Divinity Rescue Corps-220- And For My Third Wish…

Divinity Rescue Corps-220- And For My Third Wish…

I was working through adding the celestine myrallis, but that wasn’t the most interesting thing that was going on at the time. I was also trying to convince a military commander to let me attend to my pregnant girlfriend, who was just now going into labor… or, now that I considered it, was a very accomplished liar. She could have been faking it in order to buy OG Fletcher even more time.
The most complicated cure he’d ever come up with was going to take more time, if he was even able to succeed at all. Keeping up Operation Goose Chase was equally as important as getting through the cure itself. Interrupting it now would ruin the whole thing and cause me to start over from square one.
And just as important was infiltrating the headquarters of the Agency itself, and uncovering its weird onion of secrets.
Case in point, the moment I crawled through the small door Trent had created, I found myself in a place far larger than it should have otherwise been. The inner sanctum was easily a hundred feet across and more than double that long. There was no way such a room could exist in secret without being heavily magical.
Indeed, just like the three ritual circle rooms, this one was layered with spells. Dozens, possibly hundreds. The spells themselves seemed to be layered: stone slabs with ritual runic circles standing vertical were clearly layered on top of the walls, which also had more runic circles etched into them.
The place was in serious disarray though. File cabinets, bookcases, armchairs, rugs, and desks littered the place, along with every ritual spell component you could think of. There were some Nakamamon in cages.. It was an open studio apartment, but the biggest one I’d ever seen, totally unkempt, but for someone with unlimited resources. No rhyme or reason to anything in here.
There, a pile of spell scrolls sat piled under a bed table. And over there, a pile of books sat atop it, some open and some closed.
I pulled a frozen Azalea close to me. She had been hit by some spell or another, causing her to stiffen with a paralysis. A terrified look was frozen on her face, and her limbs simply wouldn’t move.
“There is no stopping me, Healer,” Claudius said from somewhere in this hellscape of a room. “You don’t know the extent of my plans, you have no clue how long I’ve waited to get someone in position to flush out the birch.”
“The… birch?”
“Jocinda!”
I squinted, looking around for him. “Have you… locked yourself in this room and not been out?”
“That’s neither here nor there!” he snapped. “Now, come here so I can end your quest, and set you on the path I originally put you on.”
I picked up the frozen Azalea in my arms. “I’m not doing anything you say until you release this spell on my friend here and show yourself.” He was acting like a madman, but calling a madman what they were was the type of thing that made them flip out. And he was clearly a powerful Wizard. Once Wizards got to the point where they were throwing around fireballs and freely teleporting long distances, you were pretty much screwed if they turned that on you.
“Claudius, you need to call your people off,” I told the room. “Let my people go. What you’re doing makes no sense.”
“Jocinda will come crawling out of the woodwork,” he said, chuckling madly. “She’ll see what you’re doing and she’ll come after you.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She always knew someone would use this world to cure earth diseases, and she won’t have that. She always railed on and on about how this world wasn’t a health spa.”
A shiver ran down my spine.
“She won’t have it,” his voice chuckled.
That was it. I activated
Spirit of Purity
and gained the eyes that see true. Impurities started getting removed from everything around me, which wasn’t ideal. I took Vellenia’s hand, and passed Azalea back to April so the purple poison aspect would stop taking damage at all times. I then advanced into the Wizard’s sanctum to put more distance between myself and my beloved poisoner of things.
“Interesting,” Claudius said from across the room. I raked my eyes across the room and made sure I didn’t settle them on him.
There he was, standing beside the desk with a staff in his hand, the kind where the wood has been grown around a violently magical crystal. He had on a wavering cloak that clearly gave him invisibility. Even though my eyes could see true with this ability, he appeared half transparent, like a hologram.
“Your abilities have grown a great deal, Healer and Pleasure Seeker.”
Nobody knew about my second class except for the ladies, so it was very strange to have this ash gadget talking about my powers that he had no business knowing. Then again, I’d met him over a magical face call of sorts. We weren’t friends, but we also weren’t strangers any longer.
“Why don’t you come out so we can talk?” I asked, continuing to move my eyes back and forth over the room. As I passed large stacks of things, I made sure to keep up the ruse that I couldn’t see him, and peek behind whatever large pile of books or crates or random junk we passed.
“Fletcher, Fletcher, Fletcher,” he said, the sound appearing from all different places. “You’re not going to succeed at whatever nonsense you’re trying to do.”
“Call off your people,” I told him again. “Do it now. I’ll handle Jocinda.”
The mirth in his voice was unmistakeable. “And how are you going to do that?”
I stared right at him, just long enough to see his eyes go wide, and engaged my new ability.
Puppetry: Spend a Durability Token and make a Durability check against a target you can see that’s no more than 30 feet away. This check uses your Relationship level as your skill level. On a success, your body becomes incorporeal and you enter your target’s body. You have full control over their words and actions for 5 minutes, though you do not have access to the target’s abilities. As this is a contested check, you may not spend Tokens to succeed automatically. Would you like to spend Tokens to lower the target’s effective Durability?
Total Tokens: 8 Durability and 8 Free Tokens.
The most important thing about what needed to happen next was that this check succeeded. I spent all 8 of my Durability Tokens and pressed go.
The sensation of my body disincorporating and reappearing inside Claudius’s body was extremely disorienting. I was standing over there… now here. I was just over average height, with a good build, but now I was  average height with a whole lot of extra pounds, no hair, an invisibility cloak over my regular cloak, and a magical staff.
“Hey, it worked!” I said, astonished. To even further astonishment, it wasn’t my voice that came out of the throat, but his. Then I threw off the cloak and made Claudius grin.
Somehwere inside, far deep down, was a man howling in protest. He didn’t have any defenses now, since this was ghost aspect possession. He might have spells against mental intrusion, but this was my spirit or body inhabiting him rather than intrusion… somehow, this was different, and somehow it worked.
“You didn’t even vanish as a clone?” Vellenia asked.
“Nope.” The small circle with a sliver missing hanging in the UI was enough to let me know that I didn’t have infinite time. “Hold on now.”
I cupped my hands to my face.
“Buttercup,” I said loudly, in the voice of Claudius, “I summon you.”
I had been with Buttercup in my mind long enough to have discussed this. The Defrit appeared, hanging in the air as a silhouette with nothing but pink eyes narrowed in my direction. I sensed the indecision and question in her before she even spoke up.
“Yes, Master?” she asked.
“See?” April said from the room’s entrance. “You said it sounds weird when I call him Master.”
“It’s still weird,” Trent said, still exhausted.
“I would like to recondition the terms of our bond arrangement,” I told her.
For the first time since I’d met the terrifying bringer of doom and sower of chaos and wearer of spiky tutus, the creature before me smiled. It was a shark’s smile, as done by a graphic designer on meth. Her teeth flashed darkly silver in the dim light of Claudius’s sanctum, with her eyes narrowed into slits.
“Is that so, Master?” she asked with knowing glee.
“I would like for you, once I’m finished, to go intercept the Agency personnel trying to stop Fletcher from creating his cancer cure. Once that is finished, all former strictures will be lifted.”
“All of them, Master?” she asked coquettishly.
“All of them,” I told her.
“Will there be any strictures on the Agency personnel I am to intercept?” she asked in a tone of gleeful anticipation. Like a four year old dancing around the room clapping and waiting for the cake to appear.
“They should be removed from the area, alive, and delivered anywhere safely where they will not be able to interfere with Fletcher’s cure.”
“I understand that cures take a great deal of time, Master.”
“You are free to incapacitate them with the minimal possible amount of permanent damage.”
She laughed. This evil incarnate actually laughed, from what sounded like four or five different directions and distances. “Oh poo,” she said. “You are entirely too like the Claudius I know.”
Although I didn’t like that, I wasn’t about to set her on a murder spree. The people at the bottom rungs of the Agency ladder were literally following orders, though the ones at the top were culpable, in my eyes, of impeding cancer research.
“How quickly will you be able to complete this task?” I asked.
“Quickly,” she said, and vanished.
***
Buttercup was a whirlwind. Reese couldn’t follow her actions; didn’t even know she existed, in fact. He did know that he was peeking over the wall and trying to get a clearer sniff of Fletcher himself when time froze.
“You are… one of the Agency personnel,” she said, and also asked.
Reese’s ridiculous belief in human supremacy actually saved him here. His belief that Nakamamon were less than people and should all be subject to the will of humanity wasn’t a quality that endeared him to anyone. Even his old team was simply amazed at how he’d managed to bond the Gryphereal in the first place, given what he believed.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
She studied him for a moment, apparently satisfied that he didn’t have any weapons out in the open. “Are you with Fletcher? I do not believe so.”
“Yes! That’s me. I’m with him.”
She vanished.
Fights were breaking out between Richter’s people and the natives, and suddenly they weren’t fights any longer. Richter had Fletcher by the shirt as the Healer clutched to his pregnant girlfriend, but then suddenly Richter had vanished.
The net that made up Richter’s perimeter was swiftly dismantled. The figures didn’t see anything coming after them; they simply reappeared in a different place, tied at the hands and tied to one another. Whatever it was that tied them, it also sucked out their will to resist. Every single one of them failed to resist the dark aspect ability, and therefore lost all their Durability and Stamina in a very short time.
She snatched them up and tied them up, but also had them chained together. With Claudius’s magic, she could freeze time and accomplish all this in the same moment.
I knew all this because
Myriad Mind
told me a flood of information was coming in all at once. Inside Claudius’s body, the notifications came fast and hard.
Your bond mate has used an instance of teleportation
was directly followed by
Your bond mate has used an instance of freeze time
repeated over and over again. I had to stop what I was doing with Cinzy in order to handle it all while crafting the cancer cure. The next series of notifications was weirder and scarier.
Your bond mate has used the dark aspect ability Devour.
It wasn’t two minutes before she returned to the castle and stuffed all the Agency personnel into the cells. She then swallowed the keys to the magical cells.
“I have completed the task you have assigned,
Master
,” she said snidely.
My time was running down. “How do I revoke the bond between us?” I asked, using Claudius’s mouth.
Deep down, Claudius was now begging. Don’t, please, no.
“Say these words, and mean them,” Buttercup said. “Defrit, I renounce the bond.”
The words came out of me with a power I hadn’t anticipated. Literal shackles of magic appeared out of thin air, of blue and silver and gold and a plethora of other colors. Blue was all the Abjuration magic he had cast snapping, the protection spells that kept her from harming him.
And then a whole bunch of abilities left him, along with a strong conduit of dark magic that unraveled. One fraying thread remained, bleeding from ashy black to a lighter gray before it too snapped.
Then Buttercup was in my face.
“FLETCHER,” she boomed. “RELEASE HIM.”
“I would like it very much if he lived through his,” I told her, then did as I was bid.
Buttercup had suffered through this man’s control and orders for quite a long time. Not following his orders gave her pain. Following his orders annoyed her, and insulted her in a fundamental way. She was like a god herself, extremely powerful, not taking kindly to being ordered by someone she perceived as beneath her. I still didn’t know what had compelled her to accept the bond, but it had either been a trick or a spell. In either case, Claudius was probably going to receive something proportionate to what he’d given her. Death might actually be a kindness compared with what was coming to him.
I reappeared where I had started out, but it wasn’t in Vellenia’s hands, and thus the clone vanished just in time for me to see Buttercup open up a portal that looked like it was also a mouth.
Back in my main body, I suppressed a shudder and continued working the cure. It was almost time for me to add gravetwine to the mixture, though I had a feeling it was going to be rough going from now.
“Come on,” I urged myself.
The next check came at a difficulty of 39. I could still count on all my amassed skill levels now, but I absorbed all the Ingenuity Tokens and spent 9 of them to reduce the difficulty down to 36.
“Come on,” I said. There was every chance that I would fail really hard, under thirty successes. I had been getting lucky for so long that it seemed like it was time.
I didn’t. Instead, I ended up with 37 successes, and the UI informed me by instinct just how to add the gravetine.
Or it would have, if Jocinda hadn’t chosen that moment to appear.
This is Christopher down by twenty at the buzzer.

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220- And For My Third Wish…