The room was silent as everyone listened intently, straining to hear Mr. Kynbaz's (his first name was Kevin?) response.
"An extraction? Why? Isn't she in hospital for a medical condition?" There was a pause, not quite long enough for Joanna to interject, but long enough to hear. "How do you even know about that?"
"You left the team on read and the emergency system kicked it to Matthew and your second, but Matthew has it set to forward things to family members if he doesn't answer and it's flagged as an emergency."
Another brief pause. "Why do you want Princess Alicia extracted?"
"We think that–" Joanna visibly collected herself. "There's evidence that Revyvtech is involved in the poisonings and responsible for Alicia's condition."
"Joanna–"
"My judgment was poor as a teenager, but don't you dare hold that over me when my family is in danger!" snapped Joanna. She closed her eyes. "I– I'm sorry, that was inappropriate of me."
"What kind of evidence? Would it hold up overseas?"
Joanna's eyes flicked over Danny, Jazz, and their other cousins. "No. But that doesn't mean it isn't valid."
Mr. Kynbaz hissed softly, the sound barely transmitted by the phone speakers. "I'll get back to you."
"Kevin, wait, I–"
The end-call tone played.
Joanna let her hand drop to her side. Her eyes flicked over Danny, Jazz, and their other cousins. "How many of you have prescription medication?"
Everyone but Jazz and Danny raised their hands. Jazz elbowed Danny. "You have that stuff you were prescribed for your eyes," she said.
"Oh, yeah."
"Danny– Danny. Do you think you could tell if this… if this poison - blood blossoms? - was in something? Like you did with the aconite?"
"Um," said Danny. "Maybe. That was mostly Gw– the ghosts, though. They saw the poison being added. If it is blood blossoms, though, I think I should be able to. Or- or they should be able to," he added, glancing at the ghosts. He didn't want to ask them to, though. Not after what had happened to Gwensyvyr's arm. "I should be able to."
"Good," said Joanna, "good. Everyone, go get your medications, and bring them here."
.
"Why are there so many?" asked Danny, intimidated. The little bottles practically surrounded him.
"We're part of the oldest royal lineages in the world," said Iris. "It'd be weirder if we didn't have any weird genetic disorders."
"What even are all of these for?" asked Danny, knowing it was rude, but not being able to help himself. It was his family medical history, anyway.
"Blood disease," said Iris and George simultaneously.
"Specifically anemia," said Iris.
"Specifically Avlynyse recurrent macrocytic anemia," said George.
"Called that because normal macrocytic anemia is supposed to be caused by something else, like hypothyroidism or alcoholism, but we don't have those problems and it always comes back."
"You guys probably have it, too," added George. "It's super common in the family, but it."
"Along with Avlynyse defective melanin syndrome," said Iris. "Purple eyes are pretty, but they come with problems, you know?"
"I knew about that," said Danny. "But you don't take medicine for that, do you? Mom has that, and I don't think she takes anything for it."
"Usually you don't," said George, "but melanin has a lot of functions beyond just skin, hair, and eye color, and sometimes ADMS affects those things as well. You remember how Iris and I would, ah, shake a little, all the time? And our eyes would scan back and forth? We couldn't stop it. That's what we take medication for." He made a face. "We actually first got this in a drug trial from Revyvtech a few years ago. It's new…"
"Oh! Don't forget the epilepsy," said Iris.
"Yeah, can't forget the epilepsy."
"You have epilepsy?" asked Danny. "But I've sent you flashing videos… Memes…"
"No, no, Lewis is the one who has epilepsy. I'm just saying it's relatively common."
Lewis made a face. "I could have told him myself. They're only focal seizures, anyway."
"I don't know what that means," said Danny. "I've sent you flashing videos, too."
"It's fine," said Lewis. "Focal seizures don't make you lose consciousness all the way, and I've got a filtering program on my phone."
"Mostly he shows them to me, first," said Leo. "I have the anemia and a heart condition and low blood pressure and poor circulation and also eczema, which sort of makes my skin break out in hives if anything is touching it the wrong way for too long."
"Still not a good reason to not wear shirts," muttered Lewis. "Eugene?"
Eugene blushed, then looked down at the medicine bottle in his hand. He looked back and forth between Danny and the bottle, then the bottle and Jazz. The bottle was a slightly different color than everyone else's.
"Um," he said. "I have bipolar disorder. And I have auditory hallucinations. It's not– It's not schizophrenia, though. I don't have the other symptoms."
Joanna put her hand on Eugene's shoulder. "I also have bipolar depression. And anemia."
Now Danny just felt bad. "Sorry. I shouldn't have asked." (Also, wow, why was he suddenly thinking about the time his parents tried to 'spin the crazy' out of him?)
Eugene laughed a little. "It's fine. I mean, we're showing you all our medications." He held out his bottle towards Danny.
"Still." Danny took the bottle. "But… have you ever considered that the hallucinations could be…?" He trailed off as Gwensyvyr and the other ghosts started shaking their heads.
"Oh," said Eugene. "No, definitely not. There are ways to check if you're hearing ghosts, assuming they're cooperating. We tested it." He sat down on the floor across from Danny. "So. How are you going to do this?"
"Um," said Danny. "I was just going to phase my hand through each of these and see if anything happened? That way, I'm not screwing up good medicine by taking it apart or anything."
"Is that safe?" asked Jazz with a slight frown.
"I– Nothing has ever happened to the stuff I've phased through before?"
"For you," clarified Jazz.
"Might give me a burn," said Danny. "But the blood blossom cream is already out, so… I'll be okay."
"If you say so," said Jazz.
Danny nodded and held up Eugene's bottle with his right hand and swiped his left hand through it.
(It was so strange to just do that in front of so many people, and in human form.)
"Nothing," he said, handing the bottle back to Eugene.
"That makes sense," said Eugene. He turned the bottle so Danny could see the logo imprinted on the bottom, a simple eye with an apple in place of a pupil. "Avl Ayg does more psychiatric medicine than Revyvtech."
Danny nodded, and hunted through the bottles to find Joanna's. It also didn't have anything in it that Danny could detect.
Then, he started working through Leo's medication. The heart stuff was fine, but when he passed his hand through the anemia medication, he flinched back, hissing.
"Blood blossoms?" asked Jazz.
"Yeah," said Danny. "Ow." He shook out his hand.
Jazz held out the cream to him.
"It's such a tiny amount," said Danny. He examined his hand. It wasn't even red. "It was just, like, touching something too hot, rather than all-consuming agony."
"Your standards for all consuming agony are off," said Jazz. "Put on the cream before you do more."
Danny grumbled but did what Jazz said. Then he tested the eczema medication, and…
"This feels weird, but not like blood blossoms," he said. There was something ectoplasmic in it, but only in trace amounts. "Could be ectoplasm contamination?"
"Could you tell how even it is?" asked Jazz.
"No," said Danny. "Do you think… If they are getting things for their medicines from Andyr, do you think that there could be ectoplasmic stuff down there? From the ghosts, maybe?"
He saw Gwensyvyr's face screw up, and she opened her mouth as if to speak, but then shook her head.
"That would make sense," said Jazz, slowly. "But that would be incredibly dangerous. Ectocontamination made a cooked turkey come back to life."
"What," said Lewis, flatly.
"Never mind," said Jazz.
Danny moved on to Lewis's. His anti-seizure meds were fine, but he had a jar of anemia supplements, just like Leo. Again, there was something in it. He set it aside.
He moved on to Iris and George's. They had a larger number, but theirs were largely identical, so he did them all at once. Again, most of them were fine, one of the melanin ones was weird, and the anemia supplement had blood blossoms in it.
"These actually have more than any of the others," said Danny, nodding at the bottles while rubbing more cream into his hand. "It's still tiny, the ghosts aren't even affected by it being near, but…"
"But we've been getting slowly poisoned for who knows how long," said Joanna. "All of us."
"It does cast some doubt on it being what killed everyone, though," said Iris. "Since none of us have keeled over in anaphylactic shock any of the times we've taken these. It's possible that there's a legitimate medical use."
"I don't know. I guess there are some things… Mom and Dad wanted to use it to purge ectocontamination." Danny looked up. "Did Martin have this? Do you think any of his medication is still here?"
"Maybe," said Joanna. "If he did have any here, it would probably be in his room, or the master bathroom."
Getting everyone into the master bathroom was a squeeze, but no one wanted to be left out. Joanna opened the cabinet and moved aside a woebegone toothbrush and a few boxes of band-aids before pulling out three bottles and a weekly pill organizer. The organizer was mostly full, with only Sunday morning empty.
"Ferromultyx, melanyorata, and escitalopram?" she read from the bottles.
"Huh," said Iris. "I didn't know his melanin defect was bad enough to take melanyorata." She sounded a little congested.
Danny, not quite in arms' reach of Joanna, between all the people in the room, made grabby hands. "Let me see."
Joanna passed them over, and Danny phased his hands through. The melanin deficiency drug had the same weirdness as Iris and George's. The anemia drug on the other hand…
"There's nothing here," he said. "It's clean."
Iris chewed her lip. "None of this makes sense."
"I think it does, actually," said Danny, turning the bottle over and over in his hand. He wriggled his way out of the bathroom.
"How?" asked Lewis, who managed to get out before the others. "Why poison us just a little bit, and kill everyone else?"
"I don't know that it's just about that," said Danny. He put Martin's medication on a nearby shelf and pulled the small bottle of the medicine he'd been prescribed from his pocket and passed his hand through it. It burned. Badly enough to make him hiss and drop the bottle.
"Danny?" asked Jazz, alarmed.
"I'm fine. I just had to check something." He cradled his hand near his chest. "I don't think they want you dead. They want me dead. They don't want you ectocontaminated."
"You guys keep saying that," said Leo. "What is it?"
"Ectoplasmic contamination. Ectoplasm. Ghost magic." Danny licked his lips, then stepped sideways to get a better view of Gwensyvyr. "That's what's actually in Andyr, isn't it? There's a source of ectoplasm. There's a portal."
Gwensyvyr gazed at Danny for a long moment, then nodded.
"There's something that happens in the Trials that makes you… more spiritual. Or something. More like a syvyr." And Danny hoped beyond hope that 'something' wasn't dying like he had in the portal. He could almost imagine it, all of them, all his family, walking, practically dancing down into the dark, into glowing, deathly green. A tableau. A danse macabre. A memento mori. Except no one really died…
… until now.
"That," said Danny, "that's what they're trying to stop. They're trying to keep that from happening. Because if it did– if it did…" He trailed off, unsure, then looked at Gwensyvyr. Her eyes were sharp, expectant. "Well, what we thought before, about them using stuff down there for medical research is probably still true, but… There are probably parts of the Trials you can't do without having ectoplasm. Things for the ancestors. Things for…"
If there was a portal beneath Avlynys, the ghosts here should be as strong as in Amity Park. They weren't. But they were gaining strength from Danny's presence.
"Things for the portal," Danny continued. "Like, unblocking it or something. Fixing it." He shivered, remembering the last time he'd tried to fix a portal.
"A portal?" asked Joanna. "To where?"
"The, you know, the afterlife," said Danny.
There was quiet.
"Unfortunately," said Joanna. "We can't do anything about that until we take the Trials. Except for not taking any more of these things." She snatched up Martin's medication and put it back in the cabinet.
Leo groaned. "Fainting town, here we come."
"For now… I think all of you need some sleep."