I followed Rainer through the process of healing up the God of Footfalls. This first meant keeping it under guard all the time. While it was sedated by the potion, people’s footsteps were still all over the pce, but the sensation was a lot quieter. Rainer wanted to move the god, but the guards on hand weren’t comfortable putting their hands anywhere near it. Understandably, since some of them had watched me nearly die from the meadow goddess, and the ones who hadn’t had definitely heard about it from the ones who had.

  I’d picked that up from the snickers I was hearing while walking around the castle.

  As the days wound on, he allowed me to mix up the potion to calm it. I memorized the pnts used: stem of hellfeather thistle, dried and crushed, globe amaranth petals, and root of phoenix creeper. These were mixed into a solution of jaln oil, and magic was added to allow the god to ingest it. Once infused with magic, it needed to be administered within an hour of creation.

  Luckily for us, the god didn’t have a mouth, so it could simply absorb the potion through its magical body. Pouring the potion onto it worked perfectly.

  As the week wore on, we researched the magical ailments he had on hand. It wasn’t something called mana drought because the supply of ambient magic wasn’t critically low. It wasn’t mana sickness because the ambient magic wasn’t insanely high.

  “What about the little rainbows it left when it started to run away?” I asked.

  Rainer frowned. “Good catch. It’s the rainbow pgue then.”

  I returned my attention to the ‘book’ of cures, the huge stack of cy tablets done up like newspapers. “And that is…”

  “We don’t know yet. Not sure where it comes from or why it’s affecting certain gods at random, and not others.”

  It was the same as the Goddess of Meadows. That meant I was about to do something stupid.

  “When you healed me, for touching the flower god…” I asked. “What, uh… I only saw white. What did you do to save my life?”

  “It simply requires you to administer the cure to the source,” he said wearily, flexing his one hand over and over again. “You’ll develop a resistance to it, over time, if you’re not killed outright.”

  Relief flooded me. Now I could do something stupid in retive safety. The operative word being retive.

  He held up his wrist and removed the bandage, revealing the telltale ssh, seething with rainbow oil slick energy. Several drops fell and plopped onto the workstation, where they sizzled with rainbow magic and began to dissolve into steam. He waved me back away; apparently it was contagious even airborne. “It’s vital you bandage this and… and…” He swayed on his feet. “And we still need to hurry, resistance or no resistance.”

  He wasn’t looking good by the second day, and handed over working up the cure to me. We needed ingredients from the mountains. According to the cure write up, there were summer mist lilies up there.

  This meant heading out into the nds beyond the castle on his manta ray Nakamamon, who was called Rafael. I was given a new runner, Tara.

  “Hi!” she chirped. “You’re the new Healer, huh? I’m Tara. I’m technically a Ranger, but they mostly have me running errands all over the castle because they need someone who has a lot of energy. Turns out I have a lot of energy!”

  She certainly did.

  Tara kept talking as she seized my hand and shook it, telling me she was amazed I wanted to be a Healer here. She also told me her older sister’s friend Bethany wanted to be a nurse but she wasn’t any good at it, and Bethany had come here but kind of flunked out of being a Healer here. Then Tara told me about her sister, her parents, the deal with her parents (they hardly spoke but had been married forever), about her brother (a drywall installer) and the time she’d gone out to Disneynd in California.

  Tara stood a hair taller than me, long and lean without a hint of fat. She was the type of sorority girl who worked out relentlessly and went out to yoga and pites all the time. Subsequently she was in the sort of shape that allowed her to wear yoga pants right this second.

  I blinked at her several times as she continued on, telling me about her recruitment situation back a few months ago. She had been in the cohort after Timmy, and bh bh bh…

  I couldn’t help but gnce at her body. The yoga pants were flesh colored, making it look like she wasn’t actually wearing anything below the waist. The long red t-shirt that fred out like a skirt halfway down her butt didn’t help. It was sleeveless, with little ruffles at her shoulders. Then I stopped myself from staring with a mental sp, because I didn’t want her to notice. Also, I had a steady stream of mind-bending sex in the form of Regina.

  “You don’t need armor or weapons or anything as a Ranger?” I asked.

  She ughed the question off. “Nonsense. Only Nakamamon out there, and some defective gods here and there, but I’ve been informed they’re quite rare. We should be okay.”

  She did have a fully stocked hiking pack, and I hefted my pack as well.

  “We should only be gone for a few hours,” I said, and expined about mountain mist lilies, as well as henge grass. We needed that as well. I was under instructions to gather up any of the other ingredients for the treatment potion while I was out, but not to dally.

  “If we’re lucky we’ll find both of those things on top of the mountain, or in a valley… on top of the potion ingredients.”

  “A cozy, misty mountain valley! I can’t wait.” Tara chirped, and grinned. “Okay Rafael, are you ready to have us aboard?”

  Rafael was fully sapient, because his head dipped in a quick nod. I cmbered aboard after Tara, first getting a completely inappropriate view of her ass in those yoga pants, and a hint of what y between her legs. She grinned at me when I got seated and strapped in next to her.

  It didn’t seem like she’d caught me out, and I gave an internal sigh of relief.

  The flight over to the mountains only took perhaps a half hour, but Tara was so, so excited for me to know everything about her experience here, her life before, and the way this job was changing her life for the better.

  “You know, I can afford any food I want now,” she said. “Pff. I used have just mac n’ cheese, ramen, and a lot of egg sandwiches. Now I can go to restaurants any time I feel like it. I put down a payment on an actual house, not that I need to, but apparently rental property is the way to make money. My student loan debt is gone—”

  “What did you major in?” I asked.

  “Anthropology!” she said, grinning. “Ugh, this pce is absolutely amazing for anthro, Fletcher. You haven’t met the natives yet, but you will. They’ll have you in one of the rger towns, and then you’ll probably be making house calls out to the vilges…”

  She kept going, telling me about how great it was, and then her hand covered mine. “Look.”

  Out amongst the sun-kissed fields were a group of something like dinosaurs, duck-billed creatures with mottled red and yellow skin. They also had feathery frills running the whole length of their bodies, from forehead on back to the tips of their tails, which appeared to be made of unduting fingers. They were bounding across the fields and toward a river. Beyond, the grasses themselves were purple, red, yellow and gold. I couldn’t focus on much other than the warm feel of her hand on mine.

  “This pce,” she said reverently, and removed her hand. “You can smell it in the air, you can taste it… it’s so good. It’s so perfect.”

  “It’s great,” I said, meaning it. It had been two days without anything in the way of leg pain. The encounter with the God of Footfalls had gotten me almost all the way to level 5. Aside from Bke, and the fear that the company people were going to forbid Regina and I from being together, I had only positive experiences here. Money was piling up on the other side of the portal, going to my parents and my sister.

  “Hey, where’s your Nakamamon?” I asked.

  “I have a confession,” she said, grinning like she was about to open her first ever Christmas present. “We’re actually here for another reason. If I can find a companion, I’m supposed to form a bond with it.”

  “That is so great!” I said, instantly wondering how that should go and whether or not that meant I had a Nakamamon in my near future. “What level do you need to be before you get one?”

  The answer was after level 12. Meaning I had just a few more weeks of leveling and work before I could get my own.

  “So what level are you?” I asked. There was no viewing other people’s character sheets without extremely high wizard skills and special abilities. Discussing skill levels, attribute ranks and special abilities seemed frowned upon, except with your superiors.

  “Eighteen,” she said, then rushed to expin that since she’d been doing all this running around the castle, she hadn’t really gotten much in the way of leveling up. She’d begged to get this assignment, for leveling as much as for trying to find a companion creature. She didn’t have any expectations of finding the perfect one today, but she was going to keep her eyes open. “You never know what you’re going to see, or if life will throw a miracle at you, you know?”

  “Two weeks ago I wouldn’t have agreed with you,” I told her. “Now though, I think you’re absolutely right.”

  “Oh yeah? Why not?”

  I was hesitant to give her details. I didn’t want a pity party. And I didn’t generally share what was going on in my family life, for reasons of discomfort and fishing for sympathy.

  That said, she had just poured out her entire life’s story to someone she had never met before.

  “My mom’s sick, my sister’s life is kind of a mess, and she and my parents don’t talk a lot.”

  “Oh!” Her voice filled with concern, but I smiled and waved it away.

  “But the money from this job is going to help. I think me leaving is probably going to force them to talk. My parents need to see their grandchildren, especially if my mom’s cancer gets really bad really fast. And my dad… he wasn’t doing well. I was worried he might lose his job.”

  “You’re so kind,” she said.

  I waved her off. “Thanks. You’d do the same—”

  “A lot of the people here wouldn’t. That Bke guy that got in your face? He wouldn’t. There are a lot of Rangers who are talking about investing, traveling a lot, retiring at age thirty-five.” She gave me a winning smile, and I noted that her eyes were two different colors. One of them was gold, like glowing molten gold, and the other was a soft ocean blue. “You’re certainly a Healer.”

  Rafael had brought us to the top of the mountain. It was covered in vegetation, with tons of flowers, bushes, young trees, and a few older ones all clogging the absolutely breathtaking view we’d just had on Rafael’s back.

  “Hey,” she said, and when I turned she was very close to me. She wrapped me in a tight hug, and I pointedly ignored all the curves, the softness, and the warmth of her body against mine. “Some of the others, they have situations at home… I don’t hear them talking about paying for their nieces and nephews. You’re a good person, Fletcher.”

  “Thanks,” I said, both flustered and embarrassed. I had had a simple and straightforward retionship with girls like this all through school: none at all. Oh, I could secretly lust after them, because that’s what teenage boys did, they lusted. So while there was Stephanie Ambrose and Danielle Donazewski and the rest, I’d never actually talked to them. And talking to Tara was… not as hard as I’d imagined. The wondrous beauty of this other world definitely helped us bond over literally everything around us, sort of how Regina and I had done.

  The weather was unpredictable, and wind had begun to gust in, bringing cooler air with it and turning a pleasant summer day into a chilly fall. Tara whipped out a knit sweater and zipped it up, which only accentuated her lovely butt and legs in those skin-colored yoga pants. Ugh. It wasn’t even fair… whenever she got more than 20 feet away it looked exactly like she was naked from the waist down. Her hair was up in a blonde ponytail.

  She was well out of my league, and not only that, but Regina and I… were…

  Actually what were we? I had no real concept of what she felt like our retionship was. She had slept at my pce two out of the st five nights, and I had enjoyed carnal delights with her even when she didn’t stay the nights. She’d ranged out to grab up other incoming newbies, but she kept returning and slobbering all over my knob, or shoving her crotch in my face, or riding me cowgirl, or begging me to pull her hair and spank her ass.

  Meaning we were, uh, sex friends. I had no idea what that meant in terms of exclusivity. We hadn’t formalized anything.

  Tara broke me out of my reverie. “What do these things look like?”

  By now, after only a half hour, I liked Tara. I felt like she was already my friend. I described the pnts we were looking for, and showed her the painted panels I’d brought, copies of several pages. She nodded and stalked off.

  While I searched for the pnts I needed, and quickly found a bunch of them, I ruminated. Tara was far, far above me.

  The old me.

  The new Christopher Fletcher could eventually have a Physicality of a fracking Olympian if I wanted. I could artificially boost my Likability, and… whatever happened once I did that.

  I resolved, while picking the summer mist lilies off a shady part of the mountain ridge, to have a talk with Regina.

  “Is this Hellfeather thistle?”

  “I’ve already got some,” I called back.

  We moved lower, got on Rafael and swooped into a cleft in the mountain, where rain would collect, or where a spring would carve a natural stream and then turn that stream into a shallow valley. It was shady, gorgeous, and very quiet. “There, we’ll look there.”

  Rafael made a strange hooting sound and set us down nearby. I immediately started swiping said the phoenix creeper with a walking stick. It soon had burn marks up and down the end, and when I found the root I hacked at it with my multi-tool. Once it was dead the roots came up easily.

  “Is this the henge grass?” she called. “You said it grows out of cracks in rocks, right?”

  “Yup!”

  She came trotting up, swatting pnts aside and panting. “Oh, good…”

  She trailed off, and I locked eyes with her.

  “Uh… Fletcher?” she asked. “Are you, is there, um, what’s happening?”

  There was, and I also was. Something was happening, because I had a hard on and it had come from nowhere. It was straining against my pants. I was hard enough to feel it in my balls.

  When I looked, my eyes were drawn magnetically to the crotch of her yoga pants.

  A wet spot had formed there, through her panties and through the yoga pants themselves. I was no expert in female anatomy, but in my experience so far, it wasn’t possible to get so turned on you flooded through both panties and pants.

  Tara looked drunk: eyelids drooping, lips parted, cheeks flushed, and breathing heavily. Right in front of me, she shoved one hand down her pants and groaned.

  “Fletcher I’m burning up.”

  This is beyond Christopher’s wildest fantasies.