Divinity Rescue Corps
71- Shagnasty

Two important things happened in the wake of my level up. One, the duration of Healer’s Endurance shot from 10 to 24 hours. Two, the penalties for sleeplessness were no longer doubled. I hadn’t used this ability much, but I was seriously considering it now. With Stalwart I regained a Durability Token each morning. This was good, like ‘never sleep again’ good.

“Nope,” I told myself, squashing that impulse. If there was a future version where I never took the penalties for sleeplessness after using the ability, then I’d consider it, but not like this. If I went for more than five days without sleep, I was liable to seriously injure myself.

Still, this was great. I’d begin on the cure for the God of Apparel right away, and I wouldn’t stop until I got it right.

Creating a treatment for the God of Apparel was the first stop. There was no way to open its misty, smoky mouth to pour a potion or elixir in there. No, this one needed a compress on its exposed head and hands. Compresses used salves or unguents, or sometimes tinctures. I hadn’t made an unguent or a tincture yet, but I had the basic knowledge.

Tincture: concentrated herbal or plant remedy made by soaking and reducing the material down in liquid. It would be a liquid treatment, but required no boiling. Instead, the plant matter dissolved in a solvent. I had two basic possibilities here: alcohol alcohol, or glycerin, sugar alcohol.

Unguent: grease or oil-based remedy spread on the affected area.

The tincture, unlike potion or elixir, would work without being drunk. It was topical. It could soak through the god’s clothing and get into the mass of its body. The unguent couldn’t. We’d have to peel its clothing off to do that, and there was no way in hell I was going to strip down the literal God of Getting Naked to do that.

”Tincture it is,” I told the room.

The reason I’d stayed away from tinctures so far was very, very simple: they used alcohol or glycerine as a solvent. I had been issued both of these by HQ when I left, but in limited amounts. So far as I knew, the natives didn’t have the technology level necessary to turn vegetable oil into glycerine… you needed tiny amounts of sulfuric acid, and a whole host of other materials. You needed time as well.

Neither pure alcohol nor glycerine could be manufactured in this other world. And we were now far enough away that getting a resupply was going to be difficult… maybe impossible. For now, except in the event of an emergency, I needed to stick to oil based elixirs, salves or unguents, or oil and water-based potions.

This was one such emergency.

I retrieved the glycerine jars, thankful that Trent’s stunt in the first week of our mission had only destroyed our supply of the anti-magic pills and not these babies.

Glycerine from HQ was pharmaceutical grade: a clear white liquid, and viscous, like nail polish remover.

I took a deep breath; this was all I had, and getting more would be a serious pain in my bare naked behind. Therefore, getting the tincture recipe out with Alan’s help, I saw only a single remedy listed for gods of medium size.

Sighing, I put a single skill point into Develop Cure (Medium), and found that I’d already had a point in there. I blinked at it, and concentrated on the skill. The UI did the work for me, informing me that I’d gained a first skill level through sheer research over the last two weeks. I knew that it had been applied when Alan and I were reading over the entire handbook on healing, in our half-exhausted state. I must have missed it.

If I lucked out and got another level before developing the cure, I could spend another skill point. Level 2 would have to be enough.

Once again, the familiar rush of knowledge trickled over my brain. It felt like the one time I’d smoked marijuana, but in reverse. Instead of the weed making my brain feel like it was cupped in a pair of hands and squeezed, this felt like a warm liquid poured onto my brain helped it to feel larger and… fluffier than before. Fluffier was the right word for it.

That knowledge? The correct temperature to distill the rough dosage for medium sized gods and Nakamamon entered my mind. I knew all the flowers, and how potent they were. I knew a large number of the herbaceous plants and how potent those were as well. Now those aligned to form a clearer picture of the correct amounts to use when developing the cure.

It was time.

This is Christopher putting this thing to bed.

The tincture set me back only another three hours. The laboratory grew a little heady with the mixture of herbs and flowers, in addition to the weird smell of heat coming off the Magmamander.

I carefully added flowers in a single layer to the tray of glycerine, and only stirred once it was clear the alcohol was breaking them down. These were cherry violets, a unique species to this world. In the daytime they went bright red, but as dusk set in they bled down to purple and finally blueberry color. These had be added to the mixture at a specific time: an hour after dusk, to maximize the mana soaking properties. After the cherry violets turned the glycerine a deep ultramarine and made the place smell in a way I can’t properly describe, I had to use a sieve to grab out the petals, then add the heartsblood stems.

Only the sap of the heartsblood was important, so that meant squeezing the devil out of them and trying to avoid the thorns. I also needed to spread the sap evenly throughout the whole tray full of tincture-to-be. Last, I needed to ensure my own actual blood didn’t end up in there, so even when I pricked myself several times, I had to whip my gloved hands away, bandage up as fast as possible, and apply bandages at lightning speed. Then I had to get that sap flowing again, to the areas of the tray without. I ended up cutting myself only seven times.

(Sarah didn’t believe me, but that was my story and I was sticking to it.)

Afterwards, I raked the mixture back and forth this way and that, spreading out both sap and cherry violet infusion. The glycerine then soaked up various medicinal plant matter: aloe vera, rosemary, peppermint, and yet another native plant, lemon vera. With these on, I needed to add the mana but in a new way.

With potions and elixirs, the mana was getting stirred in and around. This one wasn’t getting heated, and that meant the material wasn’t moving around in a volatile way. Instead I just swept my stirring stick through it, back and forth, over and over. It also meant I needed to add mana in a sort of web. I hadn’t done this before, but the Tincture skill gave me a basic understanding of how it was supposed to happen.

I took a deep, steadying breath and reached into my soul for my mana. It needed to be turned into a web shape as it came out of the center of my forehead, through that third eye. The weird thing was knowing that there were several seats of mana, and one of them was… ahem… in my balls.

Now, it was much easier to get magic out of my gut, and out of my heart, and easy enough to get some of it out of my brain, but in the end it wasn’t enough. I needed it from all the chakra places. Grabbing power from within my sack was just… odd. It was weird to contemplate, weird to visualize, and then weird to do. I’d witnessed the blossoming of power when having sex with the ladies, but it felt strange drawing it up from within that place.

But I did it.

Again, I knew the feeling of draining mana out of my stomach, a hungry sensation of gnawing emptiness. I knew the feeling of draining out of my heart, which was a sweaty, racing heart with palpitations. I also knew the woozy, headachy feeling of drawing mana out of my mind, but I’d always avoided drawing mana out of the lowest ‘storage vessel’ if you will.

It was like the feeling of having too many orgasms in one day. It was like my body, and specifically my nether regions, were begging for water.

The feeling didn’t start out that way, obviously. At first it was just a strange tugging sensation from all of those places at once. As I added the herbs, the mana was used to speed up the process of the alcohol breaking down the plant matter, and spread it throughout the glycerine evenly. The heartsblood and cherry violets needed to be spread out the same way, so the mana infused the glycerine and told it to grab and pull.

Time went on, with me doing the stirring with mana alone. Since I’d never done this before I wasn’t sure what to expect out of the tincture itself. The glycerine had been set into essentially a baking tray, and as the mana hit it, it coruscated with various colors. Lights appeared and dimmed out of existence. Sounds clapped into being and vanished.

In short, magical remedies were fracking weird. To help me handle the oddness of this, and the even flow of mana from my body and out through the third eye, I entered the meditative state. It was much easier, now that the temperature on my skin, the floor on my feet, the workbench feeling on my hands and the sights of the tincture tray and laboratory all faded to the background. Instead there was only mana. Only my body slowly drawing it out of the air, and the sources of mana producing a stream that went up through my spine, into my brain, then out in a net to the tray.

Treatment check: You have the associated skill Treatment (Tinctures) at level 3, and Affinity at level 6. This check is Difficult, requiring 4 successes. Would you like to spend 2 Tokens for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 5 Affinity and 7 Free Tokens.

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

With Hard at Work in play, I decided to chance it. The new level of the ability would give me a free retry without spending a Token, so I could afford to fail.

Which I did.

It had been possible on 9 levels to hit 4 successes, but unlikely. So after the skill check reappeared, I spent the 2 Affinity Tokens. They came into being: cla-cling! cla-cling! and spinning just once to reveal the Fairy Poppins-looking figure with one outstretched leg, and the dragonfly wings. They vanished just as soon as they had appeared, in a shower of multi-colored sparkles.

The UI notified me of the success, and I smiled a triumphant grin. Then I got on with finishing the damn treatment.

This was, at best, fairly sloppy. Mana bounced off the tray edges where I failed to line things up well, and flowed out into the world where it created random sounds, bursts of image, colors, smells, and even tactile sensations. These were just mana doing what mana did when it was used: change things.

I registered very little, except the sensation of a large blubbery creature brushing up against my hand on the workbench. I didn’t even notice team members come or go, intent on not disturbing me. They probably saw the shimmer of magic passing down into the tray, and the intent way I was staring at the tray of glycerine before me, and decided not to mess with me. Only Larelle made her way around the workbench and displayed her female parts to me.

I almost choked with laughter, seeing her do what Tara had done when we concocted the cure for the God of Footfalls. Thank all the gods that it didn’t completely wreck my concentration. The Affinity Tokens I’d spent helped to solidify my control, shaky as it was, and assisted me in crossing the finish line.

“That wasn’t necessary,” I told her shakily, once I’d slumped forward and almost gotten my hair in the tincture. The UI was telling me I’d done such a great job, and that I was being awarded xp. I ended up getting some bonus xp for messing up the first check, causing me to chuckle.

Wonderful.

I thought this was a human tradition, Larelle told me mentally.

“It was merely Tara being Tara.”

I am uncertain as to what that actually means.

“She was trying to help keep me focused… with her body. It was halfway a joke, and halfway not.”

She narrowed her eyes.

The tincture smelled heavily of medicine. It was the strongest cough syrup smell I’d ever beheld. It made my eyes water, honestly.

Tincture made, it was time to apply it. The first thing I did was soak three rags, fold and press those rags down onto the being’s fog-swirly forehead, and the backs of its resting hands. I then poured the rest of the mixture directly onto the god’s shirt and pants.

Then I nearly jumped out of my skin when my boxers and socks reappeared on my body.

It took about two minutes for everyone to come swarming into the laboratory and start dancing around me. The girls were now in their bras and panties, along with socks. The guys were in their underwear and socks, like me.

Although some demanded explanations, Tara was quick to explain: when we had treated the God of Footfalls, the strange effect of all our footsteps sounding insane had muted. Not gone away, but it got dramatically better. You could actually hear yourself think when you were walking down the hallways.

I got a lot of hands clapped on my shoulders and plenty of cheerful thanks.

“It’s so weird now,” Trent said, eyeing his boxer briefs. He then seemed to sense, all at once, that he was wearing a golden pendant. “Oh! Oh my gosh, I’m so glad this is back.”

“Y-y-y-you kn-n-now,” Alan said, and everyone hushed. “W-w-w-we sh-should l-l-look for a-a-any backpacks, o-o-o-or—”

“All the things we were holding or wearing that disappeared!” Tara shouted, right overtop Alan. “My backpack might be out there.”

I went over to give Alan thanks for his dynamite idea.

As it happened, most of the discarded clothing and backpacks were recoverable. Vellenia and I found Tara’s bulging rucksack in the marsh waters, along with several others that had been on people’s shoulders when they crossed the boundary and into the God of Apparel’s influence. Regina and Muppin had headed down the long and difficult way, around the cliff that Trent took us directly through. She brought us to the place where her clothes and backpack disappeared, and we found it in under ten minutes.

More celebration was on the menu, and I allowed myself to be swept up into that joy. The girls were now dancing around in bra and panties, and in a lot of ways this felt even more lewd and erotic than before.

There’s an undressing paradox, where the more you see, the less it affects your mind. I don’t know if I can explain it well, but it goes a bit like this: if you see a woman fully covered save for her hands and head, anything she removes—no matter how insignificant—will seem like a lot. If she suddenly has a plunging neckline with just a hint of cleavage, that cleavage will seem extra provocative and sexy. If instead she has a sliver of midriff showing, you’d better believe that midriff will draw the eye and get more of a reaction than a girl who habitually wears a tube top and micro-mini skirt.

Similarly, for whatever reason, if the skirt and the knee high socks leave a two inch gap of thigh, it’s somehow infinitely sexier than bare legs all the way down to her shoes. In this way, semi-transparent stockings are sexier than bare legs. A backless shirt is sexier than just a naked torso.

Now, for sure, there is a short time when a clothed person becomes unclothed, and their allure increases. I think this closely aligns with the the law of diminishing returns: the more you see a woman naked, the more it will seem normal as opposed to mind-blowing and erotic.

All this is to say that I couldn’t keep my eyes off the girls now that they were half-naked. It sounds ridiculous, but it was true. Isabelle wore cutesy floral patterned purple underwear with a silky shine to it. Ivy had similar but with less adornment, and all in black. Tara and Regina were full functional: white and plain.

Now, I was sure that Cinzy had some dynamite underwear. Call it a hunch, or call it intuition, but she was the type of girl who really gave her wardrobe some thought.

And yes, it was a massive shame that she’d left, but no, it wasn’t just because I wanted to see her in underwear that cost more than my dad’s car. One should not lust after one’s coworkers.

This is Christopher changing his name to ’whoopsie-daisy.’ But not really.

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