The meeting took place in a conclave. Right off the bat, the name didn’t bode well. Conclaves were for deciding how the infidels were going to meet their end on the field of battle, or how many witches you could burn at a time.

The room had several steps up to a raised platform, and the conclave members sat in high-backed chairs behind desks I couldn’t see. They did turn over thin sheets of metallic paper and mumble to one another throughout the proceedings, which also did not fill me with confidence and or joy.

Rus was with several of the other higher ups in the Agency, discussing what was supposed to happen to me versus what I had offered.

“Look, the boy is here to save his mother’s life. He knows you’re after him, and that’s not an easy situation to deal with if you’re also trying to research a literal cure for cancer.”

“He has destroyed our portal and restricted movement through the second portal,” one of them said. “He has broken the contract he signed.”

“You did hear me when I said he could literally find a cure for cancer, eh?” Rus said, and gestured back at me. “Look, all yous, you’ve got family back on earth, and someone’s got a rare disease, or diabetes, or a heart condition, or cancer. You all know somebody who’s suffering now, or who passed on. Heck, I do. I’m ready to bring my uncle’s boy over here the minute I know Fletcher here has that cure. I’m willing to pay whatever it takes, and you should be too.”

The conclave members protested that there was the matter of secrecy to consider, that the public wasn’t yet ready for the knowledge of the other world, magic, Nakamamon, gods, the whole shebang.

“Well here’s the thing,” Rus said. “They don’t have to be. Mr. Fletcher here says that magic is flowing through the open portal and into the facility. All we’d need to do was get our Healers there, or even to the other side of the portal. Easy enough to create a futuristic looking hospital facility on this side and lock out any Nakamamon we come across. You’re not looking at this as the opportunity it is. And it is.”

Well, the conclave tried to rebut, the problem there is that the portal is now buried under an entire fracking mountain. To which Rus replied that Fletcher had a solution to that, too.

The whole time, I had Fairy Poppins held in two hands behind my back, lazily stroking her up and down the full length of her body. It was a delicate thing, holding her without crushing her teensy weensy form, and applying just enough pressure to be pleasurable.

The whole scene felt very sitcom.

Rus kept on, carefully laying out the situation as it stood, how it could stand, and how I hadn’t really done anything wrong. Some panicked person had triggered the Ragnarok protocol because, again, not enough people had access to the magic. Fletcher should have been celebrated for his successes instead of treated like a traitor who’d done something unforgivable because he’d done his job. And best of all, my person on side Trent was a stone Sorcerer and working on excavating a way back into the portal.

The proposal: declare all of them innocent of crimes and not liable for punishment as a result of the incident with the first portal. Reinstate the Divinity Rescue Corps as an official team, which would include several new Nakamamon members. Then, use Trent to uncover the second portal and begin to set up the magical cure division for humans with normally incurable diseases. Fletcher would see about teaching humans how to gain the knowledge to magically heal other humans, or head the thing himself.

The conclave declared, after something like forty-five minutes of back and forth, that they would deliberate by themselves and there’d be a recess.

“Well,” Rus said, “they didn’t immediately send everyone after you. I’d count that as a win.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

“Thank my embarrassing mole.”

I raised Poppy in my hand as we reached the exit outside Rus’s office hall that led to his mostly private platform. “Let’s fly out of here and—”

A whole host of spells and special abilities hit me at once. It was like a tsunami of warding spells, immobility spells, stun spells using a jolt of electricity, Bard empathy effects, and arrows with stunning effects crashing into me all at the same time. Magic Missiles with arcane force damage hit me in the chest and knocked me over.

Fletcher, of course, dropped like a stone. My entire body locked up completely under the petrification spells. A number of lassos and ropes lashed out and looped around my ankles and legs. The Bards using social skills against me came up against Indomitable and all suddenly hissed, clutching their heads and falling to their knees.

Rus had enough time to groan and curse softly once before it was over. His choice of curse words: “Aww Flumblebuggins!”

Rus was a saint in my book.

Two important other things happened though. One, I was totally locked out of my UI, and couldn’t spend any Tokens, engage any abilities, or take a single action. That wasn’t entirely true, which was why I spent a Durability Token to gain Arcane Magic Resistance and Lightning Resistance on a permanent basis, from Healer’s Resistance.

The second thing that happened was that Poppy, totally unaffected, took flight and stopped being in ‘intimate contact’ with me.

This is Christopher vanishing just as he hits the ground.

***

“Cinzy and Poppy are both going to be livid,” OG Fletcher murmured from his place around a lunch table miles and miles away. Vellenia was almost impossible to upset, since she was the type of fairy I wished Poppy was.

I grinned ruefully at the idea of being attached to Poppy again, grinding against her and keeping up the ‘intimate contact’ situation for hours while she flew weighted down by my big form. I don’t care who you are, carrying around another person’s entire bodyweight for any length of time is an exhausting and miserable experience. Luckily, the two of us put together would weigh far less than the five pound limit, meaning I could use my Telekinesis power from Shakindria to keep us moving even while Poppy required rest, and also sex as payment.

It would be nearly a full day later before Poppy found us. Team OG Fletcher had been traveling slowly and steadily northward.

But the situation with Team Rescue The Cute FF Couple was long since over by that point.

***

“Could you do… something a little less embarrassing?” Regina asked in a quavering voice.

I had managed to get my fingers under the waistband of her skirt and was slowly running them up and down the top of her butt crack. As intimate contact went, it was far more intimate than her running her thumb in circles over the palm of my hand.

“Would you prefer that I just vanished into thin air like Fletcher Three?” I asked with feigned innocence.

“No, it’s just— wait, what?”

I tried to stretch just a little farther and get a little deeper down between her cheeks. She squirmed in response, which gave me reason to smile.

“Hey!” Reese shouted. “Enough of that talk, or I’ll have you put in warding circles.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, ignoring the Ranger. “Poppy got away and she knows the drill.”

“Ugh… how can you talk tactics while… doing… that?”

“The same way I’ve had Azalea stroking me for the better part of two days, and been attached to Poppy getting dry humped, or having her shove herself down my pants so she can climb my junk like a tree.”

“Now you’re being gross.”

“I guess truthful can be gross at the same time,” I replied. “You ready to get this party started?”

She stiffened. “Really?”

My blindfold was whipped away, and I was faced with not just Reese, but his imposing divine aspected griffin Nakamamon, the Grypherial. Up close, it had a self-righteous gleam to its pure white feathers. Its beak could easily rip the flesh off my bones.

“Get what party started, Healer?”

I wiggled my finger down into Regina’s butt crack.

“You know what I think?” he asked.

“I don’t.”

“What?”

“Know what you think.”

“Shut up.”

“You should tell me what you think,” I said, with an extra glob of syrupy sarcasm. “Because it’s eating me up inside that I don’t know.”

He knelt down and gave me a punch in the gut. I spent yet another Durability Token, even though I’d only taken a couple points of damage, to raise my Physical Damage Resistance level by one more.

“You are insufferable!” he shouted in my face. “I can’t believe you had an entire team of ten and none of them put their foot up your ass on the first day. You’re pissing off the wrong people. Do you have any idea what level I am, dickhead? Do you have any idea what kinds of bonuses I’ve got from my Nakamamon?”

“Not… Likability… that’s for sure,” I got out in between wheezes.

He reeled back, whipped out a bow from seemingly nowhere, and drew the string back. As he did so, an arrow made of pure divine energy simply appeared nocked there.

“I don’t have to hurt you to hurt you,” he said in what he probably thought was a low, menacing tone. It just sounded like a frat bro being a petulant little prick. He swung the bow aside, took aim at Tweedle Dee, and loosed the arrow just a moment before my Draconic Spirit manifested around me and chomped down on his arm, shoulder, and neck.

Draconic Spirit IV

(Special Ability, Ridonkulous, Active)

I- Spend a Token. Your body is wreathed in spiritual draconic power, giving you increased Durability and Muscularity, along with damaging claws and teeth. These last 1 minute.

II- You may manifest fledgling wings and draconic breath while the spirit is active. Your spirit’s breath is tied closely to your soul and class(es). Wings allow for a controlled, gliding fall, rather than true flight. The duration of the Draconic Spirit increases to 5 minutes.

III- Your draconic spirit reaches the full size of a draconic adult. Wings now allow for ungainly but actual flight. Your draconic spirit can safely transport up to 300 pounds beyond your body weight. The duration of the ability increases to 10 minutes.

IV- You may spend 2 Muscularity Tokens to increase the duration to 1 hour.

Ridonkulous rarity level indeed. Reese opened his mouth to shout but I bathed his body in dragon spirit dragon fire.

Having experienced the situation at the HQ, I had to say I was glad these Wizards under Buckley were far more like the Wizards from Pratchett than Caverns & Creatures. In Pratchett’s books, the Wizards were always meeting for tea and having discussions, or in the case of the Archwizard, shooting things with his crossbow.

The HQ boys were the opposite.

Half a dozen of them stood up and went slack jawed at the sight of me doing such Ridonkulous non-Healer stuff. Dragon fire went all over the Grypherial, which decided being in the dank, dark underground cave with this spirit-covered psycho was not on its Bingo card for the day. It plucked Reese up off the ground and launched itself into the air.

The gorgeous thing about Draconic Spirit was that I could continue to be tied directly to Regina, keep in intimate contact with her, and have the spirit lift the both of us off the ground. She shifted upwards, allowing me to wriggle my other hand down under her waistband and get two handfuls of butt while she shrieked about what the heck was going on.

The ability let us bridge the space between ourselves and the warding circles containing Azalea and the others. It was then we came up against our first actual resistance: the other Ranger, the Bard, and Guardians.

Three huge, shield-bearing Guardians interposed themselves in between us with the Ranger between them, already firing arrows.

The other three Guardians moved to intercept and stop me from wiping away the warding circles. One came barreling in toward me, flinging its shield like a superhero long frozen in the Arctic Ice and thawed out some sixty years later. The Bard made them all faster and stronger, a smart move considering he would’ve dang near killed himself using a social attack ability on me. The other two Guardians screamed at the Wizards to do something.

“Come on,” I growled, deflecting the shield with my dragon wing. “Come on, come on, come on.”

Garnet could’ve done this job, but the big ball of amber crystal was en route to make good my promise to Rus. Fat lot of good it would do, since the conclave didn’t seem interested in using this world as a miracle cure for every sickness known to man. Well, theoretically we still needed to get back to earth.

I might just have to take down the entire Agency in order to reunite my mother with my dad, sister, nephew, and unborn niece or nephew.

They were boxing me in, forcing me to swing wildly around to swipe and fire at them to keep them away from Regina and myself. Dakota was among the frozen Wizards being screamed at by Buckley’s people.

Frustrating.

Concentrating, I located a chunk of rock that would do the trick with Telekinesis, and turned Myriad Mind to the task here and now. OG Fletcher grayed out and started drooling some miles away, but this was critical. I needed two out of three wins to make this happen. 

Behind enemy lines, the rock skidded along the cavern floor and scraped against the warding circle. Not enough.

“Come on!” I shouted.

I whirled again and just barely missed having a shield spang off Regina’s head.

Two large Guardians, one of them Buckley, surged forward on a bunch of burned Tokens and got their hands on the dragon’s body. Now the arrows started striking, doing real damage.

We were dragged down to the cavern floor as the rock scraped past the warding circle yet again. Still nothing.

“Come on!” I yelled.

And it happened. Half a dozen earth aspect Nakamamon burst out of the cavern floor, great big worm-like creatures a good three feet across and made of metal segments. Identify told me these were called Tectonyx.

Tectonyx

Second Stage Nakamamon

These elusive Nakamamon live in subterranean tunnels they excavate, churning through veins of minerals, metals, and vast pockets of crystallized underground mana. They typically have no interest in humans or other Nakamamon, but miners hauling tons of ore should watch out!

Typical length: 30-100 foot from nose to tail (large or huge)

Typical weight: 4,000-20,000 pounds

Gender: unknown

Aspect: earth

Transformations: Stonyx - Seismyx - Tectonyx

Tectonyx has been added to your Nakamadex.

Still more Nakamamon came, smaller diggers and one dark aspect called a Nightrous. It was a cloud of darkness with two big, angry eyes. It boiled out of the rocky floor and made a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before, not something I could easily describe.

 Instantly the whole tenor of the fight changed. One of the two Guardians holding me were forced back by the emergence of a Tectonyx, and the Ranger squad immediately turned fire towards the nearest metallic worm. It went from a fight to pandemonium in seconds.

Shrieking, the Wizards all leapt to their feet at the sight of the Nightrous and got their butts in gear.

“I… don’t think I can befriend that thing,” Regina said from my back.

“Which one?” I asked, a totally unnecessary question. The thing made of pure darkness and fear. Which would later beg the question: how was McCauley Skulkins the same aspect as this thing?

“All of them actually,” she said, her tone subdued and full of guilt.

“Well, that changes things,” I said drily. Mind you, we were both still tied up, still trying to get leverage so I could claw, bite or flame Buckley to get him off me, and we were all forty feet under the ground with no quick way up.

With one last mental heave, the rock scraped against the warding circle and broke through. Dakota got her mental feet under her at the same time, and cast a spell to release all the bindings on my allies.

This is Christopher’s team mostly triumphant.