Divinity Rescue Corps
127- Sundrinker Oil and Other Ingredients

When all of us were awoken and moving, it was Isabelle who seemed embarrassed by the whole thing. Cinzy was mortified but hid it well. I don’t think she hated having Regina’s face so close to her butt. On the other hand, I wasn’t able to ask or get a definitive answer.

We chuckled a bit and several body parts were squeezed and fondled before we got the mess of clothes sorted out, and people dressed. Then, breakfast was quickly wolfed down so we could begin crafting the cure.

“What’s our status?” I asked.

Tara had just sauntered in, looking tired but pleased.

“We have six godly vomit puddles and only one semi-crushed house,” she said. “Ivy and Larelle only had to pressure Him to back off once, to stay inside the town limits. It seems like our boy is content to stay within city limits.”

Shakindria was presently lending a psychic hand when necessary, taking one of the three eight hour god watches to give Tara and Regina some rest time. She had abandoned a steel golem-looking thing, and would get it on the task as well.

Tara then yawned and sleepily grabbed up some breakfast.

“Anything else to report?” I asked.

“Aside from Fletcher’s new amazing spit-roasting, DP-ing sex powers?” Cinzy muttered from beside me. I gave her a sharp look that I hope went unnoticed.

“Trent’s wall is twenty feet tall and six feet thick,” Chrysta said. “It spans the large central entryway and another eight feet to either side. It is a marvel.”

“I’ll make him up a batch of simple mana potions for today,” I said. “Let him sleep in and nobody bother him. He’s been doing great.”

Also, thankfully, Cinzy had found the cure I needed to heal up the God of Productivity.

Now, when I’d found the cure for the God of Footfalls, it had required summer mist lilies, purple morpheus root, jaln oil, and henge grass. The much larger God of Productivity required different materials, being humanoid, and being so freaking big. Only the purple morpheus was duplicated for this recipe, unfortunately, because we still had the other three among my supplies. Well, we had a bit of the root, but it was dried and for this, I needed the whole plant: root, stem, leaves and flower. I had tried planting the dried root, but it wouldn’t take, not even with Verdant Rejuvenation. I could cause seeds to sprout and turn into plants overnight, and I could turn cuttings into full-fledged plants in the same timeframe, but I could not reanimate the dead. The root was definitely dead.

“You think you can bring it back?” Vellenia asked me sweetly.

“It’d take a miracle,” I said, and she furrowed her brow in confusion over the Billy Crystal voice I did.

The purple morpheus was a flowering plant with a very stable magical aura, but was also quite rare. I’d used it up before getting Verdant Rejuvenation, sadly, or else I would’ve made sure to always have some on hand. It was magical and grew only in specific swampy areas along ley lines, and only revealed itself to open at dusk and dawn for a short period of time.

“What’s a ley line?" Isabelle asked, then gave Ivy a dark look when she swatted her on the shoulder lightly.

Alan explained that it was a powerful line of magic that ran around the planet. Inside the line, you’d see a lot more plant life, it would grow faster, and all creatures absorbed mana faster, including us. Rare plants were easier to find inside ley lines.

Alan pointed up to the sky. “I-i-if y-you c-c-c-c-can see that sh-sh-sh-shimmer i-in broad daylight, we’re i-i-in a ley line.”

“And also you’ll need to take your anti-magic medicine more often,” Ivy said, to groans of misery. The anti-magic medicine I brewed up on the regular was not cherry flavored for kids.

“So we need to find a purple morpheus then,” Regina said. “We’ll look in Alan’s library for what it looks like exactly.”

“Strike that,” I said. “We need to find…a lot.”

“Strike that,” Vellenia announced, to chuckles, “just one. After that, my Fletcher can grow more using his rapid garden growth ability.”

The others chuckled. I gave her a mock flat glare and enjoyed the radiant smile I received in return.

“Can we ask Airaconda…” Regina started, “oh, Tara’s already asleep.”

The second flower was called the passionflower. Earth had a purple passionflower, perhaps the strangest or most unique flower to not be an orchid. Dorfilialtos had a number of passionflowers, and we needed the blue one. It had mana condensing properties, so the purple morpheus could cleanse more and more mana.

“This thing climbs up trees or along the ground, and the flower looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. It’s got a stemmy bit in the middle with five points, but the rest of it is striped with pokey looking petals in a big circle. The flower is going to be about as big around as your face, and it grows in warmer regions.”

The third thing we needed was bluegrass. The blue was in the name on account of the mana saturation; the blue passionflower and the bluegrass were also used in mana potions if you were making mana potions for about a zillion mana. This one I would search out because it was just… grass. It wasn’t easy to tell what the heck might be bluegrass and what might be any type of other grass. Meaning I needed to head out over meadow and dale and grab up some instead of anyone else.

We needed sundrinker oil, and thankfully we were growing sundrinkers in my expanding hyper-fast garden. I could transmute the flowers into the oil, hopefully. I’d also ask Jacoby’s Wizard attached to our group, Wayne.

Finally, we needed bits of a hardwood tree, black cherry to be precise. Of all the things… the system informed me that black cherry did not exist here in this world, normally. I set Isabelle and Chrysta to the task of trying to find a hardwood substitute, praying that one hardwood might be as good as another.

“Are we all good on the cure situation?” I asked everybody.

Drat raised a hand. “You didn’t give me a job.”

“You want one?” Grinning, I was challenging him to care.

“Yeah, I’d rather be out of this place and back on the job. Gimme something.”

Amazing. I was pacing around the camp fire and cooking area, rubbing my chin. “See if you can’t find any black cherries. I might be able to grow a tree if we get one.” That would be something to see, an entire tree grown overnight.

He stared at me. “You’re… serious.”

“Yeah I’m serious.”

“You want me to head all the way back to HQ and rummage around there, or go back through the portal specifically to get black cherries?”

I shrugged. “You’re the Rogue. I have faith in you.”

His glower intensified. “Fine. I’ll be getting xp whether I find any or not.”

“That’s the spirit!” Vellenia gushed. Now I don’t know about you, but it’s hard to stay mad at a cute water fairy with a bright smile. Drat nodded to her, the slightest hint of smile playing over his face. I wanted to razz him about it, but I knew it would only result in him sulking away and promising some kind of prank-based revenge.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s move out, and hopefully we’ll get plants tended in my little herb garden here.” I gestured out at the expanse of land just beyond the camp, where a whole lot of strange plants grew right next to one another, not in their native environment. Good old magic.

Regina was on the day shift with Isabelle and Chrysta, going to check on the whereabouts of our sick god and keep Him from breaching containment.

“How’s Alan doing?” I asked Alan.

He turned a sluggish face up to meet mine. He was at about a third of his HP, and his stamina wasn’t much higher. He was still unable to recover mana, and I knew that feeling well. No bueno. When I put on Mender’s Aura, he healed up to half his HP and stamina, then instantly fell asleep on the fireside bench. Tara sighed in her sleep and slumped further in her camp chair, long legs spreading open enough to get my libido sending the wrong signals. Everyone else cooed at the light show, the feelings, and the faint scent of antiseptic that emanated up from my aura. Larelle lifted him carefully and deposited him in the cube house Trent had built him.

“What are we going to do about the thousands of homeless refugees we just extracted yesterday?” I asked.

The others blinked at me. “You didn’t know?” Cinzy asked.

“Didn’t know what?”

“Well, there was some general outcry about their town, but most everybody was really happy to be themselves again. The refugees in their little town,” she waved a hand over to the west, where the many squat buildings sat, ringed by some huts, and now a lot of tents. “The newcomers welcomed them in, and it’s cramped. The ones who complained I settled down with a little Bard cheer… the check difficulty is going to get higher every day as they get riled up to move back home, but then Tara and Airaconda flew a couple of them up over the city to see the situation with the, you know.”

“The God of Productivity, drunkenly stumbling around the city and vomiting holy ichor everywhere?” I asked.

“Yeah. That.”

“Anyway between Tara showing them and me calming them down, we should be fine for a few days.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

My job was to first turn sundrinkers into sundrinker oil. I felt this probably wasn’t an impossible task. Just refine the thing using magic.

Transmutation wasn’t a simple spellcasting art, and fought me on it.

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 Difficult, and requires 4 successes. Would you like to spend 4 Tokens for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 9 Ingenuity and 7 Free Tokens.

I indicated I wanted to attempt the check without spending Tokens, and was awarded with the following notification:

Success! You have scored 5 successes and recalled the knowledge of how to turn sundrinker flowers into sundrinker oil.

Now, there’s an odd fact that comes with ‘knowing’ something through a Spellcasting knowledge skill, and ‘remembering’ it through a successful check. When I’d taken the skill, a whole lot of knowledge just ballooned out in my brain, like someone had uploaded all that knowledge in the blink of an eye, and I could go ‘I know Kung Fu’ in a breathy, amazed whisper.

But the knowledge was so vast, so intricate that it needed to be brought back up from the depths of my brain with this check.

The moment I succeeded the check, the knowledge was there again. The basics of Transmutation were there, along with a quick innate understanding of how to extract only the oil from the flower and discard the rest. The mana shaping construct looked intimidating, but they all did.

The construct appeared before me and showed me where I needed to attach mana from my third eye and… from my core?

I’d never shaped mana from two different spots before, and the going was difficult. I needed to keep the correct amount of mana flowing from two different points on my body, which I don’t need to tell you, like rubbing your head and patting your belly at the same time, isn’t easy. But the two different streams of mana didn’t simply need to be patted and rubbed in a circle, they needed to be woven into a three-dimensional construct that moved and twisted around with each correct hand movement.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the construct came into being around the flowers. They and the construct rose up in the air at the same time; I had remembered to have a container for the resulting oil. Oh yes, one does not have an Ingenuity of 9 and then just forget to bring along a container.

Or if one does, his glorious bond mate of the fairy and water aspects cheerfully brings one over while dancing like a ballerina… or like she was doing some performance art. It was almost enough to put me off the end of the spell.

Instinctual Casting (Transmutation) check:You are attempting a tier 1 Transmute Material spell. You have the Transmutation skill at level 1, Instinctual Casting at level 8, Mana Shaping at level 3, and Affinity at level 7. Since you have never cast a Transmutation spell and shaped mana only a handful of times, this check is Extreme, and requires 8 successes. Would you like to spend 8 Tokens for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 9 Ingenuity and 7 Free Tokens.

I told the UI to perform the check without requiring Tokens, and wonder of wonders, I succeeded yet again. The construct shrank down, constricting around the flowers and compressing them until they glowed with power too. The construct seemed to wring them out like a dishrag, the oil dripping down into container currently in Vellenia’s cute little hands.

“Thank you, my dear,” I managed through gritted teeth.

Her response was a wink and a pirouette away from me, holding the earthenware jug. Her tail swished as she went, and she glanced over her shoulder several times. Each time she found me still staring, she did another few dance moves. It caused her skirt to flare out and show me her smooth little Nakamamon booty and the smooth expanse where her nether regions appeared and disappeared when she got aroused.

I’d need to create a lot more oil than that, but we had a whole lot of sundrinkers blooming in the Verdant Rejuvenation garden.

I took a little walk around the garden, rubbing my fingers along petals and bending to smell the flowers. Bee-like Nakamamon were buzzing here and there, nuzzling the insane collection of flowers that had no business being in this part of the world, near one another, and out in the sun. Some of these were shade-lovers, some water plants, some bloomed in summer or fall, yet here they were. It was a riot of color, and gave me a great deal of peace just walking the rows with my hands out.

No need to be a dead gladiator on his way to the Elysian Fields to enjoy the pure bounty of nature. I rubbed my hands along the different flowers, stopping to water them and clip any dead leaves. Again, the knowledge was simply instinctual.

“Thanks, by the way,” I told the open air. I hoped the first god I’d ever met heard me. It wasn’t the first prayer I’d said in my life, but it was probably the most heartfelt. I want to say that the air warmed, and I felt the presence of the Goddess of the Meadow beside me, but I didn’t. None of the UI triggers gave me any info. No figure made of pollen appeared, or in the clouds, or anywhere else for that matter. No breath of the Goddess on my neck and whispered ‘You’re welcome’ or anything like that. Just warmth and peace.

I was standing with my hands vaguely outstretched to touch flowers on either side of the row, at the edge of my magical garden when a body bowled me over, laughing. I went into the tall grass, which soaked up the impact well with a sound like shush.

“Are you just going to stand there and admire all your flowers, my bond mate?” Vellenia asked, hugging me from behind.

“I was thinking about it.”

Several tongues licked my ear, before she giggled. “Go on,” she said. “Go find us some bluegrass and return to me.”

This is Christopher following orders.