Divinity Rescue Corps
102- Cinzy vs Fairy Poppins II

I held up a hand at the end of the morning briefing. It seemed important to get this over with while Jacoby was here, trying to siphon off my team members for her own gig.

“Listen, hey, everybody, sorry. One last thing.”

I peered around at their faces. Hopeful and bright from Isabelle and Tara, stolid acceptance of literally anything that could come their way from Larelle and Ivy, polite interest from Trent and Alan, rapt attention from Vellenia and Regina, and bored disregard from Drat. That last one was to be expected; it was physically painful for Drat to show emotion.

At least that was my running hypothesis.

“I know we’ve been here for a while and it doesn’t seem like we’ve changed much. That’s not true. Right now, we’ve made ourselves able to walk the streets. Larelle has made the streets safer to walk. We have information on the god situation, though it’t not much.”

A soft humming was emanating from Cinzy’s throat, and it laced the air with a warm and comforting feel. All of them perked up a little more. Even Drat paused in picking the dirty from under his fingernails to actually look at me.

“I want you to think about this town as a chronic patient. The whole town is bedridden. We’ve already found that some of the people in their house, the little gods, are also sick. We’ve cured them. We’ve cleaned up the insane mess the house used to be in order to get better access to our patient.”

I paused, blinking.

“I know you’re used to stone floating around and houses appearing two or three a day. You’re used to magic delivering letters over miles and miles instantly, but healing isn’t like that, even magic healing. If you went into the hospital and the doctor just injected you with whatever he felt like, you’d be screwed. And even if it was the right thing, if the doctor didn’t operate, or injected you with too much all at once, it would be just as bad.”

“Go on,” Cinzy whispered. “You’re doing great.”

“Our patient is hiding somewhere in this house and we’re going to find him. Or her. And once that happens, we have to figure out exactly what’s got this patient sick. After that step, the next is collecting up the necessary materials, cooking up the cure, and delivering it. None of those steps are going to be instantaneous. They might each take days or weeks to accomplish. But we’re talking about putting thousands of people’s lives back together.”

Vellenia was literally glowing. Even in the early morning glow, tiny pink sparkles were shooting off her body. She had fists clenched under her chin and was wiggling her shoulders, looking like the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen. Her tail was also flicking back and forth.

“If any of you want to accompany Expedition Leader Jacoby, please come talk to me. We’ll see if we can make it happen, and give you orders to assist her or take orders from her until her own mission is done.”

I peered around at them.

“That’s it. That’s all.”

None of them ended up going to go with Jacoby. In fact, Jacoby wasn’t going to stick around either. She would leave a Wizard here to communicate with my team and watch for Archie to try to enter Glumpdumpkin and perhaps rescue Blake. The real reason was, she expected Archie to try and abduct me so I could manufacture some anti-magic pills for him.

***

Some two or three minutes had passed with us walking. Cinzy had gone through a lot. We reached the bridge that spanned the river running through and over Glumpdumpkin, a construction of stone with carved stone railings. I admired the intricate braid pattern the railings were carved, and the strange creatures that topped the railings at the bridge’s entrance. I now noticed, on leaning over, that faces were carved into the sides of the bridge proper. There was a bridge in Paris… I wanted to say the Pont Neuf, that had gargoyle faces carved every six or ten feet, but I couldn’t be sure.

I had been worried about Cinzy’s state of mind. She had a lot of work to do with handling the refugee problems. Newcomers were often disoriented because something drew them here, so there was no shortage of helping them with their minor confusion. Most didn’t want to turn around and head back to their home villages, and the ones that stayed had to be convinced periodically to stay out of Glumpdumpkin.

In point of fact, she’d already had a special ability usage with Muppin, Tweedle Dee, Airaconda and Larelle’s unnamed Magmamander, to convince them not to amble into town.

“How long do they have before they start wandering into town again?” I asked.

“A couple of days,” she said with a sigh.

We continued on in silence. Whatever was bothering her, she didn’t want to come out with it, and that was okay. People moved at their own paces, and I just had to respect—

“She doesn’t want me to be with you,” Cinzy blurted.

“I’m sorry?” I asked. “Wait… Fairy Poppins?”

Did nobody consider Fairy Poppins to be sapient? Apparently they didn’t. Jacoby seemed to think bonding Nakamamon like Vellenia was unheard of. If you spent more than a day with Fairy Poppins you knew just how sapient she could be. Sapient and quite willful.

Cinzy turned to me. “She doesn’t know what I know, okay? You didn’t do the special ability with her. She doesn’t understand.”

Hang on, several of the stone faces on this bridge appeared to be the Divinity Rescue Corps members, but making silly faces. That one was definitely Chrysta, based solely on the eyes, but she had one lip pulled back and her tongue stuck out in a comical, rude way. The one next to her was definitely Ivy, from the piercings, except her nostrils were wide open and with squiggly little hairs poking out. She was looking cross-eyed down at her pig nose.

I pulled my attention away from what was obviously Trent’s handiwork.

“She doesn’t… she doesn’t think I’m good enough for you? The other way around? Or is it something else? Like she doesn’t like the idea of me having other partners? Like she thinks I’ll hurt you?”

Cinzy’s face darkened a little. She was still having trouble coming to terms with the idea of me just casually bedding Ivy and Isabelle. Well, I was about to rock her world a little farther.

“A little of… a little of this and a little of that,” she said. Evasively.

Trent hadn’t built this entire bridge. I was ninety-nine percent sure this had been here when we first came to town. If he was using it for practice, that didn’t seem so bad. Then I caught sight of the face that was modeled after my face, and rolled my eyes at the expression I found there.

“All right, well… I don’t want to push. If you want to tell me, I’ll be here. If you want me to speak with her, I c—”

“No!”

I should’ve known right then what was going on. A few things got in the way of this.

One: I was barely into my twenties. I didn’t have a whole lot of experience regardless.

Two: I had had only a single relationship with a girl, and it didn’t count. She had been with me on a dare from her friends. I had been too thrilled with the attention to see she was way out of my league and not genuine. Meaning my experience and judgement on girl-related matters was extremely limited.

Three: I had this Glumpdumpkin situation on my mind, this Jacoby situation on my mind, and more besides. The girls, and also Drat. Drat was always a low-key concern, considering how he got experience.

Four: Fairy Poppins did not, presently, speak English. Or I couldn’t communicate with her the typical way, since she was just a few inches high and I was just shy of six feet. Although… now that I had Psyspeech, I could put messages into her little fairy mind.

In short, I hope I can be forgiven for not realizing what wasn’t being said in this moment.

***

“You’re fine, dear,” my mother said.

Of course she would forgive me.

California had fully morphed into Northern California by this point. We weren’t quite halfway to our destination, but we’d be over halfway there by the end of the day today. There was still a lot of story to get through, and luckily we’d be spending ten or twelve hours on the road to get through it. In the meantime I watched the redwoods appear, the biggest fracking trees on the planet. Stretching up toward the sun, like the boogie trees didn’t do.

I caught a bit of my mom’s smile when I glanced in the rear view, and knew that telling her about the sex stuff was never, ever going to happen. On pain of death it wouldn’t happen.

Oh… oh no. I froze at the wheel and resisted the urge to look over and see the knowing look written all over her face. My mother knew exactly what I hadn’t figured out some two and a half months ago.

I still wasn’t about to go there. I wasn’t ready to face that whole ball of yarn with my own mother.

***

I tried to comfort Cinzy, letting her know I would help her corral the refugee population if there was anything I could do. They were swelling by dozens per day, and though I wasn’t the social niceties expert, I didn’t want her to have the job alone. I had Beast Talker, after all.

She shook her head, told me she would get her act together, and put Fairy Poppins in her place.

Although this seemed like absolutely the wrong way to go about the Fairy Poppins situation, it also wasn’t my rodeo bull to ride. Cinzy could sort out her own dirty laundry. She could deal with her own shirt. I didn’t want to sort out all of the Divinity Rescue Corps’s problems like I had been trying to do with my family. Doing that had made me the target of a lot of anger from both sides, even if it had been the right thing to do, and worth it in the end. Sometimes people don’t see that they’ve made you into their punching bag.

The remainder of the day passed in relative ease and normality. I worked up a treatment for the god Drat had discovered, the God of Secret Spaces.

Luckily for us, the God of Secret Spaces wasn’t large. In fact, it was a swarm of tiny humanoids even smaller than Fairy Poppins, each the size of my thumbnail with dark purple skin and shocking yellow hair. You could barely see them or make out what they were until you got the magnifying glass nice and close, and then you saw they weren’t insects at all.

Larelle had been lucky enough to get them when they were suffering Severe Confusion, and forgot they were gods. She’d swept them up into a dustpan and deposited them into a box. She presented the box to me, and frowned at it when I slid the drawer out of it. Drat also furrowed his brow when I slid the drawer out.

That didn’t have—

“I don’t know what I’m looking at,” I told them.

The drawer was empty.

“There was no drawer in that box,” Drat said. “It was a cardboard box.” Then he took it, closed the drawer, squinting at it the whole time. After a grunt, he turned the knob and slid the drawer back out, revealing the whole lot of the tiny gods inside.

“Secret catch in the box,” he said. “They must’ve made it while we brought it here.”

Most of the teensy people were sleeping, but a few staggered around the drawer’s bottom, many leaning on one another like girls in their twenties after a night at the club.

“This is Severe Confusion. I have to do the Diagnosis check,” I told them, “in order to get the bonus on the Treatment check.”

Drat just stared a look at me that conveyed a shrug. He didn’t need the explanation. It was wasted on him.

“Best keep them in the secret compartment. The God of Secret Spaces probably needs to feel like it can’t be found.”

Severe Confusion means the afflicted god is periodically unaware of their own existence and capabilities. They may even be touched without causing divinity poisoning, though this is not recommended.

Oh stop being such a stick in the mud, I touched it yesterday.

What were you thinking?

Hard eye roll. At least I know how to have fun once in a while.

You may test for divinity poisoning easily by using a live subject, though this is not recommended.

You’d better believe it’s not. The other (recommended) check for divinity poisoning is to use the Spiritual illness diagnosis test. If the divinity reacts even slightly, this means the god is exuding its power and may not be touched without dire consequences. This can be difficult to detect. Even if it is not exuding divinity, the signs that it has begun to do so are subtle.

So touch it while you can.

I grabbed the bridge of my nose and marveled at the UI’s sudden and inexplicable turn to the bizarre. This was apparently Rainer, the lead healer, and someone called Dickens, who I’d never met. These two, somehow and somewhen, created all the UI entries for the Healer class, at very least.

“We’re not letting anyone touch those,” I told him. Not after the God of Lost Jewelry situation, with all the girls getting divinity poisoning. “In fact, you hide it until I’ve got the treatment made up.”

When I looked at him, Drat nodded. The box was already gone. He got extra xp for that kind of thing.

Just like with the God of Lost Jewelry and the other handful, I needed a concoction to deal with Severe Confusion.

The original one had required gingko biloba leaves, infused. After the first time, I’d begun growing it using Verdant Rejuvenation. Which was amazing, because over the course of 48 hours I could grow an entire tree, including its stinky, stinky nuts.

They were everywhere. The mature tree was gorgeous, especially because for some reason, in the 48 hours it took to grow into a fully formed tree, it went through an autumn phase and dropped its fan-shaped leaves. Before that happened they turned a gorgeous gold color.

I couldn’t be certain that the same recipe would heal the swarm god like it had for the God of Lost Jewelry, I was cautiously optimistic. If it didn’t work, we could rummage through Alan’s collected encyclopedia of everything Healer. If it did, there was no reason to waste hours or days looking.

We had Tara and Airaconda go grab some more pure water, while I separated out and began the hours-long infusion for the gingko leaves. Afterwards I turned my attention to dealing with the St. John’s wort, ginseng root, and snake’s head fritillary.

The last was an odd, checkered flower with purple and white petals. As soon as I’d made the last treatment this had gone right in the garden too, and bloomed in little pairs of downward-facing flowers. The petals went into the infusion next, increasing the heat and working in more mana than before.

Following this, the ginseng root. Now, ginseng is famous because it’s vaguely people-shaped. Ordinarily it’s incredibly difficult to get a good one, because they take forever to grow underground.

No problem with Verdant Rejuvenation. I did some five or ten years of growing overnight, and it didn’t even require me to locate a plant and follow the stem through shady hillsides to the actual root, which could be hundreds of feet away. Instead its tiny red ring of berries grew right in my garden, surrounded by plain old inconspicuous leaves. And every time I harvested one, it had the weirdest root: almost exactly humanoid, and all of them in fun poses. We’re talking jumping jacks, the dab, one that looked like it was twerking, some yoga poses, warrior one through three… it was the most wonderful part of having these powers. I started planting and tending a lot more ginseng after this.

The root needed to be finely chopped, which Vellenia graciously volunteered to do.

Something like six hours later, the treatment cure was ready.

Develop Cure (swarm/Unique) check:Your Develop Cure (Unique) skill is at level 8, Develop Cure (Swarm) at level 3, and your Affinity is at level 7. This check is Extreme. You may spend 4* Tokens in order to succeed. Would you like to spend these Tokens?

Total Tokens: 3 Affinity and 7 Free Tokens.

*Hard At Work: Your Tokens are worth double given you are engaged in your class duties.

There was both no way my 18 skill levels were going to give me 8 successes, and no reason not to give it a shot. I pressed No.

One failed check and free retry later, I thanked Hard At Work once again and spent the 4 Tokens.

This is Christopher smiling, sighing, and healing up yet another god.