Being an ocean and a good bit of a continent away from Amity meant that Danny didn't have his usual go-tos, his unusual go-tos, his emergency plans, or his acts of blatant desperation.
Well, no, that last one wasn't quite true. He could still call Vlad, but the idea of Vlad having any access here made Danny feel faintly ill. Maybe after this, he could get Matthew to put Vlad on a no-entry list.
Anyway, if this was happening in Amity, he'd have different options. He wouldn't worry about involving Sam and Tucker, because they'd already be involved. He could recruit Frostbite and the Yetis for medical opinions. He could bribe Technus to do this. He could hide everyone in the Ghost Zone. He could talk to the ghosts.
But he wasn't in Amity.
"When you say 'a Technus' what do you mean exactly?" asked Jazz, reaching into her bag for the ouija board.
"Well," said Danny, "I guess it depends, but basically? Using ghost powers to hack into computers and get Iris the stuff she needs to help Aunt Alicia." He looked at Gwensyvyr. "So. You know about computers, right?"
Gwensyvyr held up a hand and tilted it back and forth.
"That's okay, you don't need to know a lot. Anyway, there's this guy I know who can sort of… go into them and do stuff to them. Change how they work and what they're doing. That's Technus."
Gwensyvyr nodded slowly.
"So, my first idea is that I could do that. The problem is, then I wouldn't be here. I'd be spread out through cyberspace and whatever servers Revyvtech has."
Gwensyvyr shook her head, vehemently.
"Yeah, that's what I thought, too."
Jazz, put the board down on the bed. "What did you think?"
"That it wouldn't be a good idea. We still don't really know who or what, um… killed everyone," he said, quickly, "and not to brag, but I'm the best line of defense we have. Even if all I could do was see Gwensyvyr, I'd still be the best defense."
"Because when everyone died, the ghosts were pushed away," said Jazz.
"Exactly." Danny nodded, and pretended not to notice that Gwensyvyr mirrored him.
… Gwensyvyr was something like forty generations removed from him. Even pretending Gwensyvyr was alive and taking into account the sometimes-circular nature of royal family trees, the amount of DNA shared would have been tiny. Any resemblance was coincidental.
Probably.
Danny could admit that once he got past the hysterics required by the situation, sharing things with Gwensyvyr - even if they couldn't be considered flesh and blood by any stretch of the term - was really cool.
There might have been just the tiniest bit of hero-worship there. Who could blame him? Even if his parents had edited out the ghost parts of her story, he and Jazz had still heard it for bedtime, and none of his other relatives, Alicia included, felt the need to remove those parts.
"But I'm not the only ghost here."
Gwensyvyr nodded, and turned to the ouija board, the other ghosts crowding around. Tell us what we must do. If we cannot, we will find those who can.
"Okay," said Danny, "so, for me, it works like this…"
.
"Hey," said Danny, coming back down into the living room. "Does anyone have a computer or a phone they don't care if it gets trashed?"
"Mom has the worst laptop known to man," volunteered Leo.
Lewis elbowed him in the ribs. "She keeps her photos on it. Her family photos. You can have my crime phone, I only use it when I'm in Britain, anyway." He tossed what was apparently his non-crime phone to Leo.
"Your what?" yelped Jazz, behind Danny. Danny frowned at her. She couldn't be reacting to the idea of a burner. She'd helped him get one for Dani.
"My crime phone," said Lewis, passing them. "Do you have any idea how sketchy the art world is? Especially when you're dealing with antiques? I've been trying to get the Kyp Styrryse back since I was a student."
"You graduated last year."
"It seems so long ago."
"You're still in grad school."
Lewis disappeared around the corner without saying anything else.
"You're a ledyn! You can't run around committing crimes in other countries!" Jazz shouted, as if she didn't do just that whenever she helped Danny. She turned to the cousins. "What's the Kyp Styrryse?"
"The Cup of Stars," translated George.
"I know what it means, not what it is."
"It's… a cup," said George. "With stars on it. It's, you know, artistic."
"It's an important cultural artifact that was smuggled out of the country by a British art dealer in the eighteen-fifties," said Leo. "It's an exemplar of High Middle Age Avlynyse metal working, and features the fully developed versions of both the four and five pointed Avlynyse star knots." He shrugged. "Lewis talks about it all the time at home. I used to tease him by saying he was going to marry it when we were younger."
"It's better than some of the girls I've dated," said Lewis, returning. He handed Danny a phone which was, it had to be said, much nicer than the burner they'd gotten Dani.
(... Danny wondered if Matthew and Irene would be up for adopting a 'syvyr.' A thought for later.)
"What are you going to use if for?" asked Lewis.
"I'm going to see if I can get the ghosts to hack into Revyvtech for you," said Danny, as he navigated to the corporate website. "I mean it might not work, they could have the data you need stored offline or something… I was also thinking about asking them if they could go check on Aunt Alicia through the phone lines, but I don't even know if any of them can do that trick, yet, and it's really far away, so… What?" He looked up from the phone, feeling stares. "I thought we were all on the same page with the ghost stuff?" That was a lie. He had not, in fact, told them the most important part of the ghost stuff. The part of the ghost stuff where he was also a ghost.
"Yeah," said Leo, "but that's, uh. We just learned about it a few hours ago. There's a learning curve to this kind of thing."
"Do you have, like, a computer genius ghost on call or something?" asked Iris.
"Uh," said Danny. He looked over at the ghosts who had followed him, the primary one of which was, again, his thousand-plus-year-old ancestor. "Are any of you secretly computer geniuses?"
Gwensyvyr gave Danny an incredulous and unimpressed look, and the other ghosts either shook their heads or raised their hands in full-body expressions of absolutely not. One or two slipped out through the wall, but ghosts were always coming and going, so Danny didn't question it.
"No," he said. "It doesn't look like it."
"So they're going to hack things how?"
"Um," said Danny, who hadn't expected to have to explain this part to his cousins. "You know, how in the stories you have the inbryth gyse? It's like that, but with computers."
Iris squinted. "I'm not sure that means what you think that means."
Danny sighed. "An gys magyn styw hyra sydo avyr an myn, swa magyn hya styw it avyr an thing - lyk Swyrd Grynnaé - yr an lekgytol, ekyn an kompytyr yst an lekgytol, ekyn an lekgytol yst an thing. Or– our vocabulary might not be great, but Jazz and I are fluent. Is this the right webpage?" He showed Iris the phone.
"Yeah," said Iris. "There's a login here." She leaned forward, tapping a few times on the screen. "But even when I was an intern and sort of had access, there was a bunch of stuff I didn't have access to."
"That's okay," said Danny. He looked at the ghosts. "You guys remember what we talked about? Don't push yourselves if you get stuck somewhere." He didn't want any of the ghosts to fall apart trying to do this.
Gwensyvyr stepped forward first, regarding the phone with a quizzical expression, then she touched it. Nothing happened. A few other ghosts also tried, but couldn't enter the phone. Gwensyvyr shrugged at him and flexed her hand, as if it were sore.
"Okay," said Danny. "I guess that brings us to option number two."
"Which is?" asked Iris.
"Send the ghosts to look over people's shoulders and steal passwords."
.
The problem with this plan was that it took a long time.
"Does this still count as pulling a Technus?" mumbled Jazz as the pair of them laid on one of the couches. "Since they're not going into any tech."
"Still using ghosts to hack, so, yes," said Danny, who was using Lewis's crime phone to look up random facts about Revyvtech and the Assembly. He maybe shouldn't have been doing that, but he was feeling antsy. Something that might have to do with the way the sun was now peeking up over the horizon. Or all the murder. "Yes it does."
Eugene shuffled back into the room. Danny perked up. "What did you find out?" he asked.
Eugene sat down heavily. "I don't know if it's anything useful," he said. He rubbed his eyes. "But apparently a lot of the kids of people who worked for Skyppa Wykbyldyn Gruyp when it was still big work for Revyvtech now. Julius Skyppa's and Richard Bytras's grandfathers were friends, like, all four of them. But the old lord Bytras threw Skyppa Wykbyldyn under the bus–"
"Yeah," said Leo, "that's more or less public record. Old Lord Bytras was the one who recommended Skyppa Wykbyldyn, wasn't he?"
Eugene gave Leo a suffering look. "If you knew that, why didn't you say something before I spent hours on the phone?"
Leo shrugged. "I didn't know you were looking for that. I thought you were doing, like, financials, not basic information about one of the biggest political messes of the last fifty years. They've got some cousins in common, too, if that helps?"
"Basically everyone has cousins in common," said Iris. "This country isn't that big."
"Okay," said Eugene, still obviously ruffled. "Anyway. Skyppa Wykbyldyn also built Revyvtech's original factory - not that weird, it's hard for foreign companies to do business here, and Skyppa Wykbyldyn was pretty popular. Lots of more modern buildings were built by Skyppa Wykbyldyn. But after your grandparents died," he nodded at Danny and Jazz, "Skyppa Wykbyldyn was broken up. The Skyppas kept the part of the business they'd used to import materials and renamed it Skyroad Imports, but the rest of it was eventually bought by Ryv Ynvestynys."
"Dream Investments?" asked Jazz.
Eugene nodded. "And Ryv Ynvestynys is also heavily invested in Revyvtech. They have the same board of directors. Again, that might not mean anything, Avlynys is small, and foreign companies are the same way, but–"
"But it's weird that Skyppa was working so closely with a guy who screwed his family over so often," said Leo. "Especially given his personality."
"People do stranger things for money," said Eugene. "Or to cover up crimes. Which brings me to the thing that actually took me all that time, because Dad only noticed it when he was looking at both companies side-by-side." He licked his lips. "Revyvtech's always been big here, since it was founded."
"Yeah, it was actually founded by one of our great-great-great-great aunts - Doctor Cynthia Dyrys - and her husband, but it didn't get much traction on the continent for years, because they were super publicly into the occult, and not even our kind of occult."
Eugene gave Leo an outright pained look. "Can you let me finish? Please?"
"Sorry."
"Like I was saying, Revyvtech's always been big, here, but it hasn't always been bigger than the other pharmaceutical companies we have, like Avl Ayg and Modron."
"We could've told you that," said Iris.
"Come on, you guys," said Eugene. "Not everyone here knows every political and medical thing that's happened in the last fifty years. Or every art thing."
"I wasn't going to say anything," said Lewis, mildly offended.
"Revyvtech only started to outcompete Avl Ayg and Modron after Skyppa Wykbyldyn and Ryv Ynvestynys started working with them. More specifically, after Skyppa Wykbyldyn finished their factory, they had this big breakthrough for treating necrotic tissue and started filing some of their discoveries under the trade secrets laws rather than the patent laws. Then, when Skyppa Wykbyldyn got the contract for restoring Andyr? More breakthroughs. Steadier breakthroughs. Until Great Uncle Leon announced he was going to attempt the Trials. Then they went silent until Grandpa Alfred announced the moratorium on taking the trials and they started announcing new medicines again."
"So… you think that Revyvtech is stealing medical breakthroughs from the thousand-year-old underground tunnels?" asked George. "That all seems a little coincidental."
"I don't know," said Iris. "I don't know. Most of our pharmaceutical industry is based on how strange our plant life is, compared to Europe and Britain. Maybe there are, like, mushrooms growing down there that don't grow anywhere else."
"They could have found a way down into Andyr when they were building the factory," said Jazz, thoughtfully. "Then expanded their access when they got the restoration contract. Which means everything else is just… a cover up?"
"That doesn't feel right," said Danny. "How do you explain what's going on with the ghosts? And the spirit that took Vivian's face?" There had to be more to it than just corporate greed. Human money didn't spend well in the afterlife. "What's even in Andyr? What happens during the Trials that's so important?"
"Well," said Leo after a moment, hesitantly, "they're supposed to show that you have the favor of the ancestors…"
"The original spring of Gwensyvyr's sacred pool is supposed to be down there," added Lewis.
No one else volunteered anything.
"That's it?" asked Danny.
"It's not something anyone talked about," said Eugene. "Whatever Revyvtech found down there, it isn't something any of us know about."
"Are we– are we really believing this, though?" asked George. "I mean, Iris, we worked for Revyvtech."
"Yeah, and we did walk in on that demon summoning thing, so for all we know, Revyvtech is stuffed full of evil syvyrys who were just waiting for an opportune moment to kill us all. We don't know, and this," Iris waved her phone at George, new texts from Aunt Alicia's security team clear on the front, "this is weird. Even you think it's weird. Danny, have any of your spirits come back yet?"
"Or Vivian?" added Leo, hopefully.
Cold mist wisped over the back of Danny's tongue, and he looked up, sharply, as a large group of ghosts, far larger than the group that had gone out, flew in through the wall.
"Yes," he said, standing. "Yes, actually. No Vivian, still, though."
The ghosts seemed to be arguing with each other, loudly enough that Danny almost thought he could hear harsh whispers and hisses. They seemed angry. They seemed scared.
"What happened?" he asked, worried.
The ghosts looked at him. Some of them outright glared at him. But then they parted, revealing Gwensyvyr.
The first thing Danny noticed was that she'd returned to her more elaborate, archaic mode of dress, this time complete with a crown and a very practical-looking sword.
The second thing he noticed was that her arm was burned red all the way up to her shoulder, her sleeve absolutely obliterated.
In a human, that would have been a potentially fatal injury. In a ghost… For the ghosts Danny was most familiar with, it would have been painful and difficult to heal, but not something that would destroy them. Danny didn't know what it would do to a ghost like Gwensyvyr, who was so weak she could barely interact with the world to begin with.
And there was only one thing Danny knew of that could make wounds like that.
"Jazz! Get the blood blossom cream!"
Jazz didn't hesitate. She ran for the room they shared.
Danny turned the keyboard on the phone on and tilted it towards Gwensyvyr, approaching her, but not touching. He only got burns like that from blood blossoms when they were directly smeared on him and he was in ghost form. He didn't know if Gwensyvyr had inadvertently brought any traces with her.
"What happened?" he asked.
Gwensyvyr gave him a thin, pained smile, and began to spell out a message letter by letter.