I returned to my place with head swimming. Had I really just unleashed my dark side on Chrysta like that? Poor, sweet, hardworking Chrysta, who never asked for anything and never complained? Had I really folded her over the arm of the sofa, face plastered to the floor, and fucked her senseless? Had I really muttered even darker things that I might do to her?
I shivered and tried to clear those thoughts by getting down to the research.
“Where is everybody?” Cinzy asked, sauntering in with a rare hoodie on. She hadn’t done her makeup or hair, and the hoodie had her covered down past… whatever she wore down below. Short shorts? Panties only? Was she going totally commando? The only thing I saw from the hoodie down was creamy skin, interrupted in places where the mana build up was happening and those patches were different skin colors.
And she had on cowboy boots.
The whole look made her appear incredibly cute and girl-next-door, and it definitely worked on .
“Uh… hi. There. Hi, there, is what I ant to say, clearly.”
Was this a new Bard ability, one that made incapable of speech?
She smiled, and there for the first ti I saw bags under her eyes.
“Uh, everybody. Well…” Everybody was gone. Tara was first on godwatch, presently, aning Regina was sleeping. They were on strict, difficult, eight hour shifts along with Shakindria. I hated it, but I couldn’t change it.
“That tracks. Tweedle Dee and Muppin are playing outside with Airaconda and your girls.” Then she frowned again.
Trent had a humongous, thick wall to build to discourage the God of Productivity from stomping our camp or the refugee village to bits. Garnet, his Nakamamon companion and basketball-sized orange crystal, was of course helping him in his task.
Ivy and Isabelle were on watch, on top of what was presently a ten foot tall and three foot thick wall, in the little crow’s nests Trent had created for them. Larelle was getting so rest as well, since her shift on the wall was coming up soon, and Chrysta…
“She’s resting too,” I said. With the way Fairy Poppins was getting to Cinzy, I didn’t think she noticed the obvious spike in my heart rate or the slight blush.
Alan was down with the sickness. He had divinity poisoning from trying to use telekinesis spells on divine objects and it was slowly getting worse. It had stopped him from drawing in more mana, and I theorized it was because the God of Productivity was the cause of the divinity poisoning. If he couldn’t gain mana, he couldn’t work, and he couldn’t work because he’d touched the god of work.
The rules here were… always in flux.
“And you gave Drat the day off,” Cinzy said, coming to have a seat.
“Week off… or as long as it takes to make a cure and deliver it, I guess.” We had about six days.
“So you’re looking for cures now,” she mumbled, waving a hand at the clay tablets arrayed before . A lot of them were in miniature form still, and couldn’t be enlarged because Alan couldn’t cast the spell. And also Jacoby didn’t want poaching her people.
Kind of a dick move for soone who had supplied her with everything she needed all the ti, including so pretty aweso orgasms, if I could be allowed a boast from ti to ti. I wasn’t about to say anything, though. She had the authority to run her team like she wanted.
“Cool,” Cinzy said, and for the life of , she looked like a mid-forties housewife with three kids after a long day of cleanup vomit, crayon all over the walls, lipstick in the carpet, and screaming kids. She had never looked like anything but a supermodel that had just popped out of an advertisent in your screen and into real life.
The urge to confront her over this Fairy Poppins situation was growing. I had vowed not to get involved in her business, but she just looked so sad. So unlike her typical self. I didn’t need her to look gorgeous and hot… nobody was required to be that. I’d settle for happy, and that didn’t even an she had to look happy all the ti.
“You want to lend a hand?” I asked, hoping the distraction would snap her out of this funk she was in. “We got our magical cures here, and here.”
The hope with the God of Productivity was that I had diagnosed its only ailnt already, and there was nothing besides Mana Misalignnt that had it in its grips. As the god was now, there was no good way to get close to it and diagnose it for any ntal or physical issues it might have.
If I was unlucky or wrong, concocting a cure would not work. It would be hours and hours, perhaps days of cultivating materials, creating the cure itself, and then sohow administering that cure only to find out I needed to cure sothing else on top of that. The Mana Misalignnt cure might take, and it might not.
If I was lucky and correct, the magical affliction was the only one. Since an additional diagnosis could get people killed, I was not going to chance it.
Mana Misalignnt was the sa affliction that had gotten the God of Footfalls back in my HQ days, training under the man with the toothbrush hairs for eyebrows, for a mustache, and a really long one wrapping around his head, Rainer. This was good in that I thought I knew how to create a cure from jaln oil, henge grass, mountain mist lilies, and purple morpheus root. It would actually be pretty simple if that’s what I needed to do.
It was not what I needed to do at all, according to the tablets.
“Well shucks,” I said, slapping a knee. So much for the easy try.
“You didn’t honestly think it was going to be that easy, did you?” Cinzy asked, not making eye contact.
“A guy can hope,” I said, grinning, then realized she was staring at the floor.
“The first god you worked on was a pair of shoes, and this new god is a million tis the size of that one. I didn’t expect that sa cure to work on this enormous tattooed hunk of a man, and I only have the bare bones of a knowledge base.”
I had figured, the mont we started in on the search, that it wasn’t going to work. With Alan battling his own divinity poisoning and for much longer, it wasn’t possible for him to enlarge and shrink all the trading cards, aning either I had to do it with my fledgling spellcasting powers, or we needed to use high powered magnifying glasses.
The Transmutation Spellcasting attempt failed when the difficulty to put together an instinctual spell was 11. After that, the check got even harder.
“Okay,” I told her, trying to ignore her misery. This Fairy Poppins thing was really getting to her. “I’m going to try the enlarge on a blank card that we would use to record our briefings and such, so if I ss it up, this won’t make too much of a ss.”
Instinctual Casting (Transmutation) Check: You have the Instinctual Casting skill at level 8, Mana Shaping at level 3, and Affinity at level 7. You have failed the knowledge check using Spellcasting (Transmutation), increasing the difficulty of this casting. This check is Extre, requiring 12 successes. You do not have 12 Tokens with which to receive a free success. Would you like to lower the difficulty of the check?
Total Tokens: 0 Affinity and 6 Free Tokens.
“I would not,” I breathed, and sighed. Spellcasting was going to be a bit harder than I’d anticipated. In the end, out of my 18 levels, I managed 8 successes.
Frack.
The results were, well, fun. I started weaving the mana before the check results ca in, trying to follow an insanely complicated pattern of mana shaping with my hands and the trickle of mana appearing from my third eye. Which was weird, because it was supposed to split into three strands that, I’m pretty sure simulated height, width, and depth of the object. This was not transforming a blob of stuff into a blob of similar quantity, but different chemical properties. Transmutation was kind of a lot. I definitely wouldn’t be trying to turn my friends into goats or toads as a laugh.
It quickly beca clear that not only did I not know how to split a single strand of mana into three effectively, but I couldn’t have each of those three strands follow along the complicated diagram that my brain was trying to put together.
The playing card made of clay jiggled, rattled against the table, and then shot out in size until it was the size of a beach towel, only to spread larger at one corner, while the others quivered.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not supposed to do that,” Cinzy said, with a very Drat kind of tone but a darkly amused look on her face. I’d take it.
The corners of the huge clay tablet jerked and juddered, larger and smaller, until it exploded and sprayed clay chunks and shards and dust all over the place. I took so damage from the flying debris, and made sure to spend a Durability Token using Stalwart to improve my damage resistance permanently. It was the least I could do after this little, pretty funny frack up.
“You were right, it was not supposed to do that,” I told her.
Cinzy snorted laughter, before asking for and receiving so nder’s Aura. The new ability spread out from my feet in your typical minty green magical light, the kind you think of as the antiseptic color. Sohow, instead of having the mana leak out of my third eye, this one ca out of my guts, my core. It emitted pulse after pulse of healing energy—with accompanying shockwave-like pulse of light—every six seconds. It also felt nice, which I appreciated.
“Ohhhh that is new,” she said, basking in the waves of healing that ca out away from . “I am liking that. It’s like being in a sauna, but for your cuts and scrapes, and your soul.” She actually did a little ballet dance move, and I loved her a little for it.
She no longer had the drawn look of soone who was looking at a life sentence in prison for sothing they didn’t do. She turned a smile my way, and began dancing around slowly. After a few minutes, I ended the effect and she sank down in her seat with a pleasant look on her face. The bags were gone, which was nice.
She went for the magnifying glasses after I failed the enlarge spell, still giggling as she swept the debris off the workstation and got a handful of the cards.
“Tell you what,” I told her, “I’m going to go deal with sothing, and I’ll be right back. I’m pretty sure the magical cures are stacked on that shelf right there, if you don’t see Mana Misalignnt for large gods in the stack you’ve got.”
“Okey doke.”
I headed out into the evening air and straight for the twinkling light skulking at the edge of the camp. The bonfires had been canceled indefinitely, until we finished with our slight twenty foot god situation. We all needed to work extra hard not to muck this up. Now only Drat stared into the flas of a small campfire, surrounded by Tweedle Dee, Muppin, Airaconda, and his own ferret-like creature, McCauley Skulkins. I noted Vellenia and Shakindria lounging at the fire as well, the forr stroking Tweedle Dee’s fur, the latter absently scratching at Muppin.
I tipped Drat a wave and he waved right back before turning his gaze back to the flas. Vellenia perked up, smiled, and I told her I needed a mont. Gracious beauty she was, she gave her assent without a single question.
“Now,” I muttered to myself. “Where are you?”
Most tis, especially in the dayti, it was easy to miss Fairy Poppins. She was so tiny and the bright sun diminished her glow. Since we were now living in a tiny village, with gear arrayed everywhere, the little fairy had a million places to hide if she so chose. Any plant in direct sunlight. Any out of the way place people didn’t normally look.
But it was getting dark, and her tell-tale glow was easily visible if you knew where to look.
“I know you’ve been watching ,” I said. “I know you’ve been watching us.”
I kept tromping through so of the taller grass, towards the trees. The dew forming early soaked up to my knees, then the middle of my thighs.
“Co on out,” I said, keeping my voice gentle. “We need to talk.”
The tiny fairy flew up and out, to head level. She appeared much the sa as before, until you got really close. I could see the grumpy look on her ordinarily adorable face.
“I don’t know what the deal is,” I lied, “but what’s happening can’t continue. The two of you are bonded. Cinzy barely got through the day yesterday, on our most important day ever. She nearly passed out multiple tis. Right now she’s miserable.”
Fairy Poppins crossed her arms over her chest and thrust her chin out to one side. The aning was clear: she didn’t care.
“How are you a fairy if you don’t care about what’s going on?” I asked.
The check succeeded using Beast Talker. Her level of upset and anger were just too high to convince her; whatever had been going on, it was going to take more than a single social roll to handle it.
I ended up with a tiny little finger poking my face. Then she opened her teensy little mouth and started in with the accusations… or insults… or angry exhortations. Honestly the only thing I could tell was she was upset and I had no real idea.
The problem was I couldn’t hear her. When she opened her mouth and spoke, only a tinny little squeak erged, all blending together. It just wasn’t possible to understand the way I was.
With great care, I explained what Adaptability could do, and what Pheromones could do by extension. It had worked on Chrysta, though I was a little concerned with the results. If she wanted to understand her, I could adapt to her. That would an… kissing. At least.
“It would an I’d have to kiss you,” I told her.
She stiffened and nearly fell from where she was fluttering. Yes! She nodded enthusiastically, then flew down towards my mouth and kissed without a second’s hesitation.
Adaptability was good, but there was only so much it could do. The phasing into a ghost with Chrysta required more than 7 levels to offset, along with Pheromones giving her 3 levels of Adaptability to offset in the other direction. Ten was the magic number.
It wasn’t going to be enough with Fairy Poppins. It was, however, going to give us a lot of leeway.
Now, it’s difficult to explain the sensation of shrinking if you haven’t done it. Being a property of a magic class inside a magical world ant that my clothes ca with . I shrank down, a lot.
At once, I knew I was smaller, but everything around us felt a lot bigger. The thigh-high grass now towered above , practically blotting out the night sky. The whole place went nearly pitch black, with only a bit of indigo above twinkling stars down. Light from the camp fire illuminated red orange off the canopy of trees high, high above.
And Fairy Poppins was locked onto my face.
She was still small, though not so tiny as before. Applying Pheromones had only given her about an inch to her height, making her so four inches tall. She was about the size of my head now… bigger, but not quite big enough for sexy purposes. Arms spread wide to hug my cheeks, while her legs tried to hug onto my neck, but didn’t have the right angle.
I continued kissing her, feeling a little tongue run over my upper and lower lip, until she broke off.
“You’re still too big!” she said in a little voice. On the other hand, I could finally understand her. My hands drifted up and caught her lower half, and I took the opportunity to get a look at her.
She had pixie features, obviously. But where Cinzy had that perfectly proportioned face, Poppins had sharp features: pointy chin, upturned cute little nose, an Asian angle to her eyes but more, and pointed ears. The important thing was that she had the full bust and hips of an adult.
She’d just been so tiny it hadn’t been possible to even get a close look at her.
“This is the extent of my skill level…” She pouted. “For now.” The pout disappeared and she imdiately brightened.
“You’re so… kissable,” she cried, then kissed again and again. Lips, nose, and then around my mouth.
Carefully massaging her thighs and cute little tush, I brought her away from my face so she wouldn’t be subjected to my breath over and over. If I set her down, I doubted she would co up to my knee… but the size she’d been before, I could’ve fit her entire body into my mouth, wings and all. Also if I set her down, she’d imdiately revert to her normal size, and mine. Physical contact was enough for foreplay, and that was enough for Adaptability to go to work.
“I’m sorry we haven’t been able to communicate before,” I told her, “but we need to—”
Fairy Poppins lay back in my hands and spread her little legs. One hand dove down between her thighs and massaged the junction, and she gave off a sigh I could just hear.
“You better show that dick, right now!”
This is Christopher at a loss.
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