Divinity Rescue Corps
104- BOOF and SNORC

Thankfully the California sun was still high in the sky when I woke from a nap. The girls had stopped for lunch and left me in the van, but when they returned, giggling and chatting, they asked what kind of takeout I wanted.

I just want to stop and quickly review what I was looking at:

Cinzy had on these baby short shorts in purple and a gradient tank top over a string bikini top only about one percent of the population can pull off. I know you see them all the time on the television and the internet, because they’re like one in a million, but you don’t see a million people in your day to day life, so believe me when I say that from her painted toenails and matching flip flops to her expert dye job, Cinzy was almost impossible to look away from.

Regina was a ginger and complained about the sun in a good-natured way while dressing like something out of an impressionist painting. She had on a wide-brimmed straw hat and a sundress that showed off how little she was wearing underneath when the angle of the light was right. She had a parasol.

Tara dressed as she always seemed to: yoga pants and sneakers in a medium brown color, along with a lime green t-shirt, a little too large, cut so that it was more like a tank top. She had to wear a bra because her nipples were simply huge, and it created mind-boggling cleavage. There she rivaled Cinzy.

Ivy had somehow talked Isabelle into dressing far less conservatively than normal; she had on jean shorts that showed a bit of her butt cheeks. She was constantly on edge about people seeing, so she was constantly picking at a wedgie and drawing people’s attention to it. From there, the crop top showed off her belly button and a decent amount of cleavage also. She wasn’t as well-endowed as the others but was still sexy.

And Ivy. Good gravy. She was in that see through fishnet shirt with a bikini under it, the tall boots again, and right now, jean shorts cut short enough that it looked like a bikini bottom. I could see almost her full butt, her thighs, and the whole of her trim upper body. She’d added a Stetson to this, and it made her look even sexier, somehow.

“What did you go over with my mom while I was out?” I asked.

“Not much,” Regina said. “We asked her what she’s been up to the last six months while you’ve been gone.”

“What? Why?” It had been all chemo and throwing up and hair loss and dizziness and shirt like that.

“She took up knitting,” Cinzy said. “And she promised to make us all DRC hats and scarves.”

“Um.” Well that was certainly news to me. I’d been too wrapped up in my own stuff to.

Which is how I ended up getting my mom to talk at length about the knitting she’d been doing. She had shipped a lot of it off to pet shelters so they could dress up the good doggies and kitties to get people to adopt.

And it had worked. She was kind of a badass. Instead of convalescing like she could have, like many other people would have chosen to do, she got herself a nice hobby that filled the painful time and made a difference.

“I donated a couple of hats and scarves up north.”

She said up north like we had gone to visit my aunt and uncle in Idaho ever. I was pretty sure there was a disagreement that was political in nature, but I hadn’t ever gotten into the weeds because I didn’t know the Idaho Jessens. My mom really liked the Fletcher side of the family much better.

All fueled up on salads, wraps and one falafel plate, we hit the road once again.

“Okay!” My mother announced. “We’re going back to Dork fleeing post.”

“It’s Dorian flying roast,” Cinzy said, then started and looked down like she could stare at her own betraying lips. Why couldn’t anyone say the word Dorfialialtos, the name of the other world, was unclear. It was definitely a mystery for another chapter of this story.

“Can we tell the Agency naming story first?” Tara asked.

“Ugh!” Regina said, but she was grinning.

“It’s my favorite story!”

“Fiiiiiiiiine-uh,” Regina said.

She probably knew that this part of the story with Vellenia lead to Jacoby’s involvement… sexually. But we can save that for when Christopher comes up with a plausible way to explain why Jacoby was so nice to me.

***

“You have got to see this memorandum,” Tara gushed. “This is so amazing.”

She had just returned from her job for the day: heading out to link up with Jacoby’s people, dropping off potions, and making sure nothing out there had become problematic. None had, and we were thankful of that. They had left one of their high level Wizards, a guy named Wayne. This guy could deliver and receive messages directly from HQ on the regular. These came on shrunken clay tablets that the Wizards would then enlarge with their Engorgio spells… or whatever they were called. For now, Tara had hold of two tablets, the size of playing cards, waving them at us and crying tears of laughter.

Cinzy, being the self-appointed spokesperson of the group, snatched the tiny clay tablets from her hand and read over the tiny script. She burst out laughing, replacing Tara’s look of annoyance with one of genuine delight again.

I won’t bore you with the entire thing. Suffice it to say that, in the very beginning, the Agency did not exist in any official capacity. It was a little subsection of some little subsection of the government budget. It was discretionary spending at its most discretionary.

You know, the sort of five thousand dollar hammer and twenty-five thousand dollar toilet seat type thing. Kind of makes you wonder how much of that budget is for intergalactic flight and extraterrestrial management affairs.

Back to the story.

Now, as time had gone on, the Agency was beginning to realize at least one of its goals, and so in order to move forward, the Agency was going to reveal its existence to the president. This would all be very hush-hush, very closed door. We still weren’t about to start existing. The Agency was not about to begin flooding the world with cute Nakamamon pets so everyone could have a flower fox, or open a zoo so people could see the rochidnas, and whatever sentient crystal thing that Garnet was. That wasn’t happening, and probably would never happen.

Emphasis on the word ‘probably.’

However, they wanted to name the Agency so it could be presented to the president. As usual, the people in charge were people like Rus.

Cinzy waved the paper. “Do you want to know what they’re thinking of calling it?”

“Just tell us,” Drat said.

“You are not at all fun,” Cinzy said. “No sense of drama.”

“I have an excellent sense of drama, for things that matter.”

Cinzy sighed. “Well just know that we have been invited to vote on these, because Rus is a maniac. These names were put forward by regular employees like us, and they passed several rounds of voting while we were cut off from most communications.”

“Let’s do it,” I said.

“Drumroll please!” Cinzy called, and everybody—except Drat—obliged her. I started rolling my tongue and patting my thighs, just like in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. I could tell a lot of people hadn’t seen this movie, but I soon had everyone following long. Except Drat. Cinzy could create an actual drumroll sound with her powers, which was so, so odd.

When Cinzy opened her mouth again, all ‘drumroll’ cut immediately off.

“They want to call it either BOOF… or SNORC.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah,” Regina said, already laughing. “Yeah, I’m on board with either of those. Don’t even care what they stand for. I like it. The Agency has outdone itself.”

This was the general consensus.

BOOF stood for Bureau of Otherworld Operations and Facilities. The name in no way made it clear what the Agency did, aside from operate and facilitate things here in the otherworld, but that was all right.

SNORC gave us more, but not much. This stood for Strategic Nexus Operations and Resource Command. The words ‘strategic’ and ‘resources’ implied that the other world was going to be mined for something, and that something was loosely connected to national defense.

Well, if Blake hadn’t become towering slab of Physicality, he would’ve made a rather amazing soldier.

I froze.

The realization that the Agency was using us as a guinea pig group for future super soldiers was a sobering one. Because, honestly, there was no way they weren’t doing that. They were cultivating super soldiers, super ninjas like Drat, and super talkers like Cinzy, and only beginning to consider showing those results to the big brass in Washington.

“Strategic,” I breathed, “and resource.”

What they wanted to harvest out of this world and bring into earth was immediately evident, but so far as I understood, extracting magic out of Dork Fiddle Toast wasn’t possible.

“Dorm feely host,” I said angrily. “Seriously, why can’t I even say the name of this fracking world? Anyway it doesn’t matter. Tokens disappear after twenty-four hours.” Regina had said her special abilities all dried up after about a day on earth.

Right now anyhow. If it’s one thing we can all agree on regarding humans as a species, it’s that we figure out how to do what we want to do. Usually what we figure out is how to kill one another, but when we wanted to get airborne, we figured that out too. When we wanted to touch the moon, we figured that out.

For now it didn’t matter. We had jobs to do, and my job was healing. Nobody in their right minds stopped a Healer from healing. Nobody went to doctors and told them to cut that out.

“I’ll vote… BOOF,” Regina said.

“I recognize that word from somewhere,” Trent said.

“Y-y-you should,” Alan said, and described how that word had been part of a highly televised Supreme Court justice’s confirmation hearings at the time. People had debated what the word meant, and that didn’t matter either.

It may or may not have been perverted in nature. Again, didn’t matter.

What mattered was the word sounded silly. Would it be a lot easier for the president to accept the news that there was another world out there? Maybe if it was handled by BOOF. Would the public be okay knowing that resources in their homes were coming from another world? Maybe if they were BOOF resources.

 But hell, what did I know? I was only a kid in my early twenties, and the people attempting to reassure the government that another world was good, well they had decades and decades of experience under their belts. All I needed to do was stay on target, plug the leaks faster than new ones were springing to life.

***

Ugh, I’m getting things out of order trying to avoid telling my mom all about the wonderful and unbelievable sexual shenanigans I got up to in the other world.

I’d been quietly making love with my lovely ladies for the whole week. It had been a relaxing and pleasurable time, just reveling in their bodies and making them gasp, and hearing them cry out as their bodies tipped over the climax point. We’d gone out walking during the day, away from the camp, we’d gone out walking at night, nearer the camp, and one of the things I now knew I was missing was hand-holding.

In the wake of numerous sexy time activities, the system apparently awarded extra experience points, and put me at level 20 in Pleasure Seeker. I was overjoyed to take the next step towards the milestone: whatever the hell happened at level 25. Changes were on the horizon, and I couldn’t wait to hit level 25 to see what the next thing might be.

The first thing that happened was all my Tokens replenished. The second thing that happened was I received the level up bonuses:

Level 20: +1 Durability, +2 skill points

There would be no complaints when it came to new attribute points and new skill levels. I was thankful that, the further I got from level 1 and the closer to level 25, the more points I appeared to get. On previous level ups I’d received a single skill point with most attribute increases.

Waiting for Drat do search out all the hidden spaces meant it was time to prioritize Pleasure Seeker. It was also time to consider just what I was doing with the Qualities. One of those priorities, now that I’d touched Chrysta, was increasing Adaptability. She might be a ghost aspect, and she might be an ice aspect on top of that, but she was a valuable member of my team who craved physical contact. Next, Pheromones would transmit whatever Qualities in Pleasure Seeker to my partners. I hadn’t used it yet, but practically I thought it meant an increase of Adaptability for partners who needed it, and other Qualities for those who didn’t. And to me, that said I could grant Chrysta Adaptability too.

I already understood Adaptability allowed me to avoid hurting my partners. Size allowance for smaller girls like Regina and Vellenia, and for times when Cinzy wanted to take my full length in the other hole. It also transformed me into a more ghostly being for purposes of touching Chrysta. The full scope of Adaptability was far beyond my understanding… for now.

So one point went right into Adaptability. The other one I couldn’t be sure about. I needed to see how Pheromones worked before I sank more points in. Meaning I needed to have a quick heart to heart with Chrysta and see whether it really did pass Adaptability onto her.

I read over the Pheromones description again.

This Quality grants one point of your other Qualities to your sexual partner while in the act. Each level of Pheromones can enhance your partner by one level.

I spent that time listening to Tara—and Cinzy butting in—to tell the BOOF and SNORC story. I also spent that time trying to figure out how to tell my mother how I gained Jacoby’s trust and assistance, and get to the trials we’d run with the different types of afflicted citizens from Glumpdumpkin, while Drat tried his thing.

Then I told the part where I’d gotten tired of waiting on Drat, gotten tired of Jacoby’s insistence that I was better off being her subordinate than a separate team leader, and got down to the business of trying to help the citizens in town, one at a time if I had to.

First, cleansing the second type of Glumpdumpkin citizens of their malady was… difficult.

Alan’s handbook on healing had been shrunk down to playing-card sized. We had large magnifying glasses to help us go through them with relative speed, and find some that might be helpful. He had an index blown up to newspaper size that Trent had embedded in his wall using earth magic. The two of them had worked together to make a notation system that was… insane.

Imagine your typical study of a scholar from a hundred or two hundred years back, books open all over the place, notations scrawled here and there, notes in the margins, and loose pages sticking out of books, or hidden under other books, or tacked to the walls.

Now imagine that in stone form. Since magic had a strange effect on both ink and paper, they were forced to score letters and words directly into soft earth or clay. Trent was there to turn the earth to stone, and to separate out those notated areas. He could press them into the walls of Alan’s house… and he had. Some had to be taken out, and replacements tacked up instead. But between the binders full of clay trading cards, larger newspaper-sized clay tablets, and the stone bricks where they made notes, it was a mess of epic proportions in there. Alan’s house was nothing more than one of those conspiracy theory boards, but set in stone.

We required a lot of clay tablet resizing, and then a lot of parsing through the notes we expanded through the use of Alan’s spells. Alan was steadfast, though I could sense his exhaustion after only the third resizing spell. When I told him to take a break, he refused, and instead doubled down. He would last another hour before falling asleep at his spellbook.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: spellbook? Ink on paper, but didn’t I just explain how ink and paper didn’t work in a land of magic? Well, Alan’s spellbook had been specially created by the order of Wizards to withstand magic. After all, it had to be spellproof in order to survive Alan frequently casting spells within inches of it. Alan learned spells through level progression and choices, and whenever he learned a spell, it would appear in his spellbook, indelibly printed there by some substance that wasn’t ink, but looked exactly like it.

He told me the pages were made of stone, specially spellcrafted for them to be both ultra thin and unbreakable. And yes I’d seen the advertisements for the notebook back on earth, made of literal stone on the internet, but I couldn’t believe they engineered stone to be paper. I just couldn’t.

After several hours of research, we had a decent enough formula for a severe confusion treatment.

This one required a calming agent: morning dewdrop was the name of the flower. Following that, we needed blue crocuses, and a lot of them, for renewing thoughts and for concentration. The third bit we needed was a moss native to this world, called Grandfather’s Beard. I only had a bit of the crocuses and the moss, so that meant immediately planting some and using Verdant Rejuvenation to help grow them at hyper fast speeds.

From there, it was time to check on my Treatment, of Medium creatures. I had never bought any of the aspect-specific skills, and didn’t exactly regret it. There would never be enough skill points for that. We treated a sapient-looking tree Nakamamon, getting a check difficulty that was still far too high… but possibly manageable.

Develop Cure check (medium/plant): You have the Develop Cure (medium) skill at level 4, while Ingenuity is at level 9. This check is Nigh Impossible, requiring 14 successes. Would you like to spend 7 Tokens* for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 9 Physicality and 7 Free Tokens.

Note: This check falls under the Hard At Work special ability.

Nigh Impossible was better than 30+ difficulty rating, but not by a lot. I still didn’t love the idea of spending 7 Tokens, since my 13 levels would yield an average of three or four successes… out of fourteen. This was possible, but not ideal. I cold regenerate Tokens now in a couple of different ways, but it would still be a day or two in between each stumbling, severely confused patient, and there were dozens.

This is Christopher about to do it anyway.