Divinity Rescue Corps
112- Inextricably Bound

Making love to Regina had brought a certain warmth with it. I basked in this lovely feeling, or just the post-coital bliss. Between pleasing another and being pleased, I felt complete. Her fingers threaded into mine, and we lay on the grass in the nude, snuggled up against one another. I felt her periodically turn to regard me with warmth and affection.

Regina and I, in the sun, watching clouds inch their way across a blue sky periodically shimmering with other colors. The only sound was the rustle of the Slumbershrooms wanting to get back to their places in the sun.

There wasn’t anything else. Sun in the sky? Birds flying high?

Yeah. It was that good.

“Hey, Fletcher,” she said eventually.

“Hey, Regina,” I said.

She snorted. “How long do you think we have left at this place?”

“Dunno… you’re concerned about the R&R they owe us for going over the two month mark?”

“A little,” she admitted. “I’m actually more concerned about being apart from you. If they give us more than two weeks stateside…” She trailed off.

“I’ll miss you too.”

“I don’t think ‘miss’ is the right word for it,” she said. “It’s easy and natural and good.”

“What is?”

“Being around you. Being with you. Having the other girls want you, and being the perv I know I am.”

“You are a perv,” I said.

“You’re way more of a perv than I am,” she said, giggling. “You’re insatiable.”

Somebody had given me literal sex powers. Though to be honest, I was trying to make up for never having had a girlfriend in high school, never being able to use all the hormones I had coursing through me.

But I did like Regina. We had discussed movies, and she was into Star Wars, amazingly. She preferred the new TV show stuff and the newest trilogy, which I couldn’t really agree with, but I didn’t meet a lot of vocal Star Wars fans these days.

She liked being out in and among nature over being in a crowded city. As did I. She liked a more relaxed day over a rigidly defined day overstuffed with things to do. Me too. And we both enjoyed petting adorable fuzzy companions, like Tweedle Dee.

Congratulations! You have joined in the flesh with Regina Hampstead. Your relationship has increased to Devotees.

Partners devoted to one another are something special to behold. Friends, family and even bystanders will remark upon how good they look as a couple, how natural.

This is the fifth level on the Relationship track, and brings with it the first tangible system benefits.

*You lose Relationship points with Regina more slowly.

*You gain a Meld ability.

Regina might not have said the words out loud, but I understood what she had meant when she held herself back. Her affection for me had grown into a force of its own. I mean, to be fair, my affection for her was equally as strong.

As for the new thing we’d gotten, I had a look over it.

Meld Ability: A powerful fusion of class abilities, this will replace your current ability shared with Regina Hampstead, Beast Talker.

Choose from among the Ranger abilities:

*Wilderness and Herb Lore

*Movement abilities

*Archery abilities

*Dual Wielding abilities

*Beastmastery abilities

Herb lore was already something I couldn’t do on my own. Movement seemed tempting, as we were doing a lot of traveling between assignments. However, I had Golightly from the God of Apparel, and nothing was going to beat magical footwear. Both combat abilities were right out. I didn’t want to fight, I wanted to heal.

It was possible my healing abilities could work in tandem with, say, the archery abilities. In that case, I would be firing healing arrows. Although it sounded cool, I didn’t think it would be anywhere near as cool as convincing a metal and earth dragon not to eat me or Cinzy’s brother.

In the end, I decided to stick with the Beastmastery stuff.

Your abilities are as such:

Hard at Work (Healer/Pleasure Seeker)

Healer’s Resistance (Healer)

Healer’s Endurance (Healer)

Healer’s Breath (Healer)

Verdant Rejuvenation (Healer)

Blissense (Pleasure Seeker)

Post-Sharing Clarity (Pleasure Seeker)

Drive In Deeper (Pleasure Seeker)

Please choose an ability to meld with Beastmastery.

Now, I had rarely suffered from a glut of choices like this. In general my situation didn’t allow me too many options. When I’d chosen my class, the choice was a simple one: a way to heal my mother, to make the world a better place through the elimination of pain. A force for good.

Now though… I had no idea what would help me. And my anxious mind tried to imagine what it was that I’d be getting if and when I ended up melding these two powers.

None of the others had a meld ability, so far as I knew. I’d seen nothing about this when I looked through the handbook at the start. Wild speculation was fruitless… pair Beastmastery with Blissense and… what? No amount of wondering about it would help.

In the end I decided using the best metric: the most useful ability. Healer’s Resistance and Endurance had helped, for sure. They were useful in dealing with this divine god sickness job I had. Healer’s Breath was of course a game changer. I didn’t need to put together complicated salves, potions and unguents when I could just exhale healing energy into people. Verdant Rejuvenation meant I would always have a good stock of healing herbs and flowers.

Among my Pleasure Seeker abilities (not sure I wanted to seek pleasure with beasts that I mastered but I wasn’t about to turned options away completely) I didn’t see anything that immediately screamed ‘choose me!’ Although Post-Sharing Clarity and Drive In Deeper had been a little helpful, and Blissense had paved the way for me to give Cinzy what she most desired. But it wasn’t like sensing what Nakamamon wanted most was going to prove very useful.

It wasn’t possible to choose without more information… which Regina would have. She’d get a Meld Ability too, so maybe hers would help inform me on my choices.

Beside me, Regina was also gasping in wonder.

“What…” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry, “what did you get?”

“It’s something called a meld ability,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out which one I should pick. You have resistance to infection, endurance abilities, I guess for working through the night…”

“That’s right.”

“The other one is for the healing breath, I think. It’s called Treatment, and then this one is growing and maintaining ingredients.”

“Healer’s Breath is for treating the sick. That’s what I used on Dee when he touched the holy underwear.”

She chuckled at that. Tweedle Dee must have shrugged off the effects of the Slumbershrooms because he perked up, yipped, and came bounding over through the tall grass towards us. I grinned, watching his fuzzy and flower-covered form appear with each jump, eager eyes fixed on us, and disappear back into the thigh high grasses.

“And a job class power?” she asked. “What does that mean?”

“It’s called Hard at Work, and it doubles Token use when I do the really difficult checks.”

She accepted a fluffy, many-petaled furball to the face, which bowled her over. Laughing, she gave Dee some belly rubs and soon had a stick to play fetch with him.

“Did you say it doubles Token use?” she asked, astonishment clear in her voice.

“Only on class-dependent checks,” I told her, nodding. “The second level made it easier to assist others with their checks, and the third level gave me a free retry instead of spending a Token.”

“Holy crapamoley!” She shouted, then accepted another flying furball to the face. Dee tackled her and knocked her over yet again.

“You mean I could have double Tokens when sneaking, tracking, trapping, and foraging? That’s dope as hecky Becky.”

She sounded like such a dork, but I didn’t mind. Things sounding cool or awesome didn’t really vibe with this incredible, vast, and wondrous place, where you could bond a snake made out of air, and fly on it, or a fox with flowers in its ears and tails.

“Oh em gee this is the coolest,” she said. “I decided to go with the beast powers for this meld thing, and it gave me the ability to befriend Nakamamon, like bonding them but without the power sharing. Oh this will be so fracking cool. I want a whole menagerie! I want a big lumbering sleepy boy like Isabelle has, and a sneaky snek boy like Tara has, and a sharp quilly boy, I guess also like Isabelle… and, and…” She went on to describe how she wanted fairies and fire ones and more plant ones and water ones and earth ones, maybe a gemstone one like Trent, and a floppy hoppy boy with silky ears, and… all of them, essentially. She wanted all the pets.

The downside to this was that her Herb Lore ability had been replaced by the new one. That was not a welcome sign. Although more abilities meant possibly losing track of all the things I could do, more was generally better.

My teacher back at HQ, Allie, had given me the correct knowledge about abilities. If they weren’t passed on directly from a god, I maxed out at five.

I still had way more than other people, with five from my two classes. On top of that, I had the five passed to me by my partners. And to top all that off, there was still the matter of Vellenia, who had given me water breathing and the power to dazzle the enemy. Most everyone would have five, seven if their bonds with their Nakamamon were like mine. Some weren’t, and would have deepened the bond with their bond mate. A stronger bond meant stronger powers.

So while most people had seven abilities, eight max, I had seventeen. Eighteen if you included the one from the Lovers.

For the time being, all was the feel of Regina’s skin on mine, the sticky feeling of her juices coating me until we had a dip in the nearby stream, and then the feel of her body in my hands once again in the midst of our bath.

“I can’t believe you made me squirt,” she hissed.

I looked around, wondering why she was whispering. Luckily, Blissense hadn’t given me the notification that someone’s thoughts were fixed on me. So Drat wasn’t anywhere nearby.

“Is that…”

“That’s never happened to me before!” she insisted. “You’re something else, you know that? You’d better not leave me for Miss Perfect Face.”

“Who? Cinzy?”

“The fact that you know exactly who I’m talking about is a bad sign,” she said. “And you’d better not leave me for Miss Perfect Butt.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” I said.

“It’s Tara,” she said. “I was talking about Tara.”

“I know who you were talking about,” I said. “I just don’t get why. We just had sex and I just spent skill points to make you feel like you’ve never felt in your life.”

Her eyes flew open. “You… you did? Well sheep dip, now I can’t even use the Miss Perfect Girlfriend line I was preparing.”

I took her by the hips and drew her close. I then began peppering her cute face with kisses. “You don’t have to worry…” Kiss. “I’m desperate to get all up in your business at all times.” Kiss and kiss and kiss. “I’m not going to leave you for Ivy and Isabelle. I’m not going to leave you for Tara.” Several kisses. Regina got into this and pressed herself against me. “I’m not going to leave you for Cinzy, or even Fairy Poppins if she somehow grows to human size and demands to have my—”

I froze. Holy shirt.

“That can’t be it.”

Tweedle Dee reappeared and yipped several times at the bank, then caught sight of his tails and began running in circles, trying to catch his tail. I watched him go and go, mind whirling.

“What? Fairy Poppins wants you?”

“That’s… not it… right? Just tell me that’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous,” she said. “Poppins watched you having sex. She reported back to Cinzy. Don’t forget she stuck with us instead of going with Cinzy when she had her freak out and left.”

“No… she clearly… she wanted to keep Cinzy away from me, because… I’m a womanizing, insatiable perv.”

Tweedle Dee lost interest in his tail when he spotted a butterfly, and began yipping and hopping around after it.

“You are an insatiable perv, but not a womanizer,” Regina said, slowly rubbing her nipples back and forth across my chest.

“But there’s…” It wasn’t possible, was it?

“Just admit it,” Regina said, “she wants you, and that’s that. Chrysta wants you…” I hoped she missed the way I twitched. She didn’t know, did she? But she went on. “Larelle wants you. She’s a big old muscle mommy who needs some of that good dick.”

Okay that clearly wasn’t right. Larelle…  okay, if we were being perfectly honest, Larelle had been willing to throw her clothes off with no provocation when she’d seen Tara do it. She might be just as free about sex as Regina.

“So why wouldn’t Fairy Poppins want you?”

“There’s… we’re… there’s no way.”

She drew me in close and kissed me. “Oh, sweetie,” she said, “as if wanting what you can’t have has ever stopped anyone. I can confidently say it never once stopped me, back when I liked boy bands at the tender age of way too young to legally mention in a book.” She shuddered.

Young people have hormones. This is a fact.

Dee had returned, yipping and yipping.

“You don’t have to worry about it,” she told me. At my visible confusion, she went on. “She’ll get over you. She’ll find someone who’s compatible.”

I blinked several times. That didn’t sound very Fairy Poppins.

“Now… I’d go for round two with you, but my poor little pussy is telling me I’ll die if you do anything like that to me again. Since I don’t want to die, I’m going to play with Dee.”

She played fetch with Dee after getting dressed again. Now that the Fairy Poppins issue had been raised, I had a lot to think about. She’d come to the forefront of my attention, but there was Chrysta to think about, there was Shakindria to think about, Jacoby to think about, Vellenia to think about.

It sure would be nice if attention-grabbing problems came one at a time.

I thought we could confidently shelve Fairy Poppins and Jacoby. The expedition leader out looking for Blake’s second in command wanted what she wanted, and when the time came, I could give her that. As for Fairy Poppins, I could let her stew. She hadn’t been kind to Cinzy and didn’t deserve me spending time, effort, or skill points on her. Finally, on the Chrysta front, she didn’t expect me to spend time, effort or skill points to sexually satisfy her. All the more reason for me to spend them preparing to help her out.

The last thing was something I could take care of right now, but was possibly the most vexing. The Meld Ability situation was going to replace one of my abilities. The one I wanted to keep was probably going to be the one to get the axe. Beast Talker. The question now was whether to keep it and grab an ability from Regina I had basically no interest in, or replace it and hope it was better. To be fair, Beast Talker had been a huge improvement over Wild Lore. There was a good chance the replacement would be a significant step up.

I was quietly despairing that if I chose Beastmastery, it would turn out the same as Regina’s new ability. I did want pets, but now that I had this Shakindria situation in front of my face, I didn’t want pets. The ability to keep big dangerous Nakamamon from killing me, yes. The ability to be a Divney Princess, no.

It was that good for a time, anyway.

I remembered the reason I was here, and what I needed to ask her.

“Okay,” I told her. “Before I choose my own, I need to ask your opinion on something.”

I gave her the extended version of the situation with Shakindria.

“I don’t know…” she said.

“I don’t really want to leave her behind, not if she’s going to help us in a way no one else can.”

“She’s not doing it out of the goodness of her heart,” Regina said. “She wants you to dump Vellenia.”

“That’s… not possible,” I said, dumbstruck.

“I heard that someone dismissed their bond mate and got a different one,” she said, then seemed to realize what she’d said. Her eyes shot wide open. “But you’re not going to do that.”

“Of course I’m not. I didn’t even know it was possible, and Vellenia is amazing.”

“Right. So forget I said anything.”

“I will.” I would try.

This is Christopher wondering if there’s a solution.

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