We had dealt with two of our five fighting aspect Nakamamon successfully. The problem going forward was that, unfortunately, we were running out of time.

“There is literally no possible way for me to whip up all three of these cures at the same time,” I told Jacoby. With the loss of my garden, I had to regrow some of my new spliced plants, splice new ones, and wait the required twenty-four hours for them to mature. From there, it would be a race to dry them out or wring the healing properties out of them, place them in the glycerine, and infuse everything with the necessary magic. Vellenia could help, but after that, there was literally nothing that could be done.

Doing both of these at the same time would be a strain on the possibilities of what I could accomplish. “The difficulties on both of these checks are going to go up,” I told her.

Jacoby’s look of consternation deepened. I could tell she was trying to think her way out of this problem, but there was only one good way out, and—

I shot bold upright in my seat, forgetting the henge sage in the mortar and pestle for a second, and tried to think of how to put this delicately.

“You thought of something,” she said.

“You’re not going to like it,” I replied, “but yeah, I’ve got an idea.”

“What do you mean, I’m not going to like it?”

“You already trusted me before, and that went well,” I reminded her.

“Get to it.”

I took a deep breath and engaged Psyspeech.

Look, I told her. I have and have the ability to share abilities based on, well, engaging in sexual acts. I received this ability from, uh, sleeping with a psychic aspect Nakamamon. And I don’t just receive abilities, I pass them on.

Jacoby’s breath caught. Her eyes were wide.

I know how that sounds, and I know how messed up it seems. I’m not asking you or anybody on your team to do anything with me, but you did… watch me.

“Vellenia can do this because she has abilities as my bond mate,” I said. “But Fairy Poppins has a Healer ability—”

“Hold the fracking phone!” Jacoby shrieked, leaping up out of her chair and behind it like it would offer her some protection against my communicable abilities. “You… and she… but she’s like three inches tall and you’re…”

“Not,” I said. “Look, if you really want to know, I can show you the part of my character sheet that goes over everything.”

Which was how I spent a number of tense, awkward minutes bent over my workstation grinding up various herbs and flowers, steeping others in hot water, and drawing the goodness out of my plants. I glanced over my shoulder to see Jacoby still there, mouth agape and flicking her gaze between me and the panes of system information behind me.

“Your stats…” she breathed.

“You’re only supposed to be looking at the one part.”

She had the grace to look abashed, thankfully. But after several more flicks of the eyes she left Entwined Ecstasy and my Qualities and shared abilities from Entwined Ecstasy, and moved to the Pleasure Seeker special abilities.

“Adaptability… you may alter your form in order to mate with creatures physically different from yourself.” She looked from the system windows to me. “Did you have sex with your ghost aspect?” I’m pretty sure she muttered, ‘I would’ve if I were you.’ but I couldn’t hear well enough, given that Vellenia was rustling some herbs just a bit away, with an amused smile on her face. She turned, brushing her tail against the side of my leg, very much on purpose.

“That doesn’t matter,” I said.

“I’m going to take that as a yes.”

“And also, I don’t just kiss and tell, okay? You don’t hear me bragging about sleeping with various different partners. That’s not how I roll.”

Shaking her head, she moved on to my Pleasure Seeker abilities. I knew this because she read over them in a barely audible tone. “Man Enough? Oh sheesh. Clone yourself? Fuuuuuuuuuuudge. Post Sharing Clarity… why don’t they just call it post nut clarity? Coming Together, Drive In Deeper… gosh, these are so… naughty.”

“Yeaaaaaahhhhh,” I said, infusing the henge sage with mana. It was going to be a long night, since Vellenia also had her own batch to deal with. I needed to be there to help her.

“So the question is whether or not you want to help out.” I already knew this svelte Asian Ranger wanted someone to worship her the way she felt she deserved. The bitch of this was, there wasn’t even time to properly rock her world. She’d talked about going at it for hours, which ordinarily would be enough for me to make a move on her, but I’d also never done it specifically for the purpose of giving someone healing powers.

The clock was ticking. We had two days to deliver cures to these creatures, and working with Vellenia, we could make two of the needed four. We had a small plant beast, a large earth beast, a medium fire beast, and a medium plant without other aspect. We’d either have to allow for the possibility of two of them to exist forever as fighting aspects, or Jacoby would leap onto my dick, get the power sharing on, and maybe, mayyyyyyybe, get a third cure done and administered.

“What if I gave you myself and found another willing participant?” Jacoby asked, far too evenly for my tastes.

“You can’t just press gang people into this kind of thing,” I said. “I’m not having sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with me. It…” It had been a disaster on earth, and I wasn’t doing that again. And neither of us were going to discuss my pathetic sexual past, which had thankfully taken place on a whole different planet or plane of existence… or both.

“You let me handle that,” she said.

The implication was not at all lost on me that Jacoby had basically agreed to shuck her clothes and leap into bed for some sticky sexy times. I didn’t know whether she was doing this out of the hyper-efficiency Expedition Leader will to take care of the fighting aspect flub, or she wanted some Fletcher up inside her, but that didn’t matter a lot. She was driven to complete her mission and that was the important part.

“And just to be clear,” she said with that same evenness, “you’re only interested in having women as sexual partners, correct?”

I leveled my own expressionless gaze on her. She nodded and left without a question.

While Jacoby disappeared off to wherever she was going to do whatever she was doing, we infused ingredients with mana. With that sheer oddity no longer in front of me, I continued working on the cures with Vellenia.

We determined that we had probably, if I slept with Jacoby, she got a good special ability that was helpful and then helped to work on an extra cure with competence, the means to create three cures. Meaning of the remaining Nakamamon, the Hellephant, the Invineity, the Shrubbit, and the Geodile, three out of four of them. We needed to choose the ones we were prepared to save and the ones we were prepared to let go.

Triage was the word for what we started doing.

With the difference in aspects and sizes, each of the creatures needed to be done separately. That was a requirement. I needed to add a different herb to the fire cure than to the plant cure, and I needed to scale back the potency of the plant cure to make it so it didn’t kill the Shrubbit outright.

“The Geodile is the slowest,” Vellenia suggested, just as we switched jobs. I resumed drawing the essence out of the henge sage while she scraped the hardwood bark and got it into an oil medium, then started applying mana.

“Well the Invineity is out. A fighting aspect vine creature is a strangler and that’s no good. That one is first.”

She nodded sagely.

“The Wizards informed me about the fire aspect issue,” she responded. We need ash from a holy and ash from a mana plant…”

“That’s great. I want a fire and fighting aspect about as much as I want a strangler.”

We added the Hellephant to the list of definites. With those two down, we needed to choose between the big, slow, scary Geodile and the fast, agile, camouflaged Shrubbit. Presently, the Geodile was blasting spikes of crystal out of its back scales, which shattered against the inside of its magically reinforced cage. It was also chewing on the bars with crystalline teeth.

“The Shrubbit is the most adorable and least deadly, at least in feel,” I said.

Shrubbit it would have to be.

And then, in order of importance, we put the Hellephant and the Invineity first. Vellenia and I could handle those two, I thought. One cure for an infinitely expanding kudzu-vine-like creature, and another for a fracking lava elephant coming right up.

The hours disappeared once again in the face of brewing, infusing, and combining. Vellenia and I worked and worked, often in silence. The Affinity attribute and Mana Affinity skill both helped to inform me of what was happening and anything I might need to adjust. I ended up going through not two, not three, not four, but five different checks, because the difficulties were mounting.

Also, I was working in a place that was not only god-influenced, but warded from that divine influence by arcane Wizard magic. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. When I peered into darkened corners of the house it felt like something was moving to get out of sight. Something probably was moving to get out of sight, and it probably had something to do with Rogue nonsense. Either Jacoby was spying on me with Oz or Oz’s bond mate, or that other guy’s Rogue had found us and was monitoring my activity so they could swoop in and catch me unawares. Regardless, whatever it was didn’t stop me from doing my job, so I resolved to keep doing my job.

We had plenty of henge grass and hardwood, and plenty of fire with which to turn both into ash for the Hellephant, so we simply swept the failures away and got going again.

Sometime later, minutes or hours, Jacoby reappeared with a slim, slight Wizard girl who I was told was twenty-one, but who looked younger. Some people just look younger than they are, and this girl was one of them. She had the wide eyes, the slightly chubby cheeks, and the tight figure of someone who would get carded by the liquor store clerk until she was almost fifty.

“This is Celine,” Jacoby said, and nodded to the girl. I, in the meantime, didn’t stop infusing the henge grass with mana. It needed more than I gave it, according to the UI’s description of my failure.

Celine was dressed in a long skirt embroidered with all kinds of different pictures. There were flowers, butterflies, stalks of wheat, some boogie trees, a couple of Nakamamon I recognized and a few I didn’t. One looked like a giant blue teddy bear. Above that, she had on a long-sleeved white t-shirt with a scoop neck.

She also appeared to be terrified out of her mind.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Celine,” I said, then nodded toward where I was stirring one pot of henge sage with one hand, and another pot full of boiling hardwood bark. “Forgive me if I don’t come over and shake your hand.” I’d just passed an Affinity check that allowed me to split my mana flow out of my third eye chakra into two streams, but operating both with different flows of mana was possibly the hardest mental task I’d ever done. Vellenia was in pretty much the same boat; she gave a pained smile and a quick ‘hello!’ before getting back to her stirring.

“Celine will be joining us in helping with the cures,” Jacoby said.

“Celine,” I said. “You’ve seen me around the camp. We met in Glumpdumpkin, right?”

The girl nodded but couldn’t bring her eyes up to meet me.

“I’m not sure what Jacoby told you, but I made it clear to her that absolutely nothing is going to happen unless…” I trailed off and took the hardwood off the fire so it could cool. “…where was I?”

“You were about to say something pointless and silly,” Jacoby said. “Celine understands the risks and she’s ready to do what’s necessary.”

Celine was shaking like a leaf.

“It looks more like Celine drew the short straw, or lost a game of rock scissors paper and now she’s ‘volunteering’, which won’t work.”

Jacoby threw up her hands. “You’re impossible!”

“I’m not doing someone who’s not fully invested.”

“I am doing what I have to do for the team,” Jacoby growled, squinting her eyes and somehow glaring at me at the same time.

With the terrified Wizard standing next to her, I didn’t want to call Expedition Leader Jacoby a liar and ruin her credibility. I also wasn’t about to force this shaking waif of a girl to have sex with me if she wasn’t ready for it.

“Look,” I said, again stirring the henge sage and finalizing the infusion so we could make the salve… again. “Celine, if you want to watch the process in action, you can. But I’m going to need full-throated consent in order to move forward. Vellenia and I have already determined that if we have to, we’ll allow the Shrubbit to complete its transformation into a fighting aspect, and just accept the consequences. We believe it will be the least destructive of the four current specimens.”

Jacoby’s already sour look darkened further. She knew there was no way she was going to be able to convince me to do it her way. She was the leader of this team, but I wasn’t technically part of her team. What was she going to do, threaten to turn me over to the Agency people, and ruin her chance at minimizing the damage on this fighting aspect thing?

Celine was looking between us in growing alarm.

“We are running out of time,” Jacoby hissed.

“There are certain lines I’m not prepared to cross,” I told her. “You are going to have to accept that, or you’re going to have to tie me down, hold a sword to my head, and force her to rape me.” I gestured over to Celine, who flinched.

And good luck with that. I was a lover, not a fighter, but I had an array of tools at my disposal, and I would be using every single one of them to wriggle out of any violence she had in store for me. One of those things I could do was clone myself.

Several things happened all at once.

One, Celine stiffened, having fortified her spine with perhaps some Token-enhanced courage, and blurted out, “I’ll do it!” This was loud. She had psyched herself up and practically screamed out her assent.

Two, Jacoby flashed forward and grabbed me by the wrist. The action was full of frustration that bordered on violence.

Both of these happened at exactly the same moment, which was why the third thing was so unfortunate.

Third, a thorn appeared in Jacoby’s neck, glistening with some poison. Out of the shadows, a small humanoid Nakamamon appeared, with a head full of writhing purple tentacles.

This is Christopher gobsmacked.