Given that I was in three places at once, and operating Myriad Mind so I could work three different tasks at a time, I’d started to mix up what all three of me were doing.

OG Fletcher: researching and going into the physical aspect of my mother’s ailment, which meant starting essentially at square one.

Fletcher III: working up the cure for mana disacclimation with all due speed. I had a feeling that curing mana disacclimation was going to be a step in the right direction for everyone who had problems with the Agency.

And finally, good old Fletcher II, the chillax Fletcher: teaching April, Chrysta, and now Azalea how to play euchre. We had to play with these large format playing cards developed by Trent, which were thin, stone, and still stacked up around a foot high. Shuffling them was a bit of a nightmare… but with euchre, you used less than half the deck, so it was far better.

None of them had any idea what was going on, and it was a bit like herding cats. I loved it, honestly, making Jack of the non-trump, same color suit into the second highest card available.

My mother came over with Dori to watch me work. I had already planted and grown the mugwort, so I was now preparing it in various different ways. One version needed to be dried, one version boiled, another steeped in oil. With four ingredients and three different preparations for each one, I had a whole lot of permutations to work through.

My mom was spending all her time cooing at the baby, and showing her all kinds of different things. Anything that could be picked up, my mom picked it up and let my daughter grab onto it. All of those things, bar none, went into her mouth and were promptly dropped.

Dori had pretty blue eyes and slobbered all over absolutely everything.

“Don’t forget,” I told her.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Don’t let the baby open any doors.”

We had no idea what would happen if and when Dori went and opened a door. It could have been something astonishing, the portal to cotton candy village or nacho land, or it could have been something just awful, like the main offices of the Agency headquarters, full of the most powerful Agency personnel in existence.

“Nacho land sounds awesome,” I muttered.

Ginkgo we already had from a previous cure. It had restorative properties here, meaning that a lot of superstitions and collective beliefs had some kind of weight over how the organism worked in this world.

I worked with the ginkgo nuts first, extracting the seed and keeping the awful flesh stuff. It had to be a ripeness issue, but so far none of the nuts had that familiar stench I associated with all the worst bathroom experiences I’d ever had. Maybe they’d need to be overripe and fall from the tree like I’d experienced.

Afterwards it was time to deal with the leaves. Steeping, distilling and drying were all on the table, but leaves were easy to get and easy to work with. I loved the strange, Asian fan shape of ginkgo leaves, and the gorgeous golden color they turn in the fall. For now it was time to deal with just the green ones.

I busied myself doing all the permutations. This took time, which was good, because we would need another full six hours to wait for the holy basil I’d transmuted away from being plain old basil.

And thus an afternoon bled into an evening, while I handled rewarding Fairy Poppins for her dedicated service and her turn from meddling annoyance into productive member of the team. Casting spells, researching cures, preparing ingredients, and hoping the Agency was moving slowly. Suspecting they probably weren’t.

Tara reappeared some few hours into the evening. Poppy and I had been sleeping off the effects of a full round of carnal pleasure when she was taken by Buttercup, and the clone had vanished. I’d need Fletcher III to speed this process along. I manifested Fletcher III yet again, this time with Vellenia as my helpful intimate contact assistant.

OG Fletcher did his gladiator routine, walking through the gigantic garden and brushing my hands over them while concentrating. I felt like a very special person like this, eyes closed and just feeling out what might help cure my mother’s cancer.

“What are you doing?” Cinzy asked.

“Don’t interrupt him,” Ivy muttered.

I extended my senses out, trying to get a feel for which of these would help work in my favor.

Periwinkle, vinca minor, a small plant with five-petaled flowers of the soft purple blue that gave the color its name.

“Periwinkle,” I said.

Some time after that, while walking through another section of the garden, I reached out and touched base with ginger, with its flavorful root and flower that looked like a dragon’s egg, all scaled and bright magma red.

“Ginger.”

Turmeric, with root of gold and flower of pink, like a pineapple entered a beauty contest. This also called out to me, with its huge green leaves whispering that it helped soothe the body.

“Turmeric,” I said absently, and continued my walk.

And garlic. Unassuming fluff balls of green on tall stalks hiding the fragrance and spice in the earth. Garlic, killer of cells.

“Garlic.”

Behind me, some of the girls with Verdant Rejuvenation made cuttings and planted those ingredients again and again. I would tend them in a moment, but my walk wasn’t over.

A new plant I hadn’t used before called out, and I left the garden to find a curious small flower. It had semi translucent petals of white, and glowed from within. The stems and leaves were also minuscule, but it grew in abundance in the shade of a small house, where an octopus person was sweeping their stoop.

“Celestine Myrallis,” I said. A flower that encouraged life and healthy growth. A plant I hadn’t known existed until I set eyes on it, and the Goddess of the Meadow’s knowledge came from some deep encyclopedia of all things flower.

The octopus lady looked up at me. “That’s right.” She was old and withered, like an octopus that was made up of eight elephant trunks, but colored indigo.

“Could I trouble you for a cutting or two?”

“Course you can, dearie,” she said.

“Thank you.”

The girls were watching me now. Like I was freshly back from the dead and about to proclaim the will of an almighty being from the heavens.

I went back with the Celestine Myrallis, planted it, then squinted.

“What is that?” I asked nobody, and veered off toward it. I had to use Spirit of Purity to fly down off this block and down to the surface of Saxwhacket, which wasn’t really even the city at all. Instead, a series of low, rolling hills were covered with specially created stones. These were all grave markers of one kind or another. Some were angelic versions of Nakamamon I’d seen above, ones with halos, some with clasped hands looking towards the sky. Some were simple markers with writing on them, while others had sculptures of families.

And among these, a dark purple vine wrapped up and around, sprouting a pale yellow, pale blue, or pale pink flower. They were all nearly white, only giving off color when I came close. Some of them were practically cocooned.

“Gravetwine,” I muttered, and set about harvesting some. The gift from the Goddess of Meadows told me that this was especially healthy and extended longevity by anchoring the soul to the body. It would help prevent slow degenerative illnesses like Alzheimer’s, but too much would stop death entirely and bring about a sort of zombie state. Death could only be avoided for so long.

That wouldn’t be a problem in this case.

Extending my senses further was becoming more of a problem. I’d already succeeded several Develop Cure checks using Affinity, combining Mana Affinity as well. This one though…

Develop Cure (Medium/Human) Check

: You have a total of 40 attribute and skill levels applicable for this check. This check is Nigh Impossible difficulty. The difficulty is 21. You do not currently have enough Tokens to automatically succeed at this check. Would you like to lower the difficulty of the check?

Total Tokens: 4 Affinity and 8 Free Tokens.

“Give it to me,” I muttered, and spent everything I had left to lower the difficulty by 4.

Success! You have discovered a relevant component for your cure.

I ended up scoring 19 successes on this one, and I’d lowered the difficulty down to 17, so once again it was down to the skin of my teeth. My enhanced success rate was really pulling though for me.

As I did so, I also burned through an Agility Token in order to get 2 Affinity Tokens back using Arcane Alchemy. It was the best I could do under the circumstances.

A twinkle in the air announced that I would be heading out in the direction of a distant mountain.

“Going my way, handsome?” Tara asked, pulling up beside me on Airaconda. She had a dozing Dori in a sling on her chest.

“How did you—”

She just grinned. “Let’s go.”

I launched myself up into the sky on my new dragonfly wings, encased in the warm fairy glow that was vaguely hospital color, with Tara not far behind.

“That is so cool!” she called when she drew up in front of me. “You lucky duck. I want weird fairy flight powers.”

I grinned. As much as I wanted to just fly around, spiraling up and around all over the wide world, I had a job to do. We could find a nice place where the baby could sleep, and Tara and I could maybe have sex while flying in the sky, or just near the baby. Something told me Tara wanted this also, and that something was both my intuition, and the Seduction skill telling me she wasn’t just recovered, but in love with her child and wanting more.

We landed on a ledge some hundreds of feet up, and the dragon spirit vanished off me. We were left with a breathtaking vista stretching for miles, with Saxwhacket occupying half the available sky, great big logs drifting around one another, fuzzy with distant, quaint civilization.

“It’s so beautiful here,” she said.

“I’m going to make sure we can live here,” I said.

She turned to stare at me.

“I mean, make sure we don’t accidentally turn into Nakamamon. Meaning we could live here, acclimated to the mana. If you want to.” Why was I suddenly feeling self-conscious? Oh, it was because it seemed as though I was inviting Tara to live here with me, give up earth, and in her mind that probably meant popping out babies left and right. Meaning that in her mind, I was probably proposing a full life together.

I squinted at the distant clouds shimmering with a rainbow scene of magic, the canopy of trees forming a lumpy green carpet, and the strange multi-colored blocks of Saxwhacket floating here and there in that weird infinity shape dance it was doing. Tiny specks were flying around it, conducting trade up and down the whole thing.

Could I live here? Could I give up earth entirely? There was a lot to love back home. My sister and my nephew, my father and my unborn niece or nephew. I had a handful of friends who I’d gamed with.

Here though… I had health, wealth, love, and a purpose.

It was the first time I realized that I could truly do this on a long term basis. And as I gazed out over the world here, I realized that Dick Johnson had also recruited a whole bunch of people like me, who wouldn’t mind sticking around here, staying here and calling this place home.

“Fletcher?” Tara was asking, a warm smile lighting her up from within.

“Hmm?”

“BJ for your thoughts?” she asked, then snorted laughter at my expression.

“I hadn’t considered living here before. Like permanently. Giving up earth and staying here, with other people who might want to.”

“You’ve gone native.”

“I really have… but I also like a little taste of home,” I told her, and gave her a lingering kiss. “You ever think about it?”

“All the time,” she said. “I’ve got a huge family back home, but everyone we meet here seems like such good people. They’re all so lovely.”

“Most.”

She nodded. “Most. So… what are we doing here?”

“We’re here… for a flower, I think. Or a plant.”

My success was showing me the crack in the mountain where a spray of red leaves emerged.

“What is it?”

“Emberblossom,” I said. “It’s also called thornroot, because the roots that anchor it into the earth are sharp as all heck. You can see the root sticking to the stone there, that look like blades. Definitely don’t touch it. This place has been touched by destructive mana and fire… this plant stops aggressive bubbles of mana forming out of control, so it seems like the thing for stopping aggressive cellular growth in my mom.”

Tara goggled at the small plant. There was another one down the cliff face, and one further up as well, but they were small and they were quite rare. It was going to take a serious amount of work getting them out of here… without the help of a Sorcerer who specialized in stone.

“So there’s no way we’ll get it out here and now,” Tara said, waggling her eyebrows. Another smiling moment later, she had skimmed her yoga pants down over her hips, down her thighs, and stepped out of them.

***

I didn’t have to send word across the world using my door power; I just knew the information using Myriad Mind. Fletcher paused in his euchre lessons and went with April to find Trent, and get him sent through back to Saxwhacket. Even while OG Fletcher was making a deposit in Tara, and one clone was working over Fairy Poppins with dinner and drinks, another clone took April on a quiet walk through a dark cavern.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Pleased to be with Master,” she said.

Master was feeling pretty horny right this moment. April was a paragon of innocence and cuteness, with her multiple tails and her cutesy fox ears, and I wasn’t going to simply ravish her. Instead we talked about her life as a Vulpetunia, and about what she’d gone through in the town of Glumpdumpkin.

To hear her tell it, she went into the area of divine influence specifically in order to grow up, and be able to talk to me. She had watched me lay with different humans, and Azalea, and now Vellenia and even Fairy Poppins.

“I want that,” she said quietly.

“Oh. Wow.”

“What?” she asked, suddenly changing from quiet, contemplative, and a little embarrassed, to seeming scared of what I might say next.

“I was just surprised, is all,” I told her. “There is a lot going on, and I hope you’re not upset, but I don’t want to do this—” and here she sucked in a breath, “—in a cold, damp cave without any candles or dinner laid out, or music or conversation.”

April gave me the brightest and most gorgeous smile.

This is Christopher writing April down on his dance card.