Divinity Rescue Corps
162- I’m Altering The Deal

Only a few hours later, Ribbit and the other Guardians, with Wayne’s help, were able to herd the Nakamamon over to the entry and exit to Flunt on the Rustle. The caged Bushwhack, facing out to the wider world, exploded out of its cage and disappeared into the beyond.

Maybe it would cause others of its kind to become fighting aspect Nakamamon, and maybe it wouldn’t. There wasn’t anything more that could’ve been done in either case. I couldn’t have forced myself on any of Jacoby’s people without getting my ass handed to me, and even if I had, I couldn’t have forced them to brew up cures for me after violating them. Jacoby extended an offer, and only Celine accepted.

The responsibility actually lay with Blake and his idiotic decision not to take his pills. Screw that guy.

I put all this out of my mind, and walked the town’s weird spherical streets. They were only barely detectable as curved, and above the rest of the sphere was practically invisible due to some magic I didn’t understand. The size of the thing was so huge you couldn’t really comprehend what you were doing, but not so big that you didn’t cross the whole town in a matter of hours. I soon found myself at the apex and staring down toward the earth. The buildings across the sphere from me had also vanished, like these had when I was at the other side, and ‘above’ me was a blanket of pinpricks of light. I could only discern the shapes of the neighborhoods I’d just been in, the one with the switchback street and the flatiron building, the one with the large market square with the odd fountain in the middle. That fountain…

That fountain sprayed water up in the air… and it didn’t fall directly onto my head.

I laughed. Gravity was weird, physics were just suggestions, and that was fine. Totally fine.

I sat and looked at the stars, and went to use Psyspeech to connect with my mother again. I reconsidered, because Regina was the one I wanted to see. I wanted her smiling face, very green eyes, all the freckles, and I really hoped Tweedle Dee would enjoy having April as a flower fox companion. Of course, I also hoped I could have her sleek and powerful thighs in my hands soon, and hear her grunt and groan as she repeatedly took my cock, but that was for another time.

I missed Shakindria too, for that matter, and the huge bulk of Muppin plodding placidly along, carrying all our stuff, and sometimes carrying us. I missed Chrysta and her silent need to have physical contact. I missed Larelle, also being implacable and kind of naive.

And I missed the whole crew still stuck back on earth: Tara, Cinzy, Izzy, and Ivy. I missed Trent for the miracles he could do with stone, and I even missed Drat for the dry and humorless responses.

The ability informed me that Regina was out of range. My mom was not, a fact that depressed me a little. It meant they were both in the same place, at extreme range, but my relationship to my mom was stronger than my relationship to Regina. I’d have to remedy that.

Hey Ma, I sent her. I just finished handling the situation with the fighting aspect Nakamamon. I hope you’re well, I hope Regina and Shakindria and the others are well also. I miss you, and I miss them. There’s a sick god situation here in this weird town, but I want to meet up with you guys and get back to the hunt for your cancer cure first. I know you’re going to tell me to work on this dumb sick god, but I’m going to stubbornly refuse and make my way to you. Love you.

Joke was on me. I wasn’t going to be able to refuse.

***

Jacoby recovered after I brewed up and administered an anti-venom. This process took little more than some oil, some of the original venom, and a great deal of infused mana. I also threw in some of the physical mending plants to speed her recovery: calendula, otherwise known as pot marigold, was the most common of these. I also threw in some aloe vera.

Then, I made a note to splice these restorative plants together and try to get an even stronger version that could double heal. What would I call it? Alan Vera? Caloedula? Neither appealed… I’d workshop it.

“Verandula,” I breathed. Nice.

I also made sure to splice them with the mana strengthening flowers like henge grass, purple morpheus and blue passionflower. It would be easier to make restoration potions that could boost hit points as well as mana points that way.

Jacoby looked like death warmed over, but it was only a single day after she’d been dosed.

“Listen,” I told her, holding up the anti-venom. “You’re going to have to promise not to hunt down the Injecticle. I’m more certain now than ever that she was protecting me. She took out one of the guys sent to bring me back to HQ, and she helped with the Shrubbit, Geodile, and the other fighting aspects. It wasn’t the kind of anesthetic I was hoping for, but it worked… unfortunately you got caught in that. She thought you were attacking me.”

She made a strangled groan.

“Anyway,” I said, and lifted her head gently so I could dribble this concoction into her mouth and down her throat.

I’ve been caught off guard a lot in my life. Although I had a lot of interaction with my sometimes-awful older sister, and I did get some training in how to deflect people being dicks, there were still a lot of times when I had no comeback in the moment. I chalk it up to trying not to be mean to people, which is sometimes stupid, but definitely a Healer trait. You know: do no harm.

Jacoby sprang out of bed and rushed out the door of my lab. She literally leapt onto the roof of my house a moment later, and I was too slow to see where she went afterwards.

“Fudge,” I said.

I could hardly track Jacoby as she moved. She was fast, incredibly so, and I’d just traded my amazing senses ability for an amazing divided concentration ability. A bad trade off in this case.

She moved in a blur up to the top of the highest house, and sent about scanning the whole neighborhood in seconds. Moments later, she bolted back towards my house. I had time enough to see her curl into a rolling ball and barrel through my open upstairs window, along with seeing a frantic flail of purple tentacles on the stairs.

“Jacoby!” I shouted. “I’m not going to give you another anti-venom!”

The Injecticle came rolling down the stairs like she’d been pushed. I immediately went to help, only to have several tentacles flung out in my direction. They dragged the girl toward me, between my legs, and up into the shelf beneath the workstation like she was hiding from a velociraptor in Jurassic Park.

Jacoby came down after, heaving and looking like she’d just gotten a hundred hickeys up both arms, and on her neck. She was bleeding from tons of tiny puncture wounds.

“Where is she?” she demanded. “I can smell the little prick.”

I wouldn’t get this dark joke until much later. Little prick indeed.

“You will have to go through me in order to get her,” I told her. “Now cut this shirt out. She made a mistake. And honestly, you should be dead by now if you went up against her. You’re lucky she didn’t use five hundred doses of Heartstopper on you.”

She stalked down the stairs, and I can’t be sure from where, but she’d gotten a pair of short swords.

It was time for me to be grateful that Cinzy had fallen in love with me.

Mender’s Soothing Mental Balm II

(Special Ability, Rare, Aura)

Speak soothing words to those within range suffering from mental or emotional distress to help ease their torment and anguish.

Spend an Affinity Token. Make a Treatment check with Affinity to immediately begin healing all beings within range. All mental illnesses suffered by nearby non-divine creatures are healed so long as this aura is active. Once the aura ends, all creatures previously affected by mental illnesses regain them at half strength and half duration.

Range: 60 feet. Duration: 1 hour.

I spent an Affinity Token and made the Treatment check while continuing to try to de-escalate the situation. The difficulty here was Very difficult, but only 6. My Affinity of 8 and Treatments of 7 were able to handle the 6 successes without trouble; out of 15 levels, I managed 7 successes.

The anger drained from Jacoby’s face as the aura spread out around her. “What did you… wow… that feels nice.” Calm flooded over her, and she looked almost drunk. The swords disappeared into their sheaths and she plopped heavily into a chair, then slouched down as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

“Whuwerewetalkinbout?” she drawled.

I bent and peered under the worktable where the Injecticle was cowering. She no longer looked as though she would lash out at me, though, so the aura was working on her too.

“It’s all right,” I told her. “It’s okay. Can you come out?”

“She’s scary,” the purple girl said in a tiny, adorable voice.

“She can be, but she’s not going to hurt you any longer. I think if she sees you she’ll get used to having you around. It would be better if you didn’t have to hide any longer.”

I held out a hand, and she took it, and allowed me to help her up. She was doing better in the Durability or resistance department than Jacoby, though it was possible she was in far more distress than the expedition leader.

Her foot, the left one that had been trapped by the rock down in the swamp, was still broken. She favored it, and used her tentacles to assist in walking.

With Jacoby watching, I put on Mender’s Aura as well, and slathered on some healing potion as well, to get my protector some relief. The teensy pinpricks all over Jacoby, and the little hickeys from the Injecticle’s suckers all vanished, and the Injecticle exclaimed over her repaired foot. I made sure to give her a bit of healing potion, too, because Mender’s Aura was designed more as a first aid, or emergency tool. Afterwards, all of us stared at one another.

“So,” I said. “That’s that.”

“Yep,” Jacoby said, and continued to glance between the two of us. “That’s it.”

“Your team will be packing up and heading back to HQ? And I’ll just… stick around… here?”

Jacoby’s tone had fallen flat and emotionless. “There is a god situation in this part of town,” she said. “And actually, if I can recall, whatever it is, it’s spreading. When I was up on the roof I saw the area seemed at least one set of houses bigger. It’s mostly surrounding the warding circle the Wizards set up.” With our entire camp in it.

“That’s… not good.” What was up with her?

It wasn’t hard to piece together what was going on. A team had been dispatched specifically to go after me, and Jacoby had orders, along with all the other field teams, to capture me if they found me. She hadn’t, because I’d done the work she needed me to do. Jacoby was going to go back and report that the Shrubbit had transformed into a Bushwhack, that there was at least one fighting aspect Nakamamon out there, and probably get her ass chewed out. If she had me in custody, the chances of that chewing out being instead glowing accolades for capturing the rogue Healer, she could salvage her position as expedition leader, and maybe get another field assignment.

Right now she was either weighing the pros and cons of arresting me, or she’d made up her mind to do it, never mind the enormous favor I’d done her.

“Do you have a name I can call you?” I asked the Injecticle, privately hoping it was Ivy but also not… I already had a friend named Ivy.

“I never needed one before,” she said.

“Would you like one?”

“Um… sure.”

“May I call you Azalea?” It was a lovely flower that could be a magenta color, and was also poisonous.

“I love that,” she said, grinning.

With Psyspeech, I addressed her. I am afraid the leader of this team is going to try and restrain me. I’m thankful for your protection so far and I can’t ask more of you—

“That’s okay,” she said out loud.

Jacoby’s eyes flickered between us again, and it was clear a whole lot of calculation was going on. “I’ll just… be going then.”

Once she was gone, I sat back on my butt, getting a deep breath.

“You don’t have to worry,” Azalea said. “April is also here.”

Indeed, the flower fox leapt into my arms and snuggled into my neck.

I didn’t think twelve on three was good odds, especially with one of ours being a flower fox. Jacoby was fast and commanded a dozen people on her team, without counting Nakamamon bond mates. She could just as easily overpower Azalea, or get her in a cage. Outside the range of my aura, she might get her bloodlust back up and start in with the arrows. With all the Guardians they had the shields and muscle, and with all the Wizards they had the tricks. Plus, her Rogue could be quite useful, and Savannah the Bard might charm my only ally. Or me, for that matter. Cinzy had gotten past Stalwart before.

Being a fugitive kind of sucked. I might be on an antigravity spinning ball town in a world of magic and wonder, protected by a venomous tentacle-haired ally and cuddled by the cutest creature I’d ever laid eyes on, but I had to constantly watch my back, and that wasn’t awesome at all.

“I’m very glad to have your company,” I told her. “I’m even more glad that you made it out of the swamp okay.”

“Me too,” she said in a cheerful, cutesy voice. It was awful strange coming out of a girl with warning purple skin, rubbery tentacles instead of hair, and sickly yellow eyes. But she was cute, in her own way, small and compact and a little awkward.

“I can’t breathe water,” she confessed.

I stared, and my mouth went on ahead of my brain. “What?”

“I was forced to capture air bubbles with my tentacles and bring them to my mouth.”

It wasn’t possible to suppress a shudder. She’d been like that for days at least.

“You saved my life, Healer!” she chirped, and leapt forward to hug me. And this was a complete hug, with hair tentacles wrapping around my torso all the way around to my shoulders, and others wrapping around my arms. Two of them even wrapped up my upper thighs. “I’m so sorry for trying to hurt you, and I’m happy you have some poison resistance ability.”

“You and me both.”

She slowly untangled herself from me and looked up. She was under five feet, meaning she came up to the top of my abs, but her tentacles raised her up almost eye level. “Do you think she’ll try to put you in a cage too?”

“I sure hope not,” I muttered.

“We should go out the back way.”

I agreed, and we slunk out fully expecting the house to be surrounded. I imagined that every Guardian had a Wizard at his back prepared to use telekinesis or launch a fireball or try to freeze my feet. I imagined Oz on top of the house and ready to drop down onto me at any moment.

So it was that I was quite surprised to hear shouts of alarm and dismay erupt all around us. April dashed ahead before leaping and yipping in alarm. Her hackles were raised.

“What is going on?” I asked.

Celine was the only one I could see, but I felt it, sure enough: the surge of divinity coursing over the whole camp.

The Durability and Divine Resistance check came, and I passed it with ease. Strangely, the check also added in my Stave Off levels. Beside me, Azalea didn’t appear so fortunate. She grabbed at her stomach and sank to her knees.

Well, we were about to find out what kind of god was sick here in town, whether I wanted to deal with it or not.

The mousey Wizard with the spectacles and the compact body stumbled towards me, paused as if she couldn’t quite breathe, then tore off her robe and whipped her shirt off a moment after that. She stood and shucked a knee-length skirt, leaving her only in lacy, matching powder blue underwear and thigh-high black and white striped socks. She was soaked in sweat, and fell to her knees before me.

“Celine? What is happening?”

“I… Jacoby was going to order your capture, so I broke the seal on the warding circle… daddy.” She crawled on hands and knees, and clutched at my pants. “Daddy, your whore needs you. Right now.” With that, she started trying to either crawl up my body, or rip off my pants.

In the same instant, Azalea looked up at me with those strange yellow eyes, and I saw lust boiling deep in there as well. Also hearts. She had literal heart shapes in her eyes.

This is Christopher figuring out what’s going on just in time.