“Well, that is coming along nicely, isn’t it?” Jocinda asked.
Christopher Fletcher, beginning to transition from sex clone to midwife, froze with mouth open and began to drool. OG Christopher Fletcher, Healer working on the most complex cure he’d ever set his sights on, continued feeding mana and the drive gravetwine vines into the mixture. The situation with Jocinda would require all of my focus. Internally though, I cursed. Cinzy needed .
There were a couple of things that beca instantly clear. One, she had just stepped through a portal made of vines and leaves and tree bark and moss. Two, Jacoby and her people were on the other side of that portal, presumably far to the north in the wild area Claudius and Buttercup had put on my map once upon a ti. Three, Jacoby and her people were bound up in vines from head to toe, and the only indications it really was Jacoby were her glossy black hair, frightened but still recognizably Asian eyes, Golightly, the item I’d gifted her so she could head north. Oh, and the recognizable belly bump that denoted yet another pregnancy.
Good gods, I had really jumped in feet first on that, hadn’t I? Been thinking with my dick literally the whole ti since I’d gotten Fertility added to my Qualities list by The Lovers.
I had to think fast, which was why Cinzy was currently demanding what in the hecky Becky I was doing when she was having her first contractions. One Fletcher with Myriad Mind working overti was better than two Fletchers doing a single thing each.
Fact: Jocinda was one of the progenitors of the system, which made her extrely experienced, very high level, and very dangerous. She could stop ti, and she had just stepped through a portal bringing her possibly dozens of miles, without difficulty.
Fact, at least according to Claudius: Jocinda did not want humans interfering in the affairs of this world. Claudius said she was racked with guilt over changing the world and had essentially secluded herself in the wilds with the other Druids, using their power to keep the Agency interference out.
Fact: I had at least three hours worth of work to go, if the emberroot check was to be believed, and then there was a final Develop Cure check to make at an even higher difficulty. I couldn’t just finish this up by stalling her. I needed a plan.
Fact: I was just about to lost twelve total skill and attribute levels as Post-Sharing Clarity ran out, aning like it or not, I needed to have sex. As silly as it sounded, having sex was literally going to seal the deal with this cure. If I couldn’t, there was no way I’d get the 40 or so successes needed for the final check. I could also use the free Token from orgasm to help lower the difficulty on that last check.
Chuckling sigh there.
But for the mont, there was a much more imdiate problem that required so ti to think.
“Is your last na really Funktiliosaurolophus, or did you just change it here in this world?” I asked.
The thin-faced woman with the thick, eye-warping spectacles grew excited. “I did want to get it changed as a child. I never ended up with the chance to change it legally back ho before I ended up here, and then it didn’t really matter once we got here. Did you know my real last na is Schmuck. Can you believe that? Schmuck!”
“I… can believe it.” People in Arica had all kinds of strange nas. They were from all kinds of strange places, and the pronunciation rules weren’t very kind to immigrants. “Is it Eastern European originally?”
“German!” she declared. “You have no idea how much bullying I endured as a result of that stupid, stupid na! And no matter how you tell kids that in German it’s very regal and noble, they just laugh and call you schmuck!”
“People are astoundingly stupid,” I told her. It was pretty funny, regardless of how much teasing and bullying she’d endured. Tʜe sourcᴇ of thɪs content ɪs NoveI-Fire.ɴet
The mixture in the cauldron had begun to grow iridescent, and the sll had stopped being sharp, and was instead now herbal and dicinal slling. Like your grandmother’s dicine cabinet.
“You’re telling ,” she went on, and began listing all the ways people were dumb. For one, they wanted to change this world, while she wanted it to grow wild, be free, and stop humans from influencing it. She had a small army of Druids out in the wilds of the north where she was doing just that: cultivating instead of changing. Encouraging growth.
“You are the sa person who nad all this stuff, right?” I asked.
She waved her hands around like she was fighting off a swarm of bees. “Insanity, right? You would think that once I started naming everything stupid, they’d stop listening to and reject humans all together, but they were too naive, too trusting.”
“They also liked the nas?” I asked.
“They liked the nas!” Now her hands were pulling at her hair. “What kind of fools really want their moon to be nad Shagnasty? Or their city to be called Flunt-on-the-Rustle? It’s sheer insanity, it is!”
“You are the expert in such matters, Miss Funkiliosaurolophus.” I saved ‘Miss Schmuck’ for when I really wanted to get under her skin. I had it on good authority you didn’t just go around pissing off gods. Politeness was kind of my thing.
A figure burst into the room, rolled, and raised up a bow shining with magic. Jocinda casually flicked a hand to the size and he was ripped off his feet. I turned that way and found the Ranger, Reese, slowly having rock grow out of the rock walls and encase his body.
“And who might you be?” Jocinda asked.
“I’m not telling you that!” Reese hissed, and hissed in my direction. “You’re dead at, Fletcher, you hear?”
The rock grew up around his mouth soon after that, until there was only a rough human-shaped thing sticking out of the wall.
“Don’t kill him,” I said.
The Druid rolled her eyes, but then snapped her fingers and allowed two breathing holes to form in the rock. A panicked gasp followed, very small.
“Now, where were we? Oh!” She started wagging a finger at , giving off very ‘mad scientist’ vibes. “Ohhh you. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, Healer Fletcher. You’re trying to distract . Luckily this young man ca along and broke out of my monologue!” She waved his way, and the shell of rock containing Reese began to slide across the wall toward the exit.
“What did Claudius focus on when you guys were setting up the system, and what was yours?”
“Ohhhh well let tell you,” she said. “In the very beginning, we worked as a team. We had the system mapped and ready, but then the Nakamamon weren’t just dumb animals ready to submit to everything we had laid out. They had needs and demands. No Fighters, no Barbarians, no Monks, no Paladins, and especially no Warlocks. Powers related to direct combat were a no-no. We had to couch everything in hunting terms, or self-defense. Warlocks just don’t fit, you know?”
I understood that much, very well. Having just seen the place Claudius was probably residing right now, it was mostly mouths and eyes and tentacles and demons. Warlocks got their powers from infernal and fae sources, and nobody wanted humans getting their powers from a creature like Buttercup.
“We had hoped the system would simply map clearly onto all the Nakamamon powers as they stood. It wasn’t easy, but the popular RPG system Claudius chose seed up to the task.
“We were forced to created magic whole cloth out of nothing, and manifest the system around it. Many of the spells were copies of what the Nakamamon could do: strangling vines spring up out of the ground, and we have the system record the effect. A psychic Nakamamon can speak directly mind to mind with soone, we have the system record that effect.”
She kept rambling on, and I kept adding the gravetwine to the cauldron, along with a generous amount of mana over the places where the vine touched the mixture itself. I’d had to tie the vines to one another to create an uninterrupted string of gavetwine. This symbolized long life, and the stream of mana I poured down imitated this, sticking to the cure in a long and continuous stream. Jocinda prattled on about all the different effects she and Claudius had gotten out of the Nakamamon for purposes of creating the system, for long minutes.
She went over the classes, and how they directly mirrored so of those from the RPG, and how the level up bonuses matched, in so ways, those of the RPGs, while others were quite different. And then she got to achievents.
“I created the Nakamadex, naturally. I couldn’t wait to identify and classify all those wonderful different species. They didn’t have nas, you know. It was like we ca here and suddenly so of the Nakamamon were sapient. They happily gobbled up all the nas I could give them. Slinktrickle!” she cackled. “Can you imagine, they loved being called Tadproles and Bourgefrogs!”
The gravetwine had been infused with mana, and sohow, over an hour had passed with her blathering on.
“The achievents system was Claudius’s baby,” she said wistfully. Her hands even clasped together and she rocked back and forth. “I wish I could take credit for it, but between the two of us, he was the gar. What a genius idea it was, and how well it worked. Collecting achievents was such a wonderful way to explore the world, explore your capabilities, and push yourself to be even better.”
The next skill check ca up for my cure then, with her talking about how she went out collecting up Nakamadex entries to have the full set for her own.
This ti, the skill check was at 45 successes. It was classed as Impossible. After this one, there was another.
“Wait!” Jocinda suddenly said. “You were just trying to get talking so you could keep working!”
“Of course,” I said, and spent a full 27 Tokens in order to lower the difficulty by 9. “Although to be honest, the system building is fascinating. The idea of you copying powers over from the Nakamamon, genius.”
Could I get to 36 successes? And what about next ti?
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re just buttering up to keep talking, aren’t you?”
“I’m actually curious why Druid stopped being an available class at the HQ.”
Jocinda launched into yet another explanation, in ti for to get exactly 36 successes on the emberblossom thornroot.
I needed to have sex, as bizarre as that sounded. It wasn’t possible to listen to Jocinda, carry on the conversation with her, work on the cure itself, and also deliver Cinzy’s child at the sa ti.
“You were supposed to be my army of Rohan, you know,” I told her, as I used the distilled thornroot to anchor the cure in the body of the person taking it.
“What? What does that have to do—” Her eyes widened. “You thought I might be an ally? , a Druid, an ally of humanity? Ohhhhh no, no no no no no, silly head.”
And for the first ti, her eyes locked on the cauldron.
“You have been working this entire ti? I dislike people who attempt to bamboozle , you know? Have you been up to shenanigans, young Healer? Trying to turn this world into a tool just for your own betternt, are we?”
I shrugged and gave her a smile. “I’m trying to save my mother’s life. You know how it is. If you had cancer I would be working up a cure for you too.”
Her face twitched with the conflicting thoughts. She would prefer I save her life with a magical cure. On the other hand, this world had been irrevocably changed on account of her actions, and that was unconscionable in her eyes.
I didn’t stop, but instead added the emberroot one bit at a ti, squeezing the cure into it using mana infusion.
“You will need to stop, I’m afraid,” she said.
But I didn’t. There was not going to be any stopping . Instead, I tried to use Puppetry on her, only to find that I’d used all my Durability Tokens on the off chance Claudius could be stopped. After that, I employed Dazzle.
Dazzle: By concentrating, you may spend 1 Affinity Token to hypnotize a target with 7 automatic successes. This is a contested Likability Persuasion roll, and the target knows they have been hypnotized. While under the effect of hypnosis, the target will be much more truthful and compliant, though they may not be ordered to harm themselves or others. As this is a contested check, you may not spend Tokens to succeed automatically. Would you like to spend Tokens to lower the target’s effective Likability?
Total Tokens: 3 Likability and 0 Free Tokens.
Crap. I used the last 3 Likability Tokens.
Jocinda drew back with a hiss. “Whatever are you trying to employ fairy magic against for?” Then she slapped a hand against her forehead. “Oh, right, I’m here to stop you. Why haven’t I stopped you?”
“You weren’t done telling how you arrived at Shagnasty as one of the nas for the moons here,” I tried.
Pointing one finger dramatically into the air, she declared, “That won’t work on again! Although, you know, it is a rather enjoyable story involving a British pub crawl back in ‘77… but no! I’ll not get derailed again.”
This hatchet faced woman took what she believed was a nacing step forward. “Did you honestly believe you could stop from doing what I want?”
“Did you honestly believe you could stop ?” I asked, gritting my teeth and throwing another glob of mana into another clump of emberroot. The root held a fragile flower into a rocky area that could keep out every other plant in the vicinity. It was going to hold together my mother’s body, just like the gravetwine would extend her life, just like the turric and garlic and periwinkle would fight off the cancer.
Mostly though, I had a feeling all these cures were mostly about magic and effort. If you had the magic to infuse your intentions into this sauce… which slled like honey lemon lozenges right now, with a sharper tinge of garlic and ginger… you would get the product you wished for. Cancer was complex, and it was hard. Hilariously, the sickness invading the gods I’d cured wasn’t all that difficult: they weren’t sick like the body replicating cells out of control.
“I think you need to reevaluate your position,” I told her.
“Oh? And why is that?” I had to admit, her snarl was really effective. She had a whole lot of teeth to show off.
“You’re a fracking hypocrite ie why. You claim you don’t want to change the world at all, but you’re freezing it in place instead. That’s literally changing it. Forced stasis is just as much of a change as radically altering the place.”
She reacted as if slapped.
“And let’s not forget that this place is magic. Magic is nothing but intention given form. If you had stuck your face through the portal and just watched the world for a few months, I’m absolutely certain you’d have seen it evolving and maturing all on its own, with barely a whisper of effect from you.”
I held up one finger. “So in essence, not only have you already done the thing you claim you don’t want to happen any longer.” Second finger up. “But you’re stopping a natural change from occurring wherever the heck you’re living, out in the wilds with your Druids.” Third finger. “And you’re trying to stop sothing from happening that’s not even about changing the whole world.” Fourth finger. “And last of all, if you didn’t want humans here, I’ve got so seriously bad news for you: they’re all over the place. Humans are a part of the fabric of this planet now, whether you like it or not. You had a chance to fight Claudius and get all the humans back to earth. You blew it. We’re here, we’re bonded to the Nakamamon, and you can’t stop that.”
I tell you what: I delivered that speech with fracking aplomb. I sounded amazing. It was like the Dazzle had failed, only to seep into the next Persuasion style check I had. I felt, by the third finger, that I was going to convince her. Her face had fallen, her eyes went wide, and the look of self-doubt that ca over her was a glorious sight to behold.
She would straighten, sniff derisively, and maybe stomp a foot before going ‘hmph!’ That would be that.
Instead she surged forward, eyes suddenly wild. “Claudius is gone, little Healer. His rituals, his spells, and his bonded Nakamamon were all that was keeping from throwing all of you back through the portal.” She was so intense, as she always was, that specks of spittle got on my face.
“You need a breath mint,” I told her.
This is Christopher getting thrown across the room by a hyper powerful Druid.
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