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Sam slammed down an ancient tome with worn leatherbound covers. "So, I have some good news and bad news," she said and opened the tome on a bookmarked page. "The good news is, I found reliable historical records about blood blossoms. The bad news is, the latest mention of them is from the 1860's."
"Where do you keep finding this stuff?" Tucker asked. "I couldn't find anything online at all."
"I have my connections," Sam said, and failed to elaborate. "According to this herbarium from 1867, the United States Botanical Garden's collection included a bush of rosa sanguifolium. And according to this news article-" she brandished her bookmark, revealing it to be a grainy photocopy of an ancient newspaper, “-the plant was stolen from the garden in May 1868 and was never seen again."
“That lines up with what I was able to find,” Danny sighed. “I asked Ghostwriter about it -and I had to do it in alliterative trochaic tetrameter to get answers, a round of sympathetic applause, please- and he said no ghost to his vast knowledge has encountered it since about the 1860’s either.”
“There was enough to throw around in Salem!” Tucker said and threw his hands up. “How can it disappear like that?”
In response Sam pulled out another old leatherbound tome from under the table and slammed it on top of the previous one. “Seances and exorcisms,” she said as she opened the new book to yet another bookmarked page. “It was a really good way to protect mediums and priests from the spirits they were dealing with. My hypothesis is that the increased popularity of spiritism increased demand enough to harvest it to extinction.”
“Okay, what’s our plan then?” Tucker asked. “Time travel or give up?”
Danny sighed and ran a hand through his already messy fringe. “As much as I’d like to just give up, I think we’re gonna have to do time travel.”
Tucker groaned. “Every time we do time travel, I end up with gastrointestinal issues for at least three days.”
“Do you want to shit normal for less than half a week, or do you want a weapon to fight against the GIW?”
Tucker took his sweet time to consider his options. “Fine, let’s do time travel, I’m already not shitting normal because I’m anxious.”
“So you could say the GIW scares the shit out of you?”
“Danny, don’t even joke about that.”
---
The trio took the Specter Speeder while Jazz distracted the doctors Fenton, and snuck into the Ghost Zone. They went to the Far Frozen to seek Frostbite and the Infi-Map. Well, he was their second choice. They had tried to go to Clockwork first because he was the guy for time travel, but they couldn’t find his tower anywhere. The trouble with an omniscient avatar of time was that if he didn’t want to be involved, he could just pack up his house and scooch over to somewhere you’d never find him. In contrast Frostbite’s realm was stationary, he for sure liked Danny and didn’t just use him as a tool for the continued stability of the most optimal timeline, and most importantly; he didn’t speak in riddles.
They touched down near the creepy Danny shrine. A few yetis that had been milling about nearby scattered out of fear that Danny had come back for some more ice power training, but Frostbite was there to greet them the moment they stepped out of the vehicle.
“Great one and friends, welcome back!” he greeted them merrily like a big hulking Santa Claus covered in a fluffy full-body beard. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“Hi Frostbite,” they greeted back and Danny flew up to give the yeti a big hug around his fluffy neck. “We were hoping you’d let us borrow the Infi-Map again.”
Frostbite furrowed his bows. “It is our most prized possession. last time it was out of our reach, Plasmius got his nefarious hands on it and wreaked havoc in the human realm.” Then his big wolfish frown turned into a big wolfish grin. “But that problem will be solved if I join you on your quest! It has been a while since I’ve been away from home.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Frostbite,” Danny said. “This could be really dangerous for you.”
“Nonsense!” Frostbite boomed. “I am fully capable of protecting both myself and the Infi-Map from any threat.”
“We’re going to look for blood blossoms,” Sam said.
“Blood blossoms!” Frostbite exclaimed. “Shivering snowdrifts, whatever do you need them for? They are detrimental to ectoplasm’ very nature!”
“That’s why we need them,” Sam jumped in. “We need blood blossoms to destroy the anti-ghost weapons of the guys in white.”
“It’s all ectoplasm-based, so the flowers should neutralize force fields, disable weapons, and make their power sources unstable,” Tucker continued. “We’ll have to be careful so they won’t reverse engineer the chemical formula, but we have some ideas.”
Frostbite hummed thoughtfully and rubbed his big hairy chin. “That is a noble cause; the news of these unsavory gentlemen has reached us even here. I will join you.”
Nothing the teens said could sway frostbite from his decision, not that they tried all that hard. It was very difficult to keep saying ‘no’ to the yeti’s big teddy bear face. The ghost also managed to argue that he should be the one to use the map, relating that he was the one with most experience with it, and that he would simply pull the specter speeder behind him.
---
The specter speeder floated six feet above the snow and Frostbite stood next to it, holding the bumper with one platter-sized hand, and the other hand held the Infi-Map. “Where to, o Great One?” he asked.
“To blood blossoms,” Danny said.
“Take us to blood blossoms!” the yeti repeated. Immediately the magical map began to glow, unfurled to plot a strange route through a möbius grid of latitude and longitude, and then it shot off, pulling along Frostbite who in turn pulled along the speeder and its passengers.
“This is so much better than being carried,” Tucker commented as they passed a cloud of sharp, glowing crystals. “Cupholders and everything.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “No offense Danny, but you’re not exactly first class.”
“Hey!”
But Sam ignored him and pointed ahead of them. “Look, a portal’s opening!”
A wobbly line of brighter green had appeared right in front of Frostbite, and they watched it widen into a roundish disc. The map pulled them all in but instead of leading out into the human world they emerged in another part of the ghost zone, where a second portal waited right in their path, too wide and close to swerve around at the speed they were going. Frostbite didn’t even try and flew them in deftly as ever.
The second portal spat them out in a small clearing filled with dappled light shifting through big-leaved trees, and a wrought iron gazebo they would have flattened had it not been for intangibility.
“And here we are,” Frostbite said. He rolled up the map and tucked it safely in his golden belt, and niffed the air. “I can smell many flowers nearby.”
“Any blood blossoms?” Danny asked as he phased himself and his friends out of the speeder through the windshield.
“I cannot say, I’ve thankfully never had the displeasure of smelling them.”
“Let’s hope you won’t have to,” Sam said and looked around. “Where and when are we?”
Their immediate surroundings were just trees, grass, and the aforementioned gazebo, but beyond they could see slivers of sunlit paths and bushes. They couldn’t hear any traffic, but every now and then distant human voices drifted their way.
“It’s definitely not your modern human world,” Frostbite said. “The air smells different.”
“Let’s take a look.”
They found a narrow path through the copse of trees and peered out from just far enough that they were still in the trees’ shadow.
“Are you fucking kidding me,” Sam said, because right in front of them spread a neat well-maintained garden with a great variety of plants, many of them adorned with small plaques or signs, separated by gravel pathways. The garden was timeless in style, but the people walking on the paths were wearing wide-skirted dresses or suits and top hats.
“Let me guess: United States Botanical Garden, 1868,” Danny monotoned.
“Yup,” Sam confirmed.
“Why are we here and now?” Tucker wondered. “Of all the times the map could’ve taken us.”
“The Infi-Map has a mind of its own and works in mysterious ways, and though we yetis have guarded it for eons, not even we fully understand it. It must have thought this was the best place to find blood blossoms,” Frostbite told. He had gone translucent, the little streaks of sunlight shining through the trees glittered on his icy arm and horns as much as they dotted the ground beneath him. “What is the significance of this place?”
“This is the last place we know for sure had a bush of blood blossoms before they drop off from history books completely,” Sam told. “It disappeared on the night of May 12th, 1868, assumed stolen.”
“Strange,” Frostbite said with a frown. “Who would do such a thing?”
“Us, apparently,” Danny said. The others looked at him. “What? This is the kind of bull Clockwork pulls all the time, and you said it yourself: a mysterious disappearance and nobody saw it happen.”
“I hate time travel,” Tucker lamented. “This isn’t gonna turn into a paradox where none of us were ever born, right?”
“We burned Rome and we were all still born,” Danny pointed out. “Well, Vlad burned Rome.”
“But that actually happened, we learned about it in history class,” Tucker said.
“And the flowers being gone is in the history books too,” Sam said. “There are no blood blossoms because we stole the last one here in 1868.”
“How is that not a paradox?” Tucker asked and threw his hands up.
“That is a stable non-linear temporal structure,” Frostbite jumped in to explain. “A paradox would be formed if, for example, your modern human world had blood blossoms that had all descended from an individual plant in this time period, and you stole it before it could be propagated.”
“So we aren’t gonna get Back to the Future’d,” Tucker summed. “Works for me. How are we gonna get it since you can’t use ghost powers around it?”
A moment of silence followed. Only sounds in the air were the rustle of swaying leaves and a distant laughter somewhere upwind.
“None of you thought that far, huh.”
“Maybe there’s some shovels we can borrow?” Danny suggested. “And, you didn’t think of it either.”
Tucker raised his hands defensively. “Ghost-proof plant logistics is not my forte.”
“We need to find it first,” Sam pointed out.
“That’s easy, I can just fly around invisibly,” Danny said. “It should be fine as long as I don’t get too close.”
“Do you really wanna risk that, man?” Tucker asked. “If you get whammied I am not eating anymore flowers.”
“Tucker’s right, Danny, I think we’re gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way,” Sam agreed. “You had a really bad reaction last time, and those were cut flowers. The whole bush is probably a lot worse.”
Danny pouted, but didn’t disagree.
“If we’re doing this the human way, we’re gonna need disguises,” Tucker pointed out.
“That I can do,” Danny said. “I’ll raid a few laundry lines, and-”
“No, no, absolutely not,” Sam interrupted. “Do you have any idea how expensive fabric was back in the day? We can’t make people destitute by stealing the clothes off their back.”
“Okay, what do we do, then? Buy clothes with our amazing post-inflation pocket change?”
They went through their pockets and managed to compile a whopping $15,67 between them in various small bills and coins.
“Did they have Lincoln on the coins back then?” Danny wondered and rolled a tarnished 1999 penny between his fingers.
“Could have,” Tucker mused. “He’s been shot by now, hasn’t he?”
“Maybe they won’t look at the coins too closely?”
“...”
“...what if I go for the laundry line method, and then when we’re done, I’ll just take the clothes back.”
“Sure, let’s do that.”
---
Danny was gone for a good while, during which nobody thankfully wandered into the ring of trees. Sam, Tucker and Frostbite passed the time by playing cards in the gazebo with the spider-themed tarot deck Sam had forgotten in her backpack. Half of that time went to explaining the rules and point system to Tucker, who hadn’t played tarot before, and figuring out how to play what was usually a four-person game with only three players. In the end Frostbite, who was surprisingly familiar with the game beforehand, simply dealt the cards differently. They were still arguing over whether Sam’s score of negative 56 points was correct when Danny returned, landing silently next to the specter speeder and holding a bundle of clothes in his arms.
“Nobody should miss these for a good while, they were still wet when I found them,” Danny said and turned back into a human with a flash of light before passing a set of clothes to Sam and Tucker. “Couldn’t find any hats or shoes though. I found a newspaper stand though, and we were right, this is May 12th.”
Sam and Tucker accepted the offered clothes. Danny had given them each a pair of pants, a vest, a shirt, and a jacket, all with washed-out colors and patched hems like the people they’d been... borrowed from had done anything in their power to get one last use out of them.
“Where did you get these, a fundless orphanage?” Tucker asked after almost getting his toes stuck in a hole in the pants’ knee.
Danny shrugged. “I don’t know, I didn’t stick around to look.”
“We really have to take these back when we’re done.”
Once they were dressed up more appropriately and Sam had hidden her hair in Tucker’s reluctantly relinquished beret, they left Frostbite in charge of the specter speeder and ventured out of the safety of the trees.
“I feel exposed,” Tucker complained. “All my thoughts are at the mercy of the elements.”
“What elements?” Sam asked. “It’s not even windy.”
Indeed, the weather was good; a few thin clouds slowly drifted across a blue sky with a hazy horizon and a gentle breeze carried a faint scent of manure to their noses, but it was a remarkably nice day.
“Well, it could rain.”
Sam glanced up at the almost entirely blue sky. “Uhuh.”
They considered splitting up but decided against it. They might cover less ground together but none of them wanted to get caught alone now that Danny might not be able to get them out of trouble the usual way. The botanical garden wasn’t all that big, besides- the gazebo and its surrounding trees marked one end, and a grand white-framed conservatory made up the other. The area in between was less than the size of a football field, but the crisscrossing paths and a myriad of plants made visibility low in many places.
They trekked up and down the pathways, dodging other people where they could after the first well-dressed couple they passed gave Danny and Tucker’s hatless heads scandalized looks. Sam tried to guess the direction they should take by reading the plant labels and estimating what should be together, but that only took them in circles. They opted for a grid search after that.
“If only it was closer to fall,” Sam lamented and brushed her hand across the leaves of a passing flower bush about to bloom. “The heritage seeds I could get here...”
“What was that about paradoxes earlier?” Tucker wondered sarcastically.
“Just one cutting,” Sam countered. “Where’s the harm?”
“I once changed the course of an entire timeline by moving a soda can,” Danny said. “And yes, that did cause me and Jazz to never be born. Let’s just go in and out.”
It took them another twenty minutes before they found a rose garden and a further five to figure out where the blood blossom was among dark leaves and red-streaked buds. It was remarkably similar to many other roses around it, only differentiated by its purple-black stems and a little sign tied to a branch.
“Here we go, rosa sanguifolium,” Sam said after inspecting the label.
“That’s it?” Tucker asked, disappointed. “I thought it would look all... gothic and ominous.”
“It starts to look like that at the end of summer, after the leaves mature and the flowers have opened, I think,” Sam told. “Or when there are more ghosts near where it grows. There mustn’t be a lot of ghosts around here.”
“Where do you keep finding this stuff?” Danny asked.
“Monastery manuscript from the late 1600’s,” Sam said and tried to measure the size of the bush with her arms. It was maybe four feet tall and almost as much wide. “’The leaf doth turn black as coal if evil spirits be in thy house, and returneth to green once thy house has been blessed, but know this, a good harvest likewise turneth it black’, something like that.”
“So you can’t tell whether you have ghosts or food?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Now we have to find shovels and a wheelbarrow somewhere...”
They wandered around for another good while before locating a shed and a compost heap on the eastern side of the conservatory. There was even a wheelbarrow there to transport the bush once they got it out of the ground. They made a note of where everything was and made their way back towards where Frostbite and the speeder were to wait until the garden closed for the night and they could get to work.
The teens were passing near the rose garden when voices drifted to their ears and stopped them to their tracks.
“-got another letter from Kew about it,” one voice said, a nondescript male voice said.
“Another?” replied a second, slightly more nasally voice. “Didn’t we send them seeds last year?”
“They weren’t viable, according to professor Hendrickson. It must be the cross-pollination with the other roses. No, they want cuttings this time.”
“Cuttings?” the nasally voice exclaimed in abject disbelief, making the teens flinch even from two planters and as many pathways away. “How much of the specimen they expect us to hack away for them? The ocean journey alone-”
“Collaboration with Kew ensures our funding and continued credibility,” the first man said, though it seemed to be through gritted teeth. “We cannot ignore a demand like that.”
“But the rosa sanguifolium is critically endangered, our- our priority should be to ensure the health of our own specimen, not go dividing it up and risk harming it!”
“Which is why we will be taking cuttings and not touching the rootstock-”
“Absolutely not! The risk of infection-”
“-warm wax should be enough to seal-”
“-absolutely out of their minds, the lot of them-”
“-propagation alone would take months-”
“-cannot let us have anything unique for once-”
“-survive a journey across the sea during winter-”
“-damp and miserable climate-”
The voices grew more distant as the two irate botanists took their argument towards the conservatory, though not fainter because their volume seemed to go up steadily until they disappeared inside. Danny, Sam, and Tucker stayed huddled behind a burnet rose until they were sure the men were gone, and shared looks.
“What was that?” Tucker hissed, still not quite daring to speak aloud.
“Kew Gardens in London is jealous that the US has a blood blossom bush and they don’t,” Sam said. “Classic flower drama. We got here in the nick of time if they’re going to take and propagate cuttings.”
“The Infi-Map’s really cutting it close, huh,” Danny said, eliciting a pair of groans from his friends.
“Let’s go brief Frostbite.”
The yeti did not seem surprised to learn that they were one finished argument away from their target getting clipped and shipped. “Scientists like to share, whether other scientists like it or not,” he said. “It makes perfect sense that the map brought us at this date.” He didn’t elaborate on that. “How are you going to safely transport the blood blossom bush?”
“We’ll take a wheelbarrow here, and then we’ll...” Danny trailed off for a moment. “We’ll just pop it in the speeder. It’s airtight, so you shouldn’t get affected as long as you’re further away when we load it.”
Sam crossed her arms and shook her head. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of the transport beforehand.”
---
They had to wait until dark before they get on with their clandestine operation proper. They passed the time with snacks and by playing more tarot, listening to Frostbite tell tales of his realm while taking them all to the cleaners, and turning the speeder and themselves invisible for an extremely awkward half an hour where a young couple got away from the rest of the world in the gazebo. When the sun finally set, Danny did a final high-altitude spin above the garden to make sure no stragglers were left, and gave them the go ahead. The three teens made a dash for the shed by the compost heap to borrow tools and the shed was thankfully only barely hasped closed. Once they got their shovels and wheelbarrow, it took them almost ten minutes to find the rose garden again.
“Man, it is dark in here,” Tucker said after the third time he’d tripped on seemingly nothing but crunchy air. “Where is light pollution when we need it?”
“It’s not that bad,” Danny said. “You can see the stars a lot better. The moon should rise soon too, that’ll let us see.”
“It better or we’ll end up digging up the wrong bush.”
“Okay, here it is,” Sam declared, and then double checked the label on the bush just to be sure. She brushed some of the mulch at the stems’ base away and with a nearby small stick she scratched a rough circle on the dirt around the plant. “That should be a safe distance from the roots. And guys, remember that we’re digging away the outside, not the inside of this hole.”
“Yeah, yeah, let’s just get this over with,” Tucker said. “Do you think that if we do this faster, I’ll get less blisters than if we go slow?”
“You’ll bet blisters because you’re on your computer all day and never touch grass,” Sam said. Tucker stuck his tongue out at her, but she couldn’t see it properly in the dark.
They began to dig around Sam’s circle. The teens worked half-blind at first, but just as Danny had predicted, the moon began to light their mole work soon enough. They had to take breaks, dig in awkward positions and among thorny branches that tried to poke them even through the protection of the thicker fabric of their borrowed jackets, but slowly and steadily they carved away the layer of dirt under the blood blossom bush’s rootstock.
“I think we could try pulling it out now,” Sam said and wiped sweat and dirt from her forehead. The action left more dirt in its place than it removed. “It keeps sinking deeper as we try to dig from beneath.”
Danny and Tucker shimmied their shovels under the big clump of dirt and roots and Sam grabbed the stems’ forked base. She pulled, the boys levered the giant clod upwards, and slowly but surely, they managed to drag the bush out of the hole. Several downward roots had been cut, but Sam’s estimate about the width of the horizontal root growth had been big enough to only disturb the hair roots. “Okay, bring the wheelbarrow here.”
This time Sam and Tucker heaved with their shovels and Danny did his best to scoop the bush into the wheelbarrow. They almost dropped it twice and when they got it aboard it was almost horizontal, but they did it. They kicked most of the loose dirt back into the hole they’d made, and then they were off wheeling their ill-gained treasure towards the speeder.
“Oh shoot, we have to warn Frostbite we’re coming,” Danny said once they were halfway across the garden. “I’ll go tell him.”
Danny jogged ahead, and once he could see Frostbite’s pale glow through the copse, he yelled as loud as he dared, “Frostbite, we have the bush! We’re coming in hot!”
“All right, Great One!” the ghost yelled back, and disappeared from view.
Danny made his way through the bushes and opened up one of the gull-wing doors of the specter speeder. It would be a tight fit, especially with the wheelbarrow, but they would have to manage it without any intangibility or super strength. He sighed; his arms were already sore from the all digging.
The squeaking of the wheelbarrow’s front wheel signaled Sam and Tucker’s arrival to the gazebo clearing. “How’s it look?” Sam asked. “Does it fit or do we need to take it back?”
“Don’t even joke about that,” Tucker groaned and plopped down onto the grass. “I refuse to even entertain a timeline where we did all that digging for nothing.”
“It should fit if we tilt the root clump and bend some of the branches,” Danny said.
They let Tucker have his little breather. Then the three of them all together lifted the bush for the wheelbarrow, held it as low to the ground as they could to clear the top of the door, and exploded into a hissed cacophony of “Turn it!” and “I am turning it!” and “Tilt it! Not that way, my left!” and “Slow down, you’re going to take out my eye!”. Then the bush cleared the doorway, someone tripped, and Danny managed to barely dodge out of the way before the heavy clod of rootbound dirt thunked dustily on the ridged rubber mat covering the speeder’s cargo space.
“Whew,” Sam said and wiped even more dirt across her brow. “That was heavy.”
“You can say that again.”
“That was heavy.”
They took a little breather before shedding their contemporary disguises. None of them mentioned that they probably should have taken them off before starting to dig because they were all completely covered in dirt and the thorns had pulled threads into loops here and there, because none of them wanted to admit they hadn’t thought of it. Danny gathered them up into a bundle nonetheless and headed out to return them and closed the door behind himself.
He was gone almost as long as it had taken him to find the clothes in the first time, during which dawn began to break beyond the trees’ shadow, and Frostbite reappeared. He gave Sam and Tucker, or more likely the bush sitting loose behind them, indecipherable looks. “That is it, then?”
“Yeah,” Sam confirmed. “You alright? you’re not getting any residue out there, are you?”
Frostbite sniffed the air. “No, I am quite alright. The air has a peculiar frightening quality to it, but I am led to believe the negative effect is instantaneous, so it will not get any worse.”
“If you’re sure.”
Danny appeared above Frostbite’s shoulder. “I took the clothes back to where I found them,” he told. “Hopefully they’ll just think the clothes fell off the line and into the dirt.”
“Good, good,” Frostbite said. “Are you ready to return to our own time?”
Everyone agreed, Tucker most enthusiastically. Danny decided to fly outside the speeder this time. Frostbite pulled the Infi-Map out of his golden belt with a flourish and let it unfurl in the air.
“Take us home!”
The map shot off, Frostbite, Danny, and the specter speeder hot on its metaphorical heels. They flew up into the sky and a glowing green rift opened for them almost immediately. They went through it, and then another portal, and then a third, and then they appeared right in the middle of Sam’s backyard.
“Huh,” Danny said as he touched down on the grass. “That makes everything easier.”
Tucker landed the speeder softly as a falling leaf. “The Infi-Map really knows wat it’s doing.”
“It does indeed,” Frostbite agreed. “Now that you are safely home, do you still need me and the map or shall I return home?”
“We’re good here,” Danny said and gave the yeti a friendly clap on the shoulder. “Thanks for coming with us.”
“Always a pleasure, o Great One,” Frostbite grinned, and opened the map again. “Take me home to the Far Frozen!”
And then he was gone.
Danny landed on the grass and turned back to human form with a flash of light. Tucker and Sam opened up the speeder’s doors and climbed out.
“Now we just have to plant this in my greenhouse, and we’re Gucci to start doing alchemy on it,” Sam said. “Shovel up, boys, we’re digging another hole.”
Danny and Tucker groaned.