The town’s council came out to meet me the next day. The remainder of the day I’d spent looking for the right kind of house to make my temporary base of operations. There wasn’t anything bad about the bubble houses, if you discounted the five foot ceilings and the way I’d have to cock my head to the side at all times. Azalea peered at me and asked why I didn’t just shrink if I was too big.

“Master—”

“Could I ask you not to call me that?”

Azalea froze. “You saved my life. You gave me a name. You mated with me. You are my master.”

I still wasn’t thrilled with her calling me that, but I couldn’t deny the blunt little purple beauty had a point.

Taking her by the hand while we walked and talked only served to increase the odd sensation and her calling me Master. First, she was tiny, under five feet, and the way Prismatic Apparel had formed into a cutesy strapless dress that matched her eyes only made the situation between seem all the more… wrong.

The town council was composed of three individuals. These were led by one of the Mindelas I’d seen loading and unloading all the supplies. This one was male, but looked virtually identical to Shakindria. The only difference was a slight difference in build. Mr. Mindela stood before two other sapient Nakamamon, one that appeared like a snowman but made of boulders, and the other something like a cat, but bipedal.

I have been asked to greet you, human, the Mindela said into my brain.

It’s an honor to be greeted by a psychic aspect Nakamamon, I sent back using Psyspeech. My name is Fletcher, and I am a Healer looking to help with your sick god problem.

The Mindela’s eyes went wide with shock and then darted around after having figured out I had a bond mate who was also a psychic aspect. He couldn’t find one, and his bewilderment deepened my amusement.

“It would actually be easier and convenient if all of us verbalized this meeting. I’m pleased to meet you, town elders,” I said. “My name is Fletcher, this is Azalea, and this adorable little scamp is April.” She nuzzled my hand and I gave her some extra scratches behind the flowers on her ears.

Mr. Mindela placed a hand on his chest and bowed. “Hefrekhan, at your service, though you may address me as Khan.”

I restrained the urge to scream it out like Captain Kirk. I also, and this took a monumental force of will, stopped myself from snorting or laughing.

He gestured back toward the pile of rocks with eyes and a mouth. “Shale.”

The rock person did a bow, which I returned in kind.

“And this is Yowl.”

Extremely appropriate names. “By any chance, have you met an old fellow named Claudius?”

Hefrekhan bowed. “Before I answer, I am in the unfortunate position of being forced to explain that poison aspected Nakamamon are rare in these parts, and in our town, are forbidden from using poison abilities. No offense intended, of course,” Khan said.

Azalea shrugged. “Anyone tries to eat me, the spines come out.”The three elders shared a series of long, searching looks. Azalea’s sickly yellow eyes narrowed. “Hang on… are people gonna try to eat me?”

Khan leapt back and hovered in the air to be further away from the tentacle-headed stranger accusing him of cannibalism. “Of course not!”

She looked dubious. “Then… no problem.”

“You have a sick god in your premises,” I said. “The Lovers, a god that governs mating and procreation.”

The elders shared a look again. Shale spoke up, sounding—of course—gravelly. “We have some slight… issues with our females in the last few weeks that grew concerning.”

“It is a great relief that you are a Healer,” Yowl said.

“You will be given every comfort necessary, and every resource at our disposal in the pursuit of cleansing this problem,” Shale explained. “Beginning with quarters. The three of us have estates, and we will be more than happy to clear a space for you to sleep, eat and work while you endeavor on our behalf.”

Blinking through my processing of this order, I gladly accepted, and made a mental note to contact my mom to give her the details.

Which is how I spent the remainder of the day making house calls, a thing I never thought I would ever say. I called on people in their mushroom houses, their bubble houses, their crystal houses, their tree houses, and some that looked exactly like suburban brick Tudor style houses back on earth. None of it made a lick of sense and I loved it. It was like being back in my first couple of days or weeks, when everything was fresh, new, and weird.

All the houses were filled with their own style of bric-a-brac, had their own way of decorating the place, and were in various states of cleanliness or disrepair. One mushroom house had a fungal infestation, which was odd and ironic.

The tree house had been decorated with literal living artwork, of tiny landscapes in frames made to look like paintings. They were all alive though, growing, and one of them needed a trim.

The bubble house had been filled with children’s toys, and an overly busy, overly exhausted mother was bent double, picking them all up. I used my Telekinesis ability to lift several of them and place them over in what looked like a toy chest, but which was really a large blue bubble with part of the outside carved out. The mother was a large blue frog with great big black spots, and an extremely red underside, and when she saw me helping out, she about died of embarrassment. Her tongue lashed out and swept all the toys to one side of the room. Afterwards, I was treated to the sight of her tadpoles, some blue, some bright green, and some a combination of the two, swimming around through the air like it was water. A couple of them had tiny legs sprouting out on either side of their swishing tails.

In every case, my job was to head inside and take a look at the individual’s egg or clutch of eggs. Several of them had upwards of a dozen eggs, but others had just one. We had tiny eggs no bigger than a jelly bean, and big ostrich eggs with knobby scales. One of these clutches was attached to the ceiling and needed water constantly blown over it. One of these was in the fireplace, roasting away.

All of them were a little off. The jelly bean-sized eggs were different colors, which the octopus mother confirmed was not correct. They should all be blue with a hint of purple. Some of these were green or pulsing with whitish light. All of the eggs in the tree house weren’t fuzzy with kiwifruit fur, but had spines like a pinecone. In that case, the male of the household, which looked like a large hedgehog but brown and green, was furious, looking to me for clear confirmation that his female hedgehog had somehow mated with some other Nakamamon. The large bronze ostrich egg in the family’s fireplace wasn’t supposed to be bronze, but coal black.

I performed Diagnostics on these using Affinity for magic-related illnesses first, followed by Diagnostics and Likability for mental or emotional illnesses. The tool for magic diagnosis was the thumb-sized blue crystal that needed to be run over the patient slowly, while concentrating my third eye and channeling a trickle of mana into it. The one for emotional illnesses was like a jack-in-the-box, which had a crank I needed to turn. A number of odd sounds emerged: a baby’s pure chuckling laugh, the weary sigh of a mother after a long day, a distant rumble of thunder, and others. This, too, required a channeling of mana while I turned the crank and listened to a wind chime, a cry of pain, a crunch of feet on gravel while a wave approached, and more.

Third, I did a once-over and used the stethoscope for physical problems. Finally, I had to use Ingenuity for divinity-related illnesses. The tool for the job here was first an ankh, which looked a bit like a Christian cross but with a loop at the top. Next, I surrounded it with prayer beads, followed by a scrap of a prayer rug, a small, intricately caved statue of a many-armed woman not much larger than Fairy Poppins, and a rosary with the Christian cross as one of the beads. This diagnostic required me to chant while bringing the different objects near to the patients, and again adding a touch of my mana to gauge the patients’ reactions.

Never was I more thankful to the God of Productivity than now. My mom had the box with all the different accoutrements for Diagnosis, and she would need all of them. She hadn’t been blessed by a giant, mostly-naked god like I had.

The Boon of Tools. You will always have the necessary tool for the job when engaged in the work of your Healer class. Bestowed upon you by the [God of Productivity]

Since I had burned up all my Ingenuity and Free Tokens, I had to use Arcane Alchemy. This meant taking Agility and Likability Tokens and transform them into Ingenuity Tokens before I could get through the last diagnostic test. It was a good thing, too, because the difficulties were higher than I’d like.

A bunch of these eggs had some manner of divine ailment.

The first the UI described for me was Divine Aspect Interference. Essentially, the divine entity being close by had altered the makeup of the egg in a way that made it into a divine aspect as well as its core aspect. Like the Angellies, the Glimmerflies and the Glowverns, these would be a brand new species of divine aspect Nakamamon.

Unless I did a similar sort of thing like I’d done with April and the other fighting aspects.

The last house call was by far the oddest. The wife, or lady of the house anyway, was crying when I entered. The man of the house was nowhere to be found.

Their house was one of those crystalline structures, this one a yellow topaz of uneven diagonal crystals easily a foot thick, joining up with others and looking like a complete catastrophe… with some space in the middle. The space itself only included a single metal… table that grew crystals of different colors and thicknesses. They appeared to have sprouted out of the metal in the center, and made tiny crystal mountains of deep emerald, rich sapphire, and every other glittering color I’d ever seen for jewelry on earth.

“What is the matter, Yelleen?” Khan asked the woman. The woman in question was an earth aspect, but was little more than a rock head, a disconnected rock body, with two rock arms floating to either side. Or rather, the two rock arms were clasped tight to her body. Tiny specks of dust, dirt and pebbles floated in the spaces where her joints would be. Pebblina was the name of her species.

Khan and Shale both repeated her question. She wasn’t able to speak though, and instead just sobbed uncontrollably.

The situation with Yelleen was not divine aspect interference, but was instead a condition called immaculate conception

. I held off a groan; the condition wasn’t an illness at all, but rather the god had simply used an ability to create a hybrid of a Pebblina with some other Nakamamon she’d been near, or in contact with. They’d been too close to the affected district of the town and she’d ended up impregnated by sheer proximity.

I knelt and activated my Meld ability from Cinzy, thanking her for the gift of emotional soothing. Activating Mender’s Soothing Mental Balm, I approached with a hand out for her to take. Emotional goodness radiated out, literal positive waves. She stopped crying almost immediately.

“Whatever happened can be fixed,” I told her gently. “Nothing has happened that’s irreparable.”

“But my husband and I have never mated,” she said miserably, clutching the three egg-shaped rocks to her chest, speckled as they were with spots of glowing crystal.

***

Yelleen’s condition, her spontaneous immaculate conception, was definitely the influence of The Lovers. She was adamant that she hadn’t been mating with anyone, and with no reason to think she was lying, I’d consoled her with the knowledge that The Lovers were currently out of order, they were not working properly, and it was possible she was just near another Nakamamon at the time The Lovers did their weirdness.

I did not know, however, whether immaculate conception was a condition I could undo, at all. It did not seem to be something, like the fighting aspect chakra situation, that I could change.

I probably could. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to.

And then I hoped that the magic responsible for keeping humans sterile in this world was still working, and that I hadn’t just impregnated Celine… or Azalea.

With Jacoby’s team finally gone, I made my way back to my new digs. I had three expansive, mansion-like houses to choose from, but I naturally stayed away from the Mindela’s estate. I didn’t want that guy trying to probe my mind for why I could use Psyspeech. The UI had already informed me that my Psychic Resistance had warded off intrusion, which was concerning. Shakindria had never attempted to probe my mind.

Luckily Khan stopped trying after that. He also maintained a healthy distance and stared warily at me, which I found amusing. I was able to find a pretense to turn down the use of Khan’s estate easily enough: it was farthest away from the divinely corrupted area.

Azalea and April were given leave to choose which of the two other estates they preferred, and they went with Shale’s house. I would have expected a blocky estate made of rocks with a warren of tunnels, but it was just… a house. A large, C-shaped structure with two floors and gardens in front and out back. It had all kinds of rooms I hadn’t ever seen outside of a period drama: parlor, receiving room, smoking room, guest quarters, servants’ kitchen, and others. I was shooed away from the servants’ area, where a number of Nakamamon would toil over my every need. I turned the receiving room into my lab, ordering that the study (on the second floor) be emptied and the furniture moved downstairs. Khan and his telekinesis made short work of this.

Afterwards, Azalea and I did cuttings from the garden I’d started, in what was now an area fully overrun by The Lovers. She was sweating and casting glances at me the whole time, kneeling on the ground with her yellow dress barely covering her pert little butt. I tried to ignore it, but every time I checked on her, her purple butt was pointed directly at me, and she’d taken to standing and bending at the waist. That put her sex fully on display. She was aroused, because it had appeared in the first place, and I could tell she was very aroused, because glistening wetness leaked down the insides of her thighs.

April came along, but whined and yipped uncomfortably the whole time we remained inside.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” I told her gently, but the fox merely rubbed her head against my thigh and thoroughly pollinated my pants… again.

Shrugging, I returned to the task at hand: getting all my plants to where I could re-plant them in the estate’s gardens and bring forth life anew!

One of the strangest things about going from multiple people in bed with you down to one was how large the bed felt. April pranced around the huge bed, much too large for the bipedal cat person, before turning in a circle and curling up… directly next to my head. Her tail kept twitching, which rubbed flowers against my neck, my shoulder, and my collar bone. It would’ve been adorable if I didn’t keep getting whiffs of flowers and feeling the need to sneeze for a time.

April was out like a light.

And, while it took a good ten or fifteen minutes of laying in bed and swiftly closing in on sleep, Azalea appeared in the door, hugging against the doorframe like she didn’t know what she was doing. I pretended to be asleep. A few moments later, she padded into the room, lifted the soft comforter off, slid in next to me, and promptly squished herself almost all the way on top of me.

This is Christopher sleeping with a brand new partner.