As much as I didn’t want to have a whole bunch of Guards on my team, I had to admit they were strong, fast, agile, and had defensive powers that could shield other teammates. If nobody else was going to be a healer, we needed to prevent damage. Larelle wasn’t enough.

  I also had to figure out, in a hurry, who was going to step up and do the right thing when the time game. Binks had the wrong attitude when it came to the gods. The questions I asked deliberately targeted who had been indoctrinated by the administration and who hadn’t bet made up their minds about divine entities.

  This meant almost all of them were complete newbs. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  I had quickly discovered that the administration wasn’t entirely sure what to do with most of the character csses. Most new recruits wanted to be Rangers and Wizards for obvious reasons: to range, or to wiz. With mapping efforts underway by lots of more veteran Rangers and Wizards, and the research being undertaken by even more of the veteran Wizards, more Rangers and Wizards ended up as interns. Rangers as runners and guides, Wizards as clerical staff, number crunchers, desk jobs.

  And they hadn’t signed up for that… they’d signed up to explore a rad fantasy world full of magic and weird creatures.

  However, there were still Bards, Rogues, and Sorcerers.

  The only Bard who applied for the position had been kept in the castle purely for entertainment purposes and was getting tired of it. She had changed her name to Cinzia but wanted to be called Cinzy.

  “And what is it you can bring to my god healing team?” I asked.

  She arched an eyebrow at me and grinned. It was like an explosion of charisma. I had never had someone immediately captivate me just with a smile before.

  “Well,” she said, “first off, you’re going to be talking to and integrating the team amongst natives. They have towns, vilges, and smaller communities. I do my best work making first impressions. Check this out.”

  She gave an even brighter smile, and I almost had to squint and look away. It was amazing how she could just about glow with likability.

  “And I assume you py music?” I asked.

  “Pff. Of course I py music. But I won’t be pying any music on this expedition unless I want to. If anyone tries to force me, I’ll beat them over the head with my oboe.”

  “What about the no violence policy?” I asked.

  “No requests, no violence. Easy,” she replied, and beamed another smile at me that felt like I should have put on sunscreen to guard against.

  I liked Cinzy. I was almost entirely sure that was a series of abilities she had, but wasn’t going to press the matter.

  I also wasn’t certain what a Rogue could bring to the party, but a fellow named Drat convinced me.

  Drat was really short for Kondrat, his st name. He’d used Drat when he took the job and went through the character creation process. First name unknown, at least by my two sex friends.

  He was basically the rat: sharp features, twitchy, didn’t care what other people were doing, and greedy as hell. He was famous in the cafeteria for clearing everyone’s ptes when they were finished with meals. To avoid waste, you see.

  Drat didn’t say much of anything. He didn’t do much of anything, either, so far as everyone knew. Whenever a runner was sent to find him, he wasn’t there. Whenever his name was called by the Nakamamon the Wizards had, he’d suddenly turn up at the administration office. A lot of times it was just easier to get someone else to do it.

  “And why is it you want to be a part of my team?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “This pce is boring.”

  As far as his Nakamamon, he shrugged once more and said the little bugger was around somewhere, but he wasn’t sure. “He’ll show up when he’s ready to help out.”

  And when asked about the god situation, and how he felt, again he shrugged. “I’m not worried about it. You’ll have me doing recon and scouting.”

  “I have two Rangers.”

  Another shrug. “Maybe some light burgry. That’s what you need me for. I’m the Baggins of the group.”

  The other Rogue I’d interviewed had been one of Timmy’s biggest supporters, ready to get out and explore the world with Timmy and their other friend. So… no thanks on that score. Although I wasn’t certain we’d be using a Rogue all that often, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

  I’d been initially ready to add one more Guard to the group. Her name was Ivy, and she seemed great: no attachment to either Timmy or Bke, no horror stories from Tara, Regina, or Larelle. She rgely kept to herself, and was itching to leave the castle to do real Guard work. There were too many cooks in the kitchen, she cimed. She was hoping to pnt her shield when it was necessary, scare off real threats if there were any to be found, and then paint literally everything she saw.

  “You’re an artist then,” I said, impressed.

  Ivy was one of those types who shaved her head down to stubble, had a bunch of piercings, and a handful of tattoos… that I could see.

  “Oh yeah, you could say that. I don’t know as I would say artist artist, but I’m aspiring.”

  “But not a Wizard.” I was coming to understand that Wizards could do magical painting if they went into that.

  “Too stuffy. No thanks.”

  She ticked all the right boxes in terms of attitude, attachments here, retionships (or ck thereof, ideally) with any of the other Guards… there was just this one thing.

  “If you choose to have me on board, you have to bring Isabelle onto the team.”

  “Isabelle.”

  “Isabelle Lee Martinez,” she said, nodding.

  It turned out Isabelle Lee Martinez was Ivy’s closest friend. I would have disqualified the both of them for Ivy making the condition, but Isabelle really impressed me. First of all, she had a Nakamamon, a rochidna the size of a hippopotamus. The armor ptes were astonishing. Not only was the thing docile and an excellent pack mule, it was virtually indestructible. It was called Muppin, and she loved giving it scritches: chin scritches, ear scritches, between the spiky pte scritches.

  More than that, Isabelle had a id back attitude (kind of a female version of Drat) when it came to basically all the things I was asking her to do. I really hoped she wasn’t being dismissive about the danger, the being away from the castle, and the isotion. She really didn’t seem bothered.

  The st I wasn’t sure about, but the Sorcerer I found intrigued me.

  See, the guy’s name was Trent, and I had expectations about the guy. Oily, douchebag, cocky. Sorcerers had a pretty well-earned reputation.

  Trent wasn’t any of those things. He stood a few inches shorter than me, messy blonde hair, half his face drooping with scar tissue, and deadly fucking serious.

  “I’m ready to go,” he said.

  When I asked what he brought to the team, he made the entire castle shake. Soon enough the blocks that made up the floor started to vibrate and rattle. Several of them lifted up out of the floor like blocks out of a game and rearranged themselves into various different configurations.

  “So long as I have mana, I can do that,” he said, visibly sweating. With more concentration, he sent them back to where they were, causing cries of arm to drift up from the floor below.

  So he was like a Wizard who didn’t need a bunch of glowing crystals, a staff with runes carved into it, or any of the other zillion bits and bobs An was forced to carry around.

  Wizards were Jacks of all trades, masters of none. Sorcerers, it seemed, were masters of one, and to hell with all the rest. While Wizards were restricted to the number of spells they could memorize using Ingenuity and Affinity Tokens, Sorcerers had mana pools dependent on Affinity and Likability. I could get on board with having a little of Column A and a little of Column B. Allie and Rainer made it clear that administration wanted An along simply as a scribe, who could use long range communication spells to rey messages back to the castle for mission updates, requisition orders, and probably to spy on the natives.

  When I finally selected my tenth, a new window popped up in front of my vision.

  Leadership the top of the screen read.

  You have been given control of an expedition consisting of ten individuals! You have selected:

  Cinzia Graham (Bard) + Fairy Poppins

  Chrysta (Fighter)

  Isabelle Lee Martinez (Fighter) + Muppin

  Ivy Gutierrez (Fighter)

  Larelle (Fighter) + Calida

  Regina Hampstead (Ranger) + Tweedle Dee

  Tara Marshall (Ranger)

  Drat (Rogue) + McCauley Skulkins

  Trent Thomas (Sorcerer) + Garnet

  An Abbot (Wizard)

  Would you like to name your expedition? Y/N

  I hit Y, having given this a lot of thought already. I was already thinking of having commemorative t-shirts made up, and coffee mugs printed online and sent to everybody (or brought back here for Chrysta and Larelle).

  A typical keyboard appeared with the 8-bit letters and numbers on it, and I typed DIVINITY RESCUE CORPS.

  Although I didn’t love how close CORPS was to corpse, I didn’t want to change the spelling to CORE.

  Then, when prompted whether this was my final answer, I mentally gave my assent. Yes, we were the Divinity Rescue Corps. The DRC. It was better anything else I had come up with.

  You may issue commands and give out quests through this menu! DRC members will suffer experience penalties for disobeying, and be given experience point bonuses for complying.

  Please note that the parameters of your mission will be considered when giving orders. Orders that fail to meet mission parameters or go against mission parameters will not grant bonuses or incur penalties. Your DRC members are all aware of this, so take this into account. Repeated orders that fail to take mission parameters into account or which go against mission parameters will result in command being passed to another.

  One cannot lead from the rear of the battle, commander!

  Do you wish to issue orders at this time? Y/N

  “No, no I do not,” I muttered.

  You may issue orders at any time by typing them here, or saying the phrase, ‘That is an order.’

  Some of the ten party members were giving me odd looks. One of those was Regina, who was giving me a raised eyebrow and a half smirk I didn’t particurly care for. No, I was not going to order anyone to have sex with me. Yeesh.

  While I was grappling with the weirdness of having ‘command’ of ten people and the even weirder weirdness of being forced to say ‘That is an order’ the group were mingling and beginning to talk amongst themselves.

  We didn’t remain on the flying carpet for very long. I wanted to take the long way, find out as much as I could about the world at rge, and get to know these strangers for as long as I could before we got into the weeds with poputions of natives. The fewer variables the better, at least for now.

  “Team meeting!” I called out.

  “Team meeting!” Cinzy echoed in a sing-song tone. “Everyone gather ro-ound!” Her voice carried much farther than mine, which I would discover was a basic Bard trick.

  The natives were the first to head over, though Tara wasn’t far away to begin with. Regina gave Tweedle Dee an order and the Nakamamon bounded away into the meadow, towards the colossal mushrooms.

  “Apparently I can order you guys to do things,” I said, when everyone was in attendance. “These orders have to be mission specific, so that’s good. I can’t order anybody to bark like a dog or imitate a chicken or anything like that, sadly.”

  Cinzy cocked her arms up and started bobbing her head anyway, then commenced with the strutting around. With occasional clucks.

  “Excellent.” I looked to Regina and Tara, who just shrugged. “I hope to not have to do any of that. The core mission, as you all should already know, is just to locate any suffering, diagnose the problem, treat it while researching and working up a cure, then cure it. The st stage was something we did with the God of Footfalls, but that was highly accelerated because the sickness was already well established in the record books. We may not get so lucky with future cures. Any questions so far?”

  Isabelle’s hand shot up.

  “First of all, you don’t need to raise your hand,” I said.

  “We all have job csses, but what are the roles we have as part of this expedition?” she asked. Ivy was nodding along.

  I had already considered this. In the first encounter, it was rgely the job of the Guards to keep the sick god from creating colteral damage. So in this case warding the patients away from where they can cause harm to others, or getting others away from our sick gods. And if there are outside threats, ward them off too.

  “And how rigorously are we enforcing the no violence rule?” Isabelle went on.

  “I assume there won’t be any need for it?” I turned it up into a question. “I’m told the natives are peaceful and never knew what violence was until we showed up.”

  “Well I’ve heard some of these creatures and gods are pretty nasty and attack settlements and research groups,” Ivy shot back. The tattooed member of the party with the shaved head and the piercings was already closing in on hostile.

  Being twenty, I’d never been in a position to hire people like this before, or command them. I’d never had to try being a good judge of character. I apparently was shit at it.

  “I would like violence to be used as a st resort,” I said. “After all, I’m the one with the healing powers.”

  Ivy’s eyes narrowed. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “The less people f around, the less people find out.”

  She started to jab a finger in my direction when Isabelle put a hand on her shoulder and turned her away.

  “All right, I’m making Larelle the Guard leader. We will approach any situation where Guard expertise is needed and take her advice.” Isabelle and Ivy both turned incredulous looks my way, so I took a page from Drat’s book and shrugged. Whether they had a problem trusting sapient Nakamamon, or taking orders from anyone, or if they knew and disliked Larelle, I didn’t much give a shit.

  The rest of the meeting went much better. Drat wouldn’t be needed to scout ahead in wild territories like this, but he offered up the services of McCauley Skulkins, his Nakamamon. Either his companion was invisible, made of air, or just not here at the moment, because nobody got a hint of where Skulkins was. Scouting, for now, was best handled by the Rangers. Afterwards, we discussed food procurement. Again, the Rangers were good, but Trent the Sorcerer also had a spell for helping pnts to grow at a faster rate, and this included fruiting pnts. All of us would defer to the Rangers and assist them as needed when it came to traversing the wilds, getting food moving, and camp duties.

  An would be providing support as he could, since he was only a fledgling Wizard. I was secretly thrilled to be able to have a Wizard who wasn’t deeply into whatever corporate or government structure our employers had the rest of the Wizards under. An and Trent were supposed to use their magic powers for creative problem solving type situations: if we had to climb a cliff, if a magic something came at us, or if we needed an igloo made of stone in a hurry.

  As for Cinzy, I made it very clear to the team that she wasn’t here for performance or entertainment purposes. Sure she was a Bard, but her actual job was going to be in Public Retions. If we encountered unfriendlies she was going to run point on negotiations. When we rolled into a settlement, no matter how small, it was up to her to meet with the leaders and convince them we were the good guys.

  “Are you comfortable with that role?” I asked.

  She beamed a beaming smile at me, and just for a moment I considered telling her I loved her. Goodness gracious but she was beautiful, and even more so with the power of emotional manipution or whatever was going on there.

  “I’m comfortable with that role,” she said.

  “And,” I announced to the people, “Cinzy has made it known that if you request songs, she will use her oboe to do violence on you. This is the only type of violence that is explicitly allowed, because you’ve been forewarned. Don’t mess with Cinzy.”

  I felt a touch on my face and realized she bent forward and given me a peck on the cheek.

  This is Christopher getting wide-eyed looks from the two women who’ve agreed to bed him on the regur.