Divinity Rescue Corps
69- The Meat of the Matter

I didn’t get further than that. Sarah was out of the car, unclipping Brayden from the carseat and getting his sleeping self gathered up. I waved her off, telling her that she was very pregnant and needed to let me handle this while I could. She grumbled about it, but acquiesced.

Soon enough we were in the house, depositing Brayden in his bedroom, and meeting Sarah’s roommates. Plural.

First was Christine. She was a willowy brunette in thick, comfy pajama bottoms and a hefty hoodie. Next I was introduced to Heather, a stocky redhead also wearing pajamas. Heather had on a cutesy cape and hood thing, with little rabbit ears popping up off the top.

“Bitches, I’m home,” Sarah said.

“Hey,” Heather said, and gave her a quick hug.

“Sup, slut,” Christine said, and hugged her also.

“This is my brother, Toph.”

Heather nodded at me, as did Christine, just a quick flick of the head. And that was it. If they checked me out, it was behind my back where I couldn’t see it. I made very sure to make eye contact and nod in polite greeting. I had entered the viper’s nest, and it would do to be very careful here.

I took a thoroughly conked out Brayden upstairs and Sarah lost no time in making her way to the living room, where she collapsed onto the couch and curled her feet beneath her.

“Holy crap what a day,” she said. “Chrissy if you’re up can I have some tea?”

“You got it, bitch!” we heard from elsewhere in the house.

“So uh… I’ll just walk back to Mom and Dad’s house, then?”

“No, you idiot, you tell me all the things you couldn’t tell our parents. Starting with whoever you sank your fangs into first. Then you sleep in the guest bed, assuming you don’t work your sex magic on my housemates and end up sleeping in their bed. You freak.”

“I am not discussing this here, with your housemates here, and I’m not talking about my sex life with my own sister.”

She nodded sagely. “You said sex life, meaning you have had sex over there. I was right. One point for me.”

“Stop it.”

“Stop what? Piecing together what really happened, since your story doesn’t take everything into account? You could just tell me what really went on.”

Christine reappeared with two steaming mugs, and gave one of them to a grateful Sarah and the other to me. Her bending down to pass me the tea made me realize she’d ditched the frumpy hoodie, and I got a deep look down the open neck of her loose night shirt. Pretend you don’t see anything out of the ordinary, Christopher.

Sarah warmed her hands with her tea, while the lanky brunette sat on the couch and began absently massaging Sarah’s feet one at a time.

“I can’t really… I’m not supposed to go into this stuff with your friends here.”

“Oh, the confidential and top secret information is okay for your pregnant sister, is it? But it’s too much for a complete stranger who doesn’t know any of these people and isn’t going to believe you anyway?”

Christine turned guileless eyes my way and blinked at me.

“Sare, what are you doing?”

“Which one is it?” she demanded.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Honestly, I didn’t know what this question meant.

“Which one is your girlfriend?”

“None of them.”

She frowned and took a drink. “Okay then, which one was your butt buddy? And don’t tell me you didn’t sleep with any of them, because I’m calling bull on that nonsense.”

I sighed. It was at this point that Heather came into the room. She’d also ditched her hoodie, and it was instantly clear that she had no bra on, and very large nipples. The cape with the cutesy ears was still on her head, and she entered with a bowl of chips in one hand, and a plate of quartered sandwiches in the other.

Do not look at your sister’s friend’s nipples, I told myself. Do not look at her nipples.

I wanted to ask her what was happening right now, but her question had caught me off guard.

“I know you did Vel,” she said, “but I don’t think she’s the only one. I think you went to work for this company and they worked you to the bone, you got a bunch of muscles, and the girls were throwing themselves at you. So, out with it. Cinzy left because you were screwing somebody else on the team, right?”

I sighed. “Yeah.”

She clapped excitedly. Seriously, it was only the juicy gossip stuff that got my sister’s attention. All the weird and wonderful other world bits, the magic and marvels were nothing to her, only spilled tea.

“Good! There we go! Admitting it is a good first step. Because… she wanted you, or because you hopped into bed with her and didn’t tell her about somebody else you were bumping uglies with?”

“Ugh. Can we not—”

“Just answer the question.” She chomped down on a chip as she waited, and I watched Christine rub her feet while I thought it over. Lying to her wasn’t working. She seemed to have a bullshirt detector that I couldn’t skirt around or dissuade her from using. I felt cornered, and annoyed, honestly. This wasn’t her business.

“Look, this is none of your—”

She sat up, cutting me off. “Then you shouldn’t have started telling me your insane story to begin with. Now, you went through all the boring stuff with Mom and Dad, you get to go through the spicy stuff with me. Now, you did it with Cinzy or you were about to, and she found out?”

“Did it,” I said, rolling my eyes.

She turned to Heather and Christine. “I saw her in photo form. She’s way, way out of his league.”

“But you believe him?” Christine asked. “When he says he did this super hot girl?”

“For some reason, I do,” Sarah said.

“Hang on,” Christine said, pausing in her foot massage to finally make eye contact. “So this most beautiful girl in the world… let’s call her Zendaya… so Zendaya wanted you, and you got her…”

“Correct,” I said.

“And then you lost Zendaya, the insanely beautiful one, because she caught you doing somebody else.”

A huge sigh out of me.

“Are you a special kind of stupid?”

“I’m seriously wishing this line of questioning would end,” I said truthfully.

“Woooooooooowwww,” Heather said again.

“Now, let’s get back on track,” Sarah said. “Who was it? Tara, Regina? Larelle? Chrysta?”

“Ivy,” I said.

“Ivy! The lez girl with a fracking girlfriend?” She laughed. “Now you’ve got me doing it. Okay one more time… the lesbian girl with the fucking girlfriend?”

“And Isabelle,” I said, shaking my head, eyes closed. If I could mitigate the damage a little, that would be good. Give her something juicy and she wouldn’t keep asking about me getting into bed with anyone other than Cinzy, Ivy or Isabelle.

Something soft bounced off my head. I looked up to find it was a quarter of a sandwich.

“I feel like I know what that was for. Look, can we drop this?”

“You need to tell me everything,” Sarah said. “We’re not going to bed until I wring every drop of detail out of you.”

I stared until she relented.

“Okay bad choice of words, but you know what I mean.”

“You don’t want just the main thrust of the story,” I said.

Her mouth fell open.

“What you want are all the juicy ins and outs of what happened. What took place out back. You really want to bend this story over—”

“Okay you don’t—”

“Get your fingers in there—”

“You can st—”

“You want to drill down to the meat of the matter—”

“Gross, stop!”

“With my sister.” Her housemates were busy laughing it up. Christine had a high-pitched giggle, while Heather kept her theme of being almost silent and laughing without a single sound.

I did a quick gloss over of the real actual story: Isabelle approached me secretly to ‘test me out’ because her girlfriend was actually very bisexual and wanted an occasional filler. This led to several threesomes where I made sure Isabelle was the main pleasure focus first, and then gave Ivy what she was asking for. “I also made sure they both knew that I wasn’t looking to break them up, I wasn’t looking for a throuple or whatever you call a threesome couple arrangement.”

This was how I framed it: Cinzy had been trying to date me the whole time.

“Would you have done a throuple if they proposed the idea?”

I had considered this, and the appeal wasn’t really there. I couldn’t see the point of adding myself as Isabelle’s competition. The concept of a throuple didn’t really make sense to me. I saw it instead as a series of 3 different relationships that needed careful maintenance at all times: one between me and Ivy, who seemed like she had a temper, one with Isabelle who had some kind of man-related trauma I didn’t want to detangle, and one between the two of them I would probably only be intruding upon. That felt like so much work. No thanks.

“I can’t believe you cheated on Cinzy,” Sarah said. “Now that I’ve seen her…”

“It wasn’t cheating. This thing happened with Ivy and Isabelle while Cinzy was waffling around, trying to decide if she wanted to go out on a date, and we were just talking. Maybe light flirting.”

“That sounds fair,” Christine said.

“Yeah. Sounds fair,” Heather echoed.

“I made it plain that I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. She wasn’t my girlfriend. We just, kind of, tried to go out on a date. But we were supposed to be working literally seven days a week. So when she decided to heck with it, and told me we were going to skip right to the sex part, I flat out told her, hey, I can’t just be in a relationship now. And she went ahead and sexed me anyway.”

“You’re bad!” Sarah said, but she had finally lost the demanding edge to her voice. Giggles erupted out of her and the other two. Finally, her laughter trailed off and she yawned.

When I asked if the interrogation session was over, she admitted it was.

And just like that, it was bedtime.

***

It kind of surprised me to learn that neither of the housemates had been tasked with finding out whether I was well endowed. That was the first thing I expected to have happen. It didn’t. Either that or Sarah asked them, and both Heather and Christine refused. Did they give a ‘hell naw’ or tell her she was gross for wanting to know if I had a huge dong? Or was I just imagining things were hyper sexual everywhere, and they really only were in the other world?

I didn’t have an answer to those questions, but was thankful that hadn’t happened. Because, and this won’t shock anyone hearing or reading this story, there’s a lot more sex that will go on over the course of the next five months of not making it back to earth.

It surprised me to learn that Sarah was up early with the sun, and that Brayden slept in. She hefted her heavily pregnant self out of bed and Christine and Heather seemed to have accepted their roles as substitute housewives or husbands, and chipped in on her behalf. Those two cooked up a quick breakfast and started on some early morning laundry while Sarah waddled around the house and periodically complained about her back.

“Your housemates seem like good people,” I told her.

“Nope!” she declared. “On with the story! I need to know what happens next, and now you don’t leave out any of the really salacious stuff, okay?” She narrowed her eyes in challenge. Sarah might be prone to getting the wrong kind of men to impregnate her, but she wasn’t stupid. She saw through my tendency to skip over the places where I plunged headlong into caverns both moist and hot. I sighed.

Well, I accepted a cup of coffee and a plate of breakfast while sighing.

***

The very first thing I needed to do was employ my Healer’s Resistance to shrug off the damage to myself. Cinzy’s little tantrum had once again thrown a huge Mental ailment to blanket most of the town, and the healer needed healing fast to tackle it. This cost me a Durability Token. In a flash the gigantic coin went cla-cling! into being, and I barely glimpsed the figure in relief before it vanished. The bent back, the gigantic heavy pack perched atop it, you could practically feel your body ache and the sweat pop out over your entire self. Another Durability Token gave me some resistance to this type of damage permanently.

“Thanks, Isabelle,” I muttered. Stalwart gave me the ability to replenish a Durability Token every morning, and I was going to use that to build up a resistance.

What followed was several full days of me whipping up batches of treatment potions just as fast as I could go. The whole team got involved this time, learning basic potion craft in a heartbeat. Isabelle used her Healer’s Breath special ability out where no one could see. She treated the Marshmellows who had been affected, but she treated them down on the surface of the marsh, at the boat launches.

It wasn’t fun work, since Cinzy’s departure soured the mood considerably. Nobody felt good, even when treated. Quick potions do the job, but they’re less than delicious. They clear the damage, but this was another mental and emotional illness she’d left in her wake.

Like the eggs, this was emotional. People suffered from depression. If things went badly for them for too long, their simmering anger could explode into screaming and vicious insults that weren’t true and they didn’t mean. This caused the sickness to spread.

Healer’s Resistance would have worked, but I simply didn’t have the Tokens to insulate the team from the effects for a single day, let alone multiple days. The text said I- You may spend a Durability Token to resist damage from any source. Long term effects are reduced by 75%. Onsets of all diseases, venoms, poisons, or other afflictions are tripled, as are intervals. Lasts one day.

You may spend an Ingenuity Token to gift this ability to a willing target for one day.

It luckily didn’t take a Durability and an Ingenuity Token, but I had no will to spend multiple Ingenuity Tokens every day. If only I’d been able to deal with mediation. Instead I started off every day whipping up a batch of the treatment potion, and once the team had theirs, they would get right to work.

I will say this for the team though: they picked up the skill quicker than I was able to handle upgrading my Identify. They also got into the process of mass-producing the simple feel-better potion, and handled organizing tasks. Regina and Tara were on ingredient gathering detail, Alan and Trent on mana infusion duty, while Drat and the Guardians did the container washing, the grinding with the mortar and pestle, temperature control, mixing and stirring, and other basic tasks. They also organized the distribution network, so all the affected patients got their doses every day.

Once we had a good production line, I whipped up another batch of the mental cure. This one strained resources further. Of course it did. I wanted to save all available Tokens for working on the nudity god, only to have a curveball thrown my way.

I kept telling myself this was fine. I needed experience in my Healer class. This was something I’d dealt with before. It wasn’t new, even though it was a far larger job than the egg situation had been.

After a few hours of searching through Alan’s archives on day 2, I found the cure again, and had him enlarge the clay tablet it was inscribed on. This one was going to need a few adjustments, seeing as it wasn’t for small creatures, but medium. Also, this recipe was for fairy types, which were the eggs… and the Marshins. Oh, also the Marshells and Marshmellows. The team members weren’t fairy aspect Nakamamon, they were humans… and an ice ghost, and whatever the heck Larelle was. I made a mental note to Identify her.

Either I’d need to make two separate cures for the same ailment, or one that applied to different species.

It was not a leap to believe that the Marshins and my teammates might benefit from the same mental cure, which boosted positive feelings and banished the depression and negativity from Cinzy’s shout. All the afflicted had sapient minds. They were all thinking beings, so I could work with that.

On top of the sundrinker, which was like a magical sunflower, and the common numphties, I added tears of laughter to the recipe. It was difficult to remember to gather these, but I had some specially packed away in insulated containers. Everyone considered laughter to be the best medicine, and the water fairies here were no different.

I grabbed out the sun drinker seeds and petals, and the common numphty. I sent a silent thanks up to the girls for running around the area surrounding the marsh and collecting up so many flowers. We were going to need a lot more than what I used to cure the eggs.

In fact, we were going to need the biggest cauldron available.

“Thank fork for Muppin being an amazing pack beast,” I muttered.

The common numphty I ground up and put in, while adjusting the temperature to one eighty. With the oils and the ground numphty stems, it was time to begin adding the mana.

Vellenia swept into the room as I began adding the mana.

“Oh Fletcher, what has happened?”

“Jealousy,” I said, and held a hand out to show her I couldn’t really talk. No, I had to infuse the contents with a lot more mana this time, and just as slowly. This was going to take hours and hours of concentration. That also meant not thinking about how badly the Cinzy situation had gone.

It had been a fit of anger, me ordering her not to leave as punishment. She couldn’t just quit the team, not with all of us taking commands from the HQ. She needed to go back to HQ and be formally reassigned. Barring that, if she simply wandered in the wider world, she’d suffer the penalties for disobeying my direct order. She already had reason to be upset, and now I had only made that far worse.

“Fletcher?”

I swore quietly, and messed up the entire batch of cure.

“Well sheep dip,” I muttered, and watched in dismay while the mixture congealed into a thick, black sludge. It would take time for it to cool down, and then hours more to scrape all this out of here so we could start again.

“Could you kindly come with me to grab another several bunches of common numphties?” I asked, sighing.

This is Christopher about to become a monk.

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