Morning dawned with us engaged in our fourth tryst of the night. I couldn’t help myself, and I make no apologies: she was gorgeous, willing, and we had complete privacy. We had slept maybe three hours between the second and third sex sessions. It was enough sleep to wake refreshed, go take a shower with Regina, and then get both of us horny in the midst of soaping up her back.

  We were eventually interrupted in the midst of standing on the sofa, pressing her against the wall of my dorm common room, by Tweedle Dee climbing up into the dorm room from below.

  I reluctantly stopped smming my hips up into her when her Nakamamon poked its head in through the window and whined.

  “Ohh funky chicken,” she moaned. Her hands were on the wall, and her forehead was on her hands, and she was just absorbing all I could dish out. “We have to stop.”

  I knew it… I just didn’t want to. Reluctantly, I pulled free of her, and felt a weird bout of shame for her pet creature seeing the two of us fully naked, and me with a raging hard on no less.

  Regina had slid down the wall and curled up into the couch, already drowsing. “Okay,” she mumbled, when Tweedle Dee came up and nosed her in the back. “Okay! Ugh.”

  She made her way to the shower, didn’t stop me when I also entered. This was how, two minutes ter, her lips were wrapped around my cock.

  “Last time,” I muttered. “Last time.”

  I came in her mouth with a grunt and watched in amazement as she swallowed it all. She grinned up at me.

  “You taste good,” she said.

  Goodness, a gorgeous woman, down on her knees, smattering of face and chest and shoulder freckles all glinting off the light coming from the bathroom light fixtures, her nipples hard and her hair slicked back… I would make a mental snapshot of this and keep it for ter.

  It was almost like sneaking her out of my room some twenty minutes ter, with me poking my head out and checking to see if the hallway was clear. I couldn’t help but ugh about the absurdity of the whole thing. We were consenting adults.

  Then again, first off, I didn’t feel much like an adult. I felt like a kid in a candy store. That night had been better than any Christmas. Any Halloween haul. I didn’t care that I had to brace myself against the wall of the corridor on the way to breakfast, and stopped several times to reapply icy hot to my thighs just above my knees. That didn’t matter.

  I hadn’t just had sex, I’d practically fallen in love.

  The thought shocked me out of my reverie. I couldn’t get too attached. Regina was still most likely nothing more than a hookup, as much as I might want otherwise.

  I had no idea how wrong I was.

  At the time, I mented the loss of her, and wondered if I could maybe change my job over to Ranger. It was a preposterous idea. She didn’t have broken legs, and needed to be very mobile for her job. There was no way I would slow her down.

  “Jeez o Pete’s, Fletch, are you okay?” Regina sounded concerned, and a bit guilty. Like she had caused me to screw her in every position I’d ever seen or read about all night. Pff. I could have begged off, and hadn’t.

  I nodded and brought one knee up to my chest, then the other. I repeated it several times, amplifying the pain with a hiss before letting it get back to regur levels.

  “Let’s get you to breakfast,” she said.

  We were just ten minutes away from the end of the breakfast buffet service, and I was very gd of that fact. The exhaustion I’d cheerfully boasted wouldn’t be a problem had just crashed into me. I probably looked like hell. I was practically teary-eyed to see coffee.

  The attendant grinned at my brimming cup of bck gold. “We bring fresh beans through the portal every other day,” he said. “Roast them on site.”

  “You people are doing the gods’ work,” I told him blearily.

  “Have a good day there, newbie,” the attendant said.

  “You too, my lord and savior coffee person,” I mumbled back, and he ughed raucously.

  Regina sat across from me, and periodically fed Tweedle Dee bits of everything. Sausage, sad, carrot sticks, the yogurt cup.

  She was starting to look like I felt.

  “Shiznickles,” I told her, “I’m sorry—“

  “I’m not,” she said, “but now we have to face consequences. It’ll be a rough day, and I’ll be packing extra coffee for the road.”

  “Good idea.”

  The runner from yesterday meandered through the crowded cafeteria to meet us.

  “Hey there, Fletcher,” he said, and turned to Regina. “You’re… Regina? And Tweedle Dee?”

  His smoky, inky ferret creature was perched on one shoulder, standing tall and gazing down at us with fathomless bck eyes.

  Tweedle Dee gave a yip of acknowledgement and came over to butt his head against the runner’s leg.

  “Would you believe I never got your name?” I asked sheepishly.

  “Timmy!” he barked, in an impression of a cartoon character. “And this little bundle of creepy, adorable darkness is Wendell.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” I told him. “Can I… is it okay to pet Wendell?”

  Regina was already reaching to do just that, and little arcs of lightning zapped her fingers. She jerked back.

  “Sorry, he’s a storm ferret. You’d have to be immune to electric or have a high resistance to handle touching him.”

  “Got it,” Regina said.

  Timmy beamed at us, while tiny arcs of lightning zapped him here and there.. “Good news is that bonding with him makes me basically immune.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the hair on one side of his head was standing directly up, like it was full of static electricity. Immune was a bit of a stretch.

  “You’re sted to start training at the academy today,” he said. “I’m supposed to ask what job you’ve taken on so we can get a master in to begin your training.”

  “Right. Healer.” At his disbelieving look, I repeated myself. “Healer. Right? Cleric?”

  “Good for you, Fletcher,” Regina said, and put a hand on mine. Just that simple touch and my body got ready for another bout of sex. Somehow.

  “Healer. All right. Okay. Uh. Okay,” Timmy stammered, then turned to go. “I guess that’s a field assignment. I’ll head out and see what Mr. Rainer says.” With that, he bolted out of the room.

  Although I felt wrung out, and exhausted, I was happy. Regina again touched my hand.

  “Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” I asked. “That guy Bke is somewhere nearby, isn’t he? And he’s got friends.”

  Her hand jerked away, and she frowned. “I guess you’re right.”

  “What’s up with Timmy? Am I not supposed to be a Healer?”

  Heat crept into her cheeks. “Listen, Fletcher, I’m not really supposed to talk—”

  “Oh fudgecicle,” I muttered. “Out with it, okay?”

  Her face twitched. “There’s a lot of accidents with Healers, okay? It’s practically the most dangerous profession.”

  “I would’ve thought Ranger would be more dangerous,” I said, “what with the running around all over an ever-shifting world.”

  “You would think that, but you’d be wrong. Listen… you’ll probably be fine, okay? Just pay attention to Mr. Rainer, and follow directions.”

  “Now you’re scaring me,” I told her. “What is it?”

  “It’s… not for me to say.”

  I didn’t want to be frustrated with her, but that wasn’t something I had any control over. “Okay.” I picked up my tray and started to head out.

  Regina looked ready to speak, and boy did I hope she did. I hoped she wanted to apologize for not telling me, and come give me a big hug to make up for it. Then expin what she wasn’t telling me.

  None of those things happened.

  ***

  Mustache Head was Mr. Rainer. He looked a bit like Albert Einstein, but with less hair up top. Every patch of hair on his face was like its own bristle brush, and that went double for the biggest patch, running around his head from ear to ear.

  “Well now, if it isn’t our resident god-touched,” he boomed, and ughed.

  I couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, sorry about bringing you out of the castle and away from your duties here.”

  “Nonsense!” he yelled.

  This man did not have an inside voice, and it made me smile.

  I’d been summoned not to the academy, where training happened for everybody else, but the infirmary. This involved reversing gravity again, again a weird sensation.

  The infirmary was a massive and spacious hall sectioned off by mobile white partitions. Pin old gurneys sat in neat rows, though the white sheets had been stained by magic in some form or another. One had a starfish of purple and pink seeping into it. Another was littered with yellow splotches that appeared to be stars. In four different pces around the huge room, nurses’ stations were set up, but three of the four were empty. There was a sort of inner circle of gurneys beyond that, and Mr. Rainer’s office in the center of everything.

  “Walk with me, Fletcher,” he said, and without preamble took me by the shoulder and led me outside.

  The huge medical hall had equally enormous double doors leading out onto a walkway that ran the circumference of the castle. It afforded us a rightside up view of the surrounding countryside. The trees, which sometimes spasmed and adopted different poses, the mountains rearranging themselves, and the colossal mushrooms were all easily visible. Some flying creatures made their way through the skies. I couldn’t tell if they were pin old Nakamamon monsters or perhaps gods.

  “What kind of person are you, Mr. Fletcher?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I told him truthfully. “If you’re asking my ancestry, I’m from all over the pce. If you’re asking what kind of personality I think I have, in a word I’d say stubborn.”

  He chuckled. “Tenacity is a trait my friend and yours Dick Johnson would have been looking for, sure.”

  He gestured out toward the wider world. “You could’ve chosen anything, my boy. You could have decided that you wanted to be stationed here at the castle, and thought that guard would be your best by for a magic companion animal, and powers that render you a superhuman, and that would’ve been that.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “No. You did not.”

  We walked on, with me watching some of the folks flying upside down toward lower parts of the castle, or the ones flipping midway around. The weirdest were people who took off from the upside down and soared out away from the castle a good way, continuing the gravity they’d started with, only to flip at some demarcation line I couldn’t see.

  The huge manta ray I’d seen yesterday flew into view, and edged very close to where Rainer and I were walking. I noted that Rainer chose to walk on the outside, closer to a fall of over a hundred feet, but closer to where he could come into contact with his Nakamamon.

  The stocky, chubby man reached out with one hand and the creature drifted over to nuzzle his hand.

  “You could’ve gone with research, administration, or something even more banal. A runner like our friend Timmy, at the absolute lowest rungs of administration.”

  “I chose to be a Healer.” He knew this, and I knew this, and I couldn’t be sure what he was driving at, stating the obvious.

  “Instead of knowledge, control, or ease, you went with the path of service to the world here.”

  “Mr. Rainer, if there’s a point you’d like to make, I hope you could make it quickly.”

  Mustache Head regarded me carefully.

  “You also reached out to try helping an ailing god before you knew what you were doing. And I have to tell you, Mr. Fletcher, if I hadn’t spent the st several weeks tending to the Goddess of the Meadows, diagnosing her, treating her, working up a cure… if I hadn’t spped together that cure in a handful of minutes instead of over the course of hours and hours, well…” He shook his head. “If she had resisted the cure, tried to shake me off, tried to attack or run… you’d be dead right now, son.”

  I chewed at my lip thoughtfully.

  “I’m from a different generation, kiddo. My pops served in World War II and I served in Vietnam. I never had a smartphone and I never grew up with video games, twenty-four hour television, or the internet everywhere I went. We call it going in half-cocked. But essentially it’s being impulsive. If you’re impulsive, if you go in half-cocked, you’re going to be one in a long list of dead Healers.”

  Mr. Rainer didn’t stop walking when I froze. He and his flying manta ray kept right on having a moment with one another.

  Finally, I trotted up by his side again. We turned the corner again and continued onward.

  “I know it’s dangerous now,” I told him. “I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

  He snorted. “Sure, you won’t make that mistake again, but what about the other mistakes you’re going to make? You’re in an ever-shifting, ever-changing world. Things aren’t the way they were the night before, when you wake up in the morning. You haven’t met the natives.”

  “I assume,” I told him, “your job is to help prepare me for these sorts of issues, so I don’t end up dead.”

  He nodded. “Yep.”

  “And there will be other organization members there to help keep me safe and mitigate the damage.”

  “There will be,” he said.

  “Meaning when I make the mistakes I’m sure to make, it’ll be as someone who’s fully ready to accept the consequences, and you won’t have to bme yourself for my death.”

  He regarded me for some time, while the third corner of the castle drew closer. Groups of people flew this way and that. I’m pretty sure I saw Rus on his glimmerdactyl. I liked the big, cheerful guy. A lot more than I liked the dour Rainer. More like Rainer-on-my-parade.

  “Some of what you need to know you already know,” he said. “Assuming you purchased skills with your avaible starting points.”

  I nodded. “I know a lot more than yesterday… except I don’t know how to pronounce the word unguents.”

  It was Rainer’s turn to stop and throw back his head, and roar ughter. “Oh that’s rich.”

  “Is it ung-ju-unts? Or un-gyu-ints?”

  He regarded me. “Fair py, Fletcher.”

  “You understand that my conduct as a Healer going forward is on my head and not yours.”

  He still appeared troubled, like he was ready to add my dog tag to a very heavy chain.

  “Let’s get to work,” I said.

  And we did.

  This is Christopher learning the ropes.