Divinity Rescue Corps
86- Temporary Physicality

So Drat couldn’t know how I’d gotten the Psyspeech ability. He would only know two things: one, I knew how to speak directly into his brain, and two, I just swore at him for the first time ever.

Drat got up, prompting Blake and another of the Guardians to follow after, asking what the hell he was up to.

“You don’t want the xps?” I heard Blake demand.

Drat touched his temple and scanned the place, looking everywhere but at me. He mumbled something, probably about a headache.

“I don’t care. We’re getting it, tonight.”

Another dry remark from Drat.

“I don’t care if they have floodlights and a security team with them, you’re a Rogue with a Rogue’s familiar. You go fucking invisible. You get his test tubes and his little flowers and bring it back here. Take who you need to carry whatever the Healer needs, they stay out of sight outside the camp, and get it done.”

“Yeah good luck with that!” I called.

It turned out they didn’t need luck.

That night I was given a tent. This was a bad sign. It meant that they’d lost one of their Wizards on whatever away mission they’d gotten up to that day. The other one had been close to death.

All the Wizards were in a state of disrepair. The Guardians were taking them out each day, and bringing them back wounded. It was shady as hell. What was out in the wilderness that was hurting these Wizards so much? There were far more Guardians than necessary to keep them safe.

Before I went to bed, I tried to find Cinzy and send her another Psyspeech communique, but she was already gone. She hadn’t spoken a single word to me since she’d lured me in here, and I was hoping that her guilt and shame over using her special ability on me were stronger than her anger with me over sleeping with people without her knowledge.

I slept that night on what might have been a dead man’s bed. That night, someone appeared in my bed sometime between sundown and sunup, and I have no idea when. If I was expecting a nice, comforting blowjob, I was sorely mistaken. I got kicked in the ribs again (the same spot, I you can believe it), and though I had only recovered like a single hit point, I gritted my teeth and tried not to cry out… and thanked my lucky stars. Spending my last Durability Token gave me another tiny bit of physical damage resistance.

Not sleeping well after that was understandable, but it sure did impede my abilities. If I’d known someone was going to come in and kick my ass in the night I would’ve just used Healer’s Endurance to stave off the effects of sleep.

The next morning a small group of Blake’s people escorted me to another part of the camp, where my lab equipment now sat. Drat stood there impassively, not making eye contact, while Timmy leered as if he’d put a bag of poop on an old man’s doorstep, and the old man was me. Boss came over and clapped a hand on my shoulder, which hurt, and I dutifully slapped a Durability Token on it to build up my physical damage resistance. This one had only done a single hit point of damage, which told me the damage resistance was already working.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I liked damage resistance, I just wished I didn’t need to get my butt kicked so often to build it up. I was just lucky Stalwart was generating a Durability Token each morning. Very lucky.

Two of the guards were busy building a rudimentary building. They’d already used their prodigious strength to ram four enormous logs into the ground, and had fashioned a frame by lashing more rough lumber onto those. The roof was coming along nicely, and I had no doubt they’d figure out walls by the end of the morning.

“There we go!” Blake said, spreading his freakishly huge arms wide. “No more whining about your herbs and spices.”

“I will need to go out hunting for my herbs and spices periodically,” I said, but Drat was there again, reminding him that if I just planted clippings and took care of them, they’d grow into an herb garden by magic.

“Oooohhhhh,” Blake said, grinning broadly. “Somebody’s not good at keeping secrets from his Rogue. Rookie blunder.”

And before I could attempt to get a temporary Durability Token using Fierce to taunt him, he shot a fist forward and blasted me right in the solar plexus. I lost half of my remaining hit points in that single strike, damage resistance or no. Several of the other Guardians let out amused calls of ‘oooohhhh’ or just cruel laughter. I sat there struggling to breathe, feeling for the first time like I was back in middle school.

The UI had informed me that the strike had dealt 46 physical damage, and my resistance had knocked out 8 of those, nearly 20% of the total. Not enough.

This repeated for several days: get fed almost nothing, Blake and some Guardians taking the Wizards out, the Wizards coming back injured or near death, and me expected to do something about it. Every day I watched, I waited, and I hoped the team would find me.

I knew they had been canvassing the town first, wondering if I’d gone into one of the buildings, lay down, and just gone comatose like most of the rest of the inhabitants. It would only be today that they’d have a search party going, with the theft of my lab materials.

My hope in my friends rescuing me was waning.

***

The world of Dorfilialtos still lit up with cleansing sunlight most mornings. The sky still glittered with a sheen of roiling magic that made the cobalt shimmer and twinkle, like you could still see the stars in the full light of day. The fresh scents of grass, dew, and impending rain were still a thousand times fresher and more invigorating than earth.

If only I didn’t have this annoying problem of being pressed into service to a gigantic lunatic.

I did learn an important lesson: meditation was good for recovering hit points as well as Tokens. I averaged about a single hit point a day normally, but that was sped up massively while in Meditation. My current skill level was 3, and I soon reached level 4. So I was getting 3 hp an hour, but that boosted to 4. My rate of Token recovery went from one every six hours, to one every four hours. Roughly. I didn’t have any way to tell the time other than the movement of the sun. And Token recovery was easy to do now between breakfast and lunch, and another one between lunch and dinner.

Still no luck with taunting or teasing my handlers into kicking the crap out of me. They left that job to their leader’s discretion.

The other thing I decided to do was communicate with Drat every day using Psyspeech. It was a slim chance, but if more orders caused him to lose more experience points, I wanted to stack as many orders as I could on top of him. Cinzy continued to be a no-show.

I had plenty of time to observe, so observe I did.

One, they had the Wizards cast some kind of spell I didn’t know each morning, and that was a huge swirling dome around the whole camp. My guess would be a concealment spell of some kind, because several times I saw Chrysta and a far-off Airaconda, but they never swooped down to investigate further.

Two, none of the Guardians had a Nakamamon bonded to them. Drat and

The Guardians resolved, once they lost another Wizard, to take me with them on their away missions. This happened on the first day of the second week.

“You’re coming with,” Boss said that morning. “Bring whatever stuff you need to make health potions.”

I was with three other Guardians I didn’t know, Boss, two Wizards, and for the first time, Cinzy. My first instinct was of course to use my Psyspeech to get into her mind and start to work my magic, but the last week had taught me to observe first, form a hypothesis next, and act on that hypothesis afterwards. Although exhaustion had a hold of me, I was carrying a whole backpack full of my herbs and such, and I was still down over sixty percent of my hit points, I made sure to stay sharp in the face of whatever new info I was about to find.

So I played the watch Cinzy game.

She stayed well clear of me. She did, however, sneak a lot of glances my way when she thought none of the Guardians were looking. The sour grapes face was still on, which made sense. We’d stayed a full week in a hidden camp in the middle of nowhere, some distance from Glumpdumpkin and any other civilized place, and that meant she hadn’t been able to utilize any of her Bard skills to any effect. Plus, I’d slapped her with a direct order she was currently disobeying, so she was being penalized xp.

I went into the team leader menu of the UI as we walked, since I couldn’t meditate and walk at the same time. The eight team members who I lost contact with were grayed out. Their status was currently unknown. Drat and Cinzy, however…

Cinzy was laboring under a direct order, and the menu said her xp gains were cut by 25% so long as she continued to ignore this order. She had also been ignoring this order for weeks, so while the UI didn’t explain the exact amount of the penalty’s increase, it did say that the longer this order went ignored, the steeper this penalty would become.

Drat was a different story. I hadn’t been wrong to assume that more orders would stack up, but not right either. He was currently -40% xp gains because of repeatedly ignoring direct orders given by his team leader. So while each order didn’t count for a massive increase in xp reduction, it did count for something. I’d take something over nothing.

Worse, the UI noted (with orange highlights) that Drat had acted in direct opposition to the team’s mandate, so unless I lifted these orders, his xp reduction would be doubled. Since the Divinity Rescue Corps couldn’t do anything for the moment, Drat was sitting at an 80% experience reduction.

“Serves you right,” I muttered.

Still, there was a lot I didn’t know about this situation, so I kept my eyes and ears open.

A forced march of a good few hours led us out of the forest cover, to where it opened out to reveal an enormous basin of water surrounded by sheer mountains. Gorgeous as it might be, the water still looked deep and cold, the mountains high and treacherous. Also one of them was in the process of moving. It wasn’t fast, but it was definitely sliding out from behind the nearer mountain.

“Holy,” I muttered.

“Shut it, peanut gallery,” Boss snapped. “Now, we’re on mission, and you’re on healing duty. When we bring these two back your way, you make sure they don’t bleed out.”

Um… what?

But instead of flapping my gums to get answers and beat up more, I watched. While watching meant not Meditating, this was the first time I’d been able to get a look at whatever operation this team was up to. Cinzy stuck around, along with one of the Guardians. Boss and the other two frog marched the Wizards down the slope toward the lake.

“What are the chances the Wizards are going to need healing?” I asked, watching them go.

“A hundred percent,” the last Guardian answered, chuckling darkly.

“Oh. In that case, Cinzy, I need to prep a fire and turn out some healing potions.”

The gorgeous Bard stared at me blankly, then slowly approached. In the meantime the Guardian chuckled about how I’d been holding back the whole time, and he knew I’d been faking it.

“Fairy Poppins is back at camp,” I breathed, when she had brought back some firewood.

Her breath caught.

“Yeah. She’s fine.” I glanced over at her. “How about you?”

“I’m fine,” she lied.

“You got my message on that first day,” I told her, “and you didn’t come to see me.”

She let out a shaky breath. “I thought I was going crazy.”

Tell me what’s been doing on… or better yet, come talk to me when we both have a moment. You clearly aren’t happy doing whatever it is they have you doing.

She nearly started again. “How—”

I pretended like nothing was going on, often switching to giving orders as a Healer so Blake’s goon wouldn’t get suspicious.

“I’ll explain as soon as you help get me out of this hellhole. I don’t need any more kicks to the ribs, thanks.”

I did actually, but just like she didn’t know about Psyspeech, she didn’t know about Stalwart or Fierce either. Stalwart providing me with a Durability Token every morning was a pretty good way to stack up the physical damage resistance using Healer’s Resistance… which might be good by the time I was 40. All that was contingent on Blake’s ability to one-shot me with his boulder fists.

“How do you expect me to get you out of here?” she hissed.

“You use your Bard abilities to scare them, persuade them, lull them to sleep, I don’t know. Throw your voice to create a distraction. You know your abilities much better than I do.”

There were a couple of my newer, unused abilities I hadn’t tried yet. One was the water breathing, from Vellenia. Assuming the water was safe, I could disappear under there and they’d consider me drowned. I could escape back on foot.

The second possibility was Dazzle. I looked over the description in the UI just to be sure.

Dazzle: By concentrating, you may spend 1 Affinity Token to hypnotize a target with 7 automatic successes. This is a contested Likability + Persuasion roll, and the target knows they have been hypnotized. While under the effect of hypnosis, the target will be much more truthful and compliant, though they may not be ordered to harm themselves or others.

It probably wouldn’t work on Cinzy, because she had a Likability of 12 when last I checked, and she definitely had a Persuasion skill, so if she didn’t have the skill check of 7 successes, she could spend the Tokens to break free.

But she wasn’t the only one in close proximity…

I’d need time to come up with my plan, and a few more hit points. I was still around a third of my total, and I wasn’t getting anywhere towards my max by jabbering with Cinzy.

The best option would be Boss, who could command the others… that he would escort me out on a special mission. No, that was a terrible idea.

Eventually I shelved the plan and got down to meditating. I suggested to Cinzy that she do the same. Though she looked at me funny, she settled in next to me, cross-legged, and zoned out the same way.

This is Christopher handling things by himself.