Divinity Rescue Corps
100- On And Off Mission

Although we had all been through a lot the night before, and I’d ended up boning with Tara and Regina after Cinzy, and then spent the night with Cinzy after having some unbelievable shower sexy time, the mood wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be.

Oh, we were freshly rested. No problem there. Energy wasn’t an issue. In fact, everybody seemed to have been topped up in terms of their physical needs.

So, the night before had felt frantic and desperate, like we’d spent too long apart and were ravenous to get a taste of one another. Although the Cinzy situation had calmed way the hell down, and that was a good thing, the rest of the girls were on edge now for a whole host of new reasons.

Isabelle was mortified that the others had seen her. Ivy had a sore ass, literally, and kept shooting distrustful glances Regina and Tara’s way. Probably only Regina, on account of Regina touching her girl and kind of kissing her, but I wasn’t an expert on the many feelings ladies had going on. I also caught Regina sneaking glances at the pair of girlfriends when they weren’t looking. What that meant I couldn’t fathom and didn’t want to. We had a serious task ahead of us, and it would require group cohesion. I wasn’t about to accept the failure of my mission based on hurt fee-fees.

“We need to go over a few things,” I told my mother, grabbing up my toast from the continental breakfast buffet.

“I know we do,” my mother said, scooping basically all the fruit cocktail into her bowl. “Like what happened in the aftermath of five of Blake’s people getting the worst kind of punishment you can get. The end of the Glumpdumpkin saga, and why it took another two months for you to finish it. And then the HQ reaction to finding out they’d lost five people… oh and also the HQ reaction to Blake turning into a magical creature, and a fightey one instead of any of the old kinds. Ohhh I wish he’d been a Brawlerina. A fighting and fairy kind would have been so cute.”

I frowned, trying to square the idea of Blake being both cute and ferocious. Also trying to square the idea of my mother making up much better names for things than I could. Brawlerina was excellent.

Cinzy leaned in, in the middle of waiting for her bagel to toast. “Headquarters did not like, at all, the situation with Blake’s team.”

***

“We do not like—”

“At all.”

“—the situation with Blake’s team,” the first voice finished.

In front of us, two heads floated in a circle of magical energy. One of these was Allie, the woman who had been in charge of my orientation session. Although she hadn’t done a ton for me, the stern woman had left an impression. Brusque, no-nonsense, and bereft of humor, Allie was imposing and felt like she would be a good head of House Stickinthemud, at Frogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The other was Rus, who seemed to be the opposite of Allie. He was goofy, affable, and rode around on a flying manta ray when he got the opportunity. He made sure he got the opportunity often.

Which was how it surprised me to hear them both so violently against the Blake situation.

Their two heads were presently in a sort of holographic projection created by Alan, who had reached level 15 in his class while I’d been Blake’s hostage. The old spell that allowed him swift communication over long distances had been in written form only before, basically pulling open a tiny portal and sliding a clay tablet through with news, requisition requests, and orders. He couldn’t open the portal for very long, so a single clay tablet popped through each day, and sometimes when they were busy at HQ, none at all. They had a window of about five seconds to locate his portal, get the response they had readied, and throw it through.

At least one of the clay letters had barreled through the portal and clocked Alan directly in the face. More than one of the clay order letters had been flung through and ended up broken.

And last, if he hadn’t been careful about the amount of spells he’d cast that day, such as in the case of emergency, there was no opening the portal on this side. All in all the first few months on assignment were kind of wonderful, being free of the stifling oversight that a lot of other teams had to endure.

We should have returned after Glumpdumpkin, a job that was supposed to take around two months if we had done our jobs well. We were halfway through month four now, and Glumpdumpkin still hadn’t been taken care of.

All that was to say, now that he had this far-speech spell going, we were delighted with the admin sticking their noses directly in our business.

Delighted.

“You should have reported back in at headquarters after the situation in Slinktrickle,” Allie said.

“I think we can gloss over that. The natives and the security chief have both confirmed your conduct in Slinktrickle was exemplary,” Rus said.

“I’m less concerned that they did well, and more concerned that a great deal of time was spent out there. We have two months on and two weeks off for a reason.” Rus seemed to be staring a message directly at her, and she sighed before going on. “However, I am pleased that you handled the situation without major injuries or fatalities.”

“Well done, in other words,” Rus said with a toothy grin.

“We would have probably ended up with Blake’s team in a much worse situation if we hadn’t headed out this way,” I protested.

“Noted,” Rus said. 

“We are quite concerned by the reports you have regarding Blake’s team—“

Rus took over here. “We are delighted to be back in contact with the expedition that included Blake. That team had officially gone rogue as of a month ago.”

I cast a dead-eyed glance at Cinzy, who nodded in resigned and grim agreement. We were really lucky to have been drawn into that fustercluck, so more people didn’t die. 

“Ordinarily I would be delighted to learn about the existence of a new aspect of Nakamamon,” Rus charged on. “Fighting is not one that I want to have on this planet, ever. This needs to be contained.”

Alan, standing next to Cinzy and I and straining, gave off a groan. “Hurry,” he grunted.

“We will be sending a team,” Allie said. “You are to collect casualties and the remaining members of Blake’s Guardians for detention or burial and take no further action until we arrive. You will be put under the authority of the expedition leader.”

“I’m afraid that definitely won’t work,” I said. No way was I going to be hunting down anyone who’d run away in the stampede.

“Excuse me?”

Allie didn’t appear happy, but I thought I could hear Rus’s snorted laughter. The connection wasn’t clear.

“Two things: one, most of Blake’s Guardians came to me begging with their hands out for the anti-magic serum so they wouldn’t end up transforming into Nakamamon. You only have Archie to worry about. Two, this situation with Glumpdumpkin is bigger than Slinktrickle, ma’am, sir, and we’re going to do what we set out to do, which is resolve it.”

Alan groaned again.

“Connection is failing,” I told them.

“Expedition leader Fletcher, you are hereby ordered—”

Sadly I wasn’t able to hear those orders, because I elbowed Alan in the arm and caused him to lose his concentration. The spell dissipated in the blink of an eye, with the blue heads winking out.

The orders themselves did end up coming in on my system UI, just later. I could issue orders to the expedition members, and those orders came up in the little menu. The menu I had as part of the Agency literally read:

Divinity Rescue Corps

Medical Expedition

Your mission is to boldly go out into the world in search of the sick and afflicted, and heal those who you come into contact with.

Prime Directives of course still apply:

1- If at all possible, strive to do no harm

2- Represent humans in a manner that instills confidence, faith, and goodwill in the natives of these lands

3- Advance the knowledge base of the Agency

4- Progress in levels in order to better fulfill mission objective(s)

One meeting later, I laid out the situation before us: the admin was going to charge in here and try to take over our operation. They wanted us to collect up any dead bodies for transport back to earth and wait. They wanted us to hunt down Archie, Blake’s right hand man, so he didn’t turn into a Nakamamon like Blake. All of my team members looked about as you would expect, upon hearing this news. They looked like they’d rather strap toasters to their bodies and jump into a gorge filled with ferrosaurs than follow these crap orders.

“This whole town needs to get back on its feet,” I said. “Everybody is keen on this mission even if it means going off book?”

“We’re technically staying on book,” Trent said. “Just much later and longer than anticipated.”

That was the spirit. 

This we agreed to do. The first job was to waylay all the Nakamamon who seemed drawn to the town, and were just falling into comas or acting like morons once they were inside the town limits. The second job was to relieve the town of any affected gods found inside, and heal them up so they could continue on their way doing whatever it was gods did. A byproduct of this second step was getting me levels in my Healer class, so I could attack the main threat. The third step was to figure out which god was affected here, and get the healing process underway.

“It shall be called Operation Glumpty Dumpty,” I announced thrusting a finger into the air. “And we shall put Glumpty Dumpty back together again.”

Great cheering went up, along with some laughter. 

Step one would be handled by Ivy, Isabelle, and Chrysta. All three Guardians kept getting xp for meeting people at the town’s edge and turning them away. In essence, they were guarding these natives from harming themselves. Whatever magnetic force kept drawing them in was still working, so we needed to help handle that.

Sure people didn’t like it, but it was easy to point into the town and show them the dozens of Nakamamon lying comatose there. Trent was going to be on step one as well, to organize housing for these folks. He could only really bring some simple houses into being without exhausting his mana reserves, but it beat having a tent city in our midst. He worked on aqueducts to bring the river in and worked with Alan to purify the water going out through the simple street gutters.

Steps two and three meant heading into town itself. Fortunately for me, this meant utilizing my Divine Resistance skill, along with the already-immune Larelle, and whoever I loaned my Prismatic Apparel. 

Prismatic Apparel

Item, Wondrous, Legendary

This set of clothing is able to be shaped in any way the wearer wishes. Merely turn the articles inside out to alter their form. The color of the new form will be randomized.

This item has the following properties: godsbane, unbreakable, soulbound, returning.

Godsbane: While wearing this clothing you are assumed to have +5 Divine Resistance.

Unbreakable: This item never takes damage and can never be destroyed except by divine power.

Soulbound: this item belongs solely to you. You may gift this item to another, but the item may never be taken from you.

Returning: this item returns to your possession at a thought.

I had used it just the other night, since the item returned to my possession with a thought, to strip Cinzy naked and give her the relentless, dominating sex she so often craved.

Now I would grant it to one of the others who was best suited to help identify the god in question. I wanted to say one of the Rangers would be best suited to the job, but I wondered if perhaps that wasn’t my libido talking. If I had all the time in the world in a ghost town full of comatose individuals who couldn’t tell on me, we could have shameless public sex wherever we wanted… while Larelle was over there hauling folks out of the affected area. She was bringing the ones who were barely functional, because the fully comatose ones didn’t seem to need food or water.

Instead, either Alan or Trent would probably do. They had the highest Affinity scores and were best suited to finding magical nonsense. Drat was also a better choice than the girls, because Rogues worked better in cities than Rangers.

And that was why I handed the Prismatic Apparel over to Tara.

“You’ve got eagle eyes,” I said, convincing myself. “Let’s head in and see if we can find us some traces of a sick god.”

Drat was staring at me with an expression of full knowledge on his face. He had told me he would be better at finding the answers we needed in this town, and I told him that, if he wanted, he could describe to me his special ability set and I’d be the judge of that.

As always, Drat despised giving away his secrets. I couldn’t tell if it was a Drat thing or a Rogue thing. Perhaps there was some overlap. Until that happened, I was going to enjoy partnering up with Tara.

The town wasn’t small. Sure it looked to have been perched on a check mark of land some two miles long and half a mile across, but that was plenty of space for hundreds of houses, and dozens of larger buildings. With all those houses having nooks, crannies, basements, cellars, attics, and hidden rooms besides all that, we were basically looking for a needle in a haystack.

During this time, Tara told me literally everything about her life.   Now, I’d been with her in larger group settings, when she would barely say a word, but just vibe off what was going on. She seemed content to allow Cinzy or the others to hog the spotlight, while she enjoyed the atmosphere. In one-on-one situations though, she could not stop speaking.

I learned that her parents had made bad use of the money she’d earned and gifted them when she’d joined the Agency. I then learned she had stopped that flow of money when her parents bought stock in a video game store that tanked so hard the federal government got involved.

We only took one break that day to have a little fun in a derelict jewelry shop. The fun had gotten a bit out of hand, when we realized it had gone on for almost a full, sweaty hour.

We returned without a single god on the first day, and I was left to treat the many, many inhabitants Larelle had brought out of the affected area.

“What about the rest of us who have Divine Resistance?” Drat wanted to know when we returned at the end of the first day.

“How much do we have? This is going to be Durability checks throughout the day, so of course you’re welcome to come in, but you’ll have to watch carefully so you don’t end up like Blake.”

Or rather, the thing that had once been Blake. Headquarters was sending someone to pick up that particular capital S Situation, and I was very glad just to be a low level grunt with no particular stake in how that went.

I had a bad feeling about Blake’s transformation into a Nakamamon, and even worse about the existence of a ‘fighting’ aspect. If it could break Rus out of his usual jovial joking, it was bad news.

Still, not my circus, not my monkeys.

“I have it at level 3,” Drat replied, after no small amount of hemming and hawing. Man, getting information out of this guy—about himself—was like trying to perform dentistry on a toddler.

“Well, I have it at level 3,” I told him. “On the other hand, I have a special ability that allows me to resist these kinds of illnesses, more than tripling the onset time. It gives me about twelve hours off the first Durability check.”

He sneered; his Durability must’ve been low. I knew he had a high Physicality and Ingenuity, because he had to. Both would be useful in helping him to stay off people’s radars, socially and otherwise.

“If I had that item,” he said through gritted teeth, “I could be a much bigger help.”

I blinked at him, nodding. “Well if I knew exactly what your stats and special abilities were, I could make the most effective use of them. For now I’m going to give the item to the people I know to have enhanced senses abilities.”

“Great,” he fumed. “Great. I’ll just… be… here.”

This is Christopher not minding one bit.