Divinity Rescue Corps
79- Glumpdumpkin Imperiled

The information given to us by the floating Nakamamon was this: this affliction had begun somewhere far from her jewelry shop, and slowly spread throughout the town itself. No, she wasn’t sure where the effect was strongest. She was a psychic aspect Nakamamon, and like her, other psychic aspect Nakamamon were immune to this effect. The Alloyum that worked for her in the shop had only the barest scrap of intelligence programmed into it, and was likewise immune. Those who were dual aspect psychic types were lasting long, but reported to her that they had to leave the town occasionally. Those who weren’t psychic aspect often found themselves wandering the streets. Sometimes a psychic would help them regain themselves, other times they were just left to later lay down.

“You will find the opposite to be true with a certain number of the population,” the floating meditative woman told me.

“What will I find?”

“They operate without sleep, going about their duties the whole day through. Since this began some month ago. My neighbor across the way has been baking bread around the clock, without pause.”

Also, her name was Shakindria.

“Those who lay down don’t require food or drink, which I find odd,” Shakindria told us.

“Have you tried rousing the… sleeping ones?” I asked.

She nodded. “If you find a fellow psychic aspect laying in the road, it is because they attempted to break a layabout out of their slumber.”

“Hm.” Definitely holy in nature. There was a god somewhere, a powerful one. More powerful than the God of Apparel, which meant an increase in difficulty. Not the news I was hoping for.

“And then there are the gods.”

“Come again?”

“A number of gods are also behaving very oddly. Thankfully the effects are temporary, intermittent.”

Oh man.

So, although there was technically danger, and it seemed a little creepy, none of the residents were dying. The ones in the streets merely went to sleep. The constant workers weren’t doing themselves damage. After interviewing the master baker, I didn’t find blisters up and down her hands from all the baking. I did find that she was on the verge of running out of baking supplies, but wasn’t driven insane by the situation of simply baking and selling baked goods all day and night.

“Definitely the god’s doing,” I told Chrysta.

“Agreed. Although odd, the situation is not so dire as we first imagined. This is well, since the strength of this god is far larger than the god of nakedness.”

“True story.”

A chilly, ghostly hand fell on my shoulder. “Christopher Fletcher, team leader, I wish to thank you for bringing me on this expedition.”

“You’re quite welcome,” I told her. “Now, there’s something I want to do. I hope you don’t mind if we take a bit of a detour.”

She looked a question at me.

“I want to get to the bottom of this… and by bottom I mean top.” I turned and started marching in the direction of the very tippy top of the town.

“It is quite a distance,” she said. “Are you certain we have time?”

“Not… really, but I don’t think I’ll have a problem passing the next check. It would be a shame to come all the way to Glumpdumpkin and not see any of the sights, you know?”

“I was given to understand you have a physical issue…” she said, and trailed off.

“And you don’t?” I asked, already striding off.

She blinked in confusion, then turned to follow. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have any physical body at all,” I said, then waved this away. I was being a dick. “Sorry, that wasn’t nice. I don’t think you were being cruel about your remark… I’ve had a problem with my legs my whole life, and people have been cruel to me ever since. Lots of unnecessary teasing.”

“That… is awful. I can assure you I meant no offense,” she told me.

“I know.”

We moved on in silence for some time. Eventually the ‘danger sense’ ability wore off, and the town returned to normal. Well, people were basically everywhere, laying haphazardly in the streets and propped up against buildings. Someone had taken the time and effort to drag them out of doorways and the middle of the streets in places, and sometimes put them in odd poses. A few were marching across the street like that Beatles album cover. Several were spooning one another. Two were laying opposite one another, with heads on each other’s shoulders.

The going wasn’t uphill, though we were definitely ascending. Again, it was precisely like we were on a level road.

“I received a gift from the God of Footfalls,” I told her, and showed her the shoes. Golightly wasn’t something I went around advertising. I had used them exclusively, to keep myself from becoming too fatigued on our long marches out into this wonderful world.

“They are truly divine,” she said, admiring them from close up. I didn’t even have to stop walking, she simply floated down level with the street.

“Also, Physicality has helped quite a lot,” I told her. “I really want to put another few points into it. If we travel for more than an hour or two, I start to feel the pain again, but I’m able to resist it well.”

“I had noticed very little discomfort when you undertake the long journeys,” she said. “This was the reason for my query.”

“I appreciate your concern,” I told her. “I’m grateful for your intervention regarding the danger.”

I walked on, and she hovered on, rising through the town though it felt just like we had traveled a couple of blocks. Minutes passed with me goggling at the architecture.

I hadn’t been able to fully appreciate the houses here, which were made out of literally anything imaginable. One was a boogie tree, with a treehouse there made out of… something cream colored and geometric. The tree was slowly undulating its trunk, causing the mini house to rise and fall slowly.

We had a clump of mushroom houses for people that couldn’t have been more than four inches tall, with three to four inch tall creatures sprawled out in the yard containing the mushroom houses. We had houses expertly crafted of purple crystal, houses composed of what looked like marble threaded through with veins of what looked like liquid metal, and a house on stilts like the ones in Slinktrickle.

I’m pretty sure that house over there was built out of literal cumulus clouds, somehow held in place and in shape. They were largely left to their puffy selves, but they had been shaped into straight walls and softly curving doorways or window areas. And they moved… somehow. Blue sky shone through between where the clouds dissipated, before new ones formed.

Another house was invisible. I knew this only because a blank space stood where a house would otherwise be, with a space for a lawn or garden, and as I was staring at the space, someone opened a door to reveal a house inside, then stepped out. It was a ghostly being composed of blurry outlines: a head, shoulders, and hands were the only parts visible. When it turned and closed that door, the old timey bedroom vanished.

Yet another was made of candy. I wanted to turn to Chrysta and inquire about the weird ability for their houses to mimic earth designs when she spoke up yet again.

“May I ask you a more personal query?” she asked.

“You may absolutely ask me a personal question,” I said, “on the understanding that you may not like the answer, or you may be disappointed by it.” I tried to give her a reassuring smile to let her know I’d try not to make it difficult.

“In my former life, I was a part of a civilization that was frequently… physical. We huddled against one another and packed in tight when we slept. This was largely a defense against large predators, but in times of safety there were grooming rituals, and through commerce we would clasp hands, and cheek kissing was common.”

“I see.”

“Would you be averse to contact with me?” she asked.

“I would not be averse…” I considered how best to phrase this. “but you have to understand that your new body is cold, and that could cause me pain.”

“And you me,” she said. “Contact with the living can be damaging. I have accepted this.”

I grinned, trying to stave off the pity and sorrow I felt. “Well then come here and give me some cheek kisses.”

“Oh!”

She didn’t move when I kissed her one cheek, followed by the other. I didn’t mind the burst of cold. Her startled look was enough to set me off laughing.

“It’s all right. Perhaps hand holding—“

She shot forward and pressed her lips to mine. Now when she started moving, and darted her tongue forward to lick at my top lip, I got a notification. Ignoring it, I reached out to touch her shoulders, then rubbed up and down her arms once.

She broke off. “Oh! Your lips have gone blue… I’m sorry, Fletcher. That was unwise.”

I reassured her it was fine, that I hadn’t taken any damage at all. In fact, the notification told me what I imagined I would see: my Adaptability Quality had helped prevent the damage, but it would have to be higher before my body was compatible with Chrysta’s.

No time like the present. I pumped a skill point into Adaptability.

“Here,” I said, and took her hand in mine. She had Nakamamon hands, which meant she had three thick fingers and one thick thumb, and it was cold, but the Pleasure Seeker Quality helped blunt the pain by turning me partly into an ice ghost.

“How is this possible?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You haven’t suffered.” More importantly, that astonished voice said, she hadn’t suffered either.

“It’s not a big deal,” I told her. “No need to look too deeply into it.” My instinct was to tell her it was a Healer thing, but it wasn’t a Healer thing, it was a Pleasure Seeker thing, and half-truths had gotten me in trouble already.

She responded by wrapping her whole upper body around my arm, and snuggling her frigid cheek against my shoulder. She followed that by wrapping several more arms around my torso.

We walked on with her cooing in delight, and me feeling like the big man on campus.

Pausing once we had reached the end of the swoosh, we looked out over the town and surrounding landscape. No one was around us now, with this part of the town narrow, sparsely populated, and the living inhabitants in a sort of coma state.

“I would like to… kiss you again,” Chrysta said, floating out over the place where the sidewalk ended, or rather, where the city curled down against the pull of gravity to the underside of the swoosh. She promptly vanished out of sight with a surprised yelp I wouldn’t have thought possible for a ghost.

When she reappeared, it was like she was taking the escalator from the underworld, up and around nearly three hundred and sixty degrees.

“That was… embarrassing,” she said.

“No worries in the slightest,” I said, laughing.

“To be fair to me, I have dealt with this gravitational oddity only rarely.”

“Are you blushing?”

“I am not!”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Eventually Chrysta found the humor in it as well and laughed along with me.

“Fletcher, your ability to touch me… is phenomenal,” she said, and wrapped herself around me in a big hug once more. Extra arms made sure it was a tight one.

“You’re pretty excellent yourself,” I said. “Never been hugged by so many arms at once.”

She was once again embarrassed only until I told her it wasn’t a bad thing, and that I liked it. Depending on how you viewed the situation—and I found it fortunate—the moment was not quite broken.

Chrysta held me at arms’ length… and was promptly hovering upside down on the other side of the lip of stone. She returned to rightside up land and dragged me backwards, away from the very edge, the two of us giggling like idiots.

“Have you done that on purpose, human?” she asked playfully.

“I promise I didn’t.”

Now she leaned in and kissed me. Had I been wearing glasses I would have instantly fogged them up. The kiss was far softer than I imagined, and grew softer still. She let out a soft moan, and once more her tongue appeared, licking its icy way along my upper lip and then into my mouth. She was clutching at me, walking me backwards, backing me into a house wall, kissing me all the while.

She felt softer, and somehow softer still. I couldn’t understand this, until her tongue went through me. One second it was causing me shivers—the cold kind—and the next minute I felt that cold all the way through my whole tongue. Her fingers were inside my shoulders, massaging the muscles and pressing against the bones beneath. It was… odd, to say the least.

She was no longer kissing my lips, but my teeth, and then she wasn’t really even kissing me at all, because she was intangible and she was floating into my whole body. The coldness I’d felt before intensified, doubled, and there was no way to stop a full body shiver that started through me.

Finally, I started taking damage.

A jet of vapor shot out of my mouth. “C-Chrysta,” I said, trying and failing to stop my teeth from chattering.

Still she was kissing me: my sinuses, down into my throat, and probably my brain. I couldn’t say, because things were really weird after that. There was a ghost occupying the same space as my brain. It was literally freezing my insides.

My special ability Healer’s Resistance appeared with glacial sluggishness. It was especially strange to have the backs of my eyeballs feel like they were freezing, and have the window pop up appear like it struggled through a vat of syrup. And the words also came into being with exaggerated sluggishness. Did I wish… to spend… a… Durability… Token? Yes… or no?

I could hardly process thought by this point, but I pressed Yes somehow, and most of the current situation snapped back into place. 75% of the damage was shunted off by the magic of the Token. The onset of the damage may have already started, but the speed of renewing the damage dropped dramatically.

I just wished I’d had another Durability Token to set up a permanent cold resistance. As it was, being able to think my own thoughts was nice.

“Chrysta, wait…” I made my mouth say, and the words came out, cracked midair, and literally fell to the ground as bits of frost.

She reappeared, backing out of where she had fused with me. For just a moment, there was a hollowness to her eyes I’d never seen before. It was like opening your eyes on a moonless, cloud-filled night in the woods. Nothing. Absolute void. And it felt like it could swallow up all of me without any trouble, and keep right on going.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She blinked and the icy blue of her eyes returned. “Oh! Oh, Fletcher, I’ve damaged you. I’m… sorry.” She was backing away, hands up, like I had a gun trained on her.

“No, I’m sorry. I should’ve been clearer.” I caught her by the wrists and gently guided her hands back onto my shoulders.

“What do you mean?”

“I had a run in with a god… and I gained a second class.”

This is Christopher telling her… everything.