Divinity Rescue Corps
106- Take the Shot

I sat back and felt the blades of grass tickling the back of my neck, and my forearms. You know how often you touch grass? I can tell you, in my time before the other world, those moments of grass in my hands were few and far between. I know that because it felt so good, filled me with such relief, that I seriously considered stripping my shirt off and just laying there, staring at the clouds as they went by.

Congratulations! You have crafted an elixir.

We’d been outside, working on this elixir for a good half a day, and I was grateful, delighted, and also pooped. Durability gave me peak human level stamina, but doing a job for a good six hours without a rest, concentrating the entire time, no breaks, was apparently the limit.

Still, I laughed and wrestled Vellenia when she crashed into me, also laughing. We kissed several times and rolled around on the grass, all the tension drained away.

We had enough elixir, most likely, for all dozen of the afflicted residents. Assuming we could get them to drink this mixture, they would be cured… of something that wasn’t truly a problem for them.

We next had to weigh the pros and cons of attempting this.

Pro: we would know if these people were in fact charged with the power of the god and, like the holy underwear in Vellenia’s village.

That should’ve been all it took, but the initial con was also a strong one.

Con: Larelle could get seriously injured by a creature with divine strength while attempting to administer this treatment. She didn’t have the Administer Cure skill, I did. I could just see a marshmallow fluffball creature pitching me through the ceiling of her house because I tried to play airplane with her and get her to open wide. The check difficulty for this was going to be through the roof. Ugh.

Con: this Nakamamon wasn’t actually being physically harmed by their ordeal, and bringing them out of this state was adding to the refugee crisis Trent couldn’t keep up with. He had done a heroic job thus far trying to keep up with demand for houses, expanding drainage, and getting fresh water to where it needed to be. He could build a well, but it took him a solid several days of repeatedly exhausting his mana reserves. In the meantime more and more people showed up at the town’s gates hoping to join the sleeping god’s cult of sleepy sleepers.

But the pro of gaining knowledge and potentially dealing with the god situation meant going ahead with this. If it worked, we had enough elixir to handle the remainder of the busy bees. If it didn’t, we could leave the rest to their seemingly painless fate until we solved the situation completely.

I was too exhausted and stressed over this to think logically. After sleep, and waking up with Vellenia draped over me, she helped me to remember that we could inject the elixir into our worker bee and treat her that way.

Duh. We had a good laugh over it. Although we might have really enjoyed seeing Larelle get body slammed by a two foot marshmallow painted sky blue, the danger to Larelle (or myself) would’ve been very real.

Look, you work a full shift with no breaks or meals, steadily draining your mana supply with an effort of concentration you can’t even comprehend, and then come back to me and tell me you would be immune to the occasional brain fart.

Armed with the knowledge and slightly embarrassed about not remembering the injection thing, we marched forth into town, past where Larelle had arranged the people into unconscious rows by the sides of buildings, and to the bakery in question.

The weather was again delightful. I was glad the god of weather wasn’t malfunctioning. I can imagine that brewing up a cure for that would be pretty difficult, what with the constant downpours and cyclones and rising floodwaters. Instead we had singing bird Nakamamon, chirping bug Nakamamon, and a bright sun shining down upon us.

So it was that we found her happily baking—whistling as she worked, no less—after filling the syringe and navigating the streets.

One of the things Trent’s house now had, it should be noted, was a scale map of the entire town. It was a good twelve feet long and three feet wide, but that’s neither here nor there. It was to scale. He had recreated all the houses out of stone, and some of them out of crystals he’d found while bringing up houses or digging wells. Street names were etched into the ground, and pebbles now stood for sleeping individuals we’d painstakingly relocated out of the way. So we could plan our approach and know exactly where we were going without having to make a check to shrug off the divine influence.

It didn’t take long to find her, and like before she was oblivious to our presence. Unless we touched one of her expertly-crafted rolls, cakes, cookies, or other baked delights, she didn’t acknowledge us in the slightest. If we paid for what we took, we would hear a chipper “Thank you, dearies!”   It didn’t matter if she was in the other room rolling out dough or singing to herself, the moment we touched the goods, she began to react.

It was simplest to just walk in the bakery and inject her.

Simple doesn’t mean easy, Larelle rumbled in my mind, a sullen complaint. This is a security matter and I take your security very seriously.

“Thanks, I guess,” I said. I was pretty confident this couldn’t go wrong, at first, until she described the baker woman turning and splattering me all over the walls of the bakery the moment I tried to stick her with the needle.

She determined to load up the syringe into a specially-crafted blowgun. I would attempt the first shot, I argued, because I had the Administer skill and she didn’t. After an hour of blowgun target practice outside, I was reasonably confident I could hit a two foot spherical target from a distance of ten feet.

I was also winded; who knew firing a blowgun over and over again could take it out of you like this? I mean, with the syringe the size it was, there was absolutely no way I’d do this at all without Physicality and Durability being as high as they were. I’d been making Durability checks at the end there, with increasing difficulties. She’d filled the syringes with water, but later she had Trent slot stone into the glass tube, after he’d crafted it with his Sorcerer powers. The extra weight helped—with heavy air quotes on the word ’helped’—to get me ready for the actual shot to come.

I was a pretty decent shot, though, which was good. I could hit near the center of the target from ten feet, and hit the target ten times out of ten from fifteen feet, though my placement was erratic.

Finally set, we marched into town, blowgun in hand, with Larelle holding the case containing all dozen syringes. By now it was getting toward lunch, so we stopped at the bakery, paid with coin, and I helped myself to a jam-filled pastry.

Indecision and trepidation were creeping up on me through the walk and then as I chewed the flaky, buttery pastry. This was the first time I’d be attacking a Nakamamon. It wasn’t an attack, really, since the elixir was in the syringe. Still, I hadn’t shot at anyone here. I was a healer; you know, stirring things, growing herbs and flowers, burning myself on the Magmamander or the adjustable tray we used to hold the cauldron when it needed moving up or down. I took damage, sure, but it was all in service of the patients. In one case, with them literally unraveling before my eyes, I had to push through divine damage and administer a cure.

But I’d never shot someone. Until you do, there’s a real sense of uncertainty for most non-psychopaths. And this goes double for targets who are minding their own business. I felt a hot rock settle in the pit of my stomach, weighing me down, telling me this wasn’t good. My conscious mind fought back; I wasn’t hurting her. This was to help her.

Yet, she would continue doing what she was doing without harm coming to her. I could enjoy donuts and cakes, so long as we coughed up the coins.

In the end, I took the shot. I wasn’t in love with the idea of doing it, but it needed to be done. For intelligence gathering purposes, and not so we could plunder all her baked goods without paying.

Honest.

I lined up the shot just outside the room where she was happily rolling dough. Larelle wouldn’t help me get closer, because she was being a butt. From here it was a good twelve feet. I could make it.

The rich smells of butter and baked bread wafted out at me. Why hadn’t we chosen one of the other workers? It was because I wanted jam pastry before we did this heinous act. But we could have just gotten a pastry and moved on.

Well, I told myself that if we cured her, I’d order Trent to set her up a bakery just outside our camp and supply her with everything she needed. Larelle could just…

What was I doing?

I took a deep breath, a must for any blowgun attack, and steadied myself. My heart was pounding, and my anxious mind filled with awful scenarios of this adorable little Nakamamon turning into a lightning fast killing machine, filled with divine energy and divine wrath. I could see her rolling over here and springing off her tiny little feet, rocketing upwards to slam one teensy fist into my jaw, before rebounding off the wall and striking Larelle from behind.

Instead, she continued to work as I counted between heartbeats, and took the shot.

Administer cure check:You have the Administer Cure skill at level 8, and Physicality is at level 5. Other applicable skills include Fairy aspect Nakamamon, which is unranked. This check is Very Difficult, requiring 5 successes. Would you like to spend 2 Tokens* for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 5 Physicality and 7 Free Tokens.

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

I let it go by itself, not expecting to get 5 successes out of 13 levels. I was right, and only scored 3 successes, fewer than I thought. The timer to confirm Token spending on my free retry appeared as well, and wound down faster than any other timer I’d seen yet. In the millisecond that followed, I confirmed that Yes, I wanted to spend the Tokens.

All this seemed to happen in a heartbeat. The system had a way of slowing down time so that the time between me blowing out the held breath to propel the dart and me spending Tokens after my retry were half a moment apart. The dart hadn’t even left the blowgun when the system check happened, the failure was registered, and the new timer counted down.

I was once again astonished by the system itself, but only a brief moment. The dart hit her center mass, and the clear liquid gave out a brief holy sound, that of a choir all raising their voices in a single harmonious note at once.

The small, ball-shaped Nakamamon turned to me, looking just as betrayed as she ought to have, and took a single righteous step forward with eyes blazing white, before slumping down on her face. I imagined a comical fart sound as the tiny ball of sky blue just went splat and stopped moving.

“It worked,” I muttered, just as Larelle spoke those same words into my mind.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she moved me aside with her gigantic muscles, darted into the bakery, and carried the baker off like a football under one arm. She bounded off out of town, while I breathed a sigh of relief, took another pastry, then reconsidered.

I dropped a coin to pay for it.

The baker wasn’t the key to finding the divine pieces of the god malfunctioning in town. It wasn’t too surprising, though it was disappointing. As for the baker herself, I made good on my promise to myself, set Trent to the task of creating a bakery in the town’s outskirts, and set Larelle to the task of grabbing all the bakery equipment necessary to run the thing.

The poor little puffball had apparently known, the whole time, that she’d been doing nothing but baking. She hadn’t been able to stop herself, but instead just fuzzed out of consciousness from time to time. In her waking hours she watched herself go in amazement, but grew tired of this. She hadn’t been able to let us help her, but she was very thankful afterwards.

This led to us stalking and then darting eleven others who were working without pause. If they could see and understand what they were doing, and weren’t in a mind-controlled state, they needed the relief and rest of being given the elixir.

They would need the same elixir to be made for them periodically, so the ingredients we’d used, the halo sage, the olive oil, the bamboo and the lotus petals, all went into the pile of things to grow daily with Verdant Rejuvenation.

So the work of finding the pieces of divinity fell to Drat.

Drat didn’t waste much time in finding bits of a god. He found the first one just two days after we had cleansed and set free the God of Secret Spaces. In the meantime, though, we had plenty of work to do.

That afternoon I headed in to check on Chrysta. I hadn’t had the opportunity to really understand what my Qualities could do, and it was time. She had time to rest, though she never used it. Ghosts apparently didn’t need to sleep. I took her away from where Isabelle and Ivy were now fending off the trickle of Nakamamon trying to get into the town.

“There is a problem,” she said.

One of many, I thought.

“A slight problem, but a problem regardless.” She motioned behind her, to where Isabelle’s Nakamamon companion lay comatose in the street.

“Muppin!” I said. “Shift.”

“The town itself has a pull on us that grows stronger the longer we are in proximity. I am not immune. I have informed the other team members that they should hold tight to their bond mates, as should you.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” I said. “Did the system require you to make a check?”

I really wanted the answer to be no, but knew it was yes.

She nodded. “Your Divine Resistance skill works in concert with Durability… though I am certain the difficulty will increase as time goes on. Unfortunately my Guardian abilities do not yet cover divine influence.”

I nodded.

“Does Isabelle know?”

She nodded. “She was upset, but is certain you will save her bond mate.”

Yep. I could do that. I mean, I had to do that. I didn’t love the extra added pressure of having Isabelle pushing me to get this over and done, but her being upset was totally understandable.

“What has brought you?” She asked. “This one hopes it is better than my gloomy news.”

“I have a new ability to try out,” I told her. “If you’re still interested in attempting to make physical contact.”

Chrysta floated beside me, characteristically quiet.

“I still don’t know how much it will take, so it may be a few more levels before I’m no longer taking damage.”

Still, she said nothing. More to the point, she was staring at the ground. Now, I was used to the idea that she wasn’t talkative, but she’d been very pleased with our first sweep of Glumpdumpkin, and how we had been able to interact physically. It eventually let to me taking damage, but the thrill of success, even partial success, had been worth it. I assumed she’d jump for joy at the chance to try it again.

“Is something wrong?”

The look Chrysta gave me was so naked, so vulnerable, it broke my heart a little. I would soon learn that as a ghost, she wasn’t capable of tears.

“Fletcher,” she said, “I am touched. Truly, you have ignited something in me I thought was gone forever.”

This is Christopher wondering if he’s about to have sex with a ghost.