Divinity Rescue Corps
55- Token Gains

Regina turned a look on me I’d never seen before: dread. The certainty that things were going to be bad.

“That’s not good,” she mumbled.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Dee ran into trouble of some kind.”

Her eyes suddenly flared with bright green energy, and when that magic faded, they were the brownish gray of tree bark.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, and her glittering naked butt vanished into the brush.

There was no way she had gotten in there without a special ability of some kind. I’d just selected Beastmaster, but what I needed right here was more like Pathfinder. I momentarily cursed myself for picking the wrong ability… but of course I couldn’t have known. I just had to believe Regina knew what she was doing and could handle this without me trying to barge through thick scrubby bushes.

Two minutes of fretting and waiting passed before I heard a panicked shriek.

For the first time since this vanishing clothes situation started, I really, seriously regretted the nudity. Every other time I’d been able to enjoy being in the buff, watching boobs and butts jiggle and wobble. Right now, what I needed were my tools and my ingredients. It was so awful not having them, and knowing I was going to be needed in a big way, very soon.

Worse, I didn’t have any Tokens left.

Regina came back after five of the longest minutes of my lifetime. Every second was filled with worries and fears. Dee had fallen into a crazy deep hole and there was no way to get him out. Dee had spooked some creature like the one that had nearly gotten me once upon a time, and it chopped him a good one. Dee had just had a run-in with a god we didn’t know was there.

I didn’t expect to see the fox at all, but he came out of the brush in Regina’s arms. Several flower petals dropped off of his tails and ears as he came through the clinging brush. His body was limp, but the rapid rise and fall of his little chest confirmed that he was breathing, and therefore still alive.

Instant thankfulness and relief washed over me.

Regina had a look on her face I never want to see again: devoid of hope, but also filled with grief. She had already counted him out of the fight permanently.

In Tweedle Dee’s jaws was what appeared to be some fabric. And it was glowing.

It was time to put on the reassurance.

“Heyyyyyyyy!” I said in my soothing, cheerful voice my dad used to use whenever I was sort of hurt, but not too hurt. “Hey there you two.”

“Fletcher you have to help him,” she sobbed.

“Of course, of course. Put him down,” I told her with extra extra gentleness. She knelt and did as she was told. “Now, we need a stick to help keep that thing from touching us… and it has to get out of his mouth, okay? Before I do anything, that’s gotta go.”

She obeyed robotically, with shock setting in quickly. Seconds later, she handed me a stick, and carefully pried open Dee’s jaws without touching the glowing piece of fabric. I scooped it out of there with the stick with extreme care.

It was a sort of old school t-shirt: long and laced up with a leather strip that was tied at the neck. What would you call that… a tunic?

The very first thing that needed doing was Healer’s Resistance.

Healer’s Resistance II

(Special Ability, Uncommon, active)

I- You may spend a Durability Token to resist damage from any source. Long term effects are reduced by 75%. Onsets of all diseases, venoms, poisons, or other afflictions are tripled, as are intervals. Lasts one day.

You may spend an Ingenuity Token to gift this ability to a willing target for one day.

II- You may spend a Durability Token after taking damage from any source. You gain a percentage of Resistance to that source permanently.

I still had a single of Ingenuity and Durability after handling the egg situation, and I spent them immediately. This reduced the damage, reduced the duration, and lengthened the time between taking more damage.

Now more than ever, I needed to replenish Tokens. Before tomorrow.

“I got you,” I told her, and reached for Healer’s Breath. Sure I was glad to have it, but you also hated to need to use something like this every time. I have to believe police officers would be much happier to not have to do anything… no crime would just be better.

But I bent down and breathed into Dee’s little orange face all the same, hoping that my lack of Affinity Tokens wouldn’t mean his death.

Healer’s Breath

(Special Ability, Uncommon, active)

Make a Treatment check with Affinity (or spend an Affinity Token) and breathe on the target in order to administer a temporary treatment for any damaging ailment. The target is healed by 3-18 hit points over 6 seconds. Symptoms of the ailment are reduced in intensity by 50% for a day. May only be used on a target once per day.

The Affinity Check came with Treatment (potions) somehow, and out of the 8 ranks, I ended up scoring an incredible 4 successes. I breathed out another deep breath, this one full of amazement and a soul-shattering relief. Dee was going to live.

Color immediately flooded back into Dee’s fur, and he took a deep, shuddering breath. Regina’s cry was so heart wrenching that I choked up as well.

“He’s going to need that every day,” I said. “Until this thing is cured… I assume it’s divine.”

I peered down at the tunic—or the really long shirt—and tried to will the Identify skill to work. That, plus Affinity, gave me 2 successes. Not enough to do the trick, apparently. The check said it was a Difficult check, meaning 3 or 4 successes necessary to get the ID on it.

It took some time for Dee to show signs of cognizance, but eventually he got up and shakily to his feet and went immediately into Regina’s arms. There, he licked Regina’s hands, then curled up and went immediately to sleep.

***

Without Tokens, I wouldn’t be Identifying, Diagnosing, Treating, Developing cures, or eventually Administering them. None of that was going to happen until I got some Tokens back.

With that in mind, I spent the rest of the day asking around for how to do it. Alan said it was a meditation situation, and Trent agreed. Both of them had done it under the guidance of their trainer back at HQ. They offered to sit down with me and get some meditation on, and I accepted. This led to Larelle and Chrysta also finding us, asking what we were up to, and joining us.

You must clear your mind and open your soul, Larelle told me. It is vital that no distractions disrupt you. Your breathing is everything. Every inhale, and every exhale.

And hey, I tried. I closed my eyes and opened up what I thought was my soul. I had done a lot of magic already in this place. I’d used a lot of abilities, I’d been able to begin sensing magic through smell, and I’d even begun to see it in certain instances. There was a sort of third eye in the center of my forehead that reacted every time I went to use abilities.

There was another… I don’t know, a core of power down in my abdomen. Sometimes it felt like it was in my freaking balls. Like a power generator buried in my body, the power went up throughout my body and into my brain, then out through the middle of my forehead. Usually.

So I will say this: I tried my best. I visualized the battery of power in my stomach, visualized the potential there all flowing up and into my third eye. I steadied my breathing. It was so steady. I could’ve fallen asleep if it hadn’t been for the need for Tokens.

This… did not work.

Hours later I didn’t have a single Token back. My hips and legs were numb and sore from sitting criss-cross applesauce, along with my lower back. And I was frustrated.

See, there were problems. Regina was insensate. There was a glowing holy item we’d very carefully brought back across the marsh and to the village, and the villagers did not like this thing to be among them, so we relocated it to Trent’s stone redoubt. Tara had been gone for days, and there was no word on when she would be getting back.

If I’d made a different choice of Wizards, our Wizard could have opened a chat line directly with the HQ, but I’d been so drunk on sex and enjoying the time with Regina and Tara, that I simply accepted their recommendation without really thinking things through. Never mind that I wasn’t aware of the communication problem, I was responsible for these people and it was my ignorance that was causing problems. So I was back to my old earth way of blaming myself, taking on all the responsibility, whether it fell to me to take or not, and that was clogging up the Token replenishing pipe.

I had to do better.

Unfortunately, this anxiety crushed any chance of getting Tokens back through clearing my mind, because my mind was far from clear, and I wasn’t any good at this.

I went to bed safe that night, but generally disgruntled.

***

Vellenia approached me the next day, after we had had our meeting about next steps. I’d taken a break to wander around the village and get my thoughts together, and the Marshin fell in step with me.

Outside, the air was getting even cooler, and I wanted to be able to wear, um, anything.

There was a tunic infused with godly power, but putting it on would likely kill me within hours, if not minutes.

I hadn’t noticed she was beside me initially. The marsh spread out before me, on the edge of town here. Here and there, her fellow Marshins paddled those shallow boats. Some of them were meeting with their next version beings, the Marshmellows. The mermaid-looking Nakamamon hefted themselves onto the sides of the boats or simply held themselves up on their enormous eel tails.

I was so caught up in my own thoughts and the surroundings that I nearly jumped on spotting her.

“Savior of the eggs,” she said, giving me the title the rest of the village had. They’d been so excited they’d jumped in bed with me, one after another.

“With luck, this fall will turn immediately back to spring,” she said.

“That happens?”

She nodded and took my hand, lacing her smooth and cool fingers into mine. “Sometimes the cool weather lasts only a few days… other times a few weeks.”

I peered around to see whether or not any of the other Corps members had seen us. Well, basically everyone knew I’d had sex with Vellenia already, so it wasn’t a huge deal. I could practically see Regina salivating in my mind… and since we’d been in this town for several days, I had an excellent mental picture of her nude, so I knew what it looked like when she salivated. And got really aroused.

“That is wild. I sure hope so, because we don’t know where this nudity god might be. I would love to tell you we know where he is, but there’s a story about an emperor with no clothes. Everybody just ignores the fact that he’s nude because he’s powerful. Me? I know I haven’t got any clothes on. No lie here.”

She threw back her head and laughed.

“Your levity is most wonderful,” she said.

I was so glad she hadn’t been exposed to much earth levity, because I was far from an expert.

“Fletcher, could you accompany me out to that stand of brush?”

She pointed out away from the platform we were on. Five minutes later we were on one of their wide-bottom boats, with Vellenia using a pole to push us this way and that.

“I am aware that you have attuned enough to my world that you may bond a Nakamamon,” she said quietly.

I went still. “Oh? How… are you aware of that?”

“Your third eye and your core have opened to the magic of Dorfialtos.” As if that explained things. “As such, if you were to bond a Nakamamon, they would be required to accompany you on your adventures.”

***

“What’s a Dolph Realtors?” Sarah asked, then blinked at herself. “Wait, what?”

“He said Doric Freeloaders,” my mother said. “He said Doreen… feels… toes. What the heck? Why can’t I say Door Feelings Strohs?”

I chuckled, more pleased that my mother wasn’t laying around the house trapped by her own weakness, but rather vibrant with the need to know what else happened.

“For some reason we can’t say the name of the other world. I don’t truly understand it, honestly. The natives can say… that word. We can’t.”

My father just sat there with a smirk on his face and a knowing glint in his eye. “Go on, son. You were about to bond with a magical creature that was nude and female?”

I spluttered in embarrassment.

***

This was one of those times where I channeled my father. I needed to shut my yap and listen, so that was precisely what I did: let the old noodle work overtime processing while your ears pick up vital clues to help you figure out what the missing puzzle pieces. There is a great value in silence and listening, and not just because I had absolutely no idea what to say.

“I have longed to travel beyond the reaches of the marsh and my village,” Vellenia told me.

“I think,” I told her, “that you don’t need to bond a human in order to leave your village in search of the wider world.”

“I would like to accompany you, Fletcher,” she said, “and as your bonded Nakamamon, we can do much more than simply mate.”

“I have to confess,” I said, “I don’t know a whole lot about bonding, about how it’s done or the advantages of doing so.” Chrysta and Ivy hadn’t bonded Nakamamon yet, and Ivy mentioned she just wasn’t interested in having a pet following her around. Chrysta hasn’t talked about a lack of bonding because one, she hardly ever talked and was scary, and two, she was a Nakamamon herself. Larelle had her magmamander. I didn’t need to know how the rules might be different.

Once we reached the stand of shrubbery, the boat slowly ran aground and she hopped off before extending a hand out to me. I didn’t need it, and I was thrilled with that fact. My balance was better, my legs were hurting less, and I had stamina to go farther and do more than I ever did in my teens. It was like aging backwards.

“Marshins are fairy aspect and water aspect,” she said, and I took her hand. “You receive abilities and resistances based on those two aspects.”

The shrubbery was a good ten or twelve feet high, and some of them were vines tangled around one another, tipped with purple balloon flowers. Some of those were still big purple balls, while other had popped open into star-shaped blossoms. Other bushes sported clumps of berries of all sorts of colors. All of them were swirled with two colors: red and gold, white and sky blue, orange and silver.

“And,” she said quietly, “if you agree to the bonding, we will be able to mate much more frequently.”

She squeezed my hand and turned to face me with a winning smile. The large eyes, the strange hair and the no nose all served to make her simply adorable. The perky breasts didn’t do much to lower her cuteness factor, nor did the supple butt I kept watching wiggle this way and that as the humanoid creature walked.

She stopped. “What do you say?”

I blinked several times at her. “I say… okay! Let’s do it!”

She jumped up and down several times, making those perky breasts bounce. Finally she jumped onto me for a crushing hug, wrapping her legs around my waist and burying her face in my shoulder.

“Fletcher! Thank you so much! You won’t regret this, I promise you.”

This is Christopher doubting I would regret it either.

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