Divinity Rescue Corps
64- Master Has Given Us A Sock

Following the jubilant party I was calling the hatchening were hours upon hours of languid research in the laboratory building. So far, there was absolutely zilch in the way of literature regarding dual type illnesses. I held chat sessions with the various members of the group as the day wore on, to get myself free of the laboratory for a minute. We walked around the platforms and crossed the bridges of Slinktrickle in a slow circuit that gave me a chance to stretch myself, and keep abreast of the situation with each member of the team.

It was during one of these breaks that I snuck a look at Ivy and Isabelle’s gorgeous bodies and grinned to myself. Abreast. Members of the team. Then I had to clamp down on my willpower to ensure I didn’t get a very visible erection.

 As nice as it was to see the girls in their birthday suits at all times, living in a nudist colony wasn’t for me. My hormones were far too active to handle the situation well.

I was walking around with Regina and Tara, complaining about how none of this was supposed to be possible or work like this. I couldn’t treat the illness because I wasn’t sure what I was treating. At least with the God of Footfalls I’d been able to blunt the weird sounds that came out every time someone walked anywhere.

“I don’t know what to do,” I told them.

I could tell Regina wanted to reach up and squeeze my shoulder, then make out for a while, grinding herself against me, then watch as I slid in and out of Tara for several minutes while pressing her drooling pussy directly onto my face. Since she couldn’t do any of that, she just gave me a smoldering look.

“That’s awful,” she said. “Did the city give Alan any reply back?”

“Yeah. It was useless.”

Alan had gotten a response back from HQ that was essentially a gigantic shrug and a plea to move on. They didn’t know, and since it was only nudity, they didn’t care.

Tara shrugged, and actually did reach out a hand to touch my arm. She was a very touchy feely one. “Why don’t you just try and cure one illness first, then do the second one after?”

“That’d be a shame,” Regina said, chuckling. “Then you’d have to undress me with your eyes, and actually undress me before you give me the railing of a lifetime.” She stopped. “What?”

She’d noticed both Tara and I freeze. There, hovering a good eight to ten feet away, was Cinzy’s Nakamamon, Fairy Poppins.

I made my way directly back to the laboratory afterwards. Tara’s idea was the only one I’d gotten so far. I was thankful she had worked with me so closely on the cure with the God of Footfalls, but I was kicking myself for sending her away after the anti-magic pills. Her idea wasn’t bad, actually. I didn’t have a strong hope that it would work, but it was better than doing nothing.

The human body is insanely complex as a machine. Multiple factors go into healing: whether you’re male or female, your age, your weight and your BMI. Then, if you have other illnesses or issues, those have to be taken into account. Naturally, I just assumed that a spiritual ailment would compound a magical ailment, and make everything infinitely more complicated. I felt that there had to be orders of magnitude more work to do in dealing with both at the same time.

However, if I just worked on the one first, and it worked, I could naturally just work on the second one independently.

I had no frame of reference to know if it would or wouldn’t work, so it was worth a try. The scientific method can include process of elimination, after all.

***

“What the heck does a spiritual cure even look like?” my mother asked. She was sipping at some tea and wearing a thick, comfy robe I didn’t recognize. A new purchase using my god healer funds, I was happy to learn. It looked like either a bad fur coat, or the a robe you could while away a full day in.

My mother was a lovely person, but not religious. She prayed, but didn’t need church. Once cancer was part of the equation, the concept of God as a benevolent being slowly fell in her mind. She still prayed for healing, but the justifications of the priests didn’t interest her. She didn’t like the idea she was being punished by God for something. What had she done? She didn’t like the idea that God just let bad things happen to good people for no reason.

The scientific method generally didn’t include spiritual anything. The soul was not a measurable construct. Handling maladies of the soul generally meant therapy, and assessing emotional problems tied to faith.

“You’re gonna love this,” I told her, and poured myself some coffee. I had missed this in Door feely altostratus… Dolphin eel allosaurus… Endorphin… ugh. I missed coffee in the other world with the name I couldn’t say. “It’s not too different from what people think of as god appeasement strategies. You have your prayer, your incense burning, singing and dancing, which is sort of just prayer but with more people and body movements, your offerings, your sacrifices—”

“Please tell me you didn’t sacrifice those adorable fish people,” she said, alarmed.

“The ancient peoples used to sacrifice some of their food at each meal,” I told her, “or goats or pigs… but sometimes they’d just prick themselves and sacrifice some blood. And yes, some cultures had human sacrifice, but no we weren’t about to get to that. Anyway, offerings are pretty much the same thing… you offer some of your money, or your belongings, or your food.”

These were the typical remedies.

“You don’t want to wait for Dad to wake up?” I asked.

She warmed her hand against the side of her mug, and slid into her seat at the dinner table. “He’s less interested in everything that happened. He’s just glad you’re back. He wants some help around the house and for you to watch me while he does some errands.”

I chuckled at that. He didn’t need me for any of that stuff, just the pleasant familial feeling of having your offspring there while you did menial tasks and passed on that knowledge to your kids.

“He conscripted Sarah after you left and she’s been bringing Brayden over. Then she does her Esty thing and tries to sell jewelry. She bought something to cut out stickers and paper so she could make craft things to sell online.”

Nodding, I considered this. It was probably the best way to make any kind of money in the face of being a single mother and being forced to spend time with your own mother, watching her in case of any emergency. Not that Mom needed it.

She got up and retrieved some donuts they’d bought the day before I arrived.“So tell me what happened.”

***

“Okay,” I said, “we’re going to try the simplest version, which is prayer.”

A dozen Marshins sat down cross-legged on the floor of the laboratory in a ring, surrounding the carefully arranged clothing. Seated this way, their fish tails stuck out from their butts and created a kind of sunburst pattern if you viewed it from above.

Using the incense I’d employed to suss out whether this was a spiritual malady, we periodically got a glimpse of the figure floating prone above the clothes. It became clearer then that the difficulty to diagnose this had lowered the more bits of the outfit we ended up gathering.

The Marshins tried the hands folded method first. Some of them rocked back and forth, and the others picked up on this. Once one of them began muttering under their breath, the others followed along.

After a good hour, no progress had been made.

We shifted to everyone holding hands in a circle and chanting. Someone started swaying back and forth, side to side, and the rest of them got into it, but again, nothing.

After a good two hours, still nothing. By now we were running low on the incense, and some of the materials weren’t easy to collect.

Oh well, I told myself, at least I’d have ample opportunities to head out away from the village and have a little alone time with Regina, Tara, Vellenia, or any combination of the three. Hell, maybe all three.

The second method would be song and dance, but these natives didn’t know the name or the aspect of this god… they didn’t have a song prepared, or a dance for that matter. The tablets mentioned several hymns that were non-specific, and could be used for any god. I told them that I’d consider what to do, but for now it was far easier to begin attempting to work in some sacrifices or offerings.

The tablets suggested food, burned in a fire, dedicated directly to the god in question. The god in question wasn’t named, which was a problem we had yet to remedy.

“Well then I guess we’re just going to throw everything at it and see what sticks,” I said.

We offered some money to it, destroying the jade beads the Marshins used and blowing the powder over the clothing where we knew the god’s body was floating. We burned some food gestured vaguely in the god’s direction, then blew the ashes over its body. Afterwards we tried just throwing some of the jade beads directly on it. Cinzy tried throwing a Likability Token directly into it. We tried to get water blessed and dump it onto the set of clothing. We tried offering it grasses, flowers, herbs and spices.

In all cases, the materials sparked and fizzed like they were dissolving in acid or burning up, and vanished. In essence, these all failed.

We tried blood, with me offering to do the deed and all the Guardians freaking out. Absolutely not, they said. No way no how. Ivy had her palm slit with a pocketknife while we were arguing over the situation, and the blood similarly fizzed and popped like they were being burned.

Nothing was working. Talk started up about wrangling a Nakamamon and sacrificing it to appease the god, or cure it.

“No. Nuh uh,” Regina said, and Tara immediately backed her up. “There’s no way we’re sacrificing a poor, defenseless creature on the off chance that violent death, which has never worked before, will suddenly now work.”

“You can’t stop us,” Ivy said with the sort of calm and cold calculation you’d only see out of movie villains.

“We have to use clothes then!” Cinzy burst out.

All eyes turned toward her.

“It’s a fashion god. Or a god of clothes anyway. We have to use clothes on it. Offer it the clothes.”

Ivy turned to me, as if to ask if she should go out and rustle up a bunny rabbit so I could slit its throat. I gave her a tiny shake of the head. No, we didn’t need to start killing adorable widdle bunny wunnies. No thank you.

Jeez, Ivy could be scary.  

We ended up asking some of the villagers to grab up articles of clothing they had, and they complied. Within a few minutes, we had Marshins holding the billowing, filmy dresses and clothes they normally wore, looking at me with questioning eyes.

I simply gestured at the arranged glowing clothes, as if to say ‘be my guest.’

“Do we burn them f… okay I guess not.” Tara froze when the first Marshin dumped the dress unceremoniously onto the arranged clothing.

Once again, the material dropped onto the clothes disintegrated.

“This is bullsh—” Ivy started, then stopped.

The shirt began to fill out, as though something were inflating it from below. Everyone stared, hoping for the sleeves and neck and pants to begin inflating, and have the god return to existence. For long, tense moments we all stared.

“More clothing,” I said, and the next Marshin threw in his pants.

Again the shirt swelled as though something were filling it.

“More,” I said.

Marshin after Marshin dropped clothing on, and the inflation continued. The sleeves on the tunic began to fill out, along with the top of the pants, then the legs. Over time, the rate of expansion slowed dramatically. The first and second pieces of clothing offered up did a lot of filling out, while the later pieces didn’t have much effect at all. It was barely visible.

“Holy—” Regina went to say, but Tara clapped a hand over her mouth.

“It’s a spiritual malady,” I hissed. “It literally is holy.”

More clothes were added. Then the kicker popped up: a message from the UI that we were doing it right.

Administer Cure Check: This check is Very Difficult. You currently have Administer Cure at level 7, and Affinity at level 5. Would you like to spend your 4* Tokens to lower the difficulty to Develop Cure?

Total Tokens: 5 Affinity and 7 Free Tokens.

*Hard At Work: Your Tokens are worth double given you are engaged in your class duties.

Not only were we doing it right, but we hadn’t been forced to make another check to Develop Cure. Somehow we bypassed that, and I wasn’t going to question it. It would have meant another incredibly difficult check, followed by me spending a lot of Tokens I didn’t want to spend.

I was tempted to just spend the four Tokens, but I had an inkling that the way this had worked with the inspiration might work again. If we just did the right thing, the difficulty should lower over time.

“More clothes!” I shouted. “Faster please!”

The Marshins rushed out to bring in more. I also turned to our team members to offer up a pair of socks or an extra t-shirt if they had one. They also pelted out of the room, followed by a surly looking Drat. He too went, while I sprinted to my tent and grabbed up my backpack. Locating a pair of underwear dotted with red hearts, I grinned and dashed back to the lab to throw it on.

Before my eyes, the Develop Cure check I was being asked to make dropped in difficulty, requiring me to spend only 3 Tokens instead.

Once Regina, Tara, Ivy, Isabelle, Cinzy, Alan and Trent had added their clothes, the figure looked almost entirely filled out. A ghostly, shining face had begun to swim into being above the neck hole in the tunic, and gleaming hands were now barely visible in the dim light of the laboratory, poking out of the sleeves.

“We’re just about there,” I said.

All eyes turned to Drat, who stood there frowning, holding a sock.

“Go on, Drat,” Cinzy urged.

“I like this sock,” he grumped. “It’s my favorite sock.”

“Give Dobby a sock, Drat,” Tara said. “Everybody else gave.”

“Do it,” Ivy said.

“I don’t follow your orders,” he said, then turned to me.

I wasn’t having this. A timer had appeared above the Administer Cure check write up, and it was counting down fast. “I can just spend the Tokens and pass the check automatically,” I said.

“Boo!” Isabelle called, cupping her hands against her mouth. “Boo!”

Drat took another second, then finally dropped the sock onto the figure.

A moment later, the check had been passed. The difficulty had lowered down to one, and I instructed the UI to simply make the check. With my 12 levels of Affinity and Administer Cure, I managed 4 successes. The additional 3 successes were going to be made available as Free Tokens when dealing with this godly being. Step one really was to just attempt to cure the illness. Steps two through five hundred were on the way.

This is Christopher breathing out a huge sigh of relief.