Most people would be asking themselves this question first and foremost: why, if Fletcher II had the power to surround himself with Draconic spiritual power, fly, and attack a griffin Nakamamon, wouldn’t he employ the ability and get away?

There’s an explanation forthcoming, but it doesn’t take a person it’s an Ingenuity over 10 to figure it out.

I was bound and blindfolded, though they’d left off the gag.

And apparently Regina didn’t want me blinking out of existence, because my little cutie was slowly rubbing her head against the back of my head. They’d tied us back to back. She’d found my hands and was slowly drawing a circle in the palm of my hand, the faintest form of ‘intimate contact’ possible under the circumstances.

“We rounded up your other people,” the Guardian leader said. “The Guardian was frozen into a block of ice. She’s in a warding circle monitored by the Wizards, along with your psychic Nakamamon… companion.”

Affinity still worked though. Along with the Mana Affinity skill, I got a glimpse of the layout of the place where we had been taken. Deeper into the forest, the team had found a crevasse in the earth, a deep rent in the stone. It reminded me of the Ferrosaur cave where I’d saved Cinzy’s brother’s life by throwing myself in harm’s way and employing abilities I’d sexed my way into.

The crevasse had been widened out at the bottom so it formed a large natural cave. A bright series of warding circles flared to life in my third eye, with several people inside. Another enchanted cage hung above another circle, with a mana signature inside that could only be Azalea. It was sickly in color, putrid green and purple and bruise yellow, and thrashed against the bars. Tiny ripples in the magic told me she was shooting spines, but they were harmlessly splashing against the warding circle.

“Your Ranger came willingly, so she and her flower fox are only chained up. Also, why don’t you two say hello.”

“Fletcher! Are you okay?” Isabelle called, from within the warding circle.

“We’re here, Fletcher,” Ivy also called, calmer than Izzy.

“It’s good to hear your voice,” I said, and that was the truth. “Both of you.” I liked Ivy and Isabelle, very much actually. Even without the incredible opportunity to have regular stress-breaking threesomes and give Ivy the sausage injection she needed semi-regularly, Isabelle was a pleasant and wonderful traveling companion, devoted to her job, and she genuinely liked the fact that I left Ivy to be her girlfriend instead of intruding on their relationship. Ivy too, was awesome. I had caught her doing sketches on specially crafted paper during our journeys, and working with paints. I admired her spirit, her passion, and her fierce protection of her girlfriend.

I was glad they had each other, I was glad nothing terrible had happened to them. And if this plan worked how I wanted it to, I was also glad to have them back on the team.

“You’re giving away a large amount of information to a guy you’ve abducted,” I said. “Wanna start with your name?”

“Buckley,” the Guardian said. He was a blocky guy, square of jaw, thick of shoulder and gut, prodigious of beard and hairy of forearm. If he were a fantasy species he’d be a half-dwarf half-orc.

“I want you to know the last Guardian who abducted me ended up transforming into a Nakamamon, so I’d suggest you not make the same mistake.”

A spell of silence followed, as Buckley the Guardian considered my words.

“I have half a dozen Guardians, half a dozen Wizards, two Rangers, a Bard, and a whole slew of Nakamamon allies. We’re not some second rate hacks trying to gain power for the sake of power; we’re here on an official mission. If you try something, and I don’t recommend it, we’ll stop you before it gets going.”

The Ranger, who Cinzy told me was named Reese, sauntered over. “Try something, Healer. Grow us so much corn that we get fat off the feasting. Maybe in thirty or forty years we’ll die of type two diabetes.” He chuckled at his own joke.

“Weren’t you forcibly thrown out of the last town you were in, Reese?”

Reese froze, and some of his emotions showed through in his mana signature. Then he relaxed. “Pfff, whatever. Those pussies have no concept of strength. And duty. We’re on a mission to bring you in.”

“Mission was canceled, by the way,” I said. “You can just let me go.”

“How does he know that?” Another asked in a loud whisper.

I’d spoken to a being of godlike power and she’d told me, that’s how.

“I’ll just be on my way,” I said. “Healing gods and setting the world right.”

“We’re not going back to HQ empty handed,” the leader said.

“How’s your Bard?” I asked.

“He’ll be fine.” The quaver in Buckley’s voice betrayed him though.

There were no more negotiations after that. They tried to figure out how they’d transport the lot of us back to the HQ. The half dozen Wizards they had at their disposal were pretty good at this kind of mission, including, if I recalled correctly, Dakota. She’d been at the epicenter of Reese’s douchebaggery, she had refused to follow Buckley’s orders to kill Cinzy or Ivy, and had ultimately been left alone when the rest of their team got thrown out. Dakota the Wizard, just like Celine, had seen that her leader wasn’t a good guy. The Agency wasn’t a hundred percent on mission. Buckley and Reese were proof of that. This mission itself was proof of that.

Heck, more than half of them had been forced to examine their life choices when Cinzy barreled into them with a magical guilt trip.

“I’ll heal him up,” I said. “Just bring him over here.”

“Nope!” Buckley said loudly. It was clear several of his people had already moved to grab the pretty boy Bard and get him close enough for my healing aura.

“I can feel the pain from over here,” I lied. Mana Affinity showed me that the figure over there lying on a cot wasn’t in good shape. The forehead and crown chakras were radiating anguish.

“Any of your other people hurt?” I asked, already knowing the answer. Buckley himself had suffered damage, along with several of the Nakamamon.

“You aren’t going to do anything until we get you back to HQ,” Buckley said.

“Boss, why don’t we wait for HQ to send higher level people?” The other Ranger asked quietly. The uncertainty and concern coming off him were so much music to my ears.

“The mission was to bring them back in for questioning and confinement,” Buckley snapped.

“Buckley,” I said, “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

He scoffed. “Oh yeah? Remind me again which of us is chained up and in a magic protection circle? Which of us has fifteen people on his team, and which has… lemme check my notes… a lumbering echidna made of stone snoring over there in the corner? Which of us has no options left, and which of us is holding all the cards?”

He came over and crouched in front of me. “Cut the bravado, Fletcher. We’ve got you and no amount of bluster’s getting you out. But hey, I’ll give you something to heal. Maybe it’ll shut you up for a few minutes.”

He followed this up with a friendly punch to the gut.

I straightened and twined my fingers with Regina’s, rubbing my thumb against hers as the wind was knocked out of me. I recovered my breath soon enough.

“You’re going to have to trust me on this.”

***

Now that Fletcher III was in the headquarters castle, actually getting to the people I wanted to see was a trickier prospect. The guards were mostly stationed at the castle’s perimeter, but you could trip anywhere in HQ and land on half a dozen of them. The same went for Rangers and Wizards. Inside, in the gloom of the stone hallways, Fairy Poppins would be like a searchlight, attracting attention and interest.

“It’s my turn,” I told her, and kissed her lightly on the nose. She giggled. “You’ll have to keep in intimate contact with me the whole time, so that means—“

“Cock time!” she declared.

“I was going to say you travel in my hand and, I don’t know, hump against my finger.”

“Cock! Cock! Cock!”

“Do you have any idea how wanton you sound right now? When girls get obsessed with cock, there’s a word for that, you know?”

“Do you have any idea how much I have to wait and wait and wait for cock time every time? It’s like forever. And anyway, I know the word.” She stuck out her tongue at me, and licked my nose. “Are you trying to say I’m a sludge?”

That wasn’t the word I would’ve used… on earth. Anyway, it was time to get moving. We’d been flying and then forking for almost two hours now. Time was a-wasting.

“I am not a sludge,” she said defiantly, still running her hands up and down my body. “I just know what I want, and what I want is cock. Any time I can have it. Even if it’s larger than my entire body and I have to ride it like a falcon.”

I started to imagine a tiny fairy riding a hawk and banished it. I had a lot of work to do.

“Okay, fine, you travel in my pants. But it’s your funeral.”

“What does that—“ She was cut off as I canceled Adaptability and rapidly grew to normal size. As I did, I snatched her off the window ledge and stuffed her into my pants. I peered down, feeling the odd sensation of a tiny person body hugging my shaft, and a tiny cheek nuzzling it.

Good gods my life was strange. The fact that this thought crossed my mind multiple times in a single day only reinforced how odd everything had become, and how fast.

I checked to see how everything looked. There was still a tell-tale glow emanating from my crotch, like I was a guy named Rudolph in a Christmas porn parody.

I grabbed up the laundry basket from this bedroom, which was sadly only half full, and put it in front of my lower body. Then I marched out into the halls and towards where I remembered Rus’s office was.

Rus was the intake guy. His job was to welcome new recruits, and he did so with good cheer and bad dad jokes and his sparkly dinosaur Nakamamon, a Glimmerdactyl. He had made a very good impression on me.

Checking to see the coast was clear, I headed through the halls, trying to appear bored and disinterested in anyone and everyone I might see. As I walked, every glimpse of a face tightened up the fear in my guts. Someone was going to recognize me. I wondered if it would be Timmy the Ranger, the guy who’d served on Blake’s team. Surely he’d have gotten out of interrogation or his cell on good behavior. There were others who’d helped to clean up the disasters I’d made after failing to concoct cures in the laboratories, during the God of Footfalls situation.

I concentrated on having sneaky feet, if that was even possible. My god given shoes, Golightly, gave me +5 to any skill checks I made with my feet, and I hoped I could coax a Stealth check out of the system.

Being here was bizarre. The place felt no different at first, until I was nearly bowled over by a Ranger sprinting full tilt through the hall. He didn’t even pause, but just yelled, “Watch where you’re going!”

A few turns and minutes later, a team of Wizards came around a corner, talking animatedly, but quieted as soon as they detected me. Several eyed me, but I didn’t see anyone I knew. They started up in hushed tones a moment later, apparently deciding I wasn’t the person they were dreading to see.

For some reason, the atmosphere here was oppressive. Several other laundry girls and guys kept their eyes firmly on the floor and didn’t make eye contact at all, and neither did any of the others I saw. One was checking notes on a metal plate and muttering to herself, and only caught me out of her periphery. Still, she shrank away like I was going to punch her.

I almost forgot about having a fairy in my pants.

“Is that a fairy in your pants or are you just happy to see me?” I breathed.

As I made my way through the halls and down levels, I felt the sensations from my other Fletchers. OG Fletcher was in the process of tending to his garden, and checking on his mother’s progress. She was making a soporific to help handle Tara’s pain. Airaconda had the swaddled, brand new human in her coils, and was tickling the baby’s tummy with her forked serpent tongue made of air. Larelle and Alan were both squatting over the fascinating little bundle, just staring at the girl in her first day of life.

“Kids are weird,” I heard myself say, then forced myself to shut my trap.

Fletcher II was still in Buckley’s custody, though the Guardian and his sycophants were running into every problem the Wizards could throw at them. Sure it would be okay to make a floating magical construct to transport the prisoners, but you couldn’t put a warding circle on a floating magical disk. And yes you could teleport them, if you had a million gazillion mana. They could even throw the prisoners using Telekinesis, from warding circle to warding circle, essentially from prison cell to prison cell, which would require time to construct the circles, and risk when floating them from circle to circle, because the one had telekinesis powers of her own, and the other could shoot poison fracking barbs in between circles.

One last option was to put nullifying spells on them, to prevent them using mana. It would mean assigning a Wizard to each prisoner, and they had the right amount. They even had an additional one or two if they wanted to use traditional restraints on Fletcher and Regina. It also meant he nullifying spell would need to be kept up in between forced marches to each warding circle, set up in advance by their two remaining Wizards who needed to rush on ahead to the lunch stopping point, and then later the dinner point. It meant, most likely, utterly exhausted Wizards at the end of each day, and a max range for the day of about ten miles, maybe twelve. Wizards weren’t known for their stamina.

The best they could do was create a sort of prison cart, lay a whole bunch of costly and time consuming enchantments on it, and then load the prisoners into it. When Buckley started protesting, they threw up their hands.

Yes, magic could do anything, but no, it couldn’t do anything right fracking now. It couldn’t do anything for zero cost either.

I suppressed a laugh, watching them slowly whittle down Buckley’s patience.

Eventually I headed upstairs and crossed over the strange gravity marker. It was always weird to do so. I stepped out into nothing, and instead of falling, I pivoted a full hundred and eighty degrees, landing on a step and now going upwards.

All the while, Fairy Poppins slowly squeezed my shaft and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed.

“You’re being such a sludge,” I breathed, but I doubted she could hear me. On the other hand, I was required to stay in intimate contact at all times in order to keep this clone alive.

I reached Rus’s domain, which was near the outer wall. I hadn’t realized before that he had a corner office, with a small Nakamamon helicopter pad stretching out from the castle so his glittering pterodactyl had a place to perch itself. I glimpsed out the window and found it there, along with the big guy himself.

“Deep breath,” I told myself. This wasn’t going to be easy. I had to prepare myself for the possibility that he was going to raise the alarm or try to capture me. In either case, I had a very simple exit strategy: stop having intimate contact with Poppy. Poof! No more Fletcher.

I walked out onto the platform from Rus’s office. In a short time, the plan would go into motion, and Fletcher II would get the gang back together.

This is Christopher about to take a big risk.