The sweetest flower that grows

[una_persson]

Who: Una Persson and Emilia Westmarch
What: Una undertakes a punitive assignment. Emilia's lending a hand. Neither quite knows what they're in for.
Where: A version of Earth, Indonesia, Dutch colonial era, late 19th c.
When: Some time after the events with the witch huts.
Warnings: References to colonialist awfulness. Will update as needed.

Una had argued somewhat persuasively that someone with more experience in biology (even if it wasn't botany) would be helpful on this expedition, so now here she was with Emilia, in the jungles of Indonesia, sometime around 1880.

She reflected that after a certain point (to wit, largely after Europeans started getting involved), there wasn't really any such thing as a good time to visit Southeast Asia unless you were determined to get embroiled in some conflict or other. Had Una been on her own, operating in her usual fashion, she would have almost certainly dropped herself into the middle of the Indonesian National Revolution and spent a reasonably productive length of time there. But it didn't seem fair to subject Emilia to that, so she targeted instead a period where Dutch colonial rule was still—regrettably—in place, with all that implied as far as the oppression of the local population went, but in a time where Una still felt she could function, where stretches of the wilderness beyond the plantations were relatively unspoilt, and when they had slightly reduced odds of getting into trouble.

Going rather hastily through Jakarta, she'd found a reference to the plant that Jeffers had requested in a page torn from a British scientific paper. It was mostly an illustration, with a few notes, but that was enough at least to go on in the jungle, where they could ask the locals for help in finding it.

In a small village, they'd found an old woman who spoke a very little bit of English, who pointed them in a direction where, it seemed, the plant was known to grow.

Apparently this was very funny to her. Una wasn't sure why.

(Also, there was no mistaking the fact that the villagers were more than ready to be rid of them, once they got a good look at Emilia. Una had never heard such an array of what were obviously curses, charms, and prayers.)