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Day 5: Harvest
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Amity Park was a nice place to live. It was also a very strange place to live, especially after the first ghost invasion, but, if one were to be honest, it had been strange long before that. Long, long before that. The ghosts had just put the last nail in the coffin, so to speak, locking the town into strangeness.
Of course, the ghosts weren't the end of it. Amity Park had room to get stranger yet.
(All the strange traditions and old legends started to make sense. Old journals were in high demand. The Amity Park Historical Society took the ones in their archives, made copies, and a profit.)
Danny had seen most, if not all, of the strangeness. He had an intimate connection to it. He could sense it, feel it, soul-deep, with intellect and instinct both.
Now, with Sam and Tucker at his side, he was standing in front of the latest addition. As far as these things tended to go, this wasn't too extreme, but, for some reason, Sam was upset about it.
"Danny," she was saying, "the apples are silver. Metallic silver. Apples aren't supposed to be reflective, Danny."
"Yeah, so?"
"We have to do something."
"What?" asked Danny.
Sam turned away from the tree, and towards Danny, crossing her arms. "For the record," she said, "I blame you."
"And I blame you," replied Danny, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. This had become a joke, over time, much like the constant tongue-in-cheek references to Danny's death, and (un) living status.
"Well, as long as Desiree isn't involved, I guess we can live with that."
"Maybe you can, but, alas, living is beyond my grasp."
They exchanged glances, and then doubled over, laughing.
"Well, now that you two have gotten through your weird mating ritual-" Tucker deftly dodged punches from both Sam and Danny, "- what are we going to do?"
"I don't know that we really have to do anything," said Danny. "It's just these trees here, and I don't think that anyone will come up and eat them."
"You mean, you think that everyone in Amity has common sense," said Sam.
"Oh. Yeah. That's probably a bad assumption."
"'Probably.'"
"But not everyone is going to be here to be tempted... Oh, who am I kidding. This has already managed to go viral, hasn't it?"
"Yep," said Tucker.
"How?"
"Someone took a video."
"When?" asked Danny, face scrunching. "This didn't happen all that long ago, did it? I mean, I only noticed a couple hours ago."
"Looks like one of the guys who lives here took a video."
Danny looked up and down the street. This was actually some distance away from Amity Park proper. It was in the library and school district, but outside of the urban growth boundary, on the other side of Amity Park from Elmerton. It was still well within the area that Danny considered 'his,' but it was definitely rural.
This was someone's apple orchard, a haphazard collection of ten or, no, eleven trees. He'd missed the one in the corner. Danny would bet that they were heirloom varieties, not the typical ones that you'd find in the store... Not that you could find silver apples in the store, but before they'd gone silver, they were still apples. These were old trees.
Seeing no one, Danny stepped off the road, hopped over the culvert, and into the little orchard.
"They don't feel dangerous," he said, walking under a tree festooned with small, very nearly spherical apples. He reached up to prod one.
"If you get heavy metal poisoning or something it's your fault!" said Tucker. "Ooh, the blame game. It is fun."
Danny scoffed. "If I was going to get heavy metal poisoning, it would be from Skulker, or- Oh. Wait. Never mind, you weren't there."
"Oh, come on, you can't leave a sentence like that," said Sam.
"You know the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland? I ran into one of those in the GZ. Way more beavers than I expected." He prodded one of the apples. "Well, at least these aren't exploding."
"Dude, why are you prodding it if you expect it to explode?"
"I didn't expect it to explode. It was just a possibility. Besides, you'd need a lot more than an explosion to kill me. Been there, done that, and all. Because a lot of things do explode."
"Especially around you," agreed Tucker.
"You aren't going to eat that, are you?" asked Sam, as Danny pulled an apple free of the tree.
"Maybe," said Danny, turning the fruit over in his hands. The skin was slicker, cooler, than that of a normal apple. He sniffed the apple. It smelled normal. Then again, just about anything could smell normal for an apple. There were apples that smelled like roses, like honey, like alcohol, like grapes, like limes. Apples were weird like that.
He pulled a knife from his pocket. Sam had been trying to get him in the habit of carrying a mundane back-up weapon, although he refused to bring it to school. The knife had no trouble slicing through the skin and flesh of the apple, and had soon cut it in half.
"The seeds are silver too," he said. "But I think that otherwise it looks normal." He sniffed it again, and shrugged, prodding it once with an intangible finger, then dropping one half and shooting it with a ghost ray. "Seems to act normal," he said, looking at the burnt remains. He patted the other half on the skin of his arm.
"What are you doing?" asked Tucker.
"It's a simple poison test," said Sam. "A lot of poisons will irritate the skin after a while."
"Yeah, but I'm not what you'd call a good candidate. I deal with irritating things every day."
"... Hey," said Tucker, slowly. "What do you mean by-?"
"Oh, and there's the whole bit where my biology is radically different from yours." Danny paused. "You know, it occurs to me that we could just pick them all, if you still think they're dangerous." He glanced towards the house that sat on this bit of property. It was just barely visible beyond a stand of arbor vitae. "It would take a long time, though. It would be hard to not be seen."
"We could just ask the owners. Tuck, you still have that junior ghost hunter badge, right? The official-looking one?"
"Do you mean the one we conned from Vlad, the Ghostkateers one, the one we made in Danny's basement, or the one we stole from the Guys in White?"
"You have all of those with you?" asked Sam, actually sounding somewhat impressed.
"What, with me right now? No."
"Then why list them all?"
"You asked me if I still had them."
"I meant, do you have any with you?"
"Yeah, the Guys in White one, and the one from Vlad. We drew all over the Guys in White one with crayon, though."
"What do you mean, we?" interjected Danny. "And why are you carrying it around? I thought that we agreed to get rid of it, because of the whole stolen government property thing."
"What do you mean, we?" Tucker paused. "There's something very wrong with us, isn't there?"
"Without a doubt," said Sam. "Give me the one we got from Vlad... Danny, what are you doing?"
"Forget that, how did you do that without us noticing?" asked Tucker.
Danny was currently floating two feet above the ground in ghost form. He shrugged. "Taking a leaf out of Jazz's book. Also, seeing if this looks different when I'm a ghost." Another shrug. "For the second question, you know that I can change without the rings, and you were distracted."
"We were holding a conversation with you, you nerd, and we'd better not find you writing psychological observations down in a notebook."
"I said I was taking a page out of Jazz's book, not checking out her whole library."
"Gross, dude, don't talk about checking out your sister."
"Yeah, Tucker does enough of that."
"Hey!"
"By the way, it's the same when I'm in ghost form. Thanks for asking."
Sam scratched the back of her head. "Weirdly, I'm not too worried about ghosts eating these."
"Yeah," said Tucker, digging through his bag. "Ghosts tend to have finely honed senses of self-preservation. Present company excluded."
Danny laughed. "Tucker, dude, do you not remember what Skulker did the first time we met him? He integrated a foreign, entirely unfamiliar, piece of technology into his body without a second thought"
"You're comparing yourself to Skulker? Sad. Here's the badge."
"Not just Skulker," protested Danny.
"He knows, Danny, he's just teasing you."
"Yeah, and I'm teasing him back." Danny touched down on the ground, and turned human again. "So, shall we go knock on the door?"
"Let's," agreed Sam.
.
.
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The owners of the building were skeptical. That was reasonable. 'Junior ghost hunters' were not, after all, a real thing. Even Vlad had only entertained the idea as a way to harass Danny. But the badge looked official, Sam could be awfully convincing, and the apples really might have been dangerous.
Danny flew back home for bags; it only took him a few minutes, even when he stopped to fight the box ghost. Then he, Sam, and Tucker spent an arduous two hours picking every single apple from the trees.
"Now what?" he asked, staring down at the bags.
"Dunno," said Tucker, sounding exhausted. "Chuck 'em into the GZ or something?"
"I kind of want to try eating one," said Danny. He held out his bare arm. "It hasn't done anything to my arm."
"They could still be poisonous, Danny. That test isn't perfect."
"Okay, seriously, how do you two know this stuff?"
"Um, Sam knows it because she's into botany. I know it because I read a lot of survivalist stuff, because I'm paranoid."
"Oh, it makes perfect sense, in that case. Except for the bit where you want to eat the mutant ghost apple."
"By that logic, I'm a mutant ghost human, and it should be perfectly fine. Look, I'm only going to take one bite."
"It isn't like you need to ask us for permission," said Sam. "I mean, if you're dead set on ending your half life, I can't stop you."
"Yeah, it was nice knowing you, man."
"Okay, okay, I get it, I get it. I won't eat any. We still need to figure out what to do with them, and I'm not dropping them into the GZ. Or burying them. Or setting them on fire."
"That's like, all the options, though," said Tucker.
"Yeah, and they're all bad ones. We drop them into the GZ, they come back as a monster with a hundred reflective eyes. We bury them, the seeds sprout, and we have the same problem, but more so. We set them on fire, it turns out that their weirdness is fire-related, or the smoke is some weird drug."
"You watch too many horror movies," said Tucker
"Blasphemy. Besides, my life is a horror movie, and, in case you've forgotten, that's all stuff that's happened to us before."
"Crap, you're right."
"We could take one into the GZ," said Sam, "see if your allies know anything."
"Yeah," agreed Danny. "I wouldn't hold out hope for that, though. Most stuff that happens in Amity is pretty unique." He paused. "That brings me to my second question. How are we going to get all of these home? Because I can't carry both of you and them at the same time."