Divinity Rescue Corps
103- Bri & Steph

Administering the cure for Severe Confusion required a fine mist yet again. The particles inhaled by the tiny god swarm—godlings?—needed to be as small as possible to incorporate into their bodies with all available speed. We couldn’t drown the little guys in even regular droplets.

I was saved getting the cure into my mouth and spitting it out by Vellenia, who showed me her water aspect ability, Mist.

It was a good thing I didn’t, too, because just a tiny bit of the bitter, milk white cure got on me, and it was like coffee times a hundred. I immediately went on a manic, workaholic rampage, convinced I was working at my absolute peak efficiency. I cleaned up the workshop according to a new filing system I’d just invented. I tore up half the garden and replanted all of them in a new pattern that I was convinced was more aesthetically pleasing  and better alphabetically. I then rushed back to the others and ordered them to try the cure, only to be super embarrassed later when I fell unconscious for several hours. Waking up hung over, I staggered around, apologizing to all of them.

I was laughed at, and I deserved it.

Vellenia misted the God of Secret Spaces with several waves of her hands. The whole thing came out in an antigravity blob of liquid, flattened out into a sheet, then subdivided into teensy misty droplets before my eyes.

“You will have to blow on them,” she said, smiling warmly at me.

“You are the cutest and most gorgeous-est,” I told her, only to have Tara and Cinzy react as if they’d been slapped.

“Why thank you!” she said, giggling.

Blowing on it allowed me to make the Administer Cure check, which succeeded, given the difficulty had lowered by 4 from Vellenia’s water skill.

I of course did it wrong, and dosed myself. She followed this by lightly and gracefully blowing the sheet of mist over the open secret drawer.

I was already inside my laboratory, high out of my mind.

Curing the God of Secret Spaces now allowed Drat access to the hidden spaces in Glumpdumpkin: all the hidden stashes, the secret passages and the hidden rooms. As these were the coolest possible things to find, I was annoyed when he vanished basically all day, every day.

He immediately disappeared into town on the hunt for what me, and the Rangers, could not find. He left, I should add, without permission to go alone.

For the millionth time, it seemed, I was both thankful and annoyed to have a Rogue along.

Afterwards it was back to tending my garden, speaking to Vellenia about the world of Dorfilialtos, a word which I still couldn’t say properly.

What Vellenia taught me was largely rumor. She hadn’t been outside of Slinktrickle and had met only a few other humans, or Nakamamon for that matter. She knew a bit more about the functions of mana and the aspects of Nakamamon. She knew, and this was fascinating, about the system.

According to her, the system had simply appeared before her one day. It declared that she was a first stage Nakamamon. Marshells were basic Nakamamon. Marshmellows were second stage Nakamamon. She was water aspect, along with fairy aspect. These things she knew and understood instinctually as natural. They made sense, and they were right.

“It must have been a function of a high level spell,” she said, shrugging.

“Wait, wait… hang on a second. You’re telling me the system just wasn’t a thing until one day?”

She nodded.

“And when was this?”

She shrugged. “Only a few days after I threw off the shell and dove into the waters.”

“And what were you before that?”

“Oh, we didn’t have names for the stages that day,” she said. “The humans came through and began naming things.”

***

When Jacoby’s people showed up at the lab a handful of days later, I was in the process of trying to heal up one of the comatose Nakamamon from town. Treatments had failed. They gave me the same notification every time:

This check is rated impossible. Do you not have the capacity to attempt this check given your current skill level. You do not possess enough Tokens to automatically succeed this check.

No matter how I tried, I got the same. Sure I had 7 Free Tokens and 8 Ingenuity Tokens, but that meant the difficulty rating was more than 30. I hadn’t come across anything like that before, but it made sense.

“I guess we’re going to try to move on to one of the drunken ones,” I said, sighing. This wasn’t something I liked to hear or see. Powerlessness had been a thing of the past, the earth past. My mother’s cancer, my sister’s weird insistence on doing things that were bad for her just to spite my parents, these were out of my control. The failure of my streaming job, and my getting fired from the video game store were marginally within my control, but that was different and irrelevant here.

The hope was that the drunken Nakamamon had some resistance to the divine effect and might be easier to treat. If I could treat them, then I might be able to treat the manic ones who refused to stop doing their jobs, without rest or sleep, for weeks on end.

That was the hope. In the meantime, I was really hoping Drat would find the key to the god’s whereabouts. After the God of Secret Spaces had been found and gotten back to their normal self, I had hopes Drat would soon succeed and get us moving on the path towards Glumpdumpkin’s salvation.

All that was put aside when a series of frantic shouts split the silence. Following that, a strangled scream split the air. That cry of pain meant I was needed.

Vellenia was there before me, breathing out and getting healing energy into the victim. He relaxed immediately.

I was in time to see a broken leg un-break. The bone knit itself back together, the slight wonkiness of the limb disappearing before my eyes. Immediately on the heels of this, the contusion faded.

Our victim was one of the Wizards from Jacoby’s team. She had wheat gold hair tied in a loose ponytail, and a pixie-like face. She also had actual emerald eyes; the pupils themselves were crystalline, and the whites of her eyes had gone diamond. Identify told me she had lost the vast majority of her mana, but she was now over one third of her hit points.

Standing just behind those holding her was a Guardian. A sheepish and miserable Guardian, missing just under half his hit points.

Using Identify, I could see that the Wizard (Evoker) had suffered a number of body blows and blunt force trauma all over her body. Her hands were bruised and bloody, along with several bloodied fingernails.

“You’re safe now,” I told her. “I’ll whip you up a Healing Potion and you’ll be just fine in a minute.” I gestured to the Guardian. “You too. You’re getting the healing breath too… from my bond mate or from me, your choice.”

The thickly built, squat fellow gestured to himself in question. He had bloody knuckles and fingerprints around his neck visible, along with a black eye, split lip, and misshapen nose.

“The longer you delay treatment, the more likely your body is to remember the wounds and keep them as scars. If we act fast, you go scar-free. Your call.”

The guy, who seemed almost as wide as he was tall, considered this for a time. The rule of cool was to let scars stay. He was also at war with himself, probably over whether he deserved to be healed or not.

“I’m the Healer,” I called over my shoulder. We were moving his charge into my home. “Everyone who gets wounded gets treated. Faster you’re at max hit points, the faster you can be out there to get back in the field. And make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

He trotted right over, proving my guess true: Archie had done this.

Larelle’s Magmamander had a dedicated space in my new home, basking in the light of several large windows. This large metal tray held the gigantic salamander Nakamamon, which barely did anything except sleep. The Guardian came over at my gesture and hefted the two wooden poles effortlessly. I had to strain, since the metal block was something like fifty pounds, and the Magmamander was another fifty at least. They’d rigged this up like a palanquin, so a person in front and a person in back could lift it and move it around.

The Magmamander yawned and stretched its stubby legs, surrounded by a shimmering heat haze. One eye opened and regarded me with reptilian dismissal. It licked its eye like a gecko while the two of us repositioned the creature where I needed it to heat some oil.

Then I busied myself chopping and steeping herbs. Icebalm to kill the pain and the old standby, mender’s fern. Soon the medicinal scents of pain relief wafted up.

I had the healing potion mixed and the check passed in another ten minutes. The blonde Wizard lay there groaning, while the Guardian stood stoic.

“This is from a fight with your target?” I asked, pouring some healing potion out into two cups.

“Don’t answer that,” Jacoby said, entering.

“Really?” I asked. “Operational security?”

She sniffed. “It’s just a function of my team and my mission; it’s not personal.”

“Feel like a doctor for the fracking Mafia,” I grumbled. Like she hadn’t watched me have sex with Vellenia. Like she didn’t know I’d been instrumental in breaking the Blake situation in the first place. Fracking paranoid Jacoby.

So instead I worked in silence, adding the mana to the potion as I added in the herbs and flowers. After a good minute or two of being quietly frustrated with Jacoby, I started whistling while I worked.

This put some pep in my step, and I danced around my lab, preparing a potion she couldn’t get anywhere else, unless she decided to send someone to and from HQ every three to five days. I didn’t need gratitude, I was doing this because I loved helping people. And I especially loved helping people that were trying to snatch up my people for their own ends, and display zero gratitude when I performed a valuable service—

“Thank you,” the Guardian grumbled, after I’d healed up his Wizard. “Guy came out of nowhere.” He took the Wizard’s hand and got down on one knee. “I’m so sorry, Steph.”

“I’m still alive, Bri,” she said gently. “You did your job.”

“Did he get your pack?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I put it in the dimensional space.” Then her eyes fell briefly on Jacoby, who was looming over my shoulder.

Bri, the Guardian, kissed Steph’s hand and she pulled him toward her, so they could start softly making out.

I could feel Jacoby percolating with anger. Maybe for them spilling ‘secrets’ or possibly for them displaying affection for one another in an unprofessional manner, when their team leader didn’t have someone who valued her like these two obviously cared for one another.

“Second healing potion,” I called, and handed it to Bri the Guardian. This saved Jacoby from clearing her throat.

“I’ll whip some of these up for your people when they go out on assignment, but you need to remember that I’ve got my own mission. These also have a shelf life of only about a day. I don’t magically preserve them. That’s not a thing I can do.”

She pouted, but grunted a perfunctory ‘thanks.’ I then explained that the base, oil, was not something I had in limitless amounts. She promised to get one of her Wizards, a Transmuter, on the task, to see if he could whip up some.

Some ten minutes later, I had finished with a half dozen more potions, handed them off to Bri and Steph, and Jacoby’s people left.

Daily healing potions for Jacoby’s team… I could probably add in mana potions, and see if Alan had the recipes for an all-around restorative potion, to give both mana and hit points back.

For now, I’d need to plant more icebalm and mender’s fern in my little garden.

As I was planting and tending those, I got the level up ding. After healing up and setting free the God of Secret Places, I’d also received a level up, but wanted to do at least two at once. I was using my Healer abilities less, and I also seemed to have hit a plateau, where I could handle the routine and every day healing situations thrown at me. This was definitely hubris, and I knew it. The looming situation blanketing the whole town was a long term project, and not one I could make progress on quickly. Stacking up level ups and their bonuses was okay, until we started looking at putting a god back together again.

Level 22: Ability upgrade: Healer’s Resistance, +2 skill points

Level 23: +1 Ingenuity, +3 skill points

Now that was a surprise. A very welcome one. In the past I’d gotten upgrades and a single skill point, or an attribute point and one or two skill points. Three and an attribute point felt like Christmas.

First, I needed to check out Healer’s Resistance.

Healer’s Resistance III

(Special Ability, Uncommon, active)

I- You may spend a Durability Token to resist damage from any source. Long term effects are reduced by 90%. Onsets of all diseases, venoms, poisons, or other afflictions are quadrupled, as are intervals. Lasts one day.

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

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

III- Spend 3 Durability Tokens to make yourself immune to a damage source for one day. Does not cover divine damage inflicted by gods.

The first big change here was that my target could spend the Token instead of me. Nice. The second was that the effects had been reduce further, from 75 to 90 percent, and the onsets were now quadrupled.

And then there was that level three ability. It seemed unbelievable. Maybe with more level ups, it would also take into account god damage. It was a hope, but likely a vain one. I doubted it would get so powerful as to negate all damage from gods. However, I could… dive into a volcano? Hug Larelle’s Magmamander? Go skydiving without a parachute?

I shuddered at the thought of it not working. I’d have to do some tests.

As for the rest of my level up bonuses…

Ingenuity at level 9! Awesome. Sure, I didn’t feel any smarter, but then again, I never did. The physical changes were the easiest to track: less pain in my hips and thighs and back were from Physicality, and less fatigue from a day’s work was from Durability. Also I could sex longer.

I chuckled to myself. “Perv,” I muttered.

Affinity was also something I’d been able to track, the flow and feel of mana having changed into the ability to glimpse it sometimes, when I concentrated.

Likability and Ingenuity though, those were much more difficult to see progressing.

Regardless, I had skill points to spend. The first one went directly to Divine Resistance. That one I needed.

I peered over the list of Healer skills again and frowned. It never, ever seemed like enough skill points. For now, my Develop cure was still low. Treatment, especially Potions, had leveled up on its own, from the frequency of using the skill. I wasn’t developing cures on the regular though.

“Let’s try to get everything to level 4,” I told myself. That meant two in Develop cure, for Large and Medium, and then two in Diagnosis.

Christopher Fletcher

Healer - Trainee 23

Pleasure Seeker - Novice 20

attributes:

Affinity 7

Durability 6

Ingenuity 9

Likability 6

Physicality 5

Free Tokens 7

Healer Skills:

Diagnosis (physical 4, spiritual 4, magical 4, mental 3)

Treatment (potions 4, salves 3, tinctures 3, elixirs 3, unguents 3)

Develop cure (swarm 4, small 5, medium 4, large 3)

Develop cure (unique) 7

Administer Cure 8

Pleasure Seeker Qualities:

Girth 1

Load 1

Stave Off 2

Length 1

Tongue 1

Adaptability 4

Pheromones 1

Other Skills:

Identify 5

Hiking 3

Cooking 1

Persuasion 1

Meditation 4

Divine Resistance 6

Stealth 1

Mana Affinity 1

All other skills unranked

Unspent skill points: 0

This is Christopher about to say ‘all in a day’s work.’

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