Divinity Rescue Corps
73- Godwatch

The smell of coffee, that blessed heady aroma wafting around my parents’ kitchen, was something I had missed. So much. I hadn’t realized just how much until I’d gotten out of the other world and back to earth. By all the gods great and small, coffee was great.

“It smells better than it tastes,” I said.

“But the effects are unmistakable,” my father said, drinking from his mug.

I nodded.

“Hey,” he said, “I’m going to be working in the garage this morning.”

“No work today?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“It is?” I hadn’t been keeping track of the days of the week in… months. The whole time I had been in Dorfialtos. It was one of those bizarre aspects of being in the other world. It was both like being on a permanent vacation and being permanently on the job at the same time. There was no other feeling like it.

“All day long,” my father confirmed with more than a touch of his old self. I was pleased to hear the warmth and confidence back in his voice. The old fix-it man was feeling more and more like the guy I’d grown up admiring.

I had succeeded in bringing the family back together… and all it took was traveling to a magical world of wonder and unexpectedly high amounts of sex. This of course felt amazing. I was thrilled to have been given the opportunity to work for the company, to heal the sick, and of course have a ridiculous amount of ego-boosting carnal relations. I want to say it’s just a bonus and perk of the job, but that’s just not true.

I spent half the morning helping my dad, and listening to him swear good-naturedly at the cam shafts, the bearings, the valves, the piston rings, and all that other car-related mechanical stuff he was trying to fix up and repair. I supplied the tools when he asked for them, and continued on with the story in my head.

***

Before I got to work on my cure, I set about tidying house. First, my character sheet. I pulled up my Attributes first.

Attributes:

Affinity 6

Durability 6

Ingenuity 8

Likability 5

Physicality 4

“Time to hit that Physicality,” I told myself, but didn’t really believe it. I needed to get to a place where I could work on these treatments and cures without having to spend Tokens at all times. So far I’d gotten lucky, I thought, since the situations I was dealing with were tiny and not so far gone that they couldn’t be cured. I would probably increase Ingenuity and Affinity a lot more before I went in for more Physicality.

However, I really enjoyed not having pain after five minutes of walking. No, now it was taking a good half a day of walking before I experienced any of the nasty pain in my legs, hips and back. Physicality was literally curing my growth plate injuries and I was here for it.

“Skills now,” I muttered.

Healer Skills:

Diagnosis (physical 3, spiritual 3, magical 3, mental 3)

Treatment (potions 3, salves 3, tinctures 3, elixirs 3, unguents 3)

Develop cure (swarm 3, small 3, medium 1)

Develop cure (unique) 7

Administer Cure 8

Pleasure Seeker Qualities:

Girth 1

Load 1

Stave Off 2

Length 1

Tongue 1

Adaptability 1

Other Skills:

Identify 5

Hiking 3

Cooking 1

Persuasion 1

Meditation 2

Resistance to the gods 1

All other skills unranked

Unspent skill points: 5

Something still fluttered in my stomach at seeing the words ‘Resistance to the Gods’ and I had to stop myself from sinking a skill point into it just because I could. When hovering my attention over the skill it didn’t give me anything concrete to go on. Instead the skill description just read ‘You are more likely to resist the effects of a god’s influence or damage from a god.’ In numerical terms that meant nothing. That said, the same thing applied to the Meditation skill, and I was assured that eventually it would help me replenish spent Tokens.

“You know what…” I muttered, and put a skill point in there anyway. Gods had nearly killed me before, and they came in swarms, so it was best to increase the skill at every opportunity.

The other place to increase my skills was probably the Treatment options. I’d been making a whole lot of Potions and Elixirs so far. Now that I could only spend a single skill point without needing a level up, it seemed less vital to keep my skill points in reserve. Also, the more I withheld the skill points, the more I was finding myself in situations where I wanted to buy more Pleasure Seeker Qualities. Who wouldn’t want the ability to change the size of your dong any time the necessity arose?

I sank one each into Potions and Elixirs, but couldn’t bring myself to spend the rest.

The next pull on my want to spend the skill points came from the other side: diagnosis was incredibly difficult and my skills were only 3 in each of the four categories.

Then the questions hit: what if I wanted to have a big orgy again and orgasm repeatedly, and get it up repeatedly? What if my size needed even bigger increases? What if we came across a challenge that could only be solved by forking my way out of it?

Yes, it was a stupid line of thinking. The trouble with being filled with hormones and desires is those inevitably rise up and make you question what anything is for. Surely only the biological imperative to mate matters. All those hormone-addled thoughts ran through my head regardless, and the temptation to keep the skill points for Qualities had a tug of war with the Diagnosis skills. And so the skill points sat, for now.

Lastly, I didn’t really need to look up the special abilities I had, but I looked into them anyway.

General Special Abilities:

Hard At Work III (Uncommon, Passive)

Wild Lore II (Uncommon, Active)

Beastmaster (Uncommon, Passive)

Stalwart II (Common, Passive)

Fierce II (Common, Passive)

Healer Special Abilities:

Healer’s EnduranceII (Common, Active)

Healer’s Resistance (Uncommon, Active)

Healer’s Breath (Uncommon, Active)

Pleasure Seeker Special Abilities:

Blissense II (Rare, Active)

Post Sharing Clarity (Rare, Passive)

Lastly, there were the Divine Gifts, which I was given to understand couldn’t be raised by any means, like gaining experience in them through training or practice, or spending points.

Divine Gifts:

Floral Knowledge (Rare, Passive)

Pleasure’s Bounty (Legendary, active)

Entwined Ecstasy (Legendary, active)

The problem inherent here was this: one, I’d gotten these Divine Gifts through close proximity and then touching the divine. This had nearly killed me in several cases. I didn’t want to discuss this with any of my fellow party members not because I didn’t want them to gain access to them, but because I wasn’t ready to bring people back from the brink of death. I’d basically cured some slowly encroaching sickness, a broken ankle, and some hurt fee-fees. Sure the Debilitating Lash from the Marshins had been awful psychic damage of some kind to the party, but they weren’t in serious danger of dying. They would have snapped out of it on their own. The broken ankle would have even healed on its own.

No, I didn’t share the knowledge of the Divine Gifts because I was pretty sure several of my teammates would be dead already, and I wasn’t good enough to save their lives. I was a Healer, not a Miracle Worker. Treatments and Cures took time, like back on earth.

Now that I had Healer’s Breath that changed slightly. I could probably get some help and knowledge regarding the Divine Gifts, and have at least one idiot suicidally try to gain more power without risk of losing them.

That person would probably be Ivy, I decided.

Actually… I had an idea, but it would have to wait until I had some privacy. For now, I had checked over my character sheet, found most things as I wanted them, except for skill points. I always wanted more of those.

I spent the day in the lab and about the village surroundings. People needed coordinating. They didn’t know what this flower or that herb looked like, or smelled like if you rubbed your fingers on it. They weren’t sure if I needed the root, stem, leaf or flower.

Alan put together the cure that had been communicated to him from the HQ, and I started to ensure we could make it.

There was a beauty in standing over the cauldron with mana slowly leaking out of you. Simplicity in the work. The meditation skill had yet to give me any Tokens back, but instead it helped to keep my mind on the task of slowly trickling mana into the cure I was making up.

I was very thankful to have HQ’s assistance in this matter. Just seeing the list of cures and reading about the volume of differently sized gods, I knew well how much I didn’t know.

Larelle or Ivy was usually the one who was helping me to grind or chop ingredients. Alan or Trent generally helped organize everything and keep me on task, while Tara was best at flower finding and reclamation.

Now that Drat’s main job was over, he did nothing but hang around and provide wry commentary. Usually he sat on a workbench and knocked his heels against the drawers. After he was shouted at, he moved to a workstation without drawers, a table, and kicked his feet.

“Grind it like you just got to the club,” he told Ivy in that same toneless drawl. “Unh, oh, ugh, yeah. Nice grinding.” The delivery was so deadpan, not a bump of expression to be found. You could skate across his delivery in stocking feet like a waxed dance floor.

She paused in her work at the mortar and pestle. “Stop being gross.”

“I would cease to exist,” he replied in that same non-tone.

She paused, and instead chopped up the leaves of a mint into teensy little bits. This required hard eye contact the whole time, apparently.

“Girl you scary,” he said, still totally deadpan.

“I liked you better when you were invisible… and not around,” Ivy said.

“You wound me,” he said. “Boss, how long are we stuck here?”

I sighed. “The recipe is going to require me to work on it continuously for two straight days,” I told him.

“Two days.” Finally, I hear a hint of expression in his tone: disbelief.

“Yes. I have a special ability that allows me to work through the night without incurring penalties, which I’m going to activate once the sun goes down. But you’re going to find me here again in the morning, adding mana and stirring and adjusting the temperature. It will be the very definition of boring.”

“Copy that.” He nodded, hopped off the table, and made to leave. Turning at the door, he gave me a sad smile. “Your abilities suck, bro.”

I waved cheerfully at him as he left. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had an ability that made me more awesome when I had sex, or a series of skills that literally transformed my body into that of a sex god.

Instead I got down to work.

What followed were several days spent working up a cure. I was informed by HQ that the magical cure I’d used for the God of Footfalls would not suffice. The extent of the injuries through this magical illness had effectively killed the god. It was much further along… I was forced to record the symptoms of its illness each morning and send the intel along to Rainer and the HQ Healer knowledge compendium Wizards so that I could get an idea of what the affliction was actually called.

I reported that the mana of the creature was disappearing as it bled out. Like my Affinity checks couldn’t track where the mana was going, even when I passed those checks. It was like the mana simply ceased to exist. And, aside from the infused mana that came with the treatment elixirs I made several days later, it wasn’t gaining any mana from the surroundings.

Two days of watching, recording and reporting these symptoms later, Rainer informed me that my efforts had borne fruit.

Alan reported that this was called Disjointed Mana Syndrome. This meant the entire god was out of phase with the reality. If the whole reality was the numbers one and two, somehow the God of Apparel had slipped in between one and two. It was one point three seven, in a manner of speaking. Maybe before the Spiritual cure with the offering of clothing, it had been exactly one point five,  right between one (alive) and two (dead) and slipping out of existence entirely. With the tincture, it was being brought closer to one, where mana could once again energize its body and soul.

“You said it would be two days,” Drat said, now sitting cross-legged on the work table.

“How do we reorient the body of a god to the reality it occupies?” I asked, ignoring the Rogue.

So a couple of things I glossed over here: one, there are multiple realities. That one was pretty easy to accept, due in large part to the portal linking earth to this other world. Okay, no problem there. Two, mana essentially is the means by which reality is allowed to change from one state to another. On earth, this is biological processes and laws of physics. Somehow mana allows people to briefly alter those things, by speeding up biological processes, freezing them in place, stopping them entirely, imposing extra gravity on an object, causing spontaneous combustion, that kind of stuff.

“Fletcher, this place is a backwater and there’s no more secrets to ferret out. I’m friggin dying here.”

“Head out with Tara and find where the other three towns are. Glumpdumpkin needs us there soon, but I’m not going to leave a patient.”

“What? Really?”

“If any of the Guardians volunteers you can take one of them too, for protection.”

“Pff, no worries there.”

“Eh, allow me to reconsider. Take one of the Guardians. I think Chrysta is the quietest and fastest. Stealthy and fast is the way to go.”

“All right, all right.” He was nodding, while I continued to boil an infusion of several different herbs Rainer thought I needed. “We’ll check out in an hour.”

“Your orders are to find information on the location of the target towns, and any other information you can glean without entering the town or speaking to any inhabitants. They don’t need to know who we are or that we’re coming, especially if the situation is bad. Once you have that information, you are to return.”

The silence that followed let me know he really didn’t love that direct order.

“Listen,” I said. “I can send Tara alone. She can travel fastest on her Nakamamon, put eyes on the target, and come back in probably a day or two.”

“No, no way. I’m going,” he protested.

“Then just be aware that going against my direct order will cost you xp, and HQ might even learn because the system will log that you disobeyed.”

“Fine,” he relented, clearly wanting to get into the town and start snuffling around. “I’ll grab Chrysta and Tara.” I couldn’t really blame him for wanting to do his job, just like I couldn’t really blame him for wanting to find out how bad it was in Glumpdumpkin. I had a feeling it was far worse than hanging out naked in town.

Thankful to have his attitude out of earshot and away from me, I continued work. Healing here was a lot like on earth: slow, boring, technical, methodical, sometimes grueling, and in some cases frantic.

I’d been awake for two days already on symptom watch, but I was relieved by Trent and Alan, and got some shuteye the third night. It was already two weeks after dealing with the egg situation and nearly having the whole village pull a zombie, psychic attack situation on all of us. Every day since I’d reconstituted the God of Apparel, the Marshins and their larval forms the Marshells had been coming by to pay their respects and offer up prayers.

I awoke on the third day ready to craft the cure. I just wished the bonuses from Post-Sharing Clarity would last a good forty-eight hours. Sadly, all I could manage right now was a half hour after having delightful sex with Vellenia.

Two full days of heating, steeping, infusing, stirring, grating, chopping, sifting, separating, and directing mana lay ahead of me.

This is Christopher quietly loving his job.