Divinity Rescue Corps
146- You Block of Tofu

Weather in the swamp wasn’t bad, which surprised me. The evening was cool but didn’t require a sweatshirt as my magically enhanced Durability could handle temperatures even lower without discomfort. It was one of the strange things about increasing my attributes above where I figured human maximums were, around 6 or 8. Overcoming human maximums allowed Guardians to vault high walls, allowed Rangers to see with more precision and accuracy than any earthling, even with the sharpest senses.

The Wizards also had a ritual they periodically re-upped that kept pests out of the ritual circle. They had burned a huge circle around the perimeter of this island and basically turned the whole thing into a gigantic tiki torch. Rodents and tiny flying pests were kept out, which was probably the single greatest use of magic I had ever seen.

Introductions were also made. I was reintroduced to both Oz, who I’d just met, and Wayne, who stuck around throughout the Glumpdumpkin saga, along with Savannah, the permanently smiling Bard of the group.

“I took a page out of your book and pressured the higher ups to give me a diverse team,” she said. “HQ heard about your successes in the Marshin village and agreed.”

Plus, there was that teensy little fact of everyone wanting to get out of HQ to break away from make work and desk duty. Sure Wizards were okay just recording data or doing scrying spells their whole tours here, but the rest of them itched to get the hell out and explore this wonderful new world.

“Unfortunately the Sorcerers didn’t want to join the party. Can I tell you how jealous I am that you got the stone Sorcerer to build you literally an entire village?”

She had four Wizards on the team, including Wayne, and a total of eight Guardians. They were a mixture of men and women, and all sorts of colors and sizes.

“The new split with Agility and Muscularity really did a number on our Guardians,” she said, waving to the cluster of Guardians who weren’t on duty. “I got almost all of my points put into Agility, but the Guardians got tossed in every direction imaginable. It’s wild, honestly.”

“You had more Guardians and Wizards before,” I said. “And… at least one other Ranger?”

Her expression darkened. “I have the rest of them combing the area around the town for ay other fighting aspects. I’m hoping we got them all.”

“I still say we can just kill them,” one of the Guardians suggested, full of the kind of callous disregard for life I’d seen out of Blake’s Guardians.

“What do we want to name the first fighting and ghost aspect Nakamamon? Boxergeist? Poltergiekwondo?” I asked. The guy’s eyes bulged out of his head. “How many times have you told him that there are ghost aspect Nakamamon? Did you not believe them, or did Guardian training give you too many head injuries?”

“I…” Thankfully he fell silent after that. I really wanted to make a jab at his Ingenuity but decided not to antagonize the big muscle guy. It was sort of how this situation got going in the first place.

“Okay then,” I said. “I’ll do my job, and you go do yours.” With that, I cracked my knuckles and hoped this would work.

I’d left all my diagnostic tools with my mom, hoping she would use them under Alan’s expert supervision. I had, however, been informed by the God of Productivity that any time I needed a tool, I would have it.

There are perks to saving the lives of literal gods.

I took a deep breath and went after my magic diagnostic tools mentally. I imagined the box with the four stones, each in their own smaller boxes. Inside the four boxes, insulated against the magical interference, would be four crystals. The first was a milky white threaded through with veins of black and storm cloud gray. Occasionally, a soft cerulean would steal over the whole thing. In the hours I’d spent watching it, I’d seen it darken and flash to vibrant color at dusk, then show off tiny pinpricks of starlight, only to soften from indigo into blue and orange again come sunrise.

Instead of the four boxes, the crystal that worked on air and holy magic appeared in my hand.

“Huh,” I said.

“Where’d you get that?” one of the Guardians asked. 

“He hid that watch up his arse for two years,” Jacoby said, arms crossed. When all eyes turned her way, staring at the antiquated movie quote, she grinned. She had their attention. “Everybody clear out, okay? Fletcher knows his work. Let him do his job without interruption.”

When they’d gone, she bent down. “Where did you get that?”

“Gift from a god.”

She just nodded, accepting this without comment. You save gods, there are perks. That’s how the natural order of things goes. Sure sure.

It was trickier to get the stone close enough to perform the diagnostic test without getting bitten or clawed. Jacoby had to summon the dumbass who’d been suggesting killing our fighting aspect Nakamamon, because Tweedle Dee’s twin sister shot vines out of her flowers and wrapped me up. Several slices of a magic shield later, the Guardian was fending off claw attacks and vines on my behalf.

I manifested the other diagnostic tools, but didn’t bother with the physical one. Spiritually it was not broken. Mentally, however, it was in distress. The diagnosis was not a mental illness in the way this world had them, but in the way earth defined it.

Here, being sad could melt you away into nothing or turn you into a sadness spreading zombie. Rage could break you apart or turn you into a rage spreading zombie. On earth, sadness could make you kill yourself.

The skill check from Diagnostics was… not like I thought it would go.

Diagnosis check: This check works with Affinity. You have Diagnostics at level 6, and Affinity at level 9. All other relevant skills are unranked. This check is Nigh Impossible, and requires 14 successes. Would you like to spend 14 Tokens for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 9 Affinity and 7 Free Tokens.

“Any of you Guardians have that ability where you can spend a zillion Tokens to help a guy out?” I asked through gritted teeth. Spittle and furious yipping was getting to me. So far in my journeys, I hadn’t been directly attacked by rabid animals at all, and this was distracting.

None did, or the guy I’d humiliated decided not to aid me. So I gritted my teeth and spent basically all of my Tokens to get this done.

A plethora of Tokens appeared, rising out of nowhere with that familiar cla-cling! sound before disappearing. Apparently the others could see them, because I got a lot of raised eyebrows and muttered amazement out of the assembled team.

So Arcane Alchemy, my primary special ability from Healer, wasn’t giving me a bonus to the difficulty. What I was trying to do… was heal a creature that wasn’t sick. The UI had my back, though. The window appeared, spreading from a tiny blue window into a large rectangle.

[unknown condition has been diagnosed. Contacting the administration]

I groaned. “Not this again.”

In short order, two magical face call windows appeared. The one happened in a swirl of greenish light and looked to have a gnarled wreath of branches growing into its perimeter. These sprouted flowers, followed by spring green leaves. Jocinda’s face appeared here, just as severe and sharp as before, just as darkly amused. Her curly and kinky brown hair exploded out behind her head and made it impossible to see anything behind her.

Claudius’s window appeared much more like you’d expect a ritual wizard’s to look: runes glowing in orange sparkly magic. He appeared just as a wizard would: mustache thick enough to hide his entire mouth, beard of salt and pepper, and wispy hair on the top of his head. He quickly donned a wide-brimmed hat in brick red, with silver embroidery. 

“You again!” Claudius barked, not looking at me. “Don’t think I’ve stopped looking for you. You’re inches away… don’t you ignore me!”

Jocinda simply brought her hand up in front of her face and studied her fingernails. “Claudius. Always a pleasure to see you’re still as interesting and predictable as a block of tofu.”

“How dare you—”

“Yes,” she replied, “it does appear to be an insult to tofu, which does have its uses now and again.”

“That’s enough of that!” I called.

“You,” Claudius said, and the exasperation was a nice change from his anger at this Jocinda person.

“Yeah,” I said, “Me.”

“It seems you act as the hinge upon which the world turns,” Jocinda said in a tone of slight interest.

“I have a problem here,” I said, and explained what had happened. Jocnda’s air of superiority and casual disregard for Claudius vanished, and Claudius’s fury gradually left him as well. They backed him all the way up to where this began: with Blake.

It was also about this time that I realized there were no snarls or snaps of jaws, no rattling of cages, no motion whatsoever. Jacoby and Fairy Poppins were frozen right over there. I blinked in confusion. Just how powerful were these two ‘administrators’?

“How could you not get him to take the anti-magic medicine?” Claudius demanded.

“Oh stop it,” she said. “What part of twelve foot mountain of muscle did you not hear or understand?” She turned to me. “Healer, what is your name?”

“Fletcher,” I told them. “Christopher Fletcher. Unique class, and now discoverer of a completely new aspect, not that I’m proud of either of those things.” Now, for the first time, the two looked at one another without any negative emotion. It was all raised eyebrows there. “I just want answers so I can do what I’ve been tasked to do.”

“You have been tasked with getting into Agency custody, young man,” Claudius said. “I have personally signed the order—”

I cut him off, turning to Jocinda. “And you? Are you going to help me?”

The severe, hatchet-faced older woman produced a pair of round spectacles and sniffed. “You’ll need to share the UI window results.”

I muttered the command to make the UI window and messages visible, including the Diagnostics check requirement. I was usually quite uncomfortable doing this, but these super high level people weren’t actually here. If they were, the old man would’ve already reached through with some insane level spell and flicked me across the world to the HQ castle.

Jocinda read with her lips moving slightly. “Unknown condition… this appears to be an aspect being overwritten somehow. The new fighting aspect has taken the place of the beast aspect.”

“How does that help me?” I asked.

“Well we shall need to find the appropriate name for the condition, first,” she said.

“Ohh here we go!” Claudius complained. “Why not just call it ‘aspectus investus’ or something equally inane?”

“Decent, decent,” she said distractedly. “I don’t tend towards the neo-Latinization, but it is a last resort if I feel particularly uninspired.”

“I don’t care what you call it,” I said. “I need to know how to reverse the process. What kind of malady would you say it’s closest to? So I can go through the logs and get to work on a cure.”

Jocinda just tapped her pointy chin in thought. “Aspect… sense of self… inner turmoil… war of aspects is too dramatic… hmm…”

“This is a hostile takeover of a Nakamamon’s aspect,” Claudius said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It feels like a magical illness. I’ve just healed up a mana misalignment in a god. Is it anything like that?”

“It’s certainly magical in nature,” Claudius said, and I was quietly thankful he got away from the topic of apprehending me and over toward the subject at hand. I still had my mother’s cancer to cure before they could kick me out of this world and fire me, and whatever happened next. Send me off to Guantanamo? Quietly disappear me from the entire country?

“It is now, however, a mana misalignment. This is an encroachment of the very nature of the being. This is more like a virus attacking the soul.”

“Can you tell me why the beast aspect is being overwritten? Or how?”

“Almost all Nakamamon contain two aspects. The special abilities they get fall into two categories: easily categorized, and, mmm, normal.”

“Normal,” I repeated, unimpressed.

“Yes, well,” Claudius went on. “The other administrators didn’t like the normal aspect either, and wanted to split it into beast and bug, and then subdivide beast into different earth-like critters. But as it turns out, all these have essentially the same pool of potential special abilities. Beast and bug are misnomer aspects. They are really just a single overarching aspect, and it seems to be sort of… unaspected.”

“The second aspect isn’t an aspect.”

He held up a hand. “In some cases, such as with dragon aspects or other duals, there are two aspects that intertwine within the creature’s being. Any of the elements could combine, such as fire and poison, to create a sort of acidic Nakamamon.”

I stared at Fairy Poppins, frozen and hovering there. “My bond mate is a water and fairy. Are you suggesting she will be immune to this aspect takeover?”

Claudius now held up two hands. “I couldn’t say, but I would suspect that these normal aspected subjects are more susceptible.”

“You’re both damaging my calm,” Jocinda snapped. “I can’t think of anything amusing with you two being all serious over there. The only things I come up with are apocalyptic. Soul rip. Aspect shatter. Ugh, no style.”

“Aspectus investus it is,” I said, and motioned for Claudius to continue.

“Your diagnostic has revealed the problem here. Since this creature has two aspects already, the process is not yet complete. If you Identify the creature using a spell or high level Identify, you can see that it still has abilities tied to its nature as a beast, or normal aspect. However, its attributes are… what in the devil is that?”

“It’s Agility and Muscularity, Claudius,” Jocinda remarked idly. “Physicality split into two attributes while you were poking around in your dusty old tomes and ordering this young man to be arrested. Do try to keep up.”

Claudius began to adopt his previous fury again.

I looked into the UI window where the diagram of the Vulpetunia’s chakra points were wrong. The crown of the head and third eye area of the forehead were split between the green of plant and the dark reddish color of fighting. The other three chakras: the heart, the stomach, and the uh… taint area, were split between green and a sort of clear or gray. But the dark red of fighting was surging down the mana pathways of the creature.

I had diagnosed that the situation was magical. It was and wasn’t. Which again told me that this creature wasn’t sick. It had been magically influenced to become a fighting aspect Nakamamon, even though it wasn’t normally.

“I think that’ll do for now,” I told the two administrators. “I’ll uh… be seeing you.”

The two of them frowned at me.

“I mean I hope I won’t be seeing you. But with my luck I probably will.”

“We are not finished here, young man,” Claudius said. “You have to answer for the portal’s destruction, the—”

There was no way Jocinda wasn’t going to jump to that bait. She threw a hand over her forehead in mock weariness. “Oh dear, the time freezing spell has run its course. Ta ta!”

Claudius had one moment to go red in the face and bluster something incomprehensible before both of the windows winked out of existence. Time began to run its course yet again.

I blinked and rubbed my temples, studying the readout of the Vulpetunia from the Diagnostic I’d done. The window gave her a few weeks before the aspect takeover was complete.

Conclusion: Tweedle Dee’s twin sister was just fine, adapting to her new magical status as a fighting aspect, and she was pissed off. As a fighting aspect she would also be just fine, but if I could change her back into a beast, she would also be just fine, and not a new type of Nakamamon nobody had ever seen before.

“So here is the major problem,” I said, and explained what I’d learned to Jacoby in brief. “She is in a magically ambiguous state, but that will become normal over time. Killing her will change one of her aspects to ghost, and I’ve never done that so I couldn’t say whether she’ll lose plant or fighting.”

She nodded. “That was never an option.”

“Thank frack,” I said, sighing.

“I think there is a magical cure, but since she’s technically not sick, I’m not getting my best bonus from my special abilities. This will be like doing transgenic surgery and altering her very DNA, except her DNA is magic.”

“You’re not doing HRT on a fox,” Oz said from the sidelines.

I had to stand there in silence staring at him for longer than I’d care to admit, because the words didn’t penetrate at first. HRT? Was he referring to hormone replacement therapy? And why? And then it sunk in. Transgenic… transgender.

“HRT is for gender reassignment,” I said, “For transgender people who believe they’re the other way around and want their bodies to… whatever I’m not explaining that. I’m talking transgenics. It’s a totally different thing. This is altering a creature at its most basic genetic level. This is like making insulin out of bacteria by inserting a gene, or making a mouse with an ear on its back or an AIDS resistant cat that glows in the dark.”

“Harsh, mate,” Oz said.

“What are you talking about?”

“How’s a cat gonna hunt if it glows in the dark?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Scientists had made the AIDS resistant cats glow in the dark so they could identify them and then run further tests to see if they’d contracted the virus. It was neither here nor there.

“What I’m saying is, it’s not technically a problem for a Healer to fix.” Or it hadn’t been until a minute ago. “Therefore I’m going totally off script. There are no cures already in existence, so I can’t piggyback what someone had already spent hundreds of hours researching.”

This is Christopher about to make it up as he goes along.