Divinity Rescue Corps
144- A Deep Delve

It turned out that the best way for me to keep in touch with my mom, Regina, and the rest of them, was Fairy Poppins.

Everyone agreed, first, that I needed to be the one to help with the fighting aspect issue. Jacoby refused to go to the head Healer, Rainer, even though that was the smart move. That would have meant admitting there was a problem… right now, as far as HQ knew, no such problem existed. Jacoby was just trying to salvage her career as a field commander and I couldn’t fault her there. Field command assignments were pretty rare.

Everyone secondly agreed that the best way to go about this was to separate me from the rest of the party. Which sucked, purely from an emotional point of view. From a logistical point of view, it was clearly better than Jacoby going back on her word and handing me and my mother over to the HQ people. Right now, with Regina and all the Nakamamon, they could probably head to Vellenia’s village, or back to the town I’d saved, and mount a rescue operation if Jacoby lied and whisked me off to face interrogation and possible deportation back to earth.

Again, I was not cool with any of this, but I didn’t have any say in the matter.

This led to a very hug-filled goodbye situation. My mother, then Regina, then Shakindria, followed by all the bond mates. Tweedle Dee got a bunch of ear scratches and belly rubs, followed by McCauley Skulkins for far more belly rubs, Muppin got a bunch more head scratches, and Garnet, who… I couldn’t say enjoyed the pats on its facets, but it seemed sluggish to leave, and when it did leave, it carved a furrow into the earth like it was sinking into the water.

Only Fairy Poppins seemed excited for the future. She flitted and pulled loop de loops around my head.

“I don’t like this,” Vellenia told me, wrapping herself around my arm. She hugged herself as tight to me as possible, curling one leg around mine and shoving her face into my chest. “What happens when she takes you?”

“If she takes me,” I said. She had enough power and people to make that happen. I had elected not to be the poisoner class, and I had very limited options… but I’d done just fine against Blake and his people.

“And if she takes you? What then?” she sounded like she was on the verge of tears.

“I use the abilities I have at my disposal. You gave me Dazzle and Water Breathing. I have Telekinesis and I have Psyspeech. From there I’ve got Stalwart, Fierce, and all my Pleasure Seeker abilities. I’ve got the Bondsealer one for talking to Nakamamon…”

She stood on her strange, not-human toes to try looking me in the eye. “I need to meet her.”

Jacoby agreed to this meeting as well, and after another hour or so, we strode between the bizarre Galacti and avoided the gigantic ambush spider monsters with Poppy’s help.

“Expedition Leader,” she said, still stiff and formal… still, her eyes drifted to Vellenia.

“Expedition Leader,” I said, nodding. “My bond mate, Vellenia.”

For now, we were keeping Shakindria’s existence a complete secret. Of the things I did not need, it was Jacoby spiriting me back to HQ to find out how all of the Agency’s people could learn how to bond multiple Nakamamon.

For a long time, neither Jacoby nor I spoke.

For now, Vellenia was still wrapped around my arm like Jacoby was about to kidnap me. Still, she eventually opened up and began admiring the Galacti in their midnight coloration, the huge boulders, and the shhhh shhh sound of the surf making a maraca of all the pebbles.

 Eventually though, Jacoby opened her mouth and helped get this show on the road.

“How is it I can reassure your bond mate?” she asked. “I wouldn’t be averse to having her along. I haven’t had the opportunity to speak with any other sentient Nakamamon at length.”

We watched the cacti, with their stars and nebula, twinkle and slowly shift.

“Promise me you won’t hurt my Fletcher,” Vellenia said.

The chest-clenching hurt was audible, and it brought Jacoby up short. Her cool Asian eyes fixed on the Marshin, her mint green hair and her pink bits, and the thin sundress in white fabric that barely covered her. 

“I promise not to hurt your bond mate.” It seemed like something broke inside Jacoby the moment she actually addressed a thinking, talking, non-human being instead of talking about her or near her. “I admit to a bad first impression,” she said. “Please accept my apologies. I didn’t mean to alarm you or your friends. You must be in distress, since other teams will be looking to capture your bond mate.”

Vellenia nodded and clutched at me tighter.

“Expedition Leader,” I said, “why did you choose to be a Ranger? Actually, don’t answer that. I’m going to instead tell you why I chose to be a Healer. It was to help people. And as it turns out, there are a lot of people who need help.”

She regarded me coolly.

“Actually,” I told her, “I have a special ability that will allow you to better understand me, and for me to better understand you. It can feel a bit… deep, if you’re not ready for it.”

“This is not a Healer special ability,” she said, “I’ve been briefed on the basic ones. This must be a feature of bonding with your Nakamamon? Or a feature of your class evolution?”

I pulled up a tight smile, and Fierce gave me a bonus on the Deceit check that I was about to make.

Likability Check: You do not have the associated skill for this check.* This check is an opposed one. Since this is a Deceit check, it will be made without the target’s knowledge. Bear in mind that some classes have a way of detecting Deceit checks made against them. Would you like to spend 3 Tokens to lower your target’s Deceit and Ingenuity by 1 for the purposes of this check? You may not spend a Token to retry this check.

Total Tokens: 7 Likability and 7 Free Tokens.

*Note: Fierce II has given you a temporary Deceit skill of 7. You have gained a temporary Physicality Token and a temporary Durability Token.

I decided to spend 6 of my Likability Tokens, and confirmed this. Although Eromancy wasn’t associated with Vellenia at all, and although I felt it would help alleviate the problem we were now facing, I absolutely did not want for Jacoby to get an inkling of what I was attempting before I attempted it.

The check succeeded, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief.

“I don’t see why not,” she said.

“The uncomfortable part is that we will be need to touch one another,” I said.

Eromancy III

(Special Ability, Heroic, Active)

I- You automatically detect arousal, passion, erotic thoughts and feelings, and their points of origin, to a range of Affinity x10 feet. You may spend a Token to home in on those thoughts and experience them. Targets will immediately detect your presence in this case. Unwilling targets use Psychic Resistance and Durability to force you out, versus your Pheromones and Likability. The subject may spend a Token to eject you.

II- Spend a Likability Token: You may bring a target you are touching into your mind, to experience a psychic delving of your choosing. This could be memory or imagination. The target will know truth from fiction instinctually. The subject may exit your psychic projection at any time.

III- While inside these fantasies, you may influence them or take control. Spend a Token to begin shaping these thoughts, daydreams, or dreams. You may attempt finer control using additional Tokens or by Pheromones and Likability checks. As before, the subject may spend a Token to oust you from their mind.

“It’s only uncomfortable if you’re secretly attempting to get in my pants,” she said, and extended a hand. The laugh I gave was, to my ears, forced. Still, when she didn’t jerk her hand away, I took it and spent the Token.

Once more, the palm-sized coin appeared in the air with a cla-cling! sound, twirling once to show both sides, before it burst into the same rainbow magic dust that covered both our heads.

Showing Jacoby my formative past wasn’t difficult and didn’t take long. All I had to do was show the fall, flashes of the hospital, and then relearning to walk, the pity and sadness and ridicule, followed by my friends abandoning me when the ridicule started to radiate away from me and onto the cripple’s friends. And then the strain it put on my family, as they lavished the time, attention and money on me in order to keep me from sliding into a constant depression. Sarah felt betrayed and neglected, pushed aside, and in favor of what? Christopher was never going to amount to anything.

Cancer struck next. My father nearly collapsing, trying to hold a job and my mother’s hand, with a practically crippled son and a daughter who hated him.

Sarah having a child, the fights that followed when it became clear Brayden’s father was a scumbag who wasn’t going to remain in the picture… and me trying to glue the family back together when my mom’s cancer first appeared.

Fast forwarding, I got through the grim slog that was high school, how much video games helped buoy me up, and then my job struggles. Cancer’s reappearance. My sister moving out when Brayden was one, with a different scumbag. Finally, Dick Johnson’s appearance after I applied for the Agency position.

I released my hold on Eromancy and blinked. The ability felt like far more of a superpower than Verdant Rejuvenation had been. I’d just used the concentrated magic of the Likability Token to flood Jacoby’s brain with knowledge.

“Oh… my gosh,” she breathed. She was crying. I was too, but Vellenia had wiped the tears off and was imitating a blanket, wrapped around me as tight as possible.

“Now,” I said, “Vellenia is hoping you can do the same thing. Just think of your deepest desire. What you want most in the world. Go back as far as you have to, to where it all started.”

“Where what started?” she asked, wiping the tears away.

“The thing that makes you you.” I didn’t know if this would work, but when the prompt from Eromancy level I appeared, I spent the Token.

And I knew all there was to know about Jacoby Dunlop in the span of several seconds.

Esmerelda Jacoby Dunlop had had a different name once upon a time, in another place where she was given up for adoption by poor or sick parents, and flown practically as a newborn overseas to live in Connecticut of all places. She grew up looking different, and if it weren’t for that, she would have been exactly the same. In elementary school her differently shaped eyes and darker skin hadn’t meant much to anyone else. She had friends and played with blocks and such.

Once middle school hit, all that went out the window. Just like when I’d had my legs crushed, Jacoby had her personality mangled under the weight of bullies. And these were the mean girl type, who seized on the first easy target and easily ripped her to shreds with cruel words.

Jacoby, rather than talking about all this, pushed it down. She held all of it inside, and while all her friends fell away under the onslaught of the mean girls, she valiantly held on. She held, and held, and held, until one day she couldn’t any longer. They put fortune cookies in her locker—she was of Vietnamese descent, not Chinese—they scribbled things on her backpack with indelible glass markers in Japanese—she was still of Vietnamese descent, not Japanese—and they hounded her relentlessly once COVID got going.

And she held out. Every day they broke her inside, and every day she built herself back up by watching videos, making plans, learning the language, and trying to tell herself how stupid and vain they were.

In the twelfth grade, when her nickname went from Ching Chung to Kung Flu, she ran away from home.

The intent was to return to her native land of Vietnam. She had already learned a lot of the language. She had apps, she had the video streaming sites, and she had paid for a tutor with her own money.

By the time she reached California, she had run out of money, though. Dick Johnson, HR for the Agency, discovered her almost two years later picking vegetables in the fields with all the other migrant workers, fully fluent in Spanish. She’d also been semi-adopted by the Korean and Chinese communities in Los Angeles, where she ran errands and spoke both languages with passing familiarity. She was also deeply in debt to both of those communities and their organized crime syndicates.

Dick Johnson allowed her to reunite with her parents just before her nineteenth birthday, where he then offered her a job that would allow her to live anywhere on earth, provided she fly back to Alaska for her appointed work times.

The Triads loved that she basically didn’t exist on paper. The Korean gangs loved that she had intel on the inner workings of Chinatown, and could feed them secrets. She wasn’t a great ambassador, and Dick Johnson reminded her that one false move, and she would be found dead in a ditch somewhere, or shipped off to Mexico where she’d never be seen again. By contrast, he could make sure she did disappear and was never seen again… by the Korean mob and the Triads.

Jacoby wanted to matter. She had a lot to prove and she had the tenacity to prove it. She was naturally assertive, but had no experience in a lot of different ways. She was scrappy, fierce, and she was a survivor.

The kink she had developed was that of watcher. She had never seen a healthy relationship closely. She was close to believing they didn’t exist, honestly. If she could see one, up close and intimately, she would get some pointers as to how it was really done. This had slowly warped into a voyeuristic bent: she got off on watching people do their thing, especially when she felt no one was watching. She’d nearly chosen to be a Rogue because of this.

Her deepest desire was to be wanted the way Vellenia wanted Fletcher. She wanted someone to bow before her, to worship her, to see to her needs before she even knew what those needs were. No seeing her as different, no using her to rise up in the ranks. She wanted someone smart and savvy, who saw her as an equal.

This is Christopher in awe.