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Kwan was having a bad day. Really, just about everyone from Casper High was having a bad day. There had been some kind of mosquito-type thing flying around and literally everyone got bit. Now, the entire school was here in this creepy abandoned hospital just sitting there, waiting.
So, yeah, the whole of Casper High was having a bad day. Kwan would argue his day was going just a little bit worse than everyone else’s.
Basically everyone had ended up with ghost powers and ghost powers they couldn’t control, at that. Kwan had seen Lester float through the floor a while ago and Jazz Fenton had been reduced to a floating head. Both of those things were bad, but at least they were more or less together, mentally at least. Okay, maybe Jazz’s day was almost as bad as Kwan’s.
That didn’t mean that Kwan’s day didn’t suck. He felt like he was going to pieces. He couldn’t focus on anything, which, yeah, was kinda normal if he’d forgotten his meds, but it was different this time. Instead of just constantly going on tangents, his brain felt like it was going in literally eight directions at once. It was… unsettling. Sometimes, Kwan swore that he was actually, physically coming apart at the seams.
If there were any actual nurses around, Kwan would tell them and maybe try and get some kind of medicine or something. But there weren’t any nurses. There weren’t any doctors. There were just students lining the halls with or in sparsely furnished rooms. It was weird, really weird. Kwan felt too sick to actually care.
He was doing breathing exercises to try and keep himself together the first time he saw Danny Fenton. He might have said that literally everyone from Casper High was here, but he hadn’t seen Fenton, er, the younger Fenton. The older was across the hall from him with her head in some kind of tube. If Danny had been here and up to walking around, Kwan would have sworn he’d be near his sister.
“Fenton, you’re in here too?” Kwan asked and stopped concentrating on his breathing exercises.
Before Fenton could respond, Kwan felt that weird coming apart sensation and then he was in two places at once. Literally. He was sure of it. This wasn’t just double vision. There were two Kwans one right next to the other and he was both of them.
Then it was happening again. “Four,” he said, and there were two more Kwans. “Six,” and two more popped up. “Eight,” another two.
“Who do we appreciate?” the Kwans shouted because that was how the chant ended and he needed to be done multiplying.
“Us! Us!” he shouted in response because you had to actually respond to finish the thing and self love was important.
He smiled and looked at himself. Himselves. There were eight of him and he was all of them and all of them were him. It was too much. He needed to get away.
“Ah! Run for our lives!” the Kwans shouted. He kept running even as his perspective grew more divergent. It freaked him, all of him, out so he kept running more. He was in eight different places at once seeing everything in eight different directions. It was too much. Kwan kept running.
It only took a few minutes for Kwan to stop running. Afterall, running from yourself almost never worked and he was starting to get dizzy from seeing eight different things at once anyway. It took a lot longer to find himself again.
Part of it was the dizziness. Kwan had never been good at doing two things at once, eight things at once was nearing impossible. Also, his mind was starting to splinter under the weight of controlling eight separate bodies in eight separate locations. He hoped that meeting up with himself would help, but it was impossible to tell. And, there were still no doctors or nurses around to ask!
After getting turned around and forgetting where he was far too many times, Kwan finally got back to where he started. He’d ended up needing to close the eyes of seven of his bodies and walk back with the eighth one, but, hey, it had worked. He was back where he had started next to Jazz Fenton’s embodied head. Also, it looked like Dash had been moved to a room nearby with a TV so that was nice.
Unfortunately, being together in one space wasn’t making the mind-splintering perspective shift any better. It may have actually been making it worse. He kept finding himself zoning out and forgetting that he was part of a larger whole and the identical people next to him were in fact him. His brain hurt.
At least he could be his own football team now! That would be awesome! He just needed three more Kwans and, nope, he was already in enough pieces. It was good enough that he could both throw and catch the winning pass! Maybe if he closed his eyes, all of them, and thought football thoughts long enough the mind-shattering identity crisis he was having would go away!
And really, Kwan tried to do that and he did pretty well all things considered. He thought football thoughts through Dash’s commentary on the TV show. He thought football thoughts through Sam Manson crawling into the hallway on the ceiling and through her bickering with Paulina as she did so. He even was able to focus on football thoughts through Jazz Fenton’s frequent calls for a nurse who never showed up.
He did not manage to keep up football thoughts after Phantom showed up. And when the short guy sitting next to Dash had a really grotesque transformation sequence into a monster, he was not able to ignore that. And he wasn’t able to ignore the sudden introduction of a hot, glowing, floating lady either.
Those were really hard things to ignore.
Unfortunately, that did mean he lost his grip on keeping his mind un-splintered. When the glowing, floating lady threw Jazz Fenton’s head, one of the Kwans, but not actual, self-aware Kwan, caught her. That Kwan was still thinking football thoughts.
He shouted, “Go long other Kwans,” and threw Jazz Fenton’s head. Then all the Kwans were very quickly thinking football thoughts again even as Phantom phased through them. It was Tucker Foley that managed the catch, which had to show just how off Kwan was.
Kwan lost the plot a bit after that. His mind wasn’t together and there was no getting it back after all of that, at least not while he was like this.
At some point, Kwan was pretty sure Phantom had turned the lady who had thrown Jazz’s head into green goo, which– Kwan had not known that was a power the ghost kid had, so that was terrifying. Then they kept fighting even after the lady had gotten stuck to the ceiling. She kept leaving sticky bits of green goo behind, too, the human kind, not the ghost kind. Kwan wasn’t entirely sure he saw that right though. The eight different perspectives floating in and out of his awareness made the fight hard to track.
What he was sure of was he had smelled butterscotch and gymshorts and had suddenly been Kwan again. Kwan. Singular. He was a single person that had a single mind and a single body and a single line of sight. It was the best!
And, from what he could see with his one, singular set of eyes, all of his classmates were cured too. No one was hurt. He winced as he saw Manson fall on Foley. Foley’s leg crunched. Okay, one person was hurt. Coming out of what seemed to be some kind of ghost-controlled epidemic, Kwan was going to count that as a win.