Divinity Rescue Corps
97- Letting The Girls Do The Talking

The West Coast of the United States has its own set of climates, like an ornery relative who shows up now and again from far off. We’re not entirely sure how we’re related to this ornery relative, not sure why their life and political ideas are so different from the remainder of the family, but they’ve been part of the family for years and they keep showing up with presents, strange stories, and they smell all wrong.

So even despite the season, we had amazing clouds rippling like bubble wrap in the sky. They went scudding along at a high speed, giving us glimpses of the sun, and even more views of fantastic sun rays shooting down distantly at all angles. The only constant was the wind blowing in from offshore.

It was heavenly.

My mom was not content to just enjoy the drive; she wanted to know literally everything that had happened while I was in the other world for six months. She seemed to drink it up, insatiable for more information on what we were attempting to take her into.

Luckily I had five lovely ladies who appeared to be up to the task.

And so I was able to luxuriate. Put my head down in Tara’s lap in the back bench, enjoy the softness of her thighs, and get a bit of shuteye while they talked and talked.

“Hang on, so how did you go about choosing all your team members?” she asked.

“I forced him to take my girlfriend Isabelle,” Ivy called from in the back. Izzy was leaning against Ivy’s shoulder, and every time Ivy announced her as her girlfriend, Izzy got extra touchy feely. They started covertly kissing in the back back seat.

“I forced him to take the newest recruit, Alan,” Regina said. “He chose to be a Wizard but he had a stutter, so I was worried that the other Wizards were going to dunk on him and make him miserable.”

“I forced him to take me,” Tara added. “I was bored of doing make work in the castle headquarters building—”

“The anti-gravity one?” my mother asked.

“Correct.”

Regina took up the thread here, swiveling and smiling down at me from the middle bench. “The other Wizards are all sick and tired of playing admin secretary roles and doing boring experiments there. The Guards are all sick and tired of playing fetch to grab people when they’re needed, and sick of standing watch on the walls, when nothing will ever come and attack.”

“And the Rangers are all sick and tired of running around outside the castle,” Tara said.

“So you have your Guardians, a cute girl girl couple, the tall muscly orange one with all the hair, and the slim icy ghosty one,” my mother said.

“Correct.”

“Your tall bored Ranger, and your shorter freckly redhead who guides people from the portal to the castle.”

“Correct.”

“Stuttering Wizard, not sure how that works, and then there’s a rat one and a rock one.”

“Rogue and Sorcerer, right,” Regina confirmed.

“How did you choose them?”

I got over to the right where the faster cars could pass us, while I tried to concentrate on the road, take in the sight of the West Coast ocean passing at sixty miles an hour, and keep the conversation going.

“They weren’t buddies with the guy who freaked out when he first saw me.”

Blake. The guy who turned into a Nakamamon. The first ever fighting aspect Nakamamon.

That topic had been mostly dealt with, in the play-by-play, but it was the aftermath that my mother wanted to handle. However, since I wasn’t really responding—Tara was running one hand up and down my torso and beginning to get me aroused—she began asking after their families and situations here on earth, and what got them hired by the Agency.

Tara and Cinzy mostly took over, after the girls sketched out their own situations. We sailed right through Isabelle’s ‘I also had a bad boyfriend experience’ and through Regina’s ‘I had a really bad experience that was illegal for the guys’ until we reached Ivy’s ‘I got doxxed and assaulted at school’ story.

Tara had been from a rather large family who all seemed to want to make the worst choices, while Cinzy had been from a small but very wealthy family. While Tara excelled but had to continually bail her family out of problems, Cinzy excelled under the oppressive thumbs of her overbearing parents. She also yearned to be free of that thumb, and that meant acting out, getting into bad situations, doing some drugs… and none of that existed over in the other world, so that was just amazing. Plus, Fletcher hadn’t known any of that, he’d only seen the capabilities of the girls through their interviews and their special abilities.

It took us a good few hours to get all the way up through California, switching drivers, taking breaks, grabbing meals and fuel and snacks and stretching out. We even took a beach break, with me and the girls enjoying some of the gorgeous waters, while Tara stayed with my mom. It was clear that Tara wasn’t even through all of her insane, gigantic family stories, but she had moved on into aunt and uncle territory, then into cousin territory. My mom eventually claimed exhaustion, and I sympathized. I also laughed uproariously at the notion my mother couldn’t take anymore Tara.

There are over eleven hundred miles of coastal highway from the very south of California to the border with Oregon, and thankfully we weren’t starting out in San Diego. We only got onto Highway 1 after lunch anyway. From my place to Oregon was well over miles, and we weren’t exactly moving at a blistering speed. Morning turned to noon, noon bled into the starker evening colors, and before you knew it, dusk was closing in.

“Few more miles,” I said. We had gotten on the 5 to skirt around San Jose and San Francisco, enjoying the palms, the scrubby hills, and once we got back on Highway 1, the Shoreline Highway, it was the coastline once more. “We’ll stop just outside of San Rafael and find a restaurant.”

“And a motel,” my mother said.

When someone with cancer says something in that definitive tone, you don’t question it. They know their limits and you follow along. Honestly, I was astonished we’d made it north of San Francisco as it was.

Since I was driving, it was back to me answering the questions. The girls had been terrible at keeping the plot moving forward, which you can’t really fault them for doing. This was their vacation, after all. Only I was engaged in work during my rest and relaxation weeks. They had essentially become bums who could not be bothered to be productive, even with regard to thinking.

I was having trouble turning Productive Fletcher off.

“We were talking about how Blake transformed into a Nakamamon?” My mom asked.

“Yeah that was weird,” Isabelle said from… Ivy’s lap? I couldn’t see her.

“Be sure to take your anti-magic vitamins, people,” Ivy added. “Or else you could end up being an eight foot mountain of muscle who only wants to fight everything it sees, and you can no  longer be classed as human.”

When we pulled off the highway for dinner later, Ivy got out a very good watercolor sketch of the thing Blake had transformed into, a Brawldar.

“Don’t spoil her appetite!” Isabelle admonished. We had chosen a nice Mexican place. “That thing gives me the creeps.

“Thank you for looking out for me, dear,” my mother said. She smiled warmly at Isabelle, seemed to melt, before taking a closer look at Ivy’s painting. “Well that is something. And this person used to be a human, huh?”

“Not a very good human,” Cinzy muttered.

“She’s upset because Blake almost killed her brother.”

“We skipped past Slinktrickle entirely,” Regina said.

“You guys made me skip past Slinktrickle almost entirely,” Tara muttered with mock affront. “And then you almost made me turn around and do it all again once my backpack vanished and I lost all my clothes.

“Yeah you missed most of the naked shenanigans from the God of Apparel,” Cinzy said.

Tara again muttered something that sounded surly but didn’t have any venom.

“Who we resurrected,” Ivy added.

That had been weird, first finding and collecting together the god’s clothing, then giving up offerings to the divine being and bringing it back to life.

“Do you remember Drat’s face when we told him he had to sacrifice some clothing to it?” Regina asked, then snorted.

I grinned. Drat had hated to be forced into anything, and more than that, he hated being forced to pray to a god. And who knows, maybe he hated the idea of praying to a dead god. Regardless, after he’d done it, the dead god’s body had incorporated and we’d made a major discovery: if a god was suffering from a Spiritual illness as well as another illness, you could believe them back to life.

Insanity, right?

So we went through the very difficult process of bringing the god back to full health, meaning we needed a ton of Tokens on my part to develop the cure, and more Tokens to administer it. Since it took so long—

“You forgot a part,” Cinzy droned, the exuberance suddenly drained out of her.

By now we had ordered our tacos, burritos, chimichangas, and fajitas, and were chowing down.

My mother paused, food in her mouth. “Oh, Christopher told me all about it. You got a tip from the Drat fellow about Blake’s operation, which included your brother, who’s also named Christopher! It’s so lovely that you would stick up for your brother like that.”

“The Christophers must be protected at all costs,” I muttered.

Cinzy stared at her, then glanced to me. I gave her a micro-shrug, like ‘what? How am I supposed to tell her that I’ve had sex with every human female on my expedition?’ And furthermore, how was I supposed to tell my own mother that Cinzy had left in a snit when she’d discovered me having sex with the two bisexuals in a committed relationship… at the same time? I had skipped over a lot with my mom. Of course, she wasn’t stupid, so she assumed whatever she assumed, and neither of us had to explicitly speak about it.

No. Thank you.

She had already, bless her heart, not told Cinzy or the other girls that I’d called Cinzy the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in real life. My mother was the soul of wit and discretion.

“Yes of course,” Cinzy continued smoothly. I heard from Drat that my brother was being held captive outside of Glumpdumpkin and I demanded Fletcher help me take care of it immediately. Which was silly, of course… he couldn’t just drop this god situation and run off that way.”

“Thankfully we found our way there after Fletcher administered the cure to the God of Apparel.”

“Guys,” Tara said, leaning forward. “Are we… gonna get in trouble talking like this?”

“What, are you assuming the Agency has our phones tapped and are listening to everything we say?” Ivy asked.

“Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhh,” Tara said. “Aren’t you?”

“Me too,” Ivy said, “which is why I’m not traveling with a phone.”

“Oh,” Cinzy said. “I’ll just turn mine off then.”

Everyone stared at her while she pulled her phone out and slowly switched it off.

“I volunteer Cinzy to charm the guards out of killing us when she shows up,” Ivy said, deadpan.

“Let’s get back on the road and hit a motel soon,” I said. “For now, we’re getting caught up, right? What did we miss?”

It turned out we had missed the travel to Glumpdumpkin, discovering the townsfolk under the influence of an even stronger god than before, and beginning to investigate the town itself.

Most everyone in the town had fallen unconscious, though there were notable exceptions: some people reacted the opposite way, by going into manic work frenzies. A few of them staggered around as if drunk, and forgot how to live. The last group were the psychic aspect Nakamamon, who were totally unaffected by the god’s presence. Which meant the god’s affliction was a mental one.

“The effect created by the god was strong enough to blanket all of Glumpdumpkin, and also affect the local gods.”

“Oh!” Tara said, and began gushing. “There was furry little blue thing, the God of Lost Jewelry, and it was just the most adorable thing. Every once in a while it would vomit up an earring, but since it was all confused, it forgot it was a god, so we could play with it. Eeeeee!”

Regina joined her with the “Squeeeeeeeeee!”

Like the two of them were fourteen year old Swifties instead of in their early twenties.

“And we healed up several of those before the Blake situation exploded.”

“Cinzia helped them capture you, and Drat was also there,” my mother said, nodding. Again, Cinzy ducked her head, embarrassed. “Oh don’t do that, honey, you were concerned about your brother. And as I understand, Drat let you in on the plan to help heal up and free the Wizards under that awful Blake.”

“That was the plan,” I said, “except it didn’t include other Wizards.”

“Until Fletcher went off script,” Cinzy explained. “He summoned a stampede of Nakamamon.”

Not sure how he did that, her tone said. Which I did not need. If my mother only knew that I got abilities from having sex, she would start putting a lot more pieces together. Right now she just thought we all slowly developed powers by spending time around one another, like the magical bonding I’d done with Vellenia, the native of Slinktrickle.

“Blake lost his mind so much that he went buck wild,” Ivy said. “Tried to kill your son here.”

My mother turned a startled look my way, as if to say that I had downplayed the danger Blake represented, and by the way if I ever did that again, I would be so grounded.

I may have exaggerated the intensity of the look slightly.

“So Blake becomes a Nakamamon, the first ever fighting aspect, and since he’s not a psychic aspect, he falls right to sleep.”

“That’s where I left off with my family,” I said.

“Awesome, that means we get to tell the next part,” Regina announced.

“First we’re going to get some sleep,” I said. My mother had cancer, and until I could get her into the other world, there was basically nothing I could do to help rid her of that cancer. She looked like she’d been in an airplane for fourteen hours nonstop, rather than in a car for no more than two hours at a time.

I ended up paying for a motel room for my mom, and another for myself. After wishing my mom a good night, and coordinating with the girls on when we’d get moving in the morning, I settled in for a good night’s sleep.

This is Christopher one hundred percent kidding.