Divinity Rescue Corps
68- Disobeying A Direct Order

68- Disobeying A Direct Order

The fog burned off and turned into a delightfully warm day that felt Spring… ish. I didn’t quite understand how the seasons changed here, having only been in the world for a good month, but I was informed that this could be a Strawberry Spring situation and that more chilly weather could be on the way. I hoped not.

First I had to inform everyone that Cinzy, uh… left the team. Before she left, I was able to get back to my normal self. Now that the special ability had worn off, I tried chasing her down and telling her she wasn’t allowed to go. Finally, I ordered her to come back here.

***

“How did everyone take the news?” my mother asked.

“Oh, terrible,” I said. “Alan, Trent and Drat all really liked her, obviously.”

“Because she was naked all the time,” Sarah said. She was in the other room putting Brayden to sleep, but I could hear the eye roll in her tone of voice alone. She then made a noise of disgust with herself, because Brayden came awake after being close to slumberland.

I’d just told them that Cinzy lost her mind over me wanting to have a private chat with Drat… and she’d coerced him with special abilities into spilling what the private chat was about. I sort of lied about how much Cinzy cared about the truth… although it was more or less the truth. Ugh, being halfway truthful was what got me into the mess with Cinzy in the first place.

“She has a Likability score that’s through the roof,” I said, and got out my phone. I turned it on, and while waiting for it to boot up, I went on. “So obviously the others took it badly. I didn’t want to tell them what the reason was, and also didn’t want to lie. Here, this is what she looks like.”

I showed them the phone, and my mother actually gasped. My dad’s eyebrows rose at the photo of Cinzy in a simple sundress. You could just tell that she was the most beautiful person ever from a single photo. She was and would always be the most beautiful person in any photo ever taken with her.

“Yeah,” I said, and turned the phone off again. “So the girls also liked her, but were more understanding. They knew that I had ultimate say over the information. When Drat appeared and told them they were better off not knowing, they didn’t like it, but they accepted it. Regina took it the worst, and stopped talking to me.”

“She wouldn’t!” I loved my mom for how indignant this made her, like anyone would choose to dislike me.

“Sadly she would, and she did. She didn’t like that Tweedle Dee was slowly succumbing to the touch of the divine. I kept healing him back almost all the way to the top every morning, but it wasn’t back up to a hundred percent. He got a little worse every day… and she blamed me. That was how it went.”

“And your supermodel girl left,” my father said.

“She wasn’t my girl,” I muttered in protest.

“How long before she came back?” My mother asked.

“What makes you think she came back?”

She looked down at my phone, already connecting dots. Phones didn’t work in the other world. I hadn’t met Cinzy here on earth. She’d been smiling and lovely in the photo. Ergo, we had reconciled. No matter what stupid things came out of our stupid mouths when we’d been upset, it had worked out in the end. My mom was sharp.

“A few weeks… it wasn’t soon.” It had not been a wonderful time, and I wasn’t looking forward to telling her this bit. 

“Can you just do that, quit the team?” My mother asked, though she didn’t look like she was in any condition to hear the answer. It had been a long day of playing with Brayden and traveling, then telling the story in the car on the way back, and finally over dinner. She and my father were both exhausted.

“I’ll tell you more in the morning,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

“At least tell me she came back,” my mother said. “She seems like such a nice young girl. I’d hate to think she ran off to join that Blake character.”

My mom was adorable. Sweet, kind, understanding.

“It took some time, and it wasn’t fun, but she came back eventually. Now, it’s past eleven. I told myself I wasn’t going to push you too hard. Let’s pick it back up tomorrow.”

Neither she nor my father felt the need to countermand this order. Instead, he escorted her to the bedroom. They disappeared, but not before my dad turned a grateful smile my way, and a teensy wave.

Roger that, I thought.

I helped Sarah get a woozy and cranky Brayden to her new-ish car.

“Now get in,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You haven’t seen the new house, you haven’t met my housemates, and there’s a lot you haven’t told me.”

“I’m pretty tired,” I lied. Housemates? I did not have a speck of interest in seeing which new dirtbag she had shacked up with. I didn’t need to meet another guy with a wispy goatee who smelled of BO, nacho chips and weed.

“Nuh-uh, no, no way, not a chance,” she said, and pushed me to the car she’d bought on the stipend I’d set up for her from my salary. “Jeez, what’re you made of, concrete? What’d they feed you over there, a dozen eggs at every meal?”

I laughed this off. “Nah it’s—”

“Don’t care. Get in the car.”

On one hand, I was very glad Sarah was back in my parents’ lives, and vice versa. On the other hand, there were times like this. I got in and got buckled up, and soon we were heading to her new house. “Okay, now that they’re out of the picture, you have to tell me why Cinzy left.”

“I told you… she learned what Drat was doing skulking around and listening in on conversations and such. She wasn’t happy to have me engaging in those sorts of activities.” This sounded decent enough to me. A good mostly non-lie.

“And how did she learn about that?” she asked. “What raised her suspicions? No, there’s more going on here.”

Shirt. Sarah was much better at this than my parents, or my mother sensed it and didn’t want details about my extremely complicated love life. Sarah was the kind of person who picked a scab every twelve hours. She was relentless. In some ways this was kind of good, but right now I didn’t much enjoy it.

“Eh… I don’t… know? She didn’t say. Maybe some Marshins or Marshmellows told her they’d caught Drat sneaking around or something.”

“Or something. You’re not a great liar, bro. I don’t buy it. If they did, she would have convened a meeting between you and her and the villagers. There’s no way you just hang out with all these naked gorgeous girls all day and all night for weeks without getting up to some monkey business. You want to know what I think?”

I did not, and said so.

“I think,” she said, steamrolling me, “I think you chose Drat because he was a skinny goth dude, Alan because he was a stuttering noob, and Trent because he was a geeky wannabe, meaning you’d be the most desirable male on the team, and then you spent the whole time flirting your way up these girls’ skirts.”

“You could not be more wrong,” I said, resisting the urge to laugh. It would sound condescending and arrogant, and maybe like I was confirming her suspicion. She certainly had a high opinion of my flirting and skirt chasing abilities.

“This Physicality and Likability thing went directly to your head, didn’t it?” she demanded.

“I promise, it did not.” Though just before the Cinzy blow up, I had begun to feel like them coming onto me made some sense. That was not the same, by any metric, as me going around skirt chasing, or selecting team members based on their forkability.

Okay the Rangers are an exception to the rule. Cinzy, most gorgeous woman of all women I’ve ever seen in real life, was not selected with the possibility of sex anywhere near the forefront of my mind. Ditto Ivy and Isabelle.

I weighed the pros and cons of coming out and telling her I had begun to amass what you might technically call a harem here on earth.

“At least you didn’t get freaky with any of the non-human natives,” she said in a deadpan, dry as a desert. The sarcasm was impossible to miss.

“Hey! That’s not nice.”

“I notice that’s not a denial. You did that Vellenia, the guide, didn’t you?”

“If I say yes will you stop asking your brother about his sex life?”

“I knew it!”

I rolled my eyes. “Could you keep it down? You already woke him up once.” Thankfully Brayden had been lulled to sleep by the warmth and the vibration of the car.

“So you did sleep with some of them? You had a naked, humanoid Nakamamon bond with you magically… and then physically. That’s so weird.” She didn’t let me answer. “And the party they threw for you after saving the lives of their babies didn’t include any of those naked humanoid monsters approaching you after having some alcohol? Or did you approach them for a little game of hide the sausage? Either way, you did at least one of them, and probably more.”

“Can I not talk about hiding the sausage with my own sister?” I asked.

“That all depends,” she said.

“Depends… on what?”

“How many of the holes in your story are actually girls you boned.”

“Gross.”

Five minutes later we pulled up to a modest bungalow that needed a new paint job, or new siding. I checked out the well-kept lawn in the glare of the porch light, and noted the edging. I also noted the red subcompact car we parked behind.

“Dad taking care of the lawn, eh?” I asked.

“Way to dodge the question,” she said. “And yes, he’s been furious that neither my housemates nor I do the yard work. And he insisted on edging.” She shook her head. “Men are so weird.”

I couldn’t disagree with that statement.

“You’ve gotta tell me the next part, right now.”

“What part?” I asked, knowing exactly what she was talking about.

“You were just at the part where you were hated to see Cinzy go, but you loved to watch her leave.”

***

Cinzy gathered her belongings and hit the road. Of course, she put on a display when she left. Maybe she was hoping I would beg for her to stay, or apologize, or anything like that. She was sorely mistaken. She wasn’t the only one who could get irrationally angry.

I had a full-on menu just for being the expedition leader, which said this about me giving orders. You may issue commands and give out quests through this menu! DRC members will suffer experience penalties for disobeying, and be given experience point bonuses for complying.

That second part reminded me that I needed to continue giving orders any time it was someone’s job to do something. They needed all the xp they could get. Part of Alan’s job as a Wizard was cataloguing the known world and seeing how it aligned with the magical world, where those points of contact existed and how they altered one another. He got some for casting spells as well. He was getting xp all the time. The Rangers got their xp for exploring and interacting with the wider world, so I had them out on collection assignments as often as possible.

As for the rest… Trent spent a lot of time meditating and trying to figure out how his magical blood could be used to further enhance his powers. That and practicing his arts. I gave him a lot of latitude, so he could shape the earth, but also gave him orders so he could gain xp any time he was helping with my stuff. Drat… did Drat things. He was his own person and disliked being given orders. I wasn’t bothered as much, and was secretly a little pleased he was losing out on the bonus xp of being given orders.

Served him right.

The four Guardians were the hardest to grant xp, given that their job was safety. Since we were only threatened with shame and embarrassment in the current malfunctioning god situation, there was precious little for them to do. I gave them a lot of make work assignments (gathering herbs and flowers with the Rangers, training exercise times where they could fight one another in mock battles) to try to make up for that.

Staying together was part of mission parameters, so the only thing I could think to do now was punish Cinzy for quitting the team. Although she had quit, her name was still on my user interface menu roster. She needed to tender her resignation with HQ in order to quit for real. That meant she’d lose her bond with Fairy Poppins, not be allowed back through the portal, and I assumed she’d get the flashy thing treatment from Men in Black. Psychic Nakamamon existed, so they could almost certainly flashy thing her.

I couldn’t stop the dots connecting in my mind, and I couldn’t stop the boiling anger. She had… she should’ve apologized… she didn’t… instead she got angry… with me? I was the leader!

Angry thoughts are usually stupid ones, self-serving ones, and angry words and actions are never your finest moments.

“You will stay with the team and do your duty, Cinzia Graham,” I cried out. “That’s an order!”

I have to admit, this was a huge mistake and I knew it the moment the words came out of my mouth. The emotions warring within me confused me, angered me, and most of all, left me feeling stupid. Fear had prevented me from telling her the full and unvarnished truth, fear that she wouldn’t want to be with me.

Why had I been so afraid to lose out on the chance to be with Cinzy? Was it the raging hormones? Was it the inexperience? Was it the possibility of dating a ten?

It was a bit of all three, and it had an extra garnish of people pleasing. At his core, Fletcher is a people pleaser, and hates letting people down. The interview situation exposed that. My team didn’t have to be eleven people. I didn’t, strictly speaking, need Drat to ferret out secrets, or Trent to shape the earth. I hadn’t needed to choose Alan either. There were dozens of interested Wizards with more experience. I hadn’t needed to include two Rangers who had both promised to be okay sharing me in bed. But Fletcher liked it when there was harmony, and leaving either Tara or Regina behind was unthinkable at the time. Their disappointment that they wouldn’t be coming was not something I would handle well.

Also Fletcher was terrible at dealing with times when there wasn’t harmony.

I’d gotten lucky so far, very very lucky. Drat was a disharmonious factor in the group, but he’d largely stayed away from the others. Trent’s recklessness had been tamped down in a hurry. I hadn’t tried to initiate Larelle and Chrysta into the complicated series of knots that was my fledgeling sex ring.

So when Cinzy did the disharmony thing with explosive anger, I reacted badly. It happened in the moment: me, being in a position of authority when I never had been before, me, wanting to have all the cake and eat it too, and me, wanting to avoid possible difficult conversations and repercussions, only to have them slingshot right back into my face.

Everybody makes mistakes. I might not make them so often, but as it turns out, I make them big, hard, and loud.

Cinzia froze at hearing my ‘that’s an order’. She paused, for just a moment, which gave me almost enough time to apologize.

“Cinzy, I’m—”

“Ah, ah!” She cried out. “No no, don’t. You ordered me to stick around. Watch what happens when things don’t go well for Fletcher for once.” The terrible feeling in my gut that I’d just done something really dumb, and really bad, calcified into a solid lump that made me nauseous.

“Cinzy,” I tried again.

She defiantly slung her backpack up onto one shoulder.

Big mistake.

In an instant, the backpack vanished. It only took a moment for realization to set in, and then the uncaring, imperious beauty vanished. Rage overcame her. She roared in frustration and betrayal now, screaming with her enhanced powers. It hit like a physical wave, pushing me back a step, and didn’t stop at me. It wasn’t targeted. It rolled out over the marsh, out over the village, and spread up into the air. She’d used a special ability, and unlike the Guardian intimidation ability, hers could (and did) influence a range of emotions. It was her whole job, after all.

A concentrated surge of rage and hurt and disappointment and betrayal were given magical form, then spread out like Saturn’s ring away from her and into the whole village. It was another Mental ailment.

This was how my days and days of preparation to heal up the nakedness god went from week to weeks.

Cinzy kept right on going. With the fairy dust blessing from Fairy Poppins, gravity only affected her by around half. She leapt around twenty feet in the air and slowly floated down into the marsh, before leaping again. Those mighty arcs soon got her to the edge of the marsh and onto dry land, where she hopped along like she was on the moon.

We had brand new problems to worry about, immediate problems.

This must have been quite similar to what happened with Blake those weeks ago. Her concentrated fury, empowered with her stamina and her mana, struck the Nakamamon and poisoned them.

The village wasn’t large. Everyone within a quarter mile or so ended up sick.

This is Christopher about to work overtime, and deserving it.