Divinity Rescue Corps
105- Apothecary’s Diary

For the next two hours, I boiled blue crocuses in a mixture of water and oil.  This allowed the Grandfather’s Beard and the morning dewdrop to grow at incredible speeds in my garden. Vellenia happily chipped in, singing as we worked with an otherworldly voice. Meanwhile, the crocuses turned the whole mixture a deep indigo color, and made my whole house smell… indescribable. It was an eye-watering, sneeze-inducing indescribable, so not a horrible type of indescribable, even if we were laughing half the time.

We eventually moved the operation outside, where the smell could be carried away—or right into my face—by the day’s breeze.

After the whole mixture had been temperature regulated, and distilled down, we added the Grandfather’s Beard. Indigo became a dark sort of turquoise. After another hour, the morning dewdrop was ready to be added.

With the addition of the white flower, the thick syrup went from turquoise to an opaque white, followed closely by disappearing entirely.

Treatment check (Unguents): You have the Treatment (Unguents) skill at level 3, Develop Cure (medium) at level 4 , while Ingenuity is at level 9. Other applicable skills are unranked. This check is Extreme, requiring 10 successes. Would you like to spend 5 Tokens* for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 9 Ingenuity and 7 Free Tokens.

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

“Hang on,” I muttered. I had been about to spend 7 Tokens to treat this creature… now it was giving me 16 levels, and possibly 5 or 6 natural successes, to work up this treatment.

“What’s the matter, bond mate?” Vellenia asked.

“I think I was just about to attempt to cure this individual with the force of my magic alone.” Brewing up an unguent automatically lowered the difficulty and gave me access to stacking my skills.

I decided to try it; Hard At Work would give me a free retry, and would grant me more information. So far, for months, I’d had about a 3:1 success rate. Sometimes it had been as high as 5:1. I still wasn’t going to succeed at 10 successes with 16 total levels, but… if I had sex first, I’d have 18 levels. The thought gave me a snort of amusement.

My 16 levels gave me 5 successes, about what I thought I’d get. I did go for the retry, and spent the 5 Tokens to succeed from Physicality. Meditation, and the Drive In Deeper ability would help me to regain Tokens. It wasn’t a permanent solution, but it was just as important to see what was happening here.

The sapient tree had been babbling incoherently, until I smeared the unguent onto the place above where its eyes were located. It immediately stopped weakly struggling, froze, and began looking around in confusion.

“Regular confusion… or severe confusion?” I asked, snorting with laughter.

“Where am I?” it asked, the first understandable words it had said since we’d brought it out of the town hours ago. Then, in a tone of increasing fear, “Where am I? I don’t remember this place… what happened to me?”

“Just outside the town of Glumpdumpkin, dear,” Cinzy said from the front door. “I’ll take it from here.”

She gave me a tired smile.

“Thank you,” I told her.

“Just let me know when you’re going to have confused and scared individuals to calm down next time,” she said, and gave me a wink. Then she guided the walking, talking tree out the door and showed him where his old home was, calmly explaining that we were on the case and that it was only a matter of time before we had the town healed up.

I appreciated her optimism. There was not nearly as much confidence stored up inside me to project that kind of reassurance.

In order to gain more skill levels, I would need to level up and get skill points, or do the same thing constantly and hope for a level up in what I was doing. If I’d stayed in Slinktrickle, I had no doubt I would eventually end up with levels in water aspect and fairy aspect Cure generation skills. If we were here long enough, I could ask to get the same type of Nakamamon again and again, and see if that worked.

I still needed 5 successes the natural way to make sure this worked, and that meant 15 skill levels to complete it comfortably. Well, I was, after all, a Novice at this, trying to be a full-on surgeon when I should be patching scrapes, burns, and stitching wounds closed at a real doctor’s side.

I had magic on my side, thankfully, because 15 relevant levels weren’t going to come quickly.

Vellenia gave me a massage of the shoulders and told me I should give myself some grace. She was right; I was new to this. A few months was a drop in the bucket compared with most doctors.

Our third test was initially the most difficult. I asked Larelle and the Guardians to try to get one of the constant workers out of town and into my lab, where I could try to treat them as I’d already done.

First of all, simply getting one to the lab for treatment was much harder than anyone anticipated. Drat had the Prismatic Apparel, so only Larelle was immune to the effect of being in town. The others only had Divine Resistance at level 2 or 3, which wasn’t enough for longer stays trying to wrestle a supernaturally strong individual out of town.

So I had to head in, and try to treat them there.

The manic workers were rare: we only found about a dozen in total working and working and working. They were supernaturally protected from starvation; they didn’t eat. They were supernaturally protected from exhaustion; they didn’t sleep. They were also supernaturally protected from the the ravages of their jobs; they didn’t get callouses, rope burns, or the normal bumps, bruises or injuries that come from doing manual labor. Somehow, they didn’t run out of raw materials either; one of them had been making salads and pasta dishes for weeks now, and we’d been grabbing these until he threatened to get us unless he was paid.

Also, once Larelle started trying to get in their way to make them give up baking bread 24/7, she found them to be supernaturally strong. The baker woman was only about two feet tall, a round ball of a creature with stubby arms and legs, but she threw Larelle aside like she weighed no more than a loaf of sourdough. And continued on her way back to the kitchen like nothing strange had happened.

It was an odd situation, to say the least. Before we tried it, we were already ready to give up the game and let them continue indefinitely.

I decided that wouldn’t do, though. The baker always baked. The chef always prepped and cooked and plated meals, which somehow simply vanished when he filled up the kitchen with uncountable plates. They weren’t going anywhere, except out to the market to get more materials for their trades. I could study them so long as I took care not to get in their way.

It is folly to do this, Larelle told me, in that same psychic speech directly into my head.

“Not folly,” I told her.

They will be fine until the broken god has been repaired.

“I know, but…” The Hippocratic Oath wasn’t exactly a thing for me. It wasn’t a requirement for me to be a Healer. It was, however, a good way of doing things. Yes, I’d turned away people who were doing others harm. These were victims, not perpetrators, and they deserved help if I could supply it. Also, I might learn more about the god when the time finally arrived for me to handle it. After all, the divine underwear and shirts and socks and pants might instead be these poor workers doing their Red Shoes dance, a dance they couldn’t break free from. I hoped that by healing them, I’d get the god out in the open, then heal him next.

It didn’t work, but a guy can dream.

So the first thing I did was try the easy route, and smear their heads with my new unguent, then let them Vape-o-Rub themselves out of their fugue states.

The unguent wasn’t the way to do it. Sadly, these ones weren’t suffering from severe confusion.

So I watched the baker lady for most of a full day, using Diagnosis to learn that she was indeed suffering from a divine ailment. The Diagnosis check was done at Extreme difficulty as well, and since I didn’t have Fire Aspect Nakamamon as a type I knew well, I was back to using Affinity and Diagnosis.

And that meant spending Tokens.

It took another 7 Tokens to deal with the Diagnosis.

I went with the divine diagnosis first, praying for answers and wafting the censor around the baker lady as she baked. When the incense smoke stuck around her, I knew I was right. Still, I needed to spend the Tokens to know exactly what it was and how I could help.

The result was called Labor Mania.

This could also be called workaholism, though my colleague doesn’t want to use it because it sounds like it doesn’t take the condition seriously.

Are we doing this again? Call it workaholism if you like.

Oh, we are doing this, because you entered the name and there’s no edit function, and secondly because you are nothing but a wet blanket. The soppingest, wettest, drippingest blanket there is.

I am not. These are supposed to be official write ups to help future generations. And I refused to name it Worksy til you Dropsy.

Well, whose fault is it that we got off track, you moist towelette? If you chose not to fight with me, these wouldn’t become messes of useless text, now would they? If only you had agreed with me and put in an edit function—

Urgh. Those suffering from Labor Mania may exhibit physical symptoms of overwork, and require physical remedies as well. If they do, this is a mental condition and they can be restrained if you are ready with a mental remedy. If they do not, it is a divine condition, and you should not under any circumstances attempt to confine the subject physically. The divinity will lend them holy strength in order to throw you off and continue about their work.

Excellent work, you soaked dishrag, you managed—

Write up over.

This was getting weird. First the other write up, and now this. These system messages had all been made by someone, and while it wasn’t at all my business to figure out who, or what it meant, it sure was tempting.

I had a lot of tasks in front of me, and a whole bunch of relationship entanglements besides.

With all that in mind, I got to work attempting a divine remedy.

I went with olive oil, because it was sacred and considered holy by many. Next came bamboo, which was also considered sacred for East Asians. The resilience and humility associations fit here, as far as I was concerned. Resilience for working for days without a rest, into weeks… and now months. Sage… halo sage here, a variation from this world with a white rim around the edge of the fuzzy and aromatic leaves. Lastly, I added lotus blossoms.

I know. My garden was so, so weird looking. Once I got the dried lotus petals out, I had to tend them using Verdant Rejuvenation. The strangest thing was seeing lotuses bloom over the course of a single day. They’re one of the biggest flowers, with massive leaves resembling lily pads. Following that, the flowers themselves can rise up on tall stalks, really huge. I was forced to dig tiny ponds for them, and water them throughout the day in order to get them, but you’d typically see these things in Asia, on small lakes or ponds, rising six feet in the air with their enormous leaves. Then the flowers themselves would seem to be as big as your head.

I really loved the way they appeared to glow from within, with bright yellow in the center and petals that were white at the bottom, fading to bright magenta at the tip. It was easy to see why people had lanterns that looked exactly like these things.

On the second day I had a crop of lotuses, halo sage, bamboo, and I used the olive oil given to me by HQ. After meeting with Cinzy to put in a request with Wayne to requisition more oil, Vellenia and I went into the lab and got our elixir on.

I wanted to go with an elixir because they were oil based, but generally more difficult because they took longer. The recipe I had on hand was full of temperature changes, stirring changes, removing the frothy scum that came to the top, and mana infusion over the course of some six hours. It wasn’t a full-fledged cure like we’d made for the gods, but it was close.

I thought we’d failed at the outset. Adding the ground bamboo leaves to the olive oil and infusing it with mana took a long time, and created a sticky black sludge that seemed unworkable.

Vellenia and Alan checked the notes we had for this concoction.

“It says it’s correct,” she said, and turned to me with her perfect. “‘Mixture will be like molasses’ is what’s written here. Does molasses look like unholy slime?”

I had to grin. “It does.”

“Does molasses smell like an abomination?”

“Not… really.”

She nodded ruefully. “We may have failed after all.”

I continued to feed the unholy concoction mana and requested more instructions as they were written. Once we added the boiled halo sage in, the stench of evil left it, and over time the clinging black sludge evened out into more of a sauce consistency. Best of all, the gleaming black void coloration began to shift.

Afterwards came the sacred lotus petals. Those went in whole, and had to dissolve individually before adding the next. Each one pushed back the darkness just a bit more.

With drips of mana applied to each lotus petal, a burst of music slammed into being, like a gigantic pipe organ in a cathedral. The type of sound you feel reverberating in your soul. I knew we were on the right track then. Nice and distracting, the type of thing you need when attempting to put together a magical elixir over the course of hours with precise instructions. Further lotus petals hit with other sounds reminiscent of worship: chanting and the strike of wood on wood, a chorus of singing, and wailing in a language that sounded like Arabic.

The coloration began changing with each explosion of holy sound, but like oil and water. The black was shoved back by a pure, colorless clarity, until I could see the bottom of the cauldron.

It was at the very last lotus petal that the UI message for the proficiency check burst into my field of vision.

Treatment check (elixirs/medium): You have the Treatment (elixirs) skill at level 3, Cure (medium) at level 4, while Affinity is at level 6. This check is Very Difficult, requiring 7 successes. Would you like to spend 3 Tokens* for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 6 Affinity and 7 Free Tokens.

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

As it happened, I did not. With 16 levels, 7 successes was a serious long shot, but theoretically within reach.

“Do you have any Affinity Tokens?” I asked Vellenia, furiously concentrating on adding just the right amount of mana to the last lotus petal. It hit the water and a deep thrumming sound went all throughout my body. The whole mixture quivered, and the countdown timer for me to make the check was faster than I’d ever seen before.

She spent 6 Tokens to lower my difficulty by 2, and I told the UI to make the check.

This is Christopher finally feeling like he knows what he’s doing.

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