To recap: I had mind-blowing sex with an unbelievably attractive young dy who was well out of my league, the god of lovers was responsible for this, the god of lovers not only made that happen but also imbued me with sex powers, and now… I was off scot free with the super hot girl Tara, had a new secondary css to handle (Pleasure Seeker), and to top all that off, got new skill points and abilities for jumping to level 3 as a Pleasure Seeker.

  I stared down at my hands, wondering if I were dreaming and if seeing my hands would prove to me that I was in a lucid dream.

  “Hey big guy,” Tara said, and cpped a hand on my shoulder, “why don’t we get these ingredients back to home base and get your mentor healed up, save the day, and celebrate? What do you say?”

  That wide smile and those mismatched eyes. She looked so pretty. One gold eye, one sky blue, and all the crinkles around her eyes showing me how happy and excited she was.

  “I have to confess,” I told her.

  She gave me a conspiratorial grin and a wink. “Confess away, big guy.”

  “There’s a girl.”

  “Oh yeah?” This didn’t seem to dampen her mood even a little. “You don’t have to tell me who she is or anything. Are you two… an item?”

  “Yeah… I haven’t, we haven’t… I’m not sure what we are. She’s not my girlfriend, and we haven’t talked about how to go forward, or if our retionship is really a retionship at all. I’m interested in her. She’s beautiful. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Of course, silly!” She said, and climbed onto Rafael. I noted that she took a little longer than before getting on. Meaning I was left staring at her flesh-colored yoga pants that still had a wet spot in the middle. That wet spot was partially made up of the loads I’d shot up into her.

  Gods she was beautiful.

  She looked over her shoulder from where she was on her hands and knees. “Come on aboard.”

  I scrabbled onto Rafael’s broad back and clipped my hiking pack into the carabiner on the harness, then strapped in around the waist like before, and grabbed onto the harness.

  Tara turned to me. “If there’s no retionship, you don’t have to worry. And since this whole thing was because of a god’s influence, you super don’t have to worry.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I don’t want to know who she is, and I’m not going to get in the way of whatever you choose to do.” Her voice dropped back to that conspiratorial whisper again. “But I tell you what… I want to find out if you’re that good without having a god get in the middle of our business. I think maybe I got hypersensitized from its influence. I mean, I came like ten times. That’s never happened before.” She ughed. “I mean I’ve only met like two gods, total, but yeah… now three I guess.”

  “You want to… find out,” I said stupidly, then recovered. “Yeah, that’s, that’s great. I’d love to. You’re gorgeous.”

  She continued beaming. “Thank you, Fletcher. I happen to think you’re quite the handsome young man yourself.” She leaned toward me. “And I want to get my insides completely rearranged again soon, okay? I mean I’m kinda sore down there, but in a good way… and I’m gonna get ready for round two.”

  “That sounds amazing.” It sounded way better than amazing. I was honestly flummoxed at going from basically zero sexual attention throughout high school and beyond, to this.

  “Yeah, so please have a talk with this girl, ask her out if you want, break up with her if you want, or, haha, I don’t know, tell her you have a long-legged twenty-two year old who wants you all up in her guts, and she can figure out whatever your retionship really is and if she’s going to put a chastity belt on you.”

  I started getting hard again just hearing her talk like this. The way Rafael’s flying harness worked, it was easiest and most comfortable to y on your stomach, or put your feet in the stirrups and get up on all fours. You could technically sit, but the way the manta ray rose up into the sky, it meant being jounced around. So when I looked over at her, and saw that butt of hers jutting up in the air, I couldn’t help but salivate.

  “And listen,” she went on, “Once that confirmation session is done with, if you pass the test, if…” Here she ughed nervously. “…if the second time is anything like the first, there’s no reason a girl couldn’t share, okay? This new world is practically Vegas, okay? What happens here stays here.”

  “Do you… have a boyfriend then?” I asked. “Back in America?”

  She ughed. “No, but it wouldn’t matter if I did, would it? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

  Again my brain went into overdrive. Why not, was the first question. Why wouldn’t she have a million men lined up to try to be with her? I guess it didn’t matter… she didn’t, and she wanted me, and that was that.

  I didn’t want to freak out. Tara might be okay sharing, a concept that I just didn’t understand at first. Did that mean if Regina put her foot down, that Tara would fight her for the chance to get that ‘confirmation session?’ Would Tara just back me into a corner and try to have her way with me no matter what happened? And if, on the off chance I had this talk with Regina and she said sharing was a thing she could abide, what would that even look like?

  I thanked my lucky stars that Tara was a) okay with what happened, and b) wanted to do it again, but now I had to add c) she was okay with me having multiple fuck buddies to the list of lucky stars in my sky here.

  I just hoped Regina wasn’t going to freak out.

  ***

  Rafael set us down, making a high pitched keening noise I didn’t understand. I took it to mean he was worried about his companion human, so the discussion with Regina would have to wait. Tara waved goodbye with a knowing gleam in her eye.

  I didn’t know yet whether the investigation into the God of Footfalls had led to her being found in my dorm room, and I was low-key dreading the questions that would follow.

  So I did what I normally did when things were getting uncomfortable: I went to work.

  The Healers occupied a wing of the rightside up portion of the castle, even though Rainer and I were the only two Healers in the pce. It held pride of pce not far from the courtyard, which doubled as an herb garden.

  The Healer wing consisted of something like half a dozen different alchemy style b rooms, and Rainer kept two of them in use. The first was for human and Nakamamon health, he expined, which mostly boiled down to minor injuries and food poisoning. The other was for handling the ailments of the gods.

  This room had everything: rge workbenches stocked with every type of vial and fsk known to man, cupboards and cabinets for holding ingredients, and also racks set into the ceiling that held dozens of dried pnts. The flowering pnts hanging up there were all known to me, the phlox, the goat’s beard, the bleeding hearts, the sage, witch hazel and some that acted like poisons, along with the non-flowering pnts I hadn’t yet memorized. All were beled according to a strict system Rainer set up. I would’ve gone alphabetical, but he had set them up differently.

  The henge grass needed drying, so I hung it up in its own pce. The mist lilies had their petals plucked and their essence distilled, so I set up the b equipment for that. Got the heat crystal burning, and put the distiltion agent into the fsk with the petals.

  “Heat, evaporation, condensation, cooling,” I muttered, and adjusted the distance between the heating element using telescoping tripod legs.

  Preparing the ingredients and then mixing them up took some time. Some of the ingredients (the purple morpheus root, the jaln oil) were already on hand, so I set those out.

  “Magical remedies don’t st,” was the inscription on the wall, literally set into stone. It was carved into a block of almost pure white stone. Rainer expined that anything of a magical nature was bound to change into something else before too long. The addition of preservatives changed them into something else. Meaning the whole process had to be done from scratch at any given time.

  “Fresh ingredients, freshly prepared,” the next inscription said. It was like something out of a sub restaurant chain advertisement.

  “You got it,” I muttered, and followed the instructions to the letter.

  We had ingredients enough to make the potion ten times. This required the proper amount of heating, using a thermometer my dad would stick in his mouth as a child. The oil had to be heated to one eighty and kept there, stirring often, but not constantly. The first to be added in were the freshly chopped morpheus roots.

  The nice thing about having earth handy was you could get a chopper, and sm your hand down on the thing about twelve times with rotating bdes. The bad thing about having a magic-filled world was that these sorts of choppers were made of pstic and were prone to melting after a couple of days. And let me tell you, the stink of a melting pstic device from earth is unbearable.

  This one had come through with Regina and her new cohort of one, at my request. I hadn’t known they didn’t st, but now that I knew, I was going to take advantage of the thing to the fullest. I had another day, possibly two, before whatever was in the pstic started to contaminate my ingredients.

  Thank the many, many gods for quality steel.

  The morpheus roots needed to be soaked and stirred and kept at one eighty degrees while the other ingredients got going. When I shouted out the door that I needed an extra set of hands for this, I was given a runner.

  Tara sauntered into the b some fifteen minutes ter, smirking at me.

  “Hey there, Fletcher,” she said. “I tell you what, today has been a pretty good day so far. I have had zero compints—”

  “Stir this every five or ten seconds. And every five minutes, check to see that the temperature is one eighty.”

  She frowned and blinked in surprise at being cut off, but got right to work, while I grabbed the henge grass from where they’d been drying. We had wind and heat creating Nakamamon, and I’d been given the use of one to rapidly dry the henge grass.

  If all went well, all the moisture would be out, and I could just get whatever medicinal ingredient resided inside into the pot as soon as possible.

  A tiny gray blue bird that was mostly mouth blew a steady stream of wind over the grass, while a creature that appeared to be a fat, droopy samander napped nearby, radiating heat. It looked like a glob of va, except the sides expanded and contracted slowly, and its tail twitched every so often.

  “You guys are miracle workers,” I told them. “I think we’re done.”

  The magma creature’s eyes opened—there were four of them, oily bck chips of obsidian—and it gave a mighty yawn in response.

  “No marveling at the many many rows of teensy little teeth,” I told myself.

  I wanted to give it a little scratch at the base of the head, but we didn’t have any thick bcksmithing gloves in this room. It slid off the rge metal tray on the workstation, which was glowing red, and plopped to the floor, then began shambling out, in alligator-like movements.

  As for the miniature bird, it had an enormous head for its size, and opened up its beak, exposing a cavernous maw. It then bsted me with wind for just a moment, its version of a tweet maybe, before puffing out of existence looking like a cloud. I caught a near-invisible rush of movement toward and then out the window.

  “This pce is awesome,” I muttered, and gathered up the henge grass.

  Tara peered at me. “Are you sure it has to stay at one eighty?”

  “Uh, yes?”

  “Oh… and if it was one sixty-five before I added more fuel to it?”

  “I haven’t done this before, so I wouldn’t know,” I told her. “I can only hope that… nope, pretty sure that’s ruined. Yep, the recipe noted that purple scum at this stage means failure.”

  The potion had developed a purple oil slick on the top that hadn’t been there before.

  Tara swore colorfully, though she didn’t use the actual curse words. Then came the effusive apologies and the promise she wouldn’t mess up next time. We had enough materials for a next time, right?

  I assured her that we did, and we really only lost two hours worth of work. Rainer wasn’t doing well, but his rate of degradation hadn’t sped up in the st two days. He would probably be okay another handful of days.

  The recipe noted that a purple scum was bad, meaning we needed to throw out the mixture, scour the cauldron, and begin again.

  Rus had been lying when he said I wasn’t going to be in a House. I felt a lot like I was in Brewing Potions css, but without a professor. I was secretly thankful for no Darke Artes Abjuration csses at all. I didn’t feel like having the Darke Artes teacher to be the vilin of every story, thanks much.

  We began again with a fresh cauldron while the other one dried off, and I showed Tara how to keep the temperature steady. When that didn’t work and she flubbed up a second batch, I sent her after that magamamander Nakamamon responsible for drying out the henge grass.

  Tara returned a few minutes ter.

  “Awesome, put the creature… where’s the Nakamamon?”

  She gestured over her shoulder at the woman entering the room, and smirked.

  In walked the rgest woman I had ever seen. And the first native I’d ever seen. She was easily seven feet tall, possibly taller. Her skin shone a brilliant orange, and she had a baffling amount of bck hair. Like, Princess Leia amounts of hair. It was braided up into big cinnamon buns. It was braided up into hanging ropes from around her ears back to the center of her head. It fell down her back and past her butt in a curtain of shining silky bck, with highlights of deep purple.

  The feeling of bigness only increased when she squeezed through the doorway. In addition to being fracking tall, she was fracking wide.

  Although in rge part she looked humanish, several factors wiped that away. One, her hugeness. Her proportions weren’t exactly right. Her arms were too long, her waist was too small. Two, she didn’t have a nose. Three, she might’ve had ears, or not, but the hair definitely seemed not human. It was too much. No human could’ve grown that much hair.

  Also, her clothing was alien. She wore a cross between a martial arts gi crossed with a monk’s robe. The material was gauzy and partially transparent in the light, and thankfully she moved out of the direct sunlight and into the room where I couldn’t see that she was definitely female. The uniform was white, trimmed with royal blue down the center and around her neck, and at the cuffs. It gave me the impression that she hadn’t worn clothes before, but made them when humans showed up.

  She was cradling the magmamander in her arms, and it radiated heat.

  “Fletcher, I’d like you to meet Larelle,” she said. “Larelle, this is Christopher Fletcher. You can call him Chris, Christopher, or Fletcher.”

  “Uh… hi,” I said.

  The native spoke directly into my brain. The words didn’t come out of her mouth. Instead they went directly into the speech center of my mind, with a husky and deep voice that made sense for this woman. You are the one who attempts to heal the God of Footfalls.

  I stopped gaping at her and nodded.

  I’d nearly forgotten. For whatever reason, having random squeaks, squishes, crinkles, smashes and such were getting to be something I could work around. Luckily with the god happily sedated by the treatment potion Rainer made, and subsequently the elixir he made for a longer term effect, it lowered the volume.

  “I am,” I said.

  Then you are to be given every assistance you require. I am at your service, friend Chris, Christopher, or Fletcher.

  She then handed me a Nakamamon that was approximately eight thousand degrees.

  This is Christopher’s next near-death experience.