I was asked several times if I wanted to do this, and each and every time, I said yes. Yes, we were stopping early. Yes, we had only gone about ten or twelve miles. Yes, it seemed like we were just trading one rolling hill covered with vegetation for another. Yes, I was okay with all that.

With camp set, and stools all arrayed around the fire, I opened my hands to my mother.

Who, by the way, looked amazing. She smiled easily, sat with purpose and calm. She looked like she was back to her old self already. Instead of looking like she’d aged ten years from the chemo, she had a full head of hair, and it was back to its usual mousey brown with only a few threads of silver here and there. The wrinkles around her eyes, and her smile lines, had receded. I wouldn’t have noticed except for the increase in my Ingenuity. She looked great, and that made the cancer cure urgency recede some. I’d need to increase my skill in Develop Cure (Human) in any event.

“You want to go first, or me?”

“You go first,” she said. “None of the girls have heard any of this, but I guess you’ve been all over the place. A swamp? And then that enormous ball town? We only went into the ocean and then came out.”

A chorus of nods and agreement followed.

They were arrayed around the campfire, all of them save the perimeter guards. It was a motley assortment I now had with me, an adorable fox girl, three gorgeous humans, another adorable and dangerous purple-skinned tentacle girl, an adorable white-skinned fairy stuck on one arm, and another adorable yellow-skinned psychic girl floating not far off. A lazy orange and red salamander sat in the fire, while a huge gem gleamed from its place near the ring of stones that was our fire pit. The air snake that was bigger around than my thigh formed a pillow for our super pregnant member. The colossal echidna made of stone had the tiny pixie resting on its horn, and my Wizard companion straddling its neck. Meanwhile the ice ghost and the huge orange-skinned Guardian were off ensuring no one snuck up on us.

Deep breath. I smiled. “Great. Right.”

It had started once I separated from Regina, Alan, my mom, and all the Nakamamon. Since I was being hunted by the Agency, it made sense to limit how many of us they could round up and arrest at a time. Also, Shakindria, Chrysta and Larelle would be more likely to do violence to protect me, and that meant a higher chance of my mother or others getting hurt.

“Jacoby struck a deal with me,” I told them. The Ranger and expedition leader of another group of Agency personnel had a different mission: to round up the fighting aspect Nakamamon that had been unleashed. It was a brand new aspect to the world here, and they had taken too long to find the original culprit, so the number of fighting Nakamamon had spread. They had six creatures in the grips of aspect interference. Fighting aspect was taking over their beast aspects, essentially changing them into new Nakamamon.

“I worked up a cure similar to what I’d done with the God of Productivity,” I said. “It was a paste that needed to be applied to the chakras.”

“Meaning you had to apply the paste directly to the butt?” Regina asked. “What?”

“Do you have to be crude?” Cinzy asked, with heavy eye roll added.

“Have to? No. Does it get a rise out of you? Yes.”

Cinzy threw popcorn at her. It was one of the plants I could now grow here with Verdant Rejuvenation, and popcorn was easy enough to make on the fire.

It turned out I needed to concoct five different cures in as many days, but I didn’t have that kind of time. “I don’t want to get too much into the weeds about it, but my mom is a Healer now, so basically the cure has to match the size and exact aspects of the patient.” Only two were plant and beast aspects, along with medium size. The infinite strangling vine Nakamamon called Invineity was not a beast aspect, so it needed a slightly different cure.

“April was actually the first one I cured.” The Vulpetunia had been underfoot, cuddling against me and sleeping on my chest every night after that. I had to make up a cure for a fire elephant called a Hellephant, and administering it nearly got people burned alive.

“I asked for the ability to create, uh, assistants, but there was a small problem. Only two volunteers. Celine and Jacoby wanted to become assistants and gain a simple Healer power—”

“You can do that?” My mom blurted.

“I can,” I replied, “but you can’t. It’s a function of a class evolution after I hit level twenty-five.”

This was ninety percent lie. Actually a hundred percent, now that I considered it. The ability sharing business began with Entwined Ecstasy, given to me by The Lovers… and given to Tara as well. Essentially I could share an ability with anyone I had sex with… and by now that number was around twenty different partners. However, there was no way my mother was going to end up with the same class evolution options I got when I finally reached level 25. They were tailored to the experiences you had in reaching that milestone, and she wouldn’t be heading in the same direction. So rather than lying again, which I was against, I’d just have to comfort her when she didn’t get the thing on her own class evolution.

I pushed on, past the place where Jacoby had wanted to sex me up, but instead got poisoned by Azalea, the purple cutie over there with the tentacles for hair and the sickly yellow eyes. Instead I ended up having Celine as a partner, and with her help, managed to cure the fighting aspect out of a Geodile, a large and angry crocodile with crystal shards for teeth and scales. Again, smearing the cure on was a serious fight that nearly got some people seriously injured.

“In the end, only a Shrubbit was fully taken over by the fighting aspect,” I said. “We just didn’t have time to handle it.”

“Shrubbit sounds adorable,” my mother said.

“A rabbit that disguises itself as a shrub?” Regina asked. “Very adorable. What did it change into?”

It had lost almost all of its rabbit-ness, and instead had become a plant creature for fighting.

“Bushwhack,” I said.

They all tried to imagine that.

“I forgot the part where all this happened in a swamp, where I tried to get some anesthetic from the tentacle creature in the swamp, realized it was actually an Injecticle with a trapped leg, and went to free it…”

Now everyone turned to look at the small purple creature with the eyes the color of pus, grinning at them with the most shark-toothed smile imaginable. Azalea waved at all the attention.

“After that, another Agency team paid Jacoby’s team a visit at night, and I hid from them. Azalea here must have poisoned one I couldn’t see.”

She nodded emphatically.

“Jacoby decided to move operations to Flunt-on-the-Rustle.” The whole town was essentially encapsulated in a colossal sphere, because this world had magic and laws of physics in some kind of teenage rebellion phase, because they didn’t often behave like they ought to. The sphere rotated slowly around on a cushion of water from the base holding it.

During the day you could see the sun shining through the opposite side of the sphere, so no problem getting light in there, and you could barely make out the opposite side’s buildings, streets, and yards if you squinted at the sun for long enough.

From outside, though, you couldn’t see in. So aside from a single entry hole, we were protected from detection.

After finishing up the whole fighting aspect situation and releasing all the Nakamamon into the wild, I healed up Jacoby, who tried to go after Azalea. I stopped her, telling her I would be staying in town. They had a sick god situation that needed dealing with.

“So when Jacoby inevitably tried to turn on you and arrest you to hand you over to the Agency, you had a poison Nakamamon ally,” Cinzy said.

“I owe Master my life, golden-haired pretty pretty girl,” Azalea said.

Several snorts of laughter followed, and Cinzy appeared unsure of whether to be offended or flattered.

“Me too,” the fox girl said.

For whatever reason, being subjected to the divine area for a long period of time had triggered the flower fox’s transformation. Vulpetunia had become Kitsunakura, and she’d grown considerable, um, assets, in that time. April considered me her savior, because I’d driven the fighting aspect out of her.

“Celine, the other member of the team who had gotten her Healer ability and assisted me, broke the circle of divine protection that kept the team’s base secure,” I said.

It had been all out insanity after that. See, the sick god in question was actually two gods, and They were The Lovers. So when the slightly wrong power of The Lovers washed over the camp, the result was a near-orgy as people scrambled to get away. Some of them used the situation as a pretext to let loose with the people they liked but had never jumped off that bridge for whatever reason. Celine wanted, and got, her sexual reward, while Jacoby came to her senses in that moment. Regretting her actions, she begged to be tied up and then left outside the divine infection area.

With my Divine Resistance leveled pretty high, I was able to ensure her team got out of there before chafing and exhaustion got them in any serious trouble. Their thanks was to leave me be, and head back to Agency HQ to report the final results of their mission.

“After that it came down to healing the sick god.”

Just kidding, but I can’t tell my mom I offered to have raucous and exhaustive orgy sex with the entirety of the town if they wanted Healer powers. An even dozen bizarre creatures took me up on the deal, with everything from a cat person (a Prowline named Yowl) to a blob of blue ooze (called Azure) ended up with me driving them to orgasmic heights in a single day.

Afterwards, we all worked on cures for their eggs who’d been sickened by The Lovers, and The Lovers themselves.

“It all came to a head when the Agency team who’d found Jacoby in the swamp entered into the town.”

That had been a bit of a nightmare. See, Nakamamon don’t understand the concept of violence between sentient creatures. Oh sure, predator-prey hunting and consumption is a thing, but even wild Nakamamon don’t like to eat what they don’t normally. They barely try to kill if you intrude on their territory, a fact I’d learned when coming up against two dragon things down under the earth. Those things ate metal, and we weren’t made of metal, so they just wanted us away from their pad.

“So when this team showed up, the town elders showed off the agreement made by the system progenitors. When they tried to fight off Azalea and April anyway, the whole of the town came together to stop them.”

My job had been to heal up The Lovers. Sure I wasn’t ready with a cure yet, but my abilities had progressed to where I might not actually need it. I judged that if the sickness was only mental or emotional, my abilities could handle it… all I had to do was move one god over to its companion so they could get busy, like sex gods do.

That was when Ivy, Cinzy, and Tara had shown up to do combat with the team.

“Hang on a second, what?” Cinzy asked.

“I picked up the one, and was trying to get it to remember how to, ahem, make love, to, ahem, its partner—”

I’d failed. It had taken Tara entering the scene and having incredible sex with me to remind The Lovers how to frack.

“No no no no no,” Regina said.

“Prog-g-g-genitors?” Alan blurted.

“Ohhhh, right. Jocinda and Claudius.”

I would go into the identities and guesswork I’d put into getting to know the acidic, wry, and sharp-witted Druid Jocinda, and the gruff, no-nonsense Claudius. Probably a Wizard, from the system creation stuff.

I would not, however, divulge anything about the other being who was visiting me on the behalf of either her or him. I suspected the dark creature with the insane powers and the ability to stop time was a servant of Jocinda. She had given me a map pointing up north towards where I thought Jocinda would be… meaning she wanted me to meet the woman responsible for naming the towns: Saxwhacket, Glumpdumpkin, Flunt-on-the-Rustle, Slinktrickle, and others? It seemed just as likely for the creature to use me to pinpoint Jocinda for Claudius, but I couldn’t put my finger on why the Wizard would want to damage and sicken this world’s gods. That made no sense. With Jocinda, Ms. Moon Namer—moons called Snuffletrouser von Zipyankee and [NAME].

Anyway, I skirted around mentioning the thing that blanked out some of my memories, before I got psychic resistance from Shakindria. “Jocinda and Claudius visited me when I did things that were completely new to the system, like discovering (creating?) an entirely new aspect of Nakamamon, or de-aspecting a Nakamamon on its transition from beast to fighting.”

They actually visited me when I’d evolved my class in Pleasure Seeker to Indulgent Consort, because The Lovers had given me that second class for no apparent reason I could fathom.

Speaking of which, I had progressed in level quite a lot during the situation leading to The Lovers being cured.

I’d gained a mess of levels in the aftermath of Flunt-on-the-Rustle: three in Healer and five in Pleasure Seeker. Couple that with the extra level I’d gotten from an achievement, that brought me to 41 in Pleasure Seeker, and 36 in Healer.

The bonuses I’d gotten were something else.

Pleasure Seeker was a treasure trove of skill points and ability upgrades.

Level 35: +7 skill points

Level 36: +7 skill points

Level 37: +Ability Upgrade: Coming Together, +1 Likability

Level 38: +7 skill points

Level 39: +Ability Upgrade: Drive In Deeper, +4 skill points

Level 40: +8 skill points

Level 41: +8 skill points

Healer had somehow slowed behind all the crazy amounts of sex I’d been having, but was arguably more important.

Level 34: +12 skill points

Level 35: +12 skill points

Level 36: +6 skill points, +1 Affinity

All of those had gone into skills I definitely needed. Having my mom around, too, seemed to influence me, which ended with me sinking some of my Pleasure Seeker points into Healer skills. Although it had been my own internal policy to use each class skill for the intended class, there were never enough skill points for Healer. I also had gotten Arcane Alchemy and Arcane Focus up a level, which allowed me to spend 2 skill points on any given skill per level I went up. After the achievement with Develop Cure had combined all of them into a single skill, I wanted it to get a serious boost. It now covered basically all the Nakamamon I might come across.

Christopher Fletcher

Healer - Apprentice Arcane Mender 34

Pleasure Seeker - Initiate Indulgent Consort 41

Attributes:

Affinity 9

Durability 8

Ingenuity 10

Likability 9

Agility 5

Muscularity 6

Free Tokens 8

Healer (Arcane Mender) Skills:

Diagnostics 12

Treatments 12

Develop Cure (swarm 6, small 6, medium 6, large 6, huge 6)

Develop Cure (All Aspects 9, unique 9, human 13)

Administer Cure 12

Instinctual Casting 12

Mana Affinity 12

Mana Shaping 6

Spellcasting (Abjuration 1, Conjuration 1, Evocation 1, Transmutation 3)

Meditation 4

Divine Resistance 16

Physical Resistance 5

Psychic Resistance 3

Pleasure Seeker (Indulgent Consort) Qualities:

Girth 6

Load 6

Stave Off 6

Length 6

Tongue 6

Adaptability 20

Pheromones 18

Refractory Period 5

Flexibility 6

Group Play 7

Seduction 6

Fertility 7

Other Skills:

Identify 10

Hiking 4

Cooking 2

Persuasion 2

Stealth 2