I stared at the girl curled up on the ground.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

My gift from Celine, Myriad Mind, was whirling at the same time. It did the Identify thing for me while I produced Prismatic Apparel, manifesting as a cloak, and wrapped her in it.

Kitsunakura

First stage Nakamamon

Kitsunakura are descended from the original Kitsune, fairies with the spirits of foxes, but in tune with the spirits of the forest as well. These are not only proficient in fairy illusion and shape shifting, but also have a strong affinity with meadows, dales and wildflowers of all types.

Typical length: 4-6 feet (medium)

Typical weight: 80-175 pounds

Gender: female

Aspect: plant, fairy

Transformations: Vulpetunia - Kitsunekura - unknown

Kitsunakura has been added to your Nakamadex.

We made our shaky, slow way out of the area, with the Kitsunakura shivering and hiding her face. I glimpsed at her, and Myriad Mind took over, telling me everything I’d just seen: full curves, taut skin, compact frame, only around five feet but busty for her height. She appeared human save only for the ears, the tails, and all the flowers.

“A little more,” I told her. “Just a little farther.”

She made a hesitant sound yet again, a kind of low cry.

“Did you touch the god?” I asked.

She continued making that low sound in her throat.

“You can’t speak yet… that’s fine. A little farther.” I put on Mending Aura

and Soothing Mental Balm to help deal with any divine damage she might have accumulated, though a visual diagnosis told me she wasn’t injured… outwardly at least.

The moment we crossed the line, she slowly sank to her knees, clutching to me. I got my first look at her face: open, pure, shy and frightened. Bright green eyes opened to meet mine, and two things happened in that moment: one, I realized it was exactly who I’d suspected. Two, I fell for her, hard.

One might be asking themselves how, if I’d had sex with so many different creatures and so many different humans in the last seven months or so, I could fall for someone. The short answer is, I can’t really be sure, but apparently fox ears and tail really do it for some people, and I’m that people.

“April?” I asked. “How… what…”

“F… Fletcher,” she breathed, in a tiny voice. So far as I knew, it was her first word. “You… you came for me.”

“Of course I did,” I told her, holding her hand and staring deep into those soulful eyes. “What were you doing out there? Didn’t you know it was dangerous?”

She nodded, looking apologetic and perfect. “I knew… I knew I could transform. If I came here, I would get what I needed.” Her hands clasped mine. “You saved me, Fletcher. You saved me from the red rage. My whole body… was constantly being torn apart, again and again. Inside me was a terrible battle. A war. I knew that I would lose, and become something else.”

I nodded. What kind of name would the system give her? Punchetunia? With the beast part of her gone, she might have lost most of her fox half.

I tried to put a soothing face on it, while my auras both worked to ease her worries. “You’re safe now, and no one is going to change what you are with me here.”

She threw herself into my arms, and my body was fully aware she was nude beneath the cloak. Her breasts pressed against my chest and she squeezed me to her, head nestled into the safety of my shoulder and neck.

“Let’s get you back home,” I told her. And figure out what to do with her.

“Will… will Azalea be upset?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

“And Poppy?”

I was suddenly conscious, and wondering where April had been each time I enjoyed my time with Poppy or Azalea. Or Celine, for that matter. April knew what had happened as a Vulpetunia. Meaning she was smarter than I’d given her credit all this time. I didn’t have perfect recall, and I’d been quite focused on my partners’ pleasure at the time. I would be mortified if she’d been watching me pound Celine into the bed while calling her all sorts of names. Or if she’d been watching while the tiny version of me punished Poppy for her unjust and ridiculous demands.

It ultimately didn’t matter. I helped April to clutch the cloak to her body and head back to the estate. I didn’t want to upset her more than she already was by clutching her in the claws of my spirit dragon ability, so I just dismissed it for now.

“I’ll carry you,” I said.

“Just as before,” she said in her tiny, adorably shy voice.

She couldn’t have weighed that much, because I was able to carry her with ease for several blocks. Her furry ears tickled at my nose, as did the pollen coming off the flowers sprouting around her head. While I did, she hummed her contentment, while looping her arms around my neck.

“There are plenty of bedrooms—”

“No!” She was frantic. “With you. I’ll sleep with you.”

Azalea didn’t wake when I brought April in, but she did snuggle up into me as before. Tentacles wound around both April and I in bed, pulling us all in tightly.

April drifted off soon after, and I wasn’t far behind. Sleep claimed me.

***

I awoke to screaming, and sprang out of bed just in time to realize it was squealing instead. The delighted kind. Azalea knelt on the bed, nude of course, grinning her needle-toothed smile at me while clapping tiny, cute claps again and again.

“Who’s she?” Azalea asked. “I like her. She’s very roundy like this.” To illustrate her point she wriggled from side to side, clapping her hands together and wriggling them back and forth slowly in a slithery motion. She meant curvaceous.

April clutched the blanket over herself up to her neck, and tried to disappear into the mattress.

“Azalea, this,” I said, “is April.”

I was impressed at just how far Azalea’s mouth could open with her jaw nearly on the floor. The sparkling in those yellow eyes of hers didn’t stop, but eventually the realization came on. She got her jaw back in the correct position—apparently it could unhinge—and grinned.

“I loooooove her,” Azalea finally declared. “She’s so roundy-round and she has good flowers.” April had a whole lot of sakura blossoms now, with other pink and magenta flowers: magnolia, tulips, and white irises, and more besides.

“Now,” I said. “We have a lot of work to do. I’d be thrilled if you could help tend the garden.”

Azalea blinked several times in rapid succession, then snapped off a salute she must have seen in Jacoby’s camp.

We spent a warm morning tending to the garden, trying my mansions, which were strange and yummy. I wasn’t very familiar with mangoes, and wasn’t familiar at all with passionfruit, but the pale orange flesh was still good. The strawbanas were of course excellent. We invited curious townsfolk to have some of the nuts and fruit, giving them apples, bananas, oranges of all sizes and shapes, strawbanas, pecans, walnuts, peanuts, watermelons, and more besides, like dragonfruit (because why not), pomegranates, the absolutely gigantic jackfruit, and lychees, a weird thing like a big acorn with a surprising amount of translucent white flesh inside, and a huge seed. We also asked them to harvest the veggies: lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, pumpkins, bell peppers, peas, and all the rest. Our job was planting and tending.

Eventually April came out, wearing a flowing white dress she’d managed to get Prismatic Apparel to turn into. It had embroidered flowers all around the cuffs and the hem of the skirt.

After the tending, the three of us headed in to dry out, grind up, soak in oil, and begin heating up all ingredients. Myriad Mind was especially helpful in allowing me to separate out the different necessary ingredients for the different aspects. Azalea and April helped to keep them organized and treat each one as they needed.

Water plants had been brought from nearby riverbeds and shores. I had cattails, swamp milkweed, and water lilies, with weeping willow at the best hardwood for the job. These, instead of being dried and ground up, needed to be soaked into water and heated, so the essence of the plant stayed with the water at all times. This distilling method kept the water and the essence both for use in the cure, and took a lot of time. By lunch though it was nearly ready.

Adding the mana to these involved quite a lot more stirring and infusing the mana drop by drop, or plunging it into the mixture like a waterfall. At times I had to shove the mana through it like a river without any mixing at all, and other times I had to stir it rapidly like the

It wouldn’t have taken me any time at all, except that I didn’t have any of those tablets from Alan and I was doing all these from half memory. Each one ended after about an hour with a failure, until finally I did it right. Chuckling to myself, I noted the correct procedure down, aware that I might never have to deal with Divine Aspect Interference for the water aspect ever again in my life. And wouldn’t that just be a laugh.

Finally, on the fourth try, sometime after everyone else had had lunch, I succeeded.

The resulting treatment was was a bowl of a sort of elixir, and the eggs needed to be submerged in it for a period of at least twenty-four hours. Breathing out shakily, I let the townsfolk know that I’d gotten that part done, and that I would administer it just after I figured out what the elders wanted.

***

I was summoned, shortly into the afternoon, back to the estate where the three elders were waiting on me to arrive. It was a lovely walk, though this section of the town had just been watered by the sphere’s passage around and around. It had passed the water, which flooded the area. Afterwards, several of the water aspect Nakamamon used their abilities to shove the water around to where it needed to go: some for collection, and some for irrigation. It was hard work, but the Nakamamon had instinctual abilities. It made the technology level of their towns and villages make a lot of sense. Fire aspects worked in forges, water aspects worked irrigation, earth aspects tilled the soil while the plant aspects encouraged growth. All of them used their combined talents to build housing out of their own materials: plant aspects bending trees to their wills, earth aspects going for rock, earth or crystal homes, water aspects somehow building houses out of enormous, opaque bubbles that kept the rain out. The fire aspects had drawn up lava and molded it into house shapes.

The Marshins hadn’t done that, but used their fairy aspect magic to ask others to build their elevated houses, so they could have their young and their advanced evolutions living in the marshy waters just below them. I shook my head at how much magic did the work, and how little technology was needed. Metal? Sure, I know an earth or a fire guy who can burrow down and bring some up without picks and tools. In a lot of cases you didn’t need to, since you could just ask a tree to make a huge hollow space within, no nails or screws necessary.

I guess when ankle deep water is rushing over the neighborhood and you see water aspects gathering it up like clay, it qualifies as shower thoughts.

The three sat with an air of authority that I didn’t think fit well to a bipedal cat, or a stack of rocks looking like a very dirty, slightly melted snowman. Khan, a Mindela, looked like what you’d get if you crossed a human with a rat and covered it with mustard, but he at least had a certain gravitas, being a psychic aspect.

“I have begun the separate cures for all the different aspects,” I told them. “With luck, I’ll get all of them done over the course of the next week or so, cure the eggs of the distress, and then deal with the problem of the god itself.”

They nodded, seeming pleased with this information.

“As for your… other proposal,” Khan said, “the council has brought the matter to a number of parties in town. As you know, refugees from the affected area are staying in elder estates and with those of relatives or friends. Most of them wish to have the power to heal, but understandably many are uncomfortable with the manner of gaining healing abilities for different reasons.”

That made sense. Marriage, if they did such a thing, or at least mating for life, would make people unwilling to engage with me. Even so, some might see it as a necessary evil, and a one-time event.

Then there were the single folk.

“Obviously the topic of intimate encounters is one fraught with a great deal of emotional and moral baggage,” I said. “It is not a proposition I bring lightly…”

Shale waved this away. “We have lined up a number of interested parties. However, we as elders would be remiss in our duties if one of us did not set an example and lead from the front. Asking you to join with Opal Manaflame was an experiment of sorts, given your differences in anatomy. As a proof of concept, you were successful, but some of our interested parties are, like myself, even more diverse.”

“Understood.”

“Therefore you will be mating with me first,” Shale said.

Shale… was a female?

“I… see,” I said.

“Unless you cannot perform as you first claimed.”

“Oh no,” I said, mentally cracking my neck and my knuckles, “I’m up for a challenge.” Shale might look like a tiny mountain with eyes, but I was about to see if I could have sex with them. And by them I hopefully meant her.

A slow clap told me that I’d been had. Both Khan and Yowl began clapping. Yowl threw back her head and was soon laughing uproariously.

“What’s happening?”

Shale is asexual and reproduces by splitting themselves down the center, Khan explained mentally. Your willingness to attempt it is quite amusing, though admirable.

Actually, I was pretty sure that Pleasure Seeker allowed me to mate with even creatures like Shale, but I didn’t mention this. I wasn’t sure if Adaptability or Pheromones were high enough for such a thing, and I wasn’t sure if I was right or not. A Seduction and Ingenuity check told me I could not, but that it was not out of the question. I needed both Adaptability and Pheromones even higher.

Good gods, was there anything I couldn’t get my mating stick up into?

“So, you then?” I asked Yowl.

The laughter stopped and the cat stared at me. Now it was Shale’s turn to burst into laughter.

“I promise that I am perfectly okay not doing this, and I’m not about to pressure anyone into doing it,” I said. “Now if you don’t mind, I have cures to formulate.”

“Wait!” Khan called.

Yowl might be afraid, but she was in.

Prowline

First stage Nakamamon

Sapient Feline Nakamamon

A species of small, semi-humanoid, sapient Nakamamon found throughout the entire continent. Prowline prefer to end up in positions of authority over villages, towns or cities so they don’t have to get their claws dirty doing manual labor, though some of them specialize as acrobats or thieves.

Typical length: 3-4 feet (small)

Typical weight: 40-80 pounds

Gender: female

Aspect: beast

Transformations: Unknown - Prowline - Purrtector

Prowline has been added to your Nakamadex.

Well, three to four feet was not something I’d have a problem with, since I could handle Poppy using my Adaptability. She was a beast aspect, and that meant mammal. Meaning I had the right tool for the job.

“All right then,” I said, smiling. “How do you want to get this party started?”

“Oh, no,” the Prowline said. “We will meet in the dining hall of your estate, where all will have an opportunity to get to know you, learn of your abilities, and… set the mood.”

“Even better,” I said. Is this Christopher about to pull a train on some unknown number of partners? This is definitely Christopher regretting not putting more levels into Refractory Period.