Making up a Healing Potion didn’t take long and wasn’t very difficult. They had a couple of clerical assistants taking turns making them pretty much every day, so almost everywhere was stocked with them.

  This was good, because I had to resist the urge to drop the chunk of living magma that had just been pced in my hands. Instead of throwing the thing directly on the floor, I yelped and pced it on the thick metal pte we had ready to accommodate it.

  Tara had only ughed a single bark of joy before the realization hit and she saw the reddening, blistered flesh of my hands and wrists. She shrieked out and dashed to grab a Healing Potion, followed immediately by apologizing about a hundred times.

  “Don’t touch anything! Oh my gods, you poor thing, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to ugh. I just do that when things go wrong. I just, it’s—”

  “It’s okay,” I told her, hissing the words through my teeth. “Just give me the potion please.”

  She held the back of my head and poured the potion directly into my mouth, then scooped the rest up with one finger and sticking that finger into my mouth.

  The red bar at the top of my vision had steadily dropped below half and toward zero, but the Healing Potion brought me back. The rush of good feeling was totally different from the Stamina Potion. The Stamina Potion had repced all my tiredness and weariness with the sort of energy you get when summer vacation starts in high school. The Healing Potion erased my pain, and helped me feel more alive. I watched as the blisters sank back down into my hands, and the pain was swallowed up, along with the raw redness of the burns.

  “I keep making everything worse!” Tara decred, beginning to tear up. “Gosh I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” I told her. “No harm… only a little harm done. And all harm erased.”

  Both of us turned to the new girl, Larelle. The huge orange-skinned woman with the acres and acres of gleaming bck hair stood there impassively, watching everything.

  “We make sure not to hurt people,” Tara said.

  I was unaware of whether he might have a fire resistance, Larelle said into my mind. Please accept my apologies for my ignorance, Chris, Christopher, or Fletcher.

  “Apologies accepted,” I told her. “I guess just assume nobody has fire resistances. And you don’t have to call me all three names. You can choose Chris, or Christopher, or Fletcher.” I told her I didn’t have a preference after she asked which I preferred, but it didn’t matter. “Now let’s get to work.”

  I was already fretting about this cure situation. I needed to save Rainer. That needed to happen before I was responsible for someone dying. Just as importantly, that needed to happen before the teacher responsible for keeping me alive on my job was no longer able to teach me.

  So this time, I went over the whole cure creation situation with Tara and Larelle. Read out the whole recipe with them, including all the side notes from Rainer and who knew who else.

  “This whole thing is going to take us almost twelve hours with the recipe as written,” I said. “Messing it up at any point means we start again. There’s no control Z situation here.”

  Tara had the good grace to look ashamed, but I held up a hand. “Don’t worry about it. We have to focus, get down to work and make sure we rock this thing.”

  We got to work. I put Larelle on the chopping. All the dried henge grass needed to be powdered, so she commenced to crushing it up with a mortar and pestle. It wouldn’t have been possible to do this in time while tending the cauldron, which meant I’d been sloppy in my prep.

  I watched her enormous muscles bulge under the monk outfit she had on, and watched her hair bounce against her very well-muscled butt.

  Tara noticed and whacked me on the shoulder. “Horn dog.”

  “I simply have a lot of questions about the natives,” I said.

  She used the thermometer again to check the jaln oil in the cauldron. “The natives are all Nakamamon.”

  “All Nakamamon. They’re all… she could be a companion creature to one of us?”

  She shrugged, stirring the oil while I chopped. “I’m not entirely clear on how companionship works. She has her own magmamander, so she has a companion too. I’ve been learning about the bond in my Ranger csses, and it’s not a simple or straightforward process, I guess. My teacher just said we’d need to reach out with our senses and make a pact with the creature that we found.”

  Bke hadn’t had a companion creature, a fact that satisfied me greatly. I decided I’d be asking Regina, until I recalled that she was pretty terrible at expining things. Well, there was more reading on Nakamamon in my near future.

  We hung the cauldron on a tripod and had to adjust the height to get the hundred and eighty degrees we needed from Larelle’s snoozing magmamander. The creature had patterning on its back and tail that at first seemed natural, but the veins ran a certain way that repeated.

  From there, it was the same as before: adding in the purple Morpheus root, frequent but not constant stirring, adding the powdered henge grass after several hours and increasing the heat up to two hundred, and finally adding the essence of mist lilies. The whole thing went on for a good four hours, and allowed only a little in the way of rest. More runners arrived, including Timmy and Wendell the storm ferret, to deliver packaged meals and give us a moment to head to the bathroom. The tter wasn’t really necessary, until hour nine. After that, exhaustion began to set in, bathroom breaks were necessary, and I got pretty cranky until I realized that I was just hungry. I scarfed down the fried chicken, colesw, biscuit with butter and jam, and green beans in about five minutes, and got back to adding, stirring, skimming off excess ‘scuzz’ as it was written, and altering temperatures as instructed.

  We failed at one point when we lost track of time and were unable to recall how many hours had been spent stirring ‘often’, which led to the whole thing curdling and emitting an absolutely wretched odor. The next time we failed was because too much of the powdered henge grass was added too quickly, and the mixture began foaming out of control. Like we needed to take baths and get new runners to sweep up the bubbles that were literally filling the room.

  Each time we failed, the easiest thing to do was simply to pick up all the ingredients we could salvage and start again in a fresh b. There were advantages to having only a single Healer and multiple bs.

  Finally on the fourth try we got to the, uh, interesting part.

  “Okay here’s the st part,” I said. “It says we need to add a trickle of mana to the mixture while stirring over the course of the next eight hours.”

  It was already past midnight and I was dead tired.

  “How do we do that?” Tara asked.

  I didn’t know, but I had Affinity and I had a skill for crafting cures. The Develop Cure (Small) skill would be used, but I didn’t have any skills for the different types of Nakamamon or gods. This one was a Unique type, a sort of natural phenomenon made into a god. Using my unspent skill points, I put all 7 ranks into Develop Cure (Unique). I did not want to mess this up.

  Develop Cure (Small/Unique) Check: This check is Extreme difficulty. You do not currently have 14 Tokens with Affinity and Free Tokens for an automatic success. Would you like to spend your 7* Tokens to lower the difficulty to Develop Cure?

  Total Tokens: 2 Affinity and 6 Free Tokens.

  *Hard At Work: Your Tokens are worth double given you are engaged in your css duties.

  I actually didn’t want to spend 7 of my avaible 8 Tokens, given that I had to Administer the cure with another skill check. Instead, I spent the 2 Affinity Tokens, which only lowered the difficulty of the check by 1. Allie had gone over this with me once upon a time, and I hadn’t used it that way. There was a lot of new information to go, but the Tokens had three uses I knew about: auto success, retrying a failed check, and reducing the difficulty at two Tokens to 1 point of lowered difficulty.

  “Okay,” I said, blowing out a huge sigh. “Okay, okay. It’s a difficulty 10 check.”

  “Oh!” Tara said. “I’ve got 3 Affinity Tokens. I’m being told it’s an Affinity check, and for some reason not Ingenuity, but pfff, fine, whatever. You want me to lower your difficulty by one more? I mean I owe you a lot more than that, but I’m really only a low level Ranger,” and here she started talking out of the side of her mouth, “who the higher ups really don’t want to let go out of the castle to actually range anywhere, but who’s compining about that, haha! Like it’s totally fine, and I shouldn’t be one to compin because this is the chance of a lifetime and all…” she trailed off and then apologized for going off on a very Tara tangent.

  I was astonished to find out people not doing the check could lower the difficulty at a cost of 3:1, but only if the pyer actively participated in assisting the check.

  “I won’t say no to that,” I said.

  “I can assist you as well, Christopher Fletcher, also known as Chris,” Larelle said.

  “Any assistance you can provide would be most appreciated,” I told the giant hair dy.

  She proceeded to spend 15 Affinity Tokens and lower the difficulty from 9 to 4. After picking my jaw up off the floor, I turned my attention back to the user interface, to find the check was now merely Difficult. I felt like my 2 Affinity and my 10 skill ranks, cross fingers, should be able to handle a difficulty of 4.

  I pressed the button that set everything in motion.

  The user interface was effusive in its praise.

  Overwhelming Success! Your 12 skill ranks produced 7 successes, a mighty feat. Your success is 3 levels above the difficulty needed for this check. You have gained 3 Free Tokens for use on your Administer Cure check.

  “Okay!”

  And then the fun part really began. With my successful check, I knew how, theoretically, to allow a trickle of mana to exit out of men and drop down into the cure we were developing. All that remained was to spend the next eight hours, from midnight until morning, doing it.

  “Okay,” I said. “It has to be me.” Then I expined what would be happening, how long it would take, and why we were not going to have a fun night.

  “You two can take off,” I said. “I’ll handle this.”

  A Stamina Potion ter and I felt like I really could handle it. Although I knew that wasn’t truly how it worked, and I would be running low on Stamina within the next few hours, at the moment I felt indestructible. Like I could run a marathon… or at least the first few miles.

  “We will remain with you,” Larelle said, and Tara nodded enthusiastically.

  “That’s not necessary,” I said. “This will be just like meditation.” Already I was beginning to feed a little mana into the concoction and the thing was responding.

  “You need us,” Tara said, while the cure bubbled and began to swirl with the mana put into it. Following the instructions meant feeding mana into the cauldron at a ‘slow, steady rate, focusing on the intended cure.’

  “You need us and you need to admit it to yourself,” she said. “There’s no internet, no streaming, no distractions, and no fun to be had as a result.”

  She was a hundred percent correct about there being no internet. No NewbTube full of videos expining how to do anything’s, or CubeTube full of videos on every science phenomenon known to man. Nor were there any other streaming services from any of the big companies. There would be no princesses, no superheroes, no streaming series(es) of any kind. To add insult to boredom, there was no music to be had, no audiobooks avaible, nothing digital at all. Books melted into parodies of themselves due to the saturation of magic. I could only ask for big cy tablets to be brought in from the library or the academy.

  Oh, and did I mention it was after midnight?

  A small crowd had begun to gather as the hours ticked on. The runners, mostly fledgling Rangers and Guards, were tasked with making sure I got anything I wanted, the moment I wanted it. They had a steady stream of water coming in, along with food and supplies they thought I might wanted. This included Healing, Mana, and Stamina Potions. I would need those.

  Other hangers on appeared too, drawn by the fact that there wasn’t much to do in the castle, and this was the only after hours entertainment they hadn’t met yet. A betting pool had started, and money was changing hands. I tried not to let it get to me.

  “Hey Tara,” I said, “Could you put twenty on me to succeed please?”

  She fshed a smile. “You got it, big guy.”

  Big guy. Yikes.

  I continued with the trickle of mana. The cure had begun as a golden oily color, which quickly turned purple and then a muddy brown. That shifted to a metallic green somehow with the addition of the henge grass, and once we’d skimmed off the scum we were left with something clear. After the essence of mist lily was stirred in there, it got marbled swirls of yellow and green. The clear part eventually became opaque, an eggshell white.

  Once the mana entered into the picture, everything went more and more blue. It started out powder blue, or robin’s egg, but eventually cerulean, deepening toward cobalt, and then royal blue…

  “Hey!” Tara barked, and snapped her fingers several times. When I looked, she had her shirt pulled tight against her body and was showing off the fact that she definitely wasn’t wearing a bra.

  I blinked several times and she went, “Mana!”

  I fed more mana in, gncing up at her clearly outlined nipples and back down at the dark blue, deepening to indigo.

  “That’s right, big guy, only two more hours to go.” She was facing away from the door where faces were peering in and watching me work. I watched as she wrenched her shirt tighter and tighter. This shirt was a button up number, and the spaces between the buttons were opening up from the strain.

  I wasn’t able to down another Stamina Potion, because it would have interrupted the flow of mana out of me and into the cure. Instead I watched Tara get increasingly more and more risqué with me. First, she closed the door on the folks watching, promising that she would let them know if I required any assistance. Then she turned back and unbuttoned several of her buttons until I got to see both plunging cleavage and her rge, erect nipples.

  Larelle, I was certain, didn’t understand earth customs well. She followed after Tara, cinching her monk’s robe shirt at the back. Since hers was belted, it just created an enormous amount of cleavage.

  “Oh, Larelle, you don’t have to—” Tara started both ughing in sheer mortification and hirity. “I’m doing this because…” She whispered something into the giant’s ear.

  Larelle’s eyes went wide and she nodded.

  “I must pair with Christopher Fletcher in the flesh first, then,” she said. Her nod was firm and resolute: this was the future she saw before her. Once she and I had ‘paired in the flesh’ then she could also ‘assist me’ by showing off her body.

  In the meantime, Tara crossed in front of Larelle, made sure she couldn’t see, and hiked up her yoga pants in the front. She turned a perfectly normal but sexy pair of yoga pants into an obscene camel toe. It was glorious.

  As the hours went on, Tara showed me more. She wriggled out of her yoga pants until they sat just below her butt cheeks, and arched her back so I could see a hint of what y between. She also raised her shirt up until she had an underboob situation going, something I’d never witnessed in real life.

  All the while her eyelids started halfway closing and the smile she gave me was pure sex.

  “I’m only doing this to help you,” she purred, and reminded me again about the mana. “You keep your eyes trained right where they’re supposed to be, okay?”

  Did she mean eyes on the cure, or eyes on the prize?

  By the time I was finished with my eight hours, the light coming in the window of the b was softening, and Tara was two feet away from me, spreading her lower lips apart and pying with her clit.

  “You’re unbelievable,” I muttered.

  The moment came. Eight hours was up. The final smidgen of mana sank into the cure and a pulse came from within.

  Success! You have crafted a magical cure for a unique creature.

  This is an exhausted Christopher wearily going, “Yay.”