I stood and went to get some fresh air outside. The air was noticeably cooler on my fully exposed skin, but the sun was shining and its warmth helped me get over the slight disappointment of having ruled out Magical afflictions for these people’s eggs.

  Luckily, my efforts over the st ten minutes hadn’t been completely in vain. The UI gave me a bit of a bolstering in that respect.

  However, since you have ruled out magical afflictions, the difficulty for all further checks would be lowered by one.

  “Damn,” I muttered.

  It would be physical.

  The Physical Diagnosis went much better. This one involved a literal physical check up: using a stethoscope to listen, running my fingers over the shells as normal, and poking them gently in the affected areas. Finally, there was a reactant strip I had for the job, and pcing it against the sickly brown section of egg did result in some sticky mucus-like substance sticking to the strip, but no color appearing. I spent 2 more Tokens to lower the difficulty and scored the two successes needed easily.

  And it wasn’t physical either. The UI told me as such in exactly the same nguage.

  The nature of the affliction is not physical, the UI reported. It went on to lower the difficulty of the remaining two categories: Mental and Spiritual.

  “That’s not good,” I said.

  “What’s not?” Isabelle asked. Both were now standing beside me on either side, watching me work.

  “I can’t imagine eggs having either a mental problem, or a spiritual crisis.” There was a lot of unexplored territory when it came to Spiritual afflictions, Rainer had said. Thinking of old Mustache Head made me smile. “There are a lot of spiritual madies we don’t understand yet. I guess a god that doesn’t believe in himself would be a pretty big deal.”

  Regina and Isabelle both snorted ughter. “God has low self esteem, huh?” Regina asked.

  “Rainer said there was an area far, far from the castle and the main admin city that all natives just don’t go, because the god or gods have a spiritual mady. Spiritual sickness is something we don’t understand and can’t easily treat, let alone cure. I wouldn’t know how to begin dealing with it,” I told them.

  “But it is still kind of funny to think about,” Regina said. “Once you get past the existential crisis.”

  Isabelle snorted. “You like your humor dark, huh?”

  The Mental diagnostic test also seemed incredibly silly. After all, the embryos within the eggs couldn’t listen in on what was going on, or react to it… could they? I couldn’t very well understand them even if they were suffering from some kind of mental illness.

  Or maybe I could and just didn’t know it.

  I once again reminded myself I was in a magical nd where mountains rearranged themselves and kes went on vacation. Anything could happen, and would, and did.

  I peered at the eggs that were afflicted, and squinted. Was I imagining things or were the two nearest to where I’d just had sex less brown than before?

  “You’re seeing things,” I told myself.

  “What are you seeing?” Regina asked, then peered at the eggs when I expined: I’d had, um, an enlightening conversation with Vellenia, and it had been rather warm of tone. Regina nodded along sagely to my lie, pursing her lips and crossing her arms in front of her perky boobs. I could see she was holding back ughter.

  “You’re wondering if good vibes coming from the two of you during that conversation influenced these nearby eggs,” Isabelle said, and regarded the eggs. “You want to do some measurements and see?”

  “Do either of you have the Hard At Work ability, which lets you spend fewer Tokens while you’re doing css-reted tasks, and lets you spend fewer Tokens to assist others doing their work?”

  Both shook their heads.

  “It’s fine. I’ll just do this. I’m the Healer, and I’ll do the job I was hired to do.”

  Isabelle clutched her hands between her breasts in the cutest naked dispy I had ever seen. “You’ve got this!” With her hands like that, it really put her pink and sky blue swirly nipples on dispy, and I peered down at the floor after accidentally checking them out.

  Now that we had been out here going on a week, the color of her skin and the advancement of the cotton candy coloration was starker than I recalled it.

  “Perv,” Regina said.

  “It’s ha… it’s difficult to just ignore things when they’re right in front of your face!” I protested, pointedly not saying the word hard. “You try ignoring my dong when I gesture right at it.”

  Both girls ughed. Fairy Poppins bobbed up and down with them, clutching her little sides. Clearly ughter made her wing fluttering more erratic.

  “I bet you’re regretting hiring on seven girls to this expedition,” Isabelle said.

  “On the contrary,” Regina said. “I bet he’s never been happier.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Between Tara, Regina, Cinzy and now Isabelle’s advances on me, I was kind of in girl heaven. I couldn’t believe my good luck, so I was keeping my fingers crossed they didn’t erupt into a backstabbing, catty, gossip-fueled team fracturing situation. I especially didn’t want to break up Ivy and Isabelle, given that either of them could snap me in two without getting winded.

  “I am not really pleased that I’m totally nude right now, no,” I said. “I’m also not happy that the weather’s getting colder and we can’t wear clothing. I don’t know what the sleeping situation looks like, but I’d prefer to have the option of pajamas.”

  Isabelle stared at me, showing me with her widened eyes she hadn’t considered nights. But she could also invent reasons to sleep cuddled up to her girlfriend. I would be hard-pressed to find justifications for sleeping with any of the dies.

  We discussed this while taking measurements of the affected portions of the eggs. I wanted to employ Fairy Poppins and her ability to make objects lighter by tapping them with her fairy dust, but I didn’t know if that would affect the eggs in a negative way, so we gingerly brought the worst of the afflicted eggs to the table Vellenia had just supplied.

  “Thank you so much,” I told her.

  “No no, thank you so much more,” she replied. “It was an honor to mate with you and help you handle your hormone.”

  Both girls stared at me. Regina wasn’t even subtle about it, staring directly at the package hanging between my legs.

  The heat immediately rose to my cheeks. “That… wasn’t supposed to be common knowledge,” I said, burning with embarrassment.

  Vellenia hadn’t told any of the other Marshins, which was good, but she had just assumed my team was open about matters of mating, which was less ideal.

  Finally Isabelle and Regina cracked up ughing. Once Regina got going, Isabelle wasn’t far behind. Isabelle’s ughter was interrupted by a snort, which set Regina off even more. She ended up ughing until she wasn’t making any sound whatsoever. Clutching at her sides, her head shook back and forth and I saw tears in the corner of her eyes.

  “Your companions do not seem bothered by knowing we mated,” Vellenia said.

  Fresh peals of ughter erupted behind me.

  “Great. Great,” I said, grinning through the embarrassment.

  I tried to go ahead with the Mental Diagnosis, and one Token ter scored the two successes needed to pass the check. I actually hadn’t needed to spend the Token, getting 4 out of the 2 successes necessary between Ingenuity and Mental Diagnosis. Stepping it down to difficulty 2 wasn’t needed, but there was no guarantee.

  I reminded myself that the re-check was still an option.

  When the ughter died down, my guess proved out. The infected sections of the eggs were indeed smaller than they had been when I’d initially measured them. The UI informed me that while it was likely contagious, it was unlikely to be contagious to humans. Moreover, it wasn’t likely to be fatal to grown Marshins.

  “The mady is a mental one,” I told them. “Something affected the mood of the eggs. An empathic or psychic effect, perhaps.”

  “That is welcome news, I suppose,” Vellenia said. “It is better to have the knowledge than sit in darkness wondering.”

  “Very welcome,” I told her. “It won’t be fatal to Marshins, but it could be to the eggs. And since it’s mental, I’m going to recommend a treatment of easy conversation, positivity, ughter, dance, music, and the like. I don’t think it will be a complete cure, but it will keep the situation from spreading and make sure these eggs can still hatch at all.”

  What the hell? I… sounded like a Healer.

  ***

  Regina followed me outside the building, agog. Just fbbergasted. Gobsmacked even.

  “We have to figure out—”

  “You have to tell me everything,” she commanded. “You had sex with a Nakamamon. That is… honestly that’s hot. She is hot, for a magical otherworldly creature.”

  “I need to do my job,” I told her, with eyes rolling. I knew she would perv on me the first chance she got, but sheesh, at least let me do my job first. “I can’t afford to get a boner right now, not like this.”

  “Okay mister, but you’d better give me every single detail,” she said, wagging a finger at me in mock seriousness. Then she grinned. “Dude you perv. That is wild.”

  I couldn’t exactly disagree with that statement. It was wild, and I was kind of a perv.

  “Wait,” she said. “Wait wait wait a second. You said the egg problem receded because of your conversation with Vellenia?”

  “Uh… yeah.”

  “Your… conversation?”

  “Regina, no. Look, we can’t. I’m not setting up the hatchery as some kind of sex dungeon, okay?”

  She waved my concern away. “All I’m saying is, we don’t have to stop caring for the eggs just because it’s night time. You and I could maybe have a little pytime, and do our part to help cure—”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Ivy asked. She’d just rounded the corner.

  “Oh hey Ivy,” Regina said. “We were talking about the situation with the sick eggs, and how there aren’t any Marshells around the area. Fletcher here is working on treatment options while he gets started on a cure.”

  She looked to me, and I nodded.

  “Okay, great. Have you guys seen Is—“

  “Ivy!”

  Isabelle rushed up and gave Ivy a big naked hug. I got to see boobs squishing together and Ivy’s stricken expression melt a little with her girlfriend there. Then it began to wax again, as worry about us and our view of the couple sprang to the forefront.

  “What’ve you guys been—“

  “Fletcher had sex with a Marshin,” she blurted.

  Time seemed to stop.

  Everyone, all four of us, began to process all this at the same time. Tweedle Dee was also there, and froze. He seemed just as startled as Ivy, Regina, me, and especially Isabelle.

  Eventually, everyone got a handle on the words that had been spoken. Dee started off the return to normal, by rubbing up against Regina’s legs and pushing a needy head into her hand.

  “Um,” Isabelle said, just as horrified as I felt. “I shouldn’t have said that. I, uh…”

  She scratched him absently, before smiling down at him. She was probably silently thankful that Isabelle didn’t know that Regina and I had been doing it for weeks.

  “You had sex with a Nakamamon?” Ivy asked, equal parts amazement, amusement, and accusation coloring her face and words.

  “I would like it very much if nobody else knew about this,” I said, before a thought struck me. I turned back to Isabelle. “Are you under the influence of fairy dust?”

  “Oh, yeah, I was chatting with Fairy Poppins a little,” she said. “She dusted me and I didn’t really think about it. I mean really I was talking and she was listening, because whatever nguage she speaks, I can’t hear it and don’t understand what I do hear. Wasn’t it weird that she was buzzing between you and Cinzy st night, right before I—”

  “By all the gods great and small,” I blurted, influenced by Vellenia. “Let’s all go back to the hatchery and sort this out.”

  I realized now that bringing Isabelle into the fold was a huge mistake. She naturally had a big mouth and it wasn’t one of the things I’d been interviewing for in the first pce. I hadn’t thought we’d need to keep secrets.

  Fairy Poppins wasn’t there, but several of the Marshins were holding animated conversations and gesturing toward my brand new workstation and the eggs sitting all around the room. They moved to leave as soon as we all entered, but I held up a hand.

  “I’m happy to have everyone stay here, so long as they don’t touch any of my materials. Good vibes are needed. Any bad feelings or disagreements have to go on elsewhere.”

  “Aren’t we about to have a disagreement?” Isabelle asked shakily.

  “We are looking for Fairy Poppins,” I said.

  The little mischief maker was gone.

  “Listen,” I said, and quickly expined the situation. Regina did her part too, expining that she’d been teasing me about a hormone imbance that didn’t exist, and Vellenia took it seriously. I finished off by trying to expin to Ivy, “It wasn’t on my list of things to do, obviously. She hit me with a psychic ability I couldn’t resist easily—“

  “Didn’t want to, more likely,” Isabelle said, then cpped her hands over her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”

  “And it amplified all the physical sensations.”

  “Whoa,” Ivy said, and gnced down at the offending penis. “This no clothes situation is, uh, difficult.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and went on to expin that we were going to have to ask the Marshins about sleeping situations. We could probably set up our tents and sleeping bags in the rge open areas on the ptforms, if they allowed it.

  “The question is whether or not sleeping bags will count as clothing when we sleep,” I said. The girls cast dismayed gnces around. “It’s getting a lot cooler at nights. It seems like the beginning of fall here. I doubt our sleeping bags will vanish but we’ll test it. We’re going to have to double up in the tents for warmth if that’s the case, which is going to get really uncomfortable.”

  “The natives may have sleeping quarters for us,” Ivy suggested.

  “You won’t have to worry about your hormonal imbance,” Regina muttered, and the three of them burst out ughing.

  “Can we not reference my sexual experiences?” I asked. “I may not have a hormonal imbance, but I have a ton of hormones anyway. I’m only twenty years old, for fork’s sake.”

  “Oh, is somebody going to get a boner?” Regina asked.

  “If we keep talking about this, yes!” I shot back.

  “Are we going to leave the natives to satiate your overwhelming lust then?” Ivy joked.

  “We are not talking about this!” I decred.

  “I shall reluctantly volunteer to assist Fletcher,” Regina said.

  All three of us stared at her.

  “What? I’m joking!”

  “Girl, I know a joke when I hear it,” Ivy shot back. “That was not a joke.”

  “Ooohhh somebody’s got the hots for Fletcher,” Isabelle said, then cpped her hands over her mouth again, eyes wide and darting to look at all of us.

  “You!” Regina whirled on her. “You’re under the influence of fairy dust, meaning you can’t really lie, right? How about we get you to say something incredibly embarrassing. Maybe a deep dark secret?”

  I knew it was only a matter of time before she confessed to having had sex with me. I had to get out of there.

  “I have to do actual work,” I said, and strode away before anything else could be said, or seen. My cock was beginning to stir at the thought of. All three of them watched me go, but they must have realized they were staring at my naked ass, and giggled before resuming their conversation.

  This is Christopher both loving and hating life.