Well that cooked it; we were dealing with an entity that was both magically and spiritually sick. I still couldn’t ‘pass the check’ and get information out of the UI until I’d done the other spiritual diagnostics, but that much was clear: it was a dual type. Just like Vellenia was a water and fairy aspect.
I ran the ntal diagnostic test just to be sure we didn’t have so sort of weird trifecta of ailnts, but with nothing to respond to , there was no response. At least the UI didn’t make the check difficult, and I passed it without having to spend a Token.
I hadn’t dealt with this kind of thing, obviously, because nobody had. At least according to the record Alan had brought along.
“Are you able to contact HQ?” I asked Alan.
“W-w-w-w-w…” he started, then grew frustrated and held up a finger. “Ev-v-very day, one ti.”
“Once a day, got it. Today, you’re going to ask about a cure for magical and spiritual illness in gods to Rainer. He’s the mustache headed man in charge of the Healers.”
Alan snickered. He knew exactly what I was talking about: with bristly mustaches for eyebrows, and a big bristly mustache that ran around the back of his head. And that wasn’t even counting Rainer’s actual mustache, which looked like roadkill taped under his nose.
“S-s-s-sure.”
He soon left, and I was joined by Vellenia again.
“You require a break,” she said.
“What?”
“You have worked hard throughout the evening,” she said. “Darkness has fallen, and it is ti to put work away. You require rest, my bonded one.”
I nodded slowly at her, and we headed out of the hatchery building, and into the night. The cool night are enveloped us, leaving Vellenia clutching my side for warmth. However, a variety of glowing creatures were out tonight.
“What’s this?”
“This is a show that happens once every few days,” she told , brimming with cheer. It was like watching soone watch your favorite movie, the look on Vel’s face.
Transparent things like earth animals flew about and pulsated. I used the Identify skill to spy Glimrfly, which were simply flies made of ethereal wisps of color.
Glimrfly
Second Stage Nakamamon
Glimrflies appear only briefly in the dayti, as the sunlight overpowers their natural glow, but can charge themselves up with mana once the sun retreats for a truly spectacular show.
Typical length: 1-2 inches (tiny, swarm)
Typical weight: unknown -> Glimrfly
Glimrfly has been added to your Nakamadex.
They ca in every aurora color imaginable: neon and electric green, bright pink, and a a silvery glow. Had these things been out all day, and we just couldn’t see them? I was also curious about where they’d co from, and what kind of caterpillar or pupa they had before they beca these funky butterfly things.
The thing that erged next was far more impressive: an orca-sized firebird composed of the sa sorts of colors as the Glimrflies. The thing left streaks of light dissipating in its wake. This one was harder to Identify, but after several attempts I got it.
Glowvern
First Stage Nakamamon
Glowverns, like the Glimrflies they often appear with, are naturally invisible during the dayti, but can often put on a show during the night. Although they seldom interact with or get close enough to make contact with, be advised that their high concentration of holy essence can be damaging for humans.
Typical length: 20-30 foot wingspan
Typical weight: 25-50 pounds
Gender: unknown
Aspect: holy/creature (beast)
Transformations: unknown -> Glowvern
Glowvern has been added to your Nakamadex.
“Holy…” I muttered.
“Precisely,” Vellenia said, clutching against her body. I loved the way her boobs pressed against my arm. “They have been showing up more and more often.”
“Have they?” I asked, watching the glowing wyvern wheel around in the air and circle back around in a holding pattern above the town.
“And… oh, I have not seen these previously.”
Descending from far, far up, were hundreds of jellyfish made of similar stuff. They trailed hundreds of long tentacles from their large bodies. They appeared to be no more than bulbous sacks.
While the Glimrflies and Glowvern simply glittered with power, these jellyfish things pulsed with it. The holy energy sizzled down their tentacles and in so few cases caused arcs of electricity to bridge the gap between them. And these weren’t your garden variety, soccer ball-sized jellyfish either. These were bigger than those Portuguese Man O’Wars they have, where the head is bigger than a person and the tentacles are sothing like 75 feet long.
“Cute!” Vellenia said.
The bells of these colossal jellyfish had little wings sprouting off them, and halos floating above them. The wings were flapping, and helping move them in the air little by little.
The glowvern was giving these things a wide berth.
Identify confird what I’d suspected.
Angelly
Basic Nakamamon
Angelly, or Angel Jellies, are colossal creatures composed of pure holy energy. Though ethereal, beautiful and quite rare, their tentacles can deliver punishing holy damage on any creature foolish enough to get near them. These are especially dangerous to dark aspect Nakamamon or their bonded humans.
Typical length: 70-100 feet (huge)
Typical weight: 40-75 pounds
Gender: unknown
Aspect: holy
Transformations: none known
Angelly has been added to your Nakamadex.
The window in front of my vision listed them as rare.
“We don’t want to be close to those when they descend,” I told her, and started leading her back toward my tent.
“Everybody inside!” I shouted. “That’s an order.”
Over on one of the large platforms, the team perked up.
“Cinzy!”
She stopped, so fifty feet away from on a different platform, with Fairy Poppins bobbing around her head like a tiny yellow lightbulb.
“You’ve got to call out to Drat. He needs to stay well away from those things.” It was a guess, but I was pretty certain Drat had a sort of forgettable-ness power, or a straight up invisibility power from his Nakamamon, McCauley Skulkins.
Her voice ca like a gaphone positioned directly behind my head. “Drat! Keep well away from all the light creatures. Fletcher thinks they’re especially dangerous. Get inside right— ow!” The sound was everywhere.
She dashed aside as a tiny spark zapped off a tentacle so three feet away, and accepted Ivy’s hand.
It rapidly beca apparent that the Angellies weren’t just a slight problem. The mont we got inside, we noted the tentacles passing right through the wooden roofing. The glowing ropes continued to descend through the ceiling toward us.
“Huh,” I said. “That is sothing, isn’t it?”
“I do not understand your tone, bonded one,” Vel said.
“We have to get lower. Where’s the nearest boat?”
All round us, Marshins were getting the sa ssage. They had been skywatching like Vel and I, and were now heading for cover… after that, they ducked out of their hos and down to the docks. And when that didn’t look safe, many of them simply headed into the marsh. Their bodies were built for a semi-aquatic lifestyle, after all. So of them were hauling Marshells down with them, or sliding them off the platforms and directly into the marsh below. They’d call out and shove their young off together.
I had to hope Larelle would see this and handle the safety of the rest of the team. They had shield powers, thankfully. That was the closest thing one could get, and I was hopeful they would work against holy energy.
We dashed outside, and I pulled Vellenia up short before she ran headfirst into a lowering mass of tentacles. We dodged around it before hitting a stairwell that descended to the surface level. There, the platform was a dock: with their wide bottod boats all tied up to posts every four feet or so.
All around us was a chaotic maelstrom of movent. Most of the Marshins were taking care of number one first, but a few made mad dashes for the hatchery, where their eggs still lay. A few were rising and diving through the waters at blistering speed, pushed on by their powerful tails, until they were directly beneath the hatchery. If there was one thing I could be thankful for, it was the calm determination in the air, rather than the hopeless grief that threatened to destroy their eggs just the other day.
“We’ll just get in here,” I said, and hopped onto the boat. If I had to, I’d end up with just my nose sticking out of the water. Vellenia did likewise, and we poled out away from where a few tentacles were poking through the raised platform so twelve feet above us.
After a tense few minutes, or perhaps an hour, it beca clear that the Angellies weren’t going to float directly down to the marsh’s surface… or lower. We had about five feet of breathing room, and watched as the colossal jellyfish hovered in place, their mantles pulsating with both muscle activity and tiny lightning bolts of holy power.
Afterwards, I called out, and was grateful to hear Cinzy’s voice coming out over the marsh. The natives were fine. She was okay, the others were okay. Only Drat remained unaccounted for.
Vellenia and I watched the glowing creatures in silence in silence. Minutes passed. A lot of minutes. She held my hand, then scooted over and draped her body over mine. She ward up, and ward up, as ti went on.
“They are coalescing,” she said.
“So they are,” I said, and sat up.
The vast majority of the tentacles were drifting over into a few directions. This created vast pockets of safety, for one thing, and that was good, but I knew what it ant.
“Let’s follow them,” I said.
In another hour or two, the Angellies had gathered in roughly three spots. The one we were closest to ended up being close to the cliff’s edge and the cave we had traveled through to get to the surface. We ended up finding a boulder the size of a house beneath a snarl of vines and thick shrubbery, and when Vellenia dove into the marsh, she ca back grinning excitedly. The holy light of the Angellies bathed her face in a holy glow, leeching the color out of the minty green portions of her body.
“Fletcher, co quickly!” She said, and dove beneath the surface again.
***
“And here it is,” my father said.
“Yeah,” I told him.
“Here what is?” my mother asked.
“The water breathing power,” Sarah called from the kitchen. She was now feeding Brayden, doing the airplane over and over again to get applesauce and cread corn and such into his face.
“How was it?” my father asked.
I laughed. “It… was awful, Dad. Awful.”
***
My body’s natural instinct, to hold my breath and screw my eyes shut… was gone. The mont I entered the water, I instantly understood what had happened. The mana gave gills at the sides of my neck and middle back. They just morphed into being. Also, the ability Eagle-Eyed from Tara gave the ability to see in the darkness. Luckily there was still so illumination from the Angellies, filtering through the shrubbery and the water. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to work for Eagle-Eyed.
And besides, the sock was glowing.
Now, I swam the rest of the way through the marsh without coming up for air, back to the village to link up with the rest of the team. The feeling of having water in my lungs-slash-gills was so wonderful and so weird. It tickled a little, but in another way, it felt… good. I can’t really explain, because the sensation was like nothing I’d ever felt before. Also, the water wasn’t nearly as chilly as it was up in the village.
Up on the docks below the stilts and the building platforms, I t up with Cinzy, Regina, the four lady Guardians, Alan and Trent.
“There’s… a sock,” I gasped. The water leaving my gills and the air replacing it… also a strange sensation I couldn’t easily describe.
“A sock, he says,” Cinzy said, as though I was ntally deficient and needed to be talked to like a three year old. She turned to the rest. “There’s a sock, everybody.”
Regina and Ivy both snorted laughter.
“We know all about the sock,” she said.
“You do?”
“Wait, there’s another sock?” she asked.
“Uhh, duh. Yes, there’s another sock,” I said, and described where I’d discovered the sock.
As for their sock, right now, a whole host of Angellies was now clustered over where it had been hidden, buried under so marsh muck. The current guess was a Nakamamon swam by it and with a powerful tail flick, sent so silt and dirt to cover it up.
“It was barely visible,” Isabelle said. “You want to see it?”
I went to ask how they’d gotten it back to the lab, and Isabelle held up her hand, manifesting the shield again out of mana. Instead of the ginormous tower shield she’d brought into being when saving , this one was only a little larger than a dinner plate. The ghostly blue energy contrasted with the dark of twilight, and I could even make out rivets, the space where the thick planks of wood had been joined and covered by an iron band running around the outside. The center had a pointy tal spike—probably tal at any rate, since it was all made of magic—and was held by flexible straps to her hand and forearm.
“Okay… well, if any of you can breathe water, or hold your breath for a long ti, the other one is in an underground cavern sort of.”
Cinzy took two purposeful strides forward, and thrust out her absolutely stunning set of boobs. And straight out of my favorite fandom of all ti, she said the words which both shocked and delighted . And she did it in the exact voice. It was like Cinzy had been replaced with a two foot green muppet on the even of his 900th birthday.
“No, there is another.”
As it turned out—while Trent went off to grab the other sock without getting anyone killed—Cinzy had spotted a third gathering of the Angellies. Although the big guys were pretty terrifying descending from the sky, they had been extrely useful in giving us the locations of the nudity god’s clothes.
She marched ahead with ridiculous purpose, arms swinging and knees pumping up and down in the darkness.
Periodically she’d freeze and I’d walk up beside her to find her smirking ridiculously at . One eyebrow was raised as if to say ‘eh? I look so dumb, don’t I?’
“We’re close,” she said imperiously, and thrust a finger in the air for good asure.
“Sobody else is close,” Regina whispered, when Cinzy marched off again and left the rest of us following after for the second ti.
“Not right now,” I breathed.
“I’m always on the verge,” she went on. I gave her a grin and stuck my tongue out at her, then put a finger up to my lips. She probably wasn’t the only one with enhanced senses.
Cinzy continued to march along. It must’ve felt really good to suddenly have a strong and clear purpose. She’d spent the beginning of our expedition feeling like a fifth wheel, and once she finally got a chance to prove her worth, she felt she had mucked it up. For a girl who had never had much in the way of trouble academically, or trouble finding friendly faces, or trouble with her job, she’d spent the last few days being really down on herself. She blad herself for what nearly happened with the Marshins.
A patch of forest obscured any view we might have had of another group of Angellies. So it was a complete surprise when, after almost an hour of poling out through the marsh and and trekking naked through the dark forest, we began to see a bit of glow diffusing through the trees.
Cinzy breathed out a sigh of relief, probably that she hadn’t imagined it. I gave her a squeeze on the shoulder and she returned the gesture with one of those smiles that you never thought you’d get from the most beautiful people on earth in real life.
“Go on,” I urged.
“What?”
“You discovered it… go tell us what it is.”
And this is how, just a few minutes later, Christopher learns that we’ve finally found underwear.
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