Divinity Rescue Corps
52- R&R (Rest & Retelling)

I knew, even before I got in the door of my home back in USA, that everything was working out perfectly. My father and my sister stood on the front porch of my house, or my old house at any rate. My new niece or nephew sat heavy in Sarah’s stomach. Brayden looked significantly bigger than he had before. Two new cars sat in the driveway of the house. Newer, at least. Both looked like they were a couple years old and probably bought used.

Neither of them had that ‘your mom’s dead’ look written on their faces, which I have to say was a massive plus.

Grinning, I trotted up the walk with hands outstretched, ready to scoop up Brayden. Unfortunately for me, he ducked behind Sarah’s leg, eyes wide.

“Unk… Ris?”

“Yeah buddy!” I told him. “Uncle Chris!”

“Are you sure?” Sarah asked.

“Oh shut it.” I bent low and peered around. “I brought you something cool, Braydon.”

That brought him out. Soon enough I’d presented him with a large, wrapped box.

“Toph?” Sarah half-said, half-asked. “What’s going on?”

I gave her a cheerful wink. “Uncle Chris has been out making that money. So my favorite and only nephew gets to be spoiled just this once.”

“Wooooow!” Brayden said, ripping the paper off. “What is it?”

Sarah’s mouth worked open and closed. Her expression went through several different important changes, but I couldn’t catch them all. I was too busy reveling in Brayden’s joy. He started trying to get the box open, but when he couldn’t manage, his grandpa stepped in. Soon enough they had the present out of the box and the extra pieces added on. My dad’s a DIY guy.

“It’s a balance bike,” I told her. “I’m not buying him an X-Cube 720. I’m not a monster, Sare.”

“But… where—”

Brayden flung himself into my arms, beaming with joy and thanking me. I told him he was very welcome, and that he should try it out right now. Dad had headed to the garage to get the wrenches necessary to put the three parts together so he could zip around.

That was done a handful of seconds later, and soon he was tootling back and forth over the sidewalk, then after my dad pulled the car out of the driveway, there too.

“Come on in,” my dad said, overcoming his own urge to say something about whatever he saw before him. “Your mom’s taking a rest. She just finished up her last round of treatments. I’ll stick around here with my grandson.”

The wonder and pride in his voice made this whole trip worth it.

We went through the house, while Sarah continued casting disbelieving glances at me.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I told her.

She seemed on the verge of saying something several times, but clamped her mouth shut. Finally, she went, “Where have you—”

But again, interrupted. “Christopher?” The sleepy voice came from deeper in the house. “Is that you, Christopher?”

“Ma?” I called.

My mother looked virtually unchanged from when I’d left: pale, scrawny, and bald from the chemo. Her clothes hung loose on her frame, but they hung loose on a woman who was standing under her own power. The former wasn’t great, but the latter sure was.

I gave her a huge hug. “I missed you guys,” I whispered. Suddenly my chest felt hot and tight, and it was like something had clamped down on my throat, strangling the words into tears.

She hugged me right back, and after several moments, Sarah’s arms joined hers. It lasted a while, but not nearly long enough. Soon enough, she had me by the shoulders and pushed me out to arms’ length. “Christopher Fletcher, you explain yourself right this minute! Where the hell have you been?”

“Right?” Sarah shrieked. “Can I get on his ass about being gone for six friggin months now? Am I allowed now?”

I laughed. “All right, all right. Should we wait until Dad gets in with Brayden?”

***

After six months the living room felt entirely alien to me, and in a disorienting way. Sure all these things were virtually unchanged and I recognized them, but I was a different person who had left them. I was seeing them with new eyes.

“I have to back up a bit, because none of this is easy to keep track of. I’ve been on a lot of adventures, though they’ve been pretty tame by the standards of most adventures people consider to be, uh, adventures.” There’ve been near death experiences, but nothing like the movies.

Thankfully.

I didn’t tell my family that. They don’t need to know all that.

“There’s a magical land through a portal,” I told them, and described it. Mountains that just shifted around however they liked. Lakes that turned into dragons made of water and went on vacation whenever they felt like it. Trees that didn’t necessarily grow towards the sun, some with leaves that were nothing less than car-sized spheres of yellow green. Clouds that shimmered with various different colored light depending on how the sun fell on them. A castle that hovered in the air, which was both rightside up and upside down at the same time.

My family shared a look that told me they might have to have me committed to a psych ward. What lay beneath that was a reluctance to contradict me. A serious amount of money had just flowed their way on my behalf, and they weren’t inclined to stop me from being insane, in case the money spout shut off.

When I mentioned Nakamamon the spell broke.

“What’s that?” Sarah asked.

“These companion creatures. My friend Regina has one that’s a fox with flowers sprouting up around its ears and multiple tails.”

“Oh,” as though she wasn’t pleased this was the answer actually. “Who’s—”

“The welcome guy has a pterodactyl-like creature with sparkling scales. The Healer trainer has a flying manta ray, and this jerk I know has a storm ferret. Anyway, there are Nakamamon that are humanoid, some that are like puddles of slime, some that are just sentient crystals. Anything and everything you can imagine, there’s a Nakamamon for it.”

“Is there a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater?” my mother asked.

“There are several different kinds of purple people eaters,” I said severely, then laughed at their expressions. “No, almost none of them eat people. We’re more of an invasive species. Anyway there’s a wind serpent that my friend Tara has, and a glowing Tinkerbell fairy that my other friend Cinzy has.”

“Cindy?”

“Cinzy, short for Cinzia.”

“Do you have any friends that aren’t girls?” Sarah asked, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

Yeah. We definitely weren’t going to go into how the girl who’d brought me to the castle in the first place had seduced me and had sex with me up in a tree. Skipping right over that.

“Oh sure,” I said instead. “There’s Alan—”

“Hoooooooold on,” my father said, holding out a hand. “Too many names. You said you would tell us why you haven’t been home in over six months.”

“Oh, right, that.”

Well, I told the story: about how I first went through the portal and met Regina with her flower fox called Tweedle Dee—skipping the sex with Regina in the tree, and then the many instances of sex afterwards—and then went through the orientation of meeting the good-natured Rus—

“Too. Many. Names,” Dad grumped. “Stick with what happened, and no quiz afterwards, okay?”

“Okay, okay. There’s orientation, I choose what job I want to have over there. The options are like Guardian, Ranger, Wizard, Thief, or Healer. There are more but they don’t really matter.”

“And you went with… what, Thief?” Sarah asked.

“Healer,” my mother said quietly. “You went to a magical land and you got magical healing.”

“That’s right,” I said softly. Our eyes met, and an important current of energy ran between us.

“This is nonsense,” Sarah said, too loudly. She rolled her eyes when everybody warned her not to wake her toddler. “What? I don’t know why we have to listen to this BS. It’s obviously not real. He’s playing a video game, most likely. Or writing a book, like he always said he would. He left for six months, wrote a book—”

“And somehow managed to grab onto a six-figure salary with excellent benefits,” Dad muttered.

It was that sort of tone that both cut through the bullshit and also explained to you that you were being a moron, and while you were at it could you please stop being a moron? Sarah’s mouth snapped shut. She had a car, a new house closer to Mom and Dad’s, peace of mind for her current son and her unborn child, and she sure didn’t have a job that changed everything in the blink of an eye. And bee-tee-dubs, he hadn’t just gotten them new cars and put food on Braydon’s table, he’d also paid for a whole host of chemo treatments and specialists to come help deal with our ailing mother’s situation.

Dad’s tone told her that her older brother had made all that happen, and maybe he was stark raving mad by now, but she was not going to antagonize him. In fact, she was going to listen to her stark-raving-mad-but-somehow-ultra-rich brother.

“Well keep going or whatever,” Sarah grumbled, with less acid than before I’d left for half a year.

All right, so after I’d gone through basic training, there’d been a situation with the God of Footfalls—

“I’m…sorry?” Sarah asked.

“There’s a small god for basically every natural phenomenon,” I told her. “Some of them have names, some are just ‘God of Sneezes’ and that’s that. This one got sick and needed to be healed, but the Healer trainer accidentally touched it while he was trying to calm it down.”

Of course he did, that look said. And to be fair, saying the story out loud made it all sound pretty ridiculous.

“We woke up one morning and every time anyone took a step, a different sound came out. Yells and squishes and the phone ringing and all that. Nuclear explosions, laughter, all kinds of stuff.”

“We eventually surrounded the thing, treated it, and the weird sounds got less… but I still needed to craft a cure. That ended up taking something like eighteen straight hours of work. It’s basically potions class straight out of Frogwarts. If you do something wrong, you start the whole process over.”

I skipped over the part where I had to go out looking for ingredients, and instead encountered the God of Lovers. This culminated in me having several hours of ravenous sex with a long-legged beauty, and grabbed me up the other job title I hadn’t told them, and would never: Pleasure Seeker.

“That sounds difficult, especially for a new doctor,” my mother said.

“Not easy. And it’s magically infused. I needed, uh, help to go through eight hours of potion crafting, so I had my friends keep my mind sharp.”

What I didn’t tell them was that the girl I’d had sex with, Tara, kept my mind sharp by showing me progressively more and more arousing sights: her cleavage, belly button, and then more.

“Here’s the other thing. Once I went to administer the cure to this god, it touched me and bestowed a blessing on me.”

“Of course it did.”

The other gods I’d encountered had done the same. The Goddess of the Meadow gifted me with the knowledge of every flower there was in that world. The Lovers made me into a sex machine.

“After that, the administration wanted to send me out away from the main HQ on a field mission. Apparently these sick gods weren’t just around the castle, they were everywhere. This involved me interviewing for positions on my team of eleven people.”

Dad was nodding along.

“I chose four Guardians, two Rangers,” (the ones I’d had sex with so far), “A Bard, a Wizard, a Rogue, and a Sorcerer. Some of these already had their companions, and some didn’t. The most important part was that two of them were natives of that world. One was an ice ghost with a bunch of arms, the other one was a gigantic muscle mommy with orange skin and way too much hair.”

“Fascinating,” my mother said.

“Were they both girls too?” Sarah asked sarcastically.

“As a matter of fact, they were,” I told her, and received a hefty eye roll in return.

Once I had my party, there was the small matter of traveling to the tiny town of Glumpdumpkin—

“You have got to be kidding me!” Sarah shrieked.

“Yeah you’re going to love this. The two nearby towns are called Flunt-on-the-Rustle and Saxwhacket.” Snorts of laughter erupted from the audience. “But we didn’t even end up at any of those places. While we were trying to cross a magical lake, it took flight and carried us on our raft for a good twelve hours out of our way. Kind of a lake dragon.”

Again, not mentioning the fact that the first girl I’d slept with, and the second girl I’d slept with conspired to sleep with me together in my tent on our journey. Or later, when a possibly-lesbian, possibly-bisexual girl snuck into my tent in the dead of night and had sex with me several nights later. As a test drive. To see if I was appropriate to share with her girlfriend.

Come to think of it, a lot of this tale is not family-friendly. The parts that are end up being pretty short and not strung together well.

“A flying lake,” my mother said in wonder. Thank all the gods great and small for her bringing me screeching back into the story. It would not do to get aroused in front of one’s family.

At least I was wearing pants.

“Yeah, and all the wild creatures that were inside it were also flown up in the water. It was insane. Anyway, after it landed, we traveled to the nearest town, which was called Slinktrickle.”

“Of course it was,” Dad said. He had scooted up to the edge of his seat. I explained how the buildings were all on stilts, with huge platforms surrounding them. Some of those platforms just glommed together, while others had been connected by various types of bridges, from rope to fully constructed wooden walkways. This would be important when things got heated.

“You know how I mentioned that the gods of everything are all messed up?” I asked. “Well, apparently there was a god of wearing clothes.”

I stopped and let that one sink in. The bombshell struck a moment later, with mom’s nonexistent eyebrows shooting up, and Sarah throwing her hands in the air.

“Do we have to listen to this?” she asked.

“You can return the down payment on the ranch you just bought,” my father said, with quiet venom.

“Ugh, fine!” she turned to me. “Please for the love of Pete don’t tell me you walked around for the next several days naked.”

“Try several weeks,” I said.

“Ewww!”

“But it wasn’t just me, it was everybody.” The four female Guardians, both Rangers (well, Tara had gone back to HQ to get a medicine that would hopefully keep us from transforming into natives), our female Bard who was absolutely smoking hot, and us five guys.

“Ewww! Super eww! Skip past this part.”

The natives of Slinktrickle, strange white and green humanoids with fish tails, had a problem with their eggs being sick. Those eggs all had brown, sticky, soft spots on them that needed healing, and I was the person to do it. So I cracked my knuckles and clenched my butt cheeks, and got to work.

“And they were also due to hatch in the next few days, so I had to get them healed up as fast as possible.”

“What happened?” my mother asked, fully invested.

“It turned out to be a mental and emotional affliction. The treatment was positivity, amazingly enough. The eggs responded to positive vibes.” More to the point, they responded to the sounds of me having sex with one of their natives, an assistant named Vellenia. Add that to the ‘do not mention’ pile. “I suggested cheerful conversation, dancing, and singing, but the natives were falling into despair. We had to hurry. After a disastrous announcement with the townsfolk, we had to retreat back to the hatchery, the Guardians had to guard the bridges between the hatchery platform and the nearby others. Some bridges ended up being destroyed.

“So while I was busy making a cure in the hatchery with one other, the rest of the team tore up bridges, kept the townspeople from crossing, and slowly backed up further and further until we were almost completely encircled.”

The cure was like essence of positivity. It glowed and sang with a heavenly chorus, and you couldn’t help but feel better just looking at it, smelling, it or hearing the distant voices. The only problem was, it needed to be misted overtop the eggs, not drizzled or dunked.

“The only thing we had on us was our mouths. So Cinzia and I got mouthfuls of this cure and sprayed them into the air like we were doing a zillion raspberries.”

“I love it,” my mother whispered.

“Outside they’d almost gotten to the point of battling. The Guardian in charge had come in and told me we were evacuating to a safe spot, but I refused. We misted the eggs, misted ourselves, and misted the natives when they burst into the hatchery.”

“You mean spit all over them,” Sarah said, making a face. She really was the personification of that green disgust girl from that Disney movie.

“Yep. I spit all over them, and afterwards they threw us a party for saving their eggs.”

“But not dealing with the pants god,” my dad said.

“Ehhh… no.”

“It was just you flopping around all together, dancing around some bonfire above a marsh with a bunch of naked savages.”

“And my team members,” I said. “Don’t forget them.” It had actually turned into an orgy, but that went into the large list of things I didn’t retell.

“Ugh, you’re not allowed to say member when you’re telling this story,” she replied.

My father, bless his heart, laughed for what seemed like the first time I could remember.

“And this is what took you six months to do?” Sarah demanded. Her hands smoothed over her bulging tummy, full of child.

I laughed. “Oh no, that was basically just the first six weeks. I was supposed to have a couple of weeks off after the first two months working as a Healer, but things didn’t work out like that.”

This is Christopher about to spill the whole can of beans.