushed a button on one of the many consoles present in his lab and a large holographic display switched on. It showed a live camera feed of his island, or rather what remained of it. It was as if a typhoon had struck it. The terrain was thoroughly torn up, trees were uprooted, and his skull-shaped lair had a gigantic chunk blasted off of its rocky cranium.
“Even if you could leave that tank without vanishing from existence, you’ll need to rebuild far more than your suit.”
Skulker’s eyes widened in horror at the state of his lair. How long was he out for? How much of his menagerie had escaped due to the destruction? And most importantly...
“Why did you save me?” Skulker asked. Technus turned his back to him and wandered over to another interface, one that seemed to be monitoring Skulker’s vital signs.
“I was merely in the right place at the right time. You’re lucky you weren’t in the living world, or I never would have found you!”
Perhaps it was because he had been unconscious for an undefined amount of time, but the statement puzzled Skulker. Surely it would be easier to navigate one town than an entire dimension, wouldn’t it? Then it hit him, and he scowled.
“Now I understand. You can’t travel to the human world to steal their latest technology as much as you please any more, so you’ve started digging for scraps in the Ghost Zone!”
The other ghost became uncharacteristically silent and stopped tapping buttons at the accusation. That was all Skulker needed to confirm he was right. He angrily banged on the glass again.
“Scavenger! Thief! ” For a split second, his outstretched hands flickered and momentarily disappeared. Skulker gasped and withdrew them, staring down his palms in shock. Technus whipped around to face him again after a spike in Skulker's levels showed up on the display.
“Careful now,” He warned, walking back towards the tank. “Exerting yourself like that won’t help you recover.”
This sensation was scarily familiar to Skulker, and spurred him to recall the humiliating defeat he had suffered earlier on. After obliterating his suit and ripping him out of it to maim him further, Phantom had him in a vice-like grip, squeezing him so tightly that his black glove was stained neon green. His vision went blurry in a strange way similar to his hands just had, like it was dissolving into static. It caused Phantom to show a rare glimmer of genuine surprise before settling back into his devious smirk.
“Ah, ah, ah. You don’t want to fade away before you get your prize half-human half-ghost catch now, do you?” he’d taunted the small ghost, holding him up close to his face. “Hate to break it to you, but that human half is long gone. You never would have won, even if you did capture me.” Pulling back his free hand, he had charged up an intense amount of energy into his palm.
“Since you’re already done for, I might as well speed up the process.”
That was the final thing he remembered hearing before blacking out and waking up in the lab. What a disaster. Now he was in a state where even the healing atmosphere of the Ghost Zone couldn’t save him from fading into nothingness.
“My question still stands,” Skulker said in a more subdued manner. “Why did you save me?”
“Because I would like to make a proposal.” Technus began to pace around the room. “You above all others must have noticed how powerful the whelp has become; how he’s changed.”
Skulker didn’t require any complex sensors to detect all that anger, ferocity, sadism and the slightest hint of grief that radiated off of Phantom.
“He has laid siege to the human and ghost worlds, and made all our afterlives a misery! Obviously, the power of one ghost will not be enough to defeat him in his present state. Which is why I have devised this. Behold!”
A paper scroll materialised in his hand. Technus unrolled it and excitedly held it up to the glass for Skulker to see.
It was difficult to make out at first from the green tint obscuring his eyes, but once they adjusted, he saw that it was a highly detailed blueprint for what appeared to be a fusion of his own battle suit and one of Technus’s mechs.
“‘Skulktech 1.0’,” Skulker read aloud from the big, bold text printed on the bottom of the page. He looked up at the other ghost. “You’ve been planning this for a while?” Considering how Technus usually constructed these things on the fly with whatever electronics were within the vicinity, Skulker found the feat impressive. Technus, however, took mild offense at the comment.
“Well, I would have spent longer on it if it weren’t for your latest stunt!” He flicked the glass sharply with his index finger, and Skulker clutched his head in pain at the loud ring it produced on the inside.
"Ah! Don't do that!"
“With my mastery of technology and your expertise in hunting combined,” Technus continued, “we would be a truly formidable match to that monster! And to prove this isn’t some kind of double cross, I will let you have joint input on all of its construction and future upgrades.”
Skulker looked over the schematics once again. From the proposed list of built-in weaponry and the overall design, it was everything he could want from an upgraded battle suit. Upon review of a few additional features - a window in the torso for Technus to see through, and a system of tubes that pumped concentrated ectoplasm to help Skulker stay stable - certain implications started sinking in for him. They weren't merging forms and losing their wills as individuals at all, but if they went through with this, Technus was still willing to sacrifice some of his bodily autonomy to keep Skulker from disappearing completely. Despite making his motivations clear, the hunter wasn’t sure if Technus knew how compassionate this gesture came off as. He was hard to read that way.
“Whaddya say?”
With his only alternative being to wallow in a tank of ooze for the rest of eternity, this was a no-brainer for Skulker. He couldn’t resist the opportunity to get revenge on Phantom for his close encounter with oblivion, and the portmanteau of their names was sounding more and more natural to him with each repetition in his mind.
“Deal," Skulker said with a menacing grin, furrowing his dark eyebrows. "Let’s make the brat wish he had never been born.” Technus grinned in kind. This was going to be the beginning of a beautiful partnership.