It wasn’t easy to send Trent back to work in the mines, but eventually he bid the rest of them farewell. April decided she’d like to join him, or rather, join me and him. OG Fletcher was pretty bored. Into the storage room they went, and when they emerged it was back beneath the mountain.

April looked around, then smiled at me.

“Lovely to see you again,” I said.

She turned around, where I was also standing in the doorway. “See you later!” I said, and closed the door.

We all got down to work. One of the stranger effects of curing the God of Doors was that now our stuff was in someone else’s house all over the city. The rooms where our stuff had been kept magically relocated all over the place. The whole city was in complete disarray, with people all over the place looking for their things now that their rooms were back. Smarter citizens among them had kept all their stuff out of their bedrooms and in the main rooms of the houses, but in a lot of cases the main rooms of the houses had switched up too. This meant assigning people to help out, and assigning people to find and return our stuff.

Drat disappeared, as that was Drat’s thing and also his assignment. Jacoby and her people went north in search of what we thought was Jocinda. Regina and Tara headed off into the swamps and the mountains respectively, with Regina taking Azalea off in search of mushrooms and rare flowers, and Tara taking Airaconda in search of rare flowers and trees.

The work involved scouting out new and rare plants, then planting them with Verdant Rejuvenation. I soon learned that bidens was a flower, and a pretty unremarkable looking one. I had larkspurs, I had fuzzy deutzias, I had begonias.

“Begonia seems like it means begone.” I chuckled. “What about Stayaroundia?”

The very first gift I’d ever received from the Goddess of Meadows was knowing every flower that ever was. And, searching through my encyclopedic knowledge of flowers, I found that there was no Stayaroundia.

Well that was going to change.

I spliced several flowers together until I got something that I liked. Begonia was red or white, and in a way almost stop sign shaped. I wanted to change that. My flower would be a soft blue and purple star shape, and it would beckon to you. Hey, it would tell you, come chill in this meadow for a while. Stop and smell the flowers why don’t you.

I loved having the time and ability to make whatever it was that I wanted, even while working on the things that mattered, like my mother’s cure.

This also involved running a Diagnostics check on my mother.

“Hm, weird,” I told her, as I passed the first of the crystals over and around her body. She was laying on my workbench table with her eyes closed.

“Weird? What do you mean?”

“You’re not leaking out a ton of divine energy and making the entire area unsafe.”

“How’s that weird?” Now she sounded a bit annoyed along with being mystified.

“All my other patients are gods.”

She slapped me on the shoulder. “Just do your crystal thing. Sheesh, seems like woo when you get glowing crystals out.”

The check proved far easier than I expected due to the lack of life threatening circumstances, although far more complicated. Just passing the crystals over my mom showed off a weak Magical affliction, a strong Physical affliction, a weak Mental/Emotional condition, and no Spiritual illness. The final one was the hilarious part that ended with me laughing. She slapped me again.

Well, she couldn’t have one of everything, could she?

Even the other gods had only a maximum of two problems.

These I was able to handle one at a time. I was pretty sure I could handle them one at a time, and the Mental one could probably end up handled by Mender’s SoothingBalm alone. The Physical I could slow down with Mender’s Aura. I got both of those moving while I checked over the last part.

As for the magical condition, I delved further into the UI message for more information.

This patient is suffering from mana disacclimation. The patient is not acclimated to the ambient mana of this world. The patient’s body will slowly accumulate more and more mana, causing wild and severe shifts in cellular structural integrity, and may eventually lead to sudden and permanent mutation.

“Ohhhhhkay,” I told myself, and promptly went over to perform the magic diagnostic on Regina. She also had mana disacclimation. So did Tara, Alan, Drat, Cinzy, and all of Jacoby’s people. And so did I.

Our bodies weren’t used to the mana come into them, or even flowing out of them. I’d been making anti-magic meds ever since the beginning… but that only purged the excess mana from the system. It didn’t deal with the actual cause.

Alan’s compendium of cures didn’t have anything regarding this. It only had the mana purging potion. Which struck me as odd.

“N-n-no, it’s s-s-s-simple,” Alan explained. I got it as soon as he said it was simple, but let him take the logic to its conclusion.

One, there weren’t many Healers. Two, you’d eventually overdose on mana and turn into a Nakamamon. Therefore you needed the Agency’s help to reduce that mana oversaturation. This dependency on the Agency kept people in line. They could withhold the cure from you and you’d have to head back to earth or risk terrible consequences. It wasn’t unbelievable to think that the Agency never cured people of this condition simply because they wanted everyone to come back to base for the treatment.

The more I had dealings with the Agency, the less I liked them.

“Don’t think about that,” I told myself. I could handle putting together a brand new cure for a completely unknown and un-researched condition. It would be a nice trial run for the physical cure that was to come.

I wasn’t wrong, either. The way to suss out the cure materials was to head out into the garden and use Diagnostics, Treatments, and Develop Cure while concentrating on the various plants out there.

Develop Cure (Medium/Human) Check: This check to ascertain which ingredients will cure this affliction is Difficult. The difficulty is 5. Your Affinity, and Develop Cure give you a total of  32 levels. Would you like to spend 5 Tokens to succeed automatically?

Total Tokens: 4 Affinity and 3 Free Tokens.

This was perhaps the first time I’d ever looked at a skill check and laughed out loud. My lack of Tokens didn’t matter against the sheer volume of skill levels, and even without my increased efficacy, it wouldn’t matter. At a 25% success rate, it would have succeeded anyhow.

I let it go, and watched as I got 14 successes. Fourteen. Good gods.

Almost at once several plants lit up in front of me. The first was ginkgo, which I did not enjoy using. The nuts of the ginkgo tree, and there’s no easy way to say this, they stink. They stink like if you took a gigantic poop on a puddle of your own vomit and then made it look like a testicle.

The next ingredient I needed was called mugwort. It was really common all over the place, thankfully. It was used to regulate cycles in people, specifically dream cycles, and that made no sense to me in reading it through the system, but what I did know was that it felt right to use. Regulate cycles? That was acclimation, and Fletcher was about to acclimate his own mother. Which definitely wasn’t gross at all.

 Next, holy basil.

“Holy basil!” I yelled out.

This stuff was also called Tulsi. I didn’t have holy basil, but I did have regular basil, and that meant it was time to use everybody’s favorite and most reliable type of spell for healing purposes, Transmutation.

Again, my increased levels were going to help tremendously. I grabbed up the basil I had and worked up a transmutation spell.

Mana Affinity and Transmutation helped me to plan out the spell: changing one species of plant into another. Relatively simple stuff by Wizard standards, but very hard for a Healer.

The check required 14 successes. Again, with my 9 Affinity, 16 levels of Mana Shaping and then 5 levels of Transmutation, I had 30 total levels to go by. It would be close. I thought Instinctual Casting would help out, adding 16 extra levels, but it wasn’t to be. Instead I ended up with exactly 14 successes.

Nice sigh of relief incoming.

Okay, so now I had ginkgo, mugwort and holy basil! After this, I needed to have flux moss. It was found around places where the mana of leylines was shifting constantly back and forth. I didn’t have access to this… yet.

“Poppy?” I asked. “Can you ask Tara and her bond mate to grab up some flux moss for me?”

I received an angry squeeze in response.

Oh, that was right. I had a job to do. A sexy job.

“Poppy?” I asked. “There’s something I’d like to try.”

I’d set Fletcher II to the task of trying out, soaking, mashing up and infusing these ingredients after he asked Tara to grab some flux moss.

Once extracted from my pants out of view of anyone who would take offense, I gave her a big smile.

“Let’s give this a go,” I said, and bent down with Poppy held in the palm of my hand. That done, I used Pheromones to grant her a whole bunch of Adaptability.

Right before my eyes, the bossy little minx grew from a three inch action figure past a foot tall posable collector’s model. And she kept growing, past the size of a cat, the size of a border collie, and even further, until the only thing I was cupping was her butt.

“Pheromones,” I breathed, thankful I’d read over the description carefully once upon a time and sank points into the Quality.

Both Pheromones and Adaptability were now at level 20, and these worked in a curious way that made little sense to me. At the lower levels they worked at about 10% per level, but after level 12, that changed to over 25% per level if I really wanted to push it. At level 20, it now worked at around 100% per level, and that worked backwards. Meaning I could increase Poppy in size by something like 2000%. This would make the 3 inch, tiny cutie into a five foot fairy.

It also meant I could theoretically grow a dick big enough to kill me from packing my five foot schlong with blood. Simultaneously stupid and hilarious. I didn’t know off hand how big a blue whale’s dork really was, but if I could breathe water, and use Adaptability, I could theoretically hump a humpback whale.

Which was neither here nor there. I stared into Poppy’s astonished eyes and watched a confused expression transform into one of pure appreciation.

“Hello there,” I said, using my best Obi-wan impression. It wasn’t good, but it didn’t have to be. She had no idea about popular media.

“Oh Fletcher,” she said breathlessly, and allowed me to help her to her feet. She then allowed me to get her dressed, a difficult prospect considering her wings. Cinzy took one look at her, shrieked in glee, and gave Poppy a huge hug. Avoiding the wings of course.

“Oh my gosh, girl! We need to give you a glow up, like right now!”

And so, with Poppy seated between my legs in our mansion (which was now a mansion again), Cinzy gave her a makeover while Poppy just kind of took it all in.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I’m big,” she breathed.

“You’re big.”

She was still so darned cute. And since I’d grown with Muscularity and Durability, I’d actually gotten above six feet just recently. She was still over a head shorter than me, but like a cosplayer. A twinkly fairy glowing from within, and adorable and perfect.

“I’m soooooo big. Everything is so small!”

“True story,” I told her.

“Also my body is really heavy.”

“Not to me,” I told her. My ability Man Enough put my attributes at least at the level of my intimate partners.

As soon as the glow-up was over, I lifted her out of the chair and stood with her in my arms. She gave a startled cry, but just looped her arms around my neck and soon was snuggling in.

“Now,” I whispered to her. “You and I are going to have just the most grown up and wonderful time.”

“What?”

“We’re going to do all the big people stuff.”

I first took her on a nice stroll through a public park. It was a lovely little jaunt through a manicured space, where the trees and shrubs were all cubes instead of their usual spheres or leafy selves. It had a fountain of some sort of fish Nakamamon I hadn’t seen yet. I didn’t do too many underwater missions, and I found myself a little jealous that my mom had done the one with the Tadproles and Bourgefrogs. But this was quaint and full of flowers. Poppy jumped and twirled around, and bent down to sniff the flowers, talking all about how tiny they looked and how she couldn’t believe she couldn’t wear any as a hat.

Next, I took Poppy shopping. This world didn’t have shopping like on earth. Instead of money, the people here just gave away what they made, or just as often made things on the spot. A plant aspect dog Nakamamon grew something like cotton right out of the earth, pulled the cotton out with the help of a different dog Nakamamon, they wove the threads of puffy cotton into a shirt and soon a skirt for Poppy to wear. We told them we’d like it pleated, and in this or that color. They soon had it dyed in an iridescent array of colors, from blue to purple to green and pink, which shone with a bit of a metallic effect. The shirt had a silhouette of a fairy on it, like Poppy herself, in the same color. The rest was white.

After ducking behind a rice paper partition with me massaging her scalp overtop so we didn’t break the connection, Poppy came out looking spectacular. The skirt rose up her thin, toned legs, and she flipped it up to show me her butt when the dogs weren’t looking.

As payment, Poppy shook out some of her fairy dust over some fabric that they’d gotten. That allowed the fabric to gain some special properties when they made clothes with it.

“A good deal,” I said.

Poppy skipped around and twirled with a hand always in mine, though she’d occasionally run her hands sensuously over my body, grinning and humming and singing. She’d sing snatches of song and instruments would just naturally accompany her.

She hugged me from behind. “You’re so good to me, Fletchy Fletch!”

“You’ve been patient, and you’ve been helpful, and not made too many demands lately. That sort of behavior gets rewarded.”

She swung around with her hands on my shoulders and looked up at me. “I will be the patientist, nicest, most non-bossy, sexy fairy friend you’ve ever had,” she told me.

“You promise?” I asked with a grin.

“I promise,” she told me, and leaned forward for a kiss. She smiled into my mouth, like she’d just played a wonderful trick and I’d fallen for it. Yes, my dear, I thought, you’ve really pulled a fast one on me by being a good person.

After this, I treated her to an excellent meal. Everybody now knew I had been the one to cure the God of Doors and waved for us to head into their little restaurants.

It turned out that Fairy Poppins could eat, and eat, and eat. For whatever reason, she could scarf down an entire bowl of noodles, a whole plate of salad, several sides of various different expertly prepared vegetables and potato-like things, and even meat. Non-sentient Nakamamon were fair game.

Throughout the whole thing, she glowed and gave off fairy dust just from having me all to herself, and having me treat her like one of the big girls. No more shrinking down just to have sexy times on a gigantic bed. No, she was going to be treated like a girlfriend.

This is Christopher driving a poor girl out of her mind.