Jacoby’s camp was in pandemonium, but a fun kind of pandemonium. Already, Savannah was buck naked and being spit roasted by Wayne and one of the Guardians. The two members of her team I had treated once upon a time, Bri and Steph, were on the ground in a sixty-nine. They hadn’t even taken off all their clothes, but instead Bri’s face had disappeared beneath Steph’s long skirt. His pants were down to his knees though, and I had a full view of the hard work she was doing.

Several of the team members had escaped the area, too, suggesting that Bri, Steph, Wayne and Savannah were all doing this because they wanted to, not because they were under a compulsion. Kinky.

The surge of divine energy was definitely familiar. Once upon a time I’d had no defense against this. It heated up my whole body, made me painfully hard, made my partner who I’d met just minutes before completely irresistible, and me irresistible to her.

Several of the other team members were engaged with one another. Ribbit had three partners, and one of them was a Nakamamon that looked like a blob of blue jelly with eyes.

“Daddy,” Celine begged, wrenching at my pants, “please. Please give your whore what she needs.”

I was about to tell her it would have to wait, when time stopped.

***

Everyone froze mid-coitus, with Celine’s hands clutched at my pants. Somewhere not far off was a powerful divine source. Not powerful like The Lovers powerful, but powerful like the God of Productivity times ten powerful.

My first thought was that I did not have the Divine Resistance levels to stop this from burning me into a cinder. My second thought was that I’d felt this pressure before.

I peered around at the frozen sexscape, and found a figure cloaked in darkness… exuding darkness… composed of darkness? They were laying on their side on the roof of my house, head propped on one elbow, knee up… playing with themselves? It was too dark to see what that hand was doing, but there was motion of the arm. Two eyes glowed with a lavender power, and two ears that reminded me of Shakindria’s poked up off its too-big head.

I had never seen this Nakamamon before.

I’d seen it a bunch of times.

“What the heck?” I asked, mostly at the way my brain was doing mental flip flops over me recognizing it or not.

“It is so amusing listening to you refuse to use harsh language,” a silky female voice purred. A decidedly female voice.

“Who… what do you want?”

I had several flashes of headache, where this creature wriggled out of places in my brain that had been closed off.

I saw her in the HQ castle, shortly after I’d cured the God of Footfalls, congratulating me on a job well done, explaining—

“You’re the reason the gods have been getting sick!” I blurted.

Those glowing eyes rolled. “This is getting repetitive. Go on, get your head together. I’ll wait.”

She appeared in Slinktrickle, smirking and asking me if I was really happy to have clothes back on for the first time in weeks.

There she was in Glumpdumpkin, standing atop a house again, clapping and looking sinister against the backdrop of exploding fireworks.

“You don’t normally show up until after I’ve cured a god.”

“Take your time,” she said.

In all three of these memories, she sauntered close, congratulating me but giving me the impression I hadn’t really done a good job at all. In Slinktrickle she told me there was a huge god in Glumpdumpkin that would need my help, and fast! In Glumpdumpkin she asked me whether I felt accomplished, undoing her work.

I clamped my eyes shut. “I don’t get it… if you’re making the gods sick, and I’m undoing it, why aren’t you stopping me?” If she could cause the God of Productivity to become sick and die, she was clearly strong enough to stop me from healing it back up.

“Did you know that the God of Lies is sick over in Saxwhacket?” she asked. “Did you know that there is a god under the mountain that currently suffers, and will cause the eruption of a volcano long dormant? Did you know that your own mother is attempting to cure her own first godly illness, and that is for the God of Utensils?  Did you know that the God of Sinuses is currently causing sneezing fits, insane mucus production, and crazy itching throughout an entire small village? Did you know that the Goddess of Light has plunged another entire village into a kind of gloomy non-day non-night? Of course you don’t.”

My mind swirled at all the sickness. She claimed to have caused the divine illnesses I’d dealt with, but she could be lying. After all, if there was a God of Lies on this world, then Nakamamon could indeed lie. She could be lying about all these sick gods also, either the causes or the sicknesses themselves. She was a being composed of pure darkness, and the only dark aspect Nakamamon I’d met was McCauley Skulkins. His invisibility power literally allowed for spying and deception.

“You… told me… in Glumpdumpkin?” She had. And then she’d caused me to forget things.

“That’s right, you poor thing.” She certainly didn’t sound like she was apologizing, but rather that she was talking to a cute doggie.

“None of what you’ve done makes any sense. You’re just… an agent of chaos?” I guessed. I was tempted to burn all of my Ingenuity Tokens. Her presence was seriously unnerving. I had questions, and the more my amnesia peeled away looking at her, the more questions appeared. Some of them had answers, but many more appeared. She was a Nakamamon, and yet she had a power over gods. Where did that come from, or just how powerful was she? And more importantly, how had she become that powerful? What kind of game was she playing?

“Chaos?” she asked, and raised her hand from where I couldn’t see what she’d been doing. “I can assure you, human, I have specific goals. You, on the other hand… you have wrought changes to the entire paradigm of this world. Unintentional changes.”

I’d been right there when Blake changed into the world’s first fighting aspect. And now there was Muscularity as well as Agility, where there’d only been Physicality before. Plus, I had a unique second class.

And then there was me bringing an unauthorized person through the portal with the express intent of healing them. The destruction of the portal near the HQ. The likely arrest and imprisonment of my entire team.

“Your friends have returned to this world,” she said.

“What? Really? Where?”

“The second portal has been lodged open. This has grave repercussions, Healer.” She said the word Healer with a certain je ne sais quoi I disliked. Like she was calling into question the fact that I was a Healer at all, and was mostly just a haver of sex. “Would you like to know the results of your actions?”

“I… suppose.” Not that I could entirely trust her. You didn’t trust someone that mucked about with your brain. Boy was I glad Psyspeech was one way and didn’t draw thoughts out.

She rose from the roof and descended to ground level smoothly, feet not touching the ground. She hovered toward me.

“The first thing that’s happening is one in every five Nakamamon without a second aspect is gaining the fighting aspect. You may have tried to undo that process, but it was a foregone conclusion before you even began.”

I sighed. “Not the Bushwhack then?”

A very amused chuckle slid out of her. “Of course not. The human Blake infected Nakamamon before he was captured. His second in command did as well. Your other human’s team was only able to detect and corral those six.”

Archie. He had run off and then been without the anti-magic drug.

She… refused to be identified using my skill. I failed several checks in a row before they even began, with the UI explaining that even spending all Ingenuity to lower the difficulty, I didn’t have enough Ingenuity and Identify to generate enough successes to handle the task. Meaning I needed more than 13 successes after lowering the difficulty by 5, the max I could do on 9 Ingenuity and 8 Free Tokens. 

“What are you?”

“Let’s stay on topic, shall we?” she asked. “The fighting aspects and the division of Physicality is perhaps the least important factor at work. These Nakamamon will do something they’ve hardly ever done before: fight one another, though they’re presently restricted to one on one battles. They will never fight to kill, but rather to increase their fighting skill. To be the very best there ever was.”

That struck me as odd. Blake had boasted that he was going to crush my skull. But the lack of Nakamamon killing one another was good news, and Blake was also in Agency custody.

“They will fight the non-fighting aspected Nakamamon as well. Every one of them, fighting or non, will become a Nakamamon who knows fighting, who gets knocked out and revived. This is the new reality.”

Then she hit me between the eyes with a real curveball.

“Magic is being released into your world at a rapid pace,” she said. “Your world is sucking magic in from this world.”

This news struck me harder. “What about the magic level here? How badly will it be affected?”

“Not badly,” she said. “There will be a long period, perhaps decades, during which your world will simply collect magic. The world is far bigger than you can comprehend, and it will take ages to saturate… assuming more humans don’t create and then open more portals. Like the marrow in your bones, this world will create more magic from the core of our star. Dissipation does happen out of the atmosphere. The loss of magic will take millennia to have any serious effect.”

I glanced at the sun, then back at this woman.

“You’re so adorable,” she said. “Your first thought was for the sanctity of life on this world. Again, commendable, even if your actions have resulted in dramatic, worldwide shifts. Even if you have acted selfishly by bringing your mother here, and the cavalcade of dominoes that has fallen as a result. The imprisonment of your friends, the patrols searching for you, the wedging open of the portal… and now whatever your friends will do now that they are here.”

She made a tongue clucking sound, though I couldn’t detect a mouth. Admonishing and patronizing. “There is good news in all this,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“With the portal wedged open, the administration has given up using a huge amount of resources in attempting to catch you. The Wizards using their Divination magic scouring the past for signs of your friends’ guilt, and the other Wizards attempting to scry your location now have different missions. Most of those teams tasked with bringing you back in have been recalled to help relocate the headquarters castle.”

“The… whole HQ is going to be moving then…” I mused. The castle did float and slowly rotate over and over, like it was in zero gravity. But it was the size of a small skyscraper. It couldn’t be easy to move.

“Wait… if Wizards were scrying my location, why haven’t they located me?”

The being stood there, eyes unblinking.

“It was you then?”

She sounded both proud of this fact and amused at the job she had done. “Just so, Healer. Your Ingenuity is indeed improving, for you are piecing together events and making leaps of logic faster than our past meetings.”

“Tell me who you are… and if you’re bonded.” It occurred to me that this creature was perhaps bonded to one of the HQ high muckety-mucks, and even potentially… “Is it Claudius or Jocinda?”

Definitely Jocinda. If this creature really had initiated the sicknesses of gods somehow, a fact I could believe given it was a dark aspect. I knew practically nothing about the dark aspect.

And in considering it, it made sense. One of the two of them could stop time, and this creature already had darkness powers and probably high level psychic powers. It almost certainly fell to Claudius or Jocinda to do the time stopping so their bond mate could come have this chat with me. Bets were still on Jocinda, though I couldn’t count out Claudius. Was he causing gods to fall ill just to try to flush out Jocinda, since a Druid would want to uphold the natural order of the world? Or was Jocinda doing this because she was a crazy Druid nature lady and she hated the Agency, wanting to undermine it? Was her final goal to damage it, ultimately destroy it or force the Agency out of this world and back to earth?

I was still assuming it was Jocinda, though I had to admit there was still a lot I didn’t know. I wasn’t an Investigator, I was a Healer.

The Nakamamon clapped her blurry black hands together. “Well done, Healer. Well done indeed. You got to this round of questions far faster than last time.” I scrunched my face down and tried to recall my discussion with her in Glumpdumpkin. I was not a fan of amnesia in general, and less of a fan of magic-created amnesia.

She leaned in, and I was disconcerted to learn she still had no features I could make out, even only inches away from me. Only those two faintly glowing eyes painting the flesh around them a deep purple.

“I’m not going to answer that question, but it’s only because I can’t.”

She was bonded. There was no other way to read that. She couldn’t answer the question because she was ordered to.

Straightening brought her away from me, and the disconcerting feel of her lessened. My Divine Resistance had already made three checks, and thankfully passed all three. I would need to increase it with future level ups… if she allowed me to remember what we’d talked about.

I could sense her frowning.

“Hm, unfortunately I will need to give you the ability to recall this information. What a pity that you’ll also have to recall me as part of the discussion we have had.”

Piecing this together, her bond mate had instructed her to visit me and see how I’d done for some reason, but had instructed her to wipe my memory. However, now that the world and the system were both changing, her bond mate wanted me to know certain information, and… hadn’t been explicit in how that information was delivered.

“I am still required to alter your memory so that our previous meetings remain out of reach,” she said, again with that smirk in her voice. “I would say it’s been a pleasure to meet you, Healer—” Again, twisting the word Healer to make it sound like an insult.

“Wait,” I said.

“I’m afraid the time for questions is at an end.”

“I’m not going to ask more questions… I’m going to make you an offer.”

“There is nothing you can offer me that I wish, or that I will accept.”

“I can offer you carnal pleasure,” I said. “And at the end of that, an ability from our union.”

The most human thing she’d done thus far was to blink and react as if I’d poked her in the chest. She still hovered in the air, and she was still a being of unlimited darkness, but I’d surprised her.

“Is that what’s been allowing your compatriots to help you in your healing efforts?” she mused. “I thought they were being a bit too successful as assistants.”

Something she hadn’t known. I felt that perhaps I’d played my cards too soon. I thought she’d had access to everything, but another important lesson here: she wasn’t omnipotent. She was far from perfect.

“I wish I could accept your offer, Healer and Pleasure Seeker, but I cannot.”

She approached, getting uncomfortably close. “Now, if you could just turn around and settle your crotch back into this position right here…” She pressed hands into my butt and pushed me back to where Celine had been clutching at my pants, trying to get them pulled down so she could get at some carnal pleasure of her own.

“Enjoy,” the being breathed in my ear.

This is Christopher shaking his head and watching time restart.