Divinity Rescue Corps
119- Arcane Alchemy

There’s a curious time-dilation sensation that happens when you’re leveling up. I’m sure the two nerds who created the system, whoever they were, worked some kind of magic into these complicated times when a lot is coming at you all at once.

The flow of people out of town had slowed, the flow of people coming to me for doses of my ability had slowed. I cleared out the two dozen requests in a handful of seconds and returned my focus to the task at hand: figuring out all that had changed.

I thought I had most of it pretty well covered, though I was still devastated at the loss of Hard At Work. The monsters who created this system were bad, bad people for taking that away. I waggled a mental finger at them in reproach.

Jerks.

I got out of the UI’s expansive system, but not before noting that Alan’s health was getting dangerously low. Muppin remained comatose in the town, since we didn’t have enough people to lift a multiple ton creature out of the affected area. Isabelle had been an absolute trooper for keeping on even despite Muppin being right there for her to see day in and day out. It wasn’t easy for her to handle. She deserved an award for pushing through the way she had.

“Whew,” I said, and got to work doing the next batch of potions as treatments for the hundreds and hundreds of townsfolk being ferried out of the town.

There’s something happening, Shakindria told me mentally. Turning and squinting toward the town, I thought I could see her floating above the bucket line of people. But too many people were passing in front of me, passing me a punch bowl full of distilled blue crocuses for me to tell. They stood watching me  as I placed them into the huge cauldron.

What’s that? I asked, through my new psychic ability linked directly to her, but I was also beginning to feel it now that I was not so closely focused on the UI.

The ‘it’ in question was a rising level of ambient divine energy. Hours had passed before I hit level 25, morning giving way to afternoon. The background hum that hit my third eye that I usually ignored had ramped up a level. Normally, that background radiation of divine power was easy to ignore; like the drone of a far off freeway, you don’t even think about all the traffic that passes by, until the horns start blaring or all the cars start going by your house at faster speeds. This was like that. The hum was humming along louder now, except it was magical in nature, so we ‘heard’ it through our Mana Affinity skill and Affinity attribute.

Does this mean it’s working? Shakindria asked.

It probably meant that, and I let her know as I went about refilling the potion vat and brewing up the next five hundred or so doses. The potions check came again soon enough, and I was annoyed to discover I hadn’t leveled up my skill in Potions or Medium cures at all.

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

Total Tokens: 9 Ingenuity and 7 Free Tokens.

I despaired that the asterisk and the note that this applied to Hard At Work was missing. The number of required Tokens was a whole different animal than before. The saving grace was that hitting level 25 automatically refreshed all my Tokens, so I went from no Ingenuity and a single Free Token to 9 and 7.

On the other hand… the difficulty had dropped by one, and I’d also gained a level of the Treatments skill by making literally hundreds of doses of the same potion. Nice! I had 18 attribute and skill levels, which still didn’t feel like enough, and no more free retry on top of that. On the other hand, I had hit 50% success rate once or twice in the past. Did I chance it? It would cost me a Token to get to the check again.

I decided to go for it. I pressed No, I didn’t want to go for the auto success.

You have scored 8 successes, which is a failure. Would you like to spend 1 Token to retry? Y/N

I mentally commanded Yes, I would like to retry, as the clock for making the decision raced by and I began to note the slightest hint of a burning smell coming from my vat of confusion treatment potion. This time, I paid the 9 Tokens for the automatic success, and finished off adding the mana required.

Success! You have crafted a magical treatment for a mental ailment!

One weak smile and about a hundred mental assents to give people my Healer’s Resistance later, I had another several punch bowls full of the potion off the fire, poured out and left to cool. Another ten minutes and infinity mental presses of the Yes button later, the strangest thing happened: I leveled up again.

Congratulations! You have reached level 26.

“Holy…” I muttered, and looked toward the town. The holy presence was indeed strengthening. I was pretty sure all this concentrated effort by us, by the townsfolk, and by the refugee camp occupants was working. It wasn’t done, not even close, but we were making progress.

And I had hit level 26 in less time than it takes to explain that I’d hit level 26, all down to crafting hundreds of doses of potion, and giving out hundreds of instances of Healer’s Resistance.

Level 26: +10 skill points

Another whistle. The UI hadn’t been messing around when it said there’d be a great increase in skill progression. Okay, effective immediately, +1 Develop Cure (Medium), another for Develop Cure (Large) because the God of Productivity was no small fry, and a third one for Treatments.

With 7 more skill points to burn, I placed one into Instinctual Casting, one into Mana Shaping, one into Mana Affinity, and the other four into the other three Develop Cures: Swarm, Small, Huge, and Unique.

My character sheet had been transformed. For now, I just wanted to look over what I’d become as a Healer.

Christopher Fletcher

Healer - Apprentice Arcane Mender 26

Pleasure Seeker - Novice 24

Attributes:

Affinity 7

Durability 6

Ingenuity 9

Likability 7

Physicality 7

Free Tokens 7

Healer (Arcane Mender) Skills:

Diagnostics 5

Treatments 6

Develop cure (swarm 5, small 6, medium 5, large 5, huge 1)

Develop cure (unique) 8

Administer Cure 9

Instinctual Casting 8

Mana Affinity 3

Mana Shaping 3

Spellcasting (Abjuration 1, Conjuration 1, Evocation 1, Transmutation 1)

Meditation 4

Healer (Arcane Mender) Special Abilities

Arcane Alchemy II

(Special Ability, Uncommon, passive)

I- Any time you undertake a class-related check, you may exchange Tokens at a rate of 1:1 from one Attribute to another. You may exchange a number of Tokens equal to this ability’s rank (presently rank 2).

II- Up to three times per day, you may instead exchanged Tokens at a rate of 1:2.

Healer’s Resistance IV

(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 2 Durability Tokens to make yourself immune to a damage source for one day. Does not cover divine damage inflicted by gods.

IV- Spend 5 Durability Tokens to make yourself and all allies within 50 feet immune to a damage source for 10 minutes. Does not cover divine damage inflicted by gods.

Verdant Rejuvenation II

(Special Ability, uncommon, passive)

Herbs and plants harvested by you and stored by you will last twice as long as normal.

I- By placing cuttings of plants in the soil, watering and tending them, they will sprout if they remain within half a mile of your location over the course of 18 hours.

II- By placing cuttings of plants together in an enclosed space and tending them they will sprout a hybrid plant if they remain within half a mile of your location over the course of 48 hours. Hybrids may not be bred with other hybrids.

Mending Aura II

(Special Ability, Rare, Aura)

Make a Treatment check with Affinity to immediately begin healing all wounded beings within range. Targets are healed by 5 hit points for each success you scored on your check, per second. Symptoms experienced by targets are reduced in intensity by 75% for an hour, per second of exposure to this aura, to a maximum of two days. Targets may only benefit from this aura once per day.

Mender’s Focus II

(Special Ability, rare, passive)

Your incredible endurance and attention to your work makes class-related checks easier.

I- All checks that use your class skills have their success rated boosted to a moderate degree.

II- All checks that use your class skills have their difficulties lowered by 1.

The day shaped up to be a bright and beautiful one to be outside. Which was good, because I was outside. Unfortunately I’d been working for the last seven hours without a single break.

Achievement: Team Player

You’ve been involved in a single undertaking involving more than a thousand individuals. That’s not nothing!

Reward: +1 skill point

I immediately shoved this into Pheromones, and pressed Yes before I could second guess myself. I was receiving skill points by the bucketful from my new class, and Pleasure Seeker always seemed like it was lagging.

Of the hundreds and hundreds of people who had been awakened by the potion we’d worked up, none were able to boost the resistances of others to get them to walk back into the town of Glumpdumpkin. Where Alan or Cinzy had been the kink in the hose of the whole operation, slowing down the work we needed to do today, now I was that person. Not only was I the best suited to completing the potions—with my lovely assistants Vellenia and almost a dozen others now—but I was the only person who could give Healer’s Resistance to the masses.

On the other other hand, it was working. We were actually serving up more doses of the potion faster than we had anticipated. It had come down to an administrative godsend in Alan and whoever he had chosen. Their team was efficiently sorting and sending off workers to work. Some of them were helping Vellenia harvest. Others were cooking up a hearty lunch and distributing it up and down the line. And mostly, it was that the hale and healthy bodies from town were bringing the townsfolk down out, spreading them out into the potion distribution area, and then the Bard was helping them shake off their initial confusion so Alan could play Sorting Hat.

At some point, Jacoby’s team must have returned to town, because Jacoby’s ever-smiling Bard Jacoby had joined Cinzy.

The clearest sign that we were doing it was that the divine power in the town was intensifying. The feeling was palpable now.

“How many people?” I called to Alan, even as I granted Healer’s Resistance again, and again, and again.

He held up a finger, then made the sign for a zero, then another zero, then another zero. A thousand already. We weren’t giving out a dose of potion every fifteen seconds, that was for sure.

I made sure to slurp up some potato soup filled with herbs and vegetables, which was just what the body needed after hours and hours of potion brewing. Sometimes, when you work incredibly hard and finally eat or drink after a long time, the stuff you put in your body literally coats the inside of your empty stomach, and you can feel that. That happened here, which struck me as very odd, but not unwelcome.

Now what to do for that fourth batch of potion? I had just wasted all my Tokens on a single batch.

No, there was a way to do this. I needed to make a check, then swap around my Tokens to get 4 Ingenuity for the cost of 2 whatever else.

Okay, it was time to make a check. That meant spellcasting.

Glycerine. I had a very limited supply, and had used almost all of it to make a tincture. Well, I’d need some serious equipment in order to distill glycerine out of alcohol, which wasn’t easy to make here anyway, since the inhabitants didn’t drink spirits either. What I needed to do was essentially turn something into sugar alcohol.

Spellcasting (Transmutation) Knowledge check: The best way to perform this action is known in the annals of Transmutation lore. You have the Transmutation skill at level 1, and Ingenuity at level 9. This check is Very Difficult, and requires 5 successes. Would you like to spend 5 Tokens for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 1 Ingenuity and 7 Free Tokens.

No! This check was supposed to help me regain my Tokens via Arcane Alchemy, not spend even more of them just to know the best way to do this.

I had 10 skill levels and needed 5 successes.

“No,” I grumbled, but pressed Yes on another two dozen Healer’s Resistance activations.

Congratulations! You have succeeded this check.

“Hang on, what?” I checked the UI, and found that my 10 skill levels had produced the 5 necessary successes. That was not normal. I should’ve gotten 3 successes, maybe 4. Well, I wasn’t about to look a gift success in the mouth.

A broad smile spread across my face and I pulled the most awesome, dorkiest pose imaginable.

“Booyah!” I cried. Whether people on earth shouted this or not was irrelevant, because I shouted it, like a boss.

It seemed like my other new ability had worked the odds in my favor, taking me from a roughly 33% success rate to a roughly higher success rate. Sure Hard At Work might be gone, but now I’d be relying on my skills over my Tokens more.

Cross fingers.

You have succeeded a check related to your class. Would you like to use Arcane Alchemy to transfer Tokens from one attribute to another? Y/N.

“Yes I would!” I informed the UI that I wanted to turn 2 Likability Tokens into 4 Ingenuity Tokens. The system did this with a flash, preserving my good cheer. This was going to work. I was going to make this work. 

A grin spread over my face.

This is Christopher about to cast his first actual spell.

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