After thanking Cinzy for her concern and her help, we reunited with the group and debriefed them. Cinzy immediately set off to help with the egg situation, guided by one of our Marshin friends.

  For the rest of us, work immediately got underway to anchor ourselves in Slinktrickle as quickly as possible. In order to get down to the real job after that, the job the good people of Slinktrickle wanted and needed us settled here.

  Or rather, they wanted me in particur to get down to business.

  I spent the rest of the day in talks with Larelle as Guardian captain, Regina as the only Ranger, Cinzy as liaison to the Slinktrickle-ians, and the rest of the boys. An in particur had a serious amount of difficulty handling the no-clothes situation. At least Trent could hold Garnet in front of himself to shield anyone from looking at his genitalia, but An was new, he already had a stutter, and he was something of a social outcast. None of these helped him to cope with the situation we found ourselves in. Eventually though Trent got tired and muscle achy from holding Garnet like that, and went with covering himself with his hands like An.

  There was herb harvesting, which Regina volunteered to get up to. She also wanted to get the y of the nd, and took several Marshins in one of their reed boats over the marsh to one of the grassy areas where the nd firmed up. Once I told her what to look for, she nodded sharply and tapped the side of her head. To me this meant ‘I got an ability from boning you, you goofball, you don’t have to expin everything’ so I let her go about the business she was best suited for. I tried not to let on that I was watching her butt jiggle as she left, but at the st moment she peered over her shoulder and winked at me. Tweedle Dee yipped in delight, fluffy tails wagging in delight, and very nearly got me caught by everyone.

  Lucky for us, the sleeping bag test proved out: it was only considered clothes if you tried standing up and hopping around like you were in a sack race. We lost one sleeping bag like that, with one very embarrassed An furiously blushing from red down to maroon.

  The Marshins, true to their word, cleared out a building on the edge of town for our use, and Cinzy set An and Trent together in one of the building’s three sleeping chambers. Drat and I should’ve had another, but Isabelle and Ivy began to kick up a fuss. Why did the menfolk get priority? There were seven of them, including Tara, and that was nearly double the number of boys. Cinzy calmed them down, but I relented. They could use the more spacious rooms, and Drat wasn’t here to compin about being relegated to a tent beside the building.

  For now this meant putting three girls in each room, and pitching tents for Drat and I. The Guardians once again kicked into action, no longer having a job to do. I chuckled; none of the men would be pitching tents in our pants until we found whatever god of clothing there was and getting them back to normal.

  Since no one had any idea where Drat had gone at the moment, I decided for us, and got two of the smaller tents put up side by side, rather than a single rger tent.

  As part of the quest we were on, An summoned me to his shared quarters.

  “Th-th-th-these b-binders,” he said, indicating several thick ring binders, “a-a-a-a-are full of t-tablets. Cy t-t-tablets.”

  “Wait what?” I waved the question away, so he wouldn’t think I was insulting his speech. Opening one, I found the tablets the size of trading cards, the illustrations minuscule and the text illegible. “Hang on, you’ve had these the whole time?”

  He nodded sheepishly. “I-I-I don’t t-talk mmm…mmm…” Finally he threw his hands up and blurted, “MM-MUCH!”

  “I know, buddy,” I told him, patting him on the arm. “No worries. Take your time.”

  He showed me by grabbing out a rge magnifying gss and holding it over the tiny tablets. It wasn’t great, but it did the trick and only gave me a tiny bit of headache.

  He also motioned for me to wait, while he took out one of the tablets, put it on the provided desk space, and performed a spell.

  Wizard spells were always so fun to watch in action. You had the slow trickle of mana through the concentration on their faces, the magic words that came out, and the way their fingers twitched in complicated hand gestures. In addition, this one used a bit of green ter identified as one of the gigantic tree spheres, the huge singur green leaves.

  For whatever reason, An didn’t have any trouble with the chanting situation. He could chant the magic words, or sing them, without inducing a single iota of stuttering. That focus, I guess, was stronger than whatever inside him made him stutter. Also, a tiny thread of mana flowed out of both his hands and his lips at the same time. The green thing was also ced with some mana, and by the end, the mana coalesced around the cy tablet.

  It immediately swelled to the size of a full newspaper sheet.

  “Shit,” he muttered, as the spell finished. The cy tablet bumped several things aside in its growth and sent one of the binders careening off, but we were quick enough to catch it.

  “We’ll have to remember that for the future,” I said, chuckling.

  “Yeah.”

  The tablet he’d enrged with his engorgio spell was a list of potential cures for mental afflictions.

  “Good thinking,” I said. “I’ll need to take a closer look at this before I start flinging ingredients around. I read through all three that appeared here, frowning at how strangely simir the cures were to the one I’d crafted for the God of Footfalls. Sure the procedures were different, and the ingredients were different, but at its core, all of them involved heating up liquids and stirring them over the course of hours, adding in different herbs, roots, flowers, grasses, generally all dried.

  There was the difference. At the end, the one cure needed to be misted into the air around the afflicted. Another needed to be condensed into a solid and wafted around the air by a censor. The third needed to be painted into a specific ritual circle so the offending mental energy couldn’t breach it. For the god, it had needed to ingest or absorb the cure in liquid form.

  At least that part was different.

  I sought out a specific tablet for An to enrge, using the magnifying gss and eventually giving myself a bit of a headache after searching so hard. I shouldn’t have; An was holding it.

  I eyed him. “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

  He burst out ughing. “You should’ve seen y-y-your f-face.” Then he did an impression of me, bent over and peering with full concentration, one eye squinted shut and the other one bulging out looking everywhere.

  “Ha ha.” I rolled my eyes, and couldn’t get mad at him. It was nice to see the timid little guy having some fun.

  Once he got the second tablet enrged—without knocking things off the workbench this time—it became clearer that the mental ailment had been caused by an oversaturation of rage and frustration. The page in question was an overview of typical mental illnesses and how they manifested in Nakamamon. There were sicknesses of sadness, a more bipor sadness and maniacal swing, depression, fear, dissociation, hallucination, and plenty of others. What we were seeing was a fear and depression reaction to the rage and frustration episode, whatever that had been.

  Somehow that emotion had been thick enough in the space around the eggs that they’d gotten infected with it. From there, the Marshins hadn’t wanted to touch their little Marshell eggs. The ck of a comforting mental atmosphere had been more damaging than the initial infection.

  I thanked An for his work, told him I’d get him back for messing with me, and then headed out to find the others.

  It was time to convince the Marshins they needed to get back to their egg-keeping duties.

  ***

  “Marshins of Slinktrickle!” Cinzy called with the aid of another Bard skill. Several snorts and snickers drifted up from below us.

  She gave the party below an unamused look, though the corner of her mouth quirked up.

  The special ability was the same one she’d used to get Drat’s attention when we were getting moving on the raft. Her voice boomed out in all directions, aided by a pulse of mana that looked nothing like the stuff An, Trent or I used. Although nearly invisible and hair thin, it came out in a massive shockwave. I wanted to understand it better, but the vilgers began drifting toward us. They were still hairless, still noseless, all of them white and minty green in mostly identical patterning. White bellies, green limbs. It was still strange.

  “Please gather round!” She bellowed.

  Cinzia and I were now standing atop Muppin, on a small wooden ptform set up by the Guardians and Regina.

  She held my hand, another slightly problematic behavior, given what I knew about her. I wanted to do some pretty nasty things to her, things I knew she wanted, but for now I had to concentrate on the marsh water, Drat’s unsettling looking Nakamamon, and the sickness gripping the eggs. Anything to keep from getting another hard on.

  “As you should know by now, Fletcher is the name of our party’s Healer,” she said to everyone present in that same authoritative voice. “He will y out the situation with your eggs, what will be done, and the cure he hopes to craft. Then he will take questions from you.”

  Well this was nerve-wracking as hell. Literally hundreds of eyes were on me, and hundreds of ears trained on what I had to say. I was very uncomfortable with this, but I decided to hell with it. Cinzia’s courage flowed through me.

  Also, I didn’t have to picture the crowd naked… they were already stark.

  “The eggs have suffered a sort of mental illness,” I said, “the result of extreme frustration and rage expressed in their presence.”

  The Marshins shifted and looked to one another. A bit of muttering rose up around the assembled people.

  “I’m sorry for that,” I said. “Luckily, I believe treatment should stop the spread, and reverse course for all your eggs.”

  “What do we do?” One of them yelled.

  I expined that the eggs needed good cheer. My people were thrilled to supply that, and if any of the townsfolk had time and was in high spirits, they should join in the merriment.

  “It may seem strange to party and sing and dance around a scene of sickness,” I called, “but the eggs have already reacted positively to these sorts of vibes.”

  They once again started muttering between one another at this news.

  “I will attempt to concoct a cure, but this will take some days. Administering the cure will also be tricky. I ask for your patience at this time.”

  Likability check! You do not have the associated skill for this check. This check is Extreme difficulty. You do not currently possess the Tokens necessary to perform this check. Would you like to spend 11 Tokens to lower the difficulty by 11?

  Total Tokens: 5 Likability and 6 Free Tokens.

  *Note: This check qualifies for the Hard At Work bonus of double Token value.

  A target higher than 11 was high. Too high. I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t… I needed all those Free Tokens to first concoct the cure, and then administer it to the eggs. There was no guarantee I would have all my Tokens replenish in time. And I couldn’t be sure what passing this check even meant. The people stayed calm?

  This wasn’t an easy decision, but in the end I thought the cure was worth more than the peace of mind of the townsfolk.

  I pressed No, and watched as my 5 Likability and the buff from Cinzy’s special ability generated only 3 successes, far short of the twelve plus that I needed.

  “Our babies need to hatch!” One of them called. “They’re past due!” A chorus of concern and assent washed over the scene, and Cinzy squeezed my hand.

  “I will try my best!” I said, but my words were being drowned out by the horror and despair that the eggs would never hatch.

  The wail that went up was stricken, horrified. “My babies!”

  “The babies!” Another cried out, like they were already dead and she was grieving lives that had never been.

  The others took up this chorus. “The babies! The poor babies!”

  Cinzy once again drew up her mana and a deep breath at the same time. “Folks!”

  A ray of hopeful sunshine seemed to break through the assorted masses, but just for a moment. Cinzy rushed on: “If need be, we will work day and night. Please give us time, and please understand.”

  It wasn’t working. Several of the females who had apparently id the eggs swooned and had to be supported by their neighbors, while others clutched their hands to their chests and howled to the sky.

  “Let’s get to the hatchery,” I said. Cinzy immediately locked eyes with Larelle, who had her Guardians fan out and keep people away from the bridges linking this huge ptform to the section of the town with the eggs.

  Isabelle clicked her tongue and Muppin lumbered into motion. Regina and Isabelle helped the two of us down.

  “Okay, well, that was a disaster,” Regina muttered.

  “I thought it could’ve gone worse,” Cinzy said. “I don’t know how, but maybe, possibly. Okay, it was a disaster.” She immediately began to colpse out of overdoing her special abilities. Trent and Drat were there to catch her, and I experienced a moment of bitter jealousy that made no sense. I wanted to be the one to catch her, cradle her, save her, and I was upset that other men had touched her gorgeous body. Sure she wasn’t mine, and sure I had more sex partners than I knew what to do with, but there it was anyway.

  Fairy Poppins was, of course, in a fit, and hovered over Cinzy’s half-conscious face. She snuggled up against her companion’s cheek and bopped her with fairy dust, so she would be easier for the boys to carry

  Larelle moved to the nearest bridge, and started fending off already grieving townsfolk, Chrysta took another, and let Ivy and Isabelle by so they could guard other nearby bridges.

  “We need to get to the hatchery and give them some love,” I said.

  An nodded. “On it, b-b-b-boss,” he said, then immediately cast a spell that gave me the ability to jump. Beside me, Regina was rushing across the bridge covered by Larelle, with Tweedle Dee bounding after her on silent toe beans.

  As the mana entered my body, I felt the oddest sensation. For the first time I could remember, I felt like my legs could take me to the Olympics. I could outperform every athlete in the hundred meter dash. I could jump higher and longer than any gazelle, to say nothing of any human. My muscles bulged, and grew muscles of their own.

  “G-go!” An urged.

  I didn’t wait; crouching, I unched myself off the ptform’s edge and damn near nded on the building on the next ptform over. Meaning I’d just jumped the fifteen foot gap, the fifteen foot ptform surrounding the building, and the whole thirty foot width of the building in the ptform’s center. I nded essentially on the curved, sloping longhouse roof, and used that to unch myself at the next ptform.

  I caught sight of Regina staring wide-eyed at me. She broke into a smile, and put on an extra burst of speed.

  UI messages about Physicality checks came and went. It seemed that the jumping spell gave me free Tokens on each of these, so it wasn’t even a thing to pass them. I nearly ended up in the gap between two of the stilt house ptforms, but managed to catch one foot on the pnks and send myself with a half-successful kick of my leg. This one sent me only about twenty feet, whereupon I rolled to a stop and stared up at the sky, ughing breathlessly.

  Then I got to my feet, saw Regina race past, and leapt clear over the smaller building in front of me. Seconds ter, Regina joined me at the hatchery building.

  She was heaving for breath. “I can’t… believe… your dick was… just flopping… like that… in the wind.”

  “Me neither,” I gasped.

  “Come on,” she said. “Dee… can you… watch the door?”

  The fox gave an affirmative yip and immediately turned to guard the door.

  “Good,” she said, pulling me inside. “Someone needs to give these eggs some good vibes, and all our team members are tied up at the moment.”

  This is Christopher feeling good about his chances at getting id in the next thirty seconds.