Divinity Rescue Corps
74- A Super Dense Black Hole

With the weather warming, forty-eight hours felt easier and easier to handle. When I wasn’t working in a laboratory constantly baking with the heat of Larelle’s Magmamander, I was nipping in to treat Dee, supply plenty of ear and belly scratches, and give Regina a bit of hope.

Which was good, because she was laying on the floor curled around the poor creature and wouldn’t even look at me when I came in.

“Don’t you worry, lil guy,” I told the flower fox. “Uncle Fletcher’s going to finish up this cure starting today. I’m going to have you just like new in no time.”

Tweedle Dee’s tongue lolled and he lay panting happily on the floor of Regina’s room, tails wagging slowly with quiet bliss. That said, he’d lost a lot of flowers from around his ears and tails. The ones that remained were in some state of drooping and withering. His coat didn’t hold the same bright orange sheen as before.

“You mean it?” Regina asked. She turned red-rimmed eyes up to me for the first time.

“I mean it,” I told her. “Your sweet little companion here is going to be right as rain, and that’s not just some doctor’s office BS either. Once the cure is in place and the god does his disappearing act, it will be like he was never sick. I promise.”

I really hoped I could keep my promise. This was easily the most difficult patient I’d ever had to deal with.

With Healer’s Breath used to treat Dee, I finished preparations and began the cure as outlined by Rainer.

A cure to reorient the God of Apparel with this reality was going to be a hell of a shock. It involved a massive amount of stimulant. Rainer identified several stimulants, and we were going to use neffkhat, a natural amphetamine. On earth there was a version of this, but not imbued with the sort of potency a magical plant could supply. For obvious reasons, the knowledge of the existence of this plant was strictly confidential. This stuff could kill you easy if you didn’t know what you were doing. Rainer had even given it an innocuous name so nobody got any ideas about it.

I had a supply of neffkhat, but it was in a secret pocket sewn into the lining of my supply box.

Once there, it was time to juice the whole thing with mana and divinity. The latter was simple enough, the former not so much.

This didn’t make sense on the surface: why would it be an easy matter to infuse a cure with divinity and less so with mana? The answer had to do with how malleable mana was. It could take any form, so it drained out of plants easily. Hell, it drained out of potions just as easily.  If you stored them for too long, their magic just disappeared.

“And I used to laugh at medicines with expiration dates,” I muttered, chopping and cutting at the divinity plants. These could be safely added before the mana ingredients, because divinity was strong. It was, so far as my skills told me, the building blocks of reality. That didn’t make much sense on the surface, and I wanted to know more, but I trusted the automatically gained knowledge. When I didn’t have a resentful girlfriend, or fuck buddy, distraught over the worsening state of her best doggo, and we weren’t needed in another city to help with whatever the declining situation there happened to be, maybe I wold investigate what divinity meant.

For now it meant getting golden halos and radiant primroses steeping separately, concentrating their power and readying to add them to the main mixture.

“I’ll just add these?” Trent asked.

“You definitely won’t,” I told him. “I don’t want to have to scrape you off the walls.”

He froze, staring down at the flower petals as they dissolved into the heated oil and the melted beeswax. “Uh… what?”

“Divine plants release tiny amounts of divinity,” I told him.

“Ah.” I could tell he wasn’t on the same page.

“Meaning if we add them at the same time, they might explode with divine energy. Remember, we’re not supposed to touch divinity directly?”

“Right.” He was looking down at the steeping plants with much more respect now. “And we can’t get these other ingredients yet… because…?”

“The mana infused ingredients need their mana fresh and topped off when we harvest them. Otherwise they’ll leak out mana or begin transforming into other plants while we wait.” With extreme care, I stirred the radiant primroses clockwise as the recipe directed.”

“We don’t have a lead-lined container for that kind of thing?”

“It’s portable,” I said, tipping my head toward what looked like a beer cooler, sitting in the corner surrounded by caution signs. “And it’s already stocked with our reserves of mana potions.” Our dwindling reserves of mana potions.  “Don’t tell me you’re getting antsy and bored too.”

“I wish I could be useful,” he admitted.

“What happened to the native you uh… befriended on celebration night?”

Not only did he redden, but he also ducked a bit. It was a little easier to broach certain topics in underwear, but not foolproof.

“It, uh, didn’t work out,” he said. 

I gave him a suspicious look while summoning him to hold the large cooking pot. I scooped the radiant primrose concoction into the master cure, chuckling a bit at Trent’s discomfort. He looked terrified that I was about to blast us both with divine energy and splatter us all over the place.

“Care to explain?” I asked.

Everybody was under orders not to anger the natives. Had he been messing around with multiple natives? Or did he break her heart some other way?

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, “it wasn’t my fault. She suddenly said she wanted to be with egg, and—” He stirred the master cure while I worked on the golden halos. “That’s it. No egg with human.”

“All right.”

“Hey man, I could ask you the same thing about Cinzy. What happened with her, huh?”

“I’m not blaming you,” I told him. “I just want us to be careful. With Cinzy gone, we have to smooth out any wrinkles by ourselves. And no, I’m not going to go into personal matters. She had a problem with me and thought the best way to resolve it was not by talking the situation out.”

We worked in silence for some time, stirring according to the recipe, and later adding the syrup of golden halos to the main mass of the cure. From there it was mixing time. The divinity needed a lot of stirring to mix with the powerful stimulating properties of the neffkhet.

It was maybe thirty minutes later, maybe an hour or more… I couldn’t tell. I was adding a steady stream of mana to the fledgling concoction before we got to the mana-addition properties, when he finally spoke up. “It doesn’t seem like her, that’s all I’m saying.”

“I know. I’m not happy she’s gone. I think we’re going to need her more for Glumpdumpkin.”

He snorted. “Such a dumb name. I love it.”

I nodded, focused on making sure the mana I added was continuous, steady, and the correct amount. What I was doing now was willing the divinity to cooperate with the stimulating amphetamine properties of the neffkhet, and it took a whole lot of mental effort, as well as a whole lot of time. You ever sit and build a jigsaw puzzle of five thousand pieces over the course of like twelve straight hours without a break? One of the ones that’s like three colors, or just the yellow faces of building block guys. The sheer mind-fudgery possible is immense. The crazy part is that the system stops notifying you of penalties due to sleeplessness. Your mind can’t handle as much when you’re running on fumes, and the system is the first thing to go. That means you literally have no idea how far you’re falling.

And since this cure required roughly 48 hours, I needed to keep my wits about me.

To assist, Healer’s Endurance was there for me. I activated the ability, and I was thrilled to regain the Durability Token once the system judged that another day had dawned.

Trent eventually fell asleep, and was replaced by Alan. The others had also been in: Ivy and Isabelle, holding hands and laughing at something, Larelle, who removes Trent and carries him in her enormous arms out of the laboratory and back to the tent he shares with Alan, and even Regina.

She hadn’t left Tweedle Dee’s side in weeks. Although I’d been feeling guilty about the situation the little guy put himself in, I was confident this cure would be the end of his misery. Not like ‘put him out of his misery’ but ease his suffering. In a good way. Why did it keep sounding like I was pronouncing doom and gloom for Regina’s best boy?

Almost twenty-four hours had passed by now, and I was getting low on mana. I was still a low level Healer, though I did have 15 levels of growth as a Pleasure Seeker. I wished that meant I would gain the hit points and mana of both classes, effectively making me doubly hard to kill and doubly capable of creating magic cures, but it isn’t to be. Each class granted me roughly half of what they otherwise would.

The upshot was the Attribute and skill growth… though I had an additional set of skills. The real upshot was the special abilities! Well, unless you factored in that I wanted all the special abilities to level up, and there were more of them to upgrade.

Ugh. Attribute growth seemed to be the only tangible benefit of having two classes… and that was only because in my off time, I was able to gain xp between the sheets. The fun way. Everybody else only got to level up their skills doing class-specific stuff, and less experience growth helping out others—read: me—as they went about their class-specific duties.

“Hey!” I said, trying not to get sidetracked. It was just about time to add the first of the mana-specific ingredients. “You okay?”

She nodded absently. She wasn’t okay. “Just wanted to check on you. Hey Alan.”

I pointed a finger at him. “Sorry, he’s under strict instructions not to speak to anyone since he’s on stirring detail.” Stir too fast and the divinity-laden mixture, which was also boiling hot, could kill you. Stir too slowly and the whole thing could harden into a taffy-like sludge before turning into a block of cement.

That would mean a brand new cauldron, and those things weren’t so easy to come by in a marsh village a week’s travel from HQ. No thank you.

“He’s super busy, sorry,” I said. “Sorry about that, if he fails now we start over. It’ll be another two or three days to get back to where we are.”

She nodded, this time with more vigor. “Sure, sure.”

“Thanks for going out on ingredient runs,” I told her, and continued swirling the cherry violet mixture. This one needed twelve hours. Since the cherry violets went from health focused to mana focused starting at dusk, I needed to work on them all throughout the night in order to enhance the mana properties. At precisely dawn they’d be as capable as possible of shifting mana. Rainer said this was the main reagent for shifting the god from one point three seven back towards one.

It was exhausting, but these people were counting on me. I smiled at Regina after explaining all about the cherry violets. 

She walked up and wrapped me in a hug, taking care to allow my free arm to continue stirring.

“The second Tweedle Dee is back to normal I’m gonna fork you til you can’t walk,” she breathed in my ear.

It was enough to prompt a Durability Develop Cure check at Difficult. I blinked and gaped at her, and she hissed through her teeth in horror. “Ohhhhh no, I’m so sorry, I’m—“

I failed the first check, got the free retry through the Hard At Work ability, and promptly spent the two Durability Tokens to pass the check on the second time.

“No worries,” I told her. “Though if you could kindly, uh… go grab out some more, um, radiant primroses, that would be delightful.”

She backed away, hands up, like I was holding her at gunpoint. She had this look on her face, the ‘I just caught my parents having sex’ look. I continued stirring as though she hadn’t just proposed hours and hours of mind-blowing carnal delights.

At the end of my twelve hours of stirring the cherry violets, I added them into the main concoction, and Ivy relieved Alan. It was time for me to get on the second mana-rich plant, the highland bellroot.

Just like ginseng, these things had specially shaped root systems. They were only found in high elevation areas of the world here, by a single flower. From there, you had to follow the longest fracking stem in the world to the root.

As for the roots, instead of looking like ninjas doing a flying side kick, or dancers doing their thing like nobody was watching, like ginseng, the bellroot seemed to grow the root into tiny cauldrons that were filled with concentrated liquid mana. Regina and Trent had managed to find four of these, while the recipe just said ‘as many as you can find’.

I crushed the root balls with the flat of my blade, scraping the thick iridescent blue mana juice into a bit of alcohol and stirring it. And adding even more mana.

Even. More. Mana.

This thing was so filled with mana, I was amazed it didn’t transform into a fracking dragon and eat our faces off. Or swallow us whole. I’d only ever seen the scorchomp.

Finally, I’d gotten to the point where my own mana fizzled out, so I was forced to use another of the mana potions.

“Where are we at?” Ivy asked.

“We’re at the heat, stirring, and mana phase,” I told her. “If I don’t have enough mana, we start over. If I stir it wrong, we start over. If the temperature is wrong—“

“We start over?” Ivy asked, rolling her eyes.

“Actually I think it turns into a super dense sort of black hole made of acidic magic, destroys the lab, falls through the floor, and drains all the water out of the marsh,” I said nonchalantly. “Somewhere in there we all get sucked in and compacted into a singularity the size of a baseball. So we all die.”

The utter astonishment on her face was totally worth it.

“I’m kidding… mostly. But I don’t want to do this again.”

She just nodded, not sure what to make of what I’d just said.

The UI window for the Develop Cure check came at the forty-three hour mark.

This is Christopher getting his eyes on the finish line.