The change that came over the creature was as immediate as it was satisfying. The muscular fox seemed to deflate back down to its original cute and fluffy size and shape. The rabid fury drained out of its muzzle and the look in its eyes softened.
“That’s right,” I soothed. “That’s right.”
Using my magical senses, I was able to track the flow of fighting aspect mana out of its body, back out through its heart, up through its third eye and crown. All the furious reddish energy was replaced by the plain white of beast aspect mana, surging up from the fox’s tummy and into the channels of mana leading to its head.
Achievement! Alter the fundamental aspect of a Nakamamon.
You have taken the power of gods into your hands and made a shift in the foundation of what makes a Nakamamon. It must feel awesome to change a creature so completely.
Reward: +3 skill points
“Let it go,” I told the Guardians. Again, they exchanged a look, but Jacoby confirmed my words and commanded them to release the creature.
I had a face full of orange fluff a moment later as the Vulpetunia pounced on me.
She was licking my face, getting the remainder of my salve back on me, and rubbing her head all in my face and neck. Pollen was all up in my nose holes and my face. I started sneezing immediately.
From that moment on the Vulpetunia might as well have been my bonded Nakamamon. She stayed with me everywhere. Jacoby called a halt to this location and that we were packing up camp, so she stuck by my side as I packed away all the tools and samples I’d been given. I needed cuttings of all the plants in my garden, and she was there on her haunches, ears perked up and bees buzzing around her flowers.
Now that she wasn’t a fighting aspect any longer, her coat seemed to gleam glossy in the weak swamp sunlight coming through the clouds. The rain had stopped, but the camp was still a muddy mess. That didn’t matter to my new best friend.
And my second new best friend. The camp was just about packed up and ready to go when a familiar form detached from the foliage nearby and spooked a whole bunch of people all at once.
“What the heck?” Savannah asked. “Guardians?”
That wasn’t necessary. I called everybody off and introduced the Shrubber-Nee! to the team.
It was basically an ambulatory bush, which could imitate a number of different forms by twining its tentacle-like branches in different configurations. “This wonderful creature helped me out of a jam,” I told them. “Helped me find some flowers I needed to whip up a cure for the God of Productivity.” At that point, the Nakamamon had flowed almost like water through the dense forest. It had also spread itself out into a sort of octopus shape with many longer, more flexible arms. At the top though, it had an almost human-like head with long, pointy ears, and a precious and comical expression of being slightly confused. Or I should say face, because the branches and leaves acted as hair, too.
“Did you… how did you find me?”
The creature didn’t answer. The eyes blinked, but it just rustled its leaves in a way that might’ve been a response.
“I don’t have the skill for speaking with plant aspects,” Jacoby said, pouting. “I’m sorry, Shrubber-Nee!”
It rustled its branches and leaves again, this time I was pretty sure differently than the first.
“She… uh, he… uh, they… must’ve been the reason the perimeter guy didn’t find me,” I said. I squinted at the creature. It seemed like a humanoid Nakamamon should have a gender, but aside from the head, I didn’t know what was going on under the branches.
I was certain Jocinda had named the thing, and it wasn’t a good one, so I pursed my lips.
“How do you feel about me giving you a name?”
It rose up and clapped two branch-like appendages, before prancing around in a bit of a dance.
Kate Bush was the first name that came to mind. The singer out of the 80’s had been featured in a BoobTube series. Everything in the 80’s had been feature in that huge hit series: The Neverending Story, Ghostbusters, Metallica, and others I didn’t know. Still, I dismissed the name. Holly was the next one up. Then…
“How do you feel about Flora?”
The Nakamamon leapt onto me, then in a thoroughly non-human way, swirled around my body. The face rotated around, down and up, around this way and that, before coming very close to mine. The face was made of wood, which appeared to be carved and painted. Still, the puzzled expression slowly bent into a satisfied smile. It leaned forward and rubbed its forehead on mine, before detaching.
Flora, who had just become a female to me, skipped and danced away through the team, who were still finalizing their preparations to leave.
It fell to the Wizards to pack most of the campsite’s materials away using shrinking spells and dimensional storage units. These had the bonus of being bigger on the inside, so a regular backpack you might wear to high school could haul two or three hundred pounds and make it feel like twenty. The trade off was that these things were volatile; they could explode if they got too close to one another.
None of the animals could be fitted into the dimensional storage units, for arcane reasons that didn’t make sense to me, so the Wizards had to devise floating platforms of pure solidified mana, which hovered a few feet off the ground and could be pulled along. Again, they couldn’t get too close to the dimensional storage or they’d risk exploding. The whole thing had a jovial feel to it, with all the Guardians ribbing the Wizards about how long it might be until we had an explosion. Would be a Nakamamon blown sky high, or a Wizard folded into a dimensional storage bag? It sure would be fun to find out! Only time would tell!
Jacoby, being higher level than Regina or Tara, had a swift movement ability that happened to be an aura. It blanketed all of us together and helped turn a leisurely jog into a gallop that ate up the miles.
We took off shortly after breakfast and made good time. The swamp slowly morphed into the grassland with occasional trees, then a series of sparse woods, mostly boogie trees now. The land started undulating, gentle rises with waving grasses and wildflowers. Off to the east lay Glumpdumpkin, poking hundreds of feet off the ground, only visible as a blue smudge against the sky, filled as it was with mana-shimmering clouds.
We passed Nakamamon, so many Nakamamon. Some were enormous eagles, some had four legs and were the size of houses, some were thin and spindly and considerably smaller. One was a pink blob with what appeared to be a helicopter rotor spinning along on top of it. Another was like a bipedal Komodo dragon made entirely of gleaming metal. We passed teensy little bugs, frogs the size of a car, centipedes the size of centipedes, but with spines sticking out of each segment that crackled with electricity.
Along the way, I got another achievement: spot 50 species of a single aspect. This gave me a free skill point, which made me grin. Then I got another achievement for 25 species of fire aspect, followed almost immediately by 25 species of plant aspect. Each of these granted a single skill point, and I whooped with each one. Nothing like more skill points. More and more and more.
We also passed some sapient types I recognized from Glumpdumpkin. They waved as we rushed by.
I was glad to have made this place a little better. I’d be happier if we could revert all the fighting aspect Nakamamon back to their original states. The appearance of half a dozen of them though… that was concerning. It went from one to six in an awful hurry.
We took a rest on a low rise, among a stand of boogie trees. Oz immediately climbed to the top to scout for any of the other Agency people who might be hunting after me. Jacoby plopped down, knees spread wide and arms on her knees, staring northward.
“Where are we going to end up?” I asked Jacoby. The Vulpetunia had hopped up into my lap and curled into a ball with its tails shielding it. The slight scents of various flowers rose up off her. Vellenia plopped down and leaned against me too, which Jacoby did not fail to notice.
“I doubt you can see it, but there’s something like a mountain up there,” she said, pointing.
I squinted. “That… ball?”
Jacoby stared at me. “You can see that?”
I nodded. Like Glumpdumpkin, it was nothing more than a shape shaded by the atmosphere, a pale blue against an even paler blue sky.
It took us another full day to get there. That thing resolved into a darker and more prominent shape, what looked to be a colossal snow globe. It was on a pedestal easily two hundred feet high, and the sphere itself was far bigger. As we drew closer, it resolved into a huge stone ball. From the pedestal came a rush of water, slowly helping the ball to revolve around and around.
“I have been waiting a very long time to ask,” I said to Jacoby, “but what am I looking at here?”
“That,” she said, sweeping a hand towards the gargantuan mystery, “is Flunt-on-the-Rustle.”
“I beg your pardon?”
That thing, Jacoby told me, that New-York-borough-sized spinning marble atop its water-gushing pedestal, was a town.
***
Flunt-on-the-Rustle was one of three towns I had been told about initially when I started my assignment. It was the second place I was supposed to visit. For some reason we still didn’t understand, bigger population centers had more broken gods. I mean, stepping back and taking a look at the forest made it make more sense, but still not the underlying bits. Population centers had more gods because they had more stuff going on. Slinktrickle had more apparel, Glumpdumpkin had more productivity and secret spaces and lost jewelry, and the various other gods I’d healed up that we found under the influence of Productivity.
“We have intel that this place is all right… or was when the last expedition left two weeks ago,” Jacoby said, and approached the gigantic pedestal. “We’ll largely keep you out of sight, or in disguise, or a bit of both, and that will prevent anyone from spy on us from above like what happened the other day.”
We ascended stairs to a large platform, which was operated by several Nakamamon handlers. The platform, a slate gray thing made of stone, was etched with fun designs of cartoonish Nakamamon shapes. Each glowed neon, like they’d been painted in special spray paint that reacted with black lights.
“If it’s safe we’ll get in contact with your people and invite them,” Jacoby said.
No, we wouldn’t. There was simply no way Jacoby, who I didn’t fully trust, was going to have me and my mother in one place, not while the Agency still had an APB out for me. She needed me for this fighting aspect job. She might need me for some relief of a more intimate nature after that. I was under no illusions that she might just, before or after the intimate relief part, rat me out to the Agency if I served her purposes, or failed to serve her purposes. She had made it clear in our first few meetings that she considered ascension in the Agency to be the number one thing.
I’d have to feel her out more.
The roar of water assaulted our senses as we reached the top of the structure. Water appeared from somewhere within, rushing up over the sphere part of the town, and also down several large channels on each side of the base structure, like waterfalls.
All of us, including Fairy Poppins, Vellenia, my new friend Flora, and my new multi-tailed, floral-scented cuddle buddy who still needed a name, met a Nakamamon just like Larelle operating the lift. She was huge, at least eight feet tall, with entirely too much hair, and her muscles had muscles. She operated the lift, guided newcomers in how the town would operate, and wore only a loincloth. Her huge breasts were on full display, and I tried not to stare at their perfect, featureless roundness. I’d wondered idly at times whether Larelle was just like Vellenia in the way her nipples and genitals slowly materialized when she got aroused… or not. The answer was yes.
This operator’s name was Zarelle, clearly the twenty-sixth of her species. Zarelle informed us that once we got up to the top of the pedestal, which itself was a thriving community of at least two hundred all in one gigantic building, we would need to wait.
There is an opening in the sphere, Zarelle told us telepathically. It rotates around and allows in newcomers, supplies, and water.
Entry into Flunt-on-the-Rustle was going to be wet. I caught Jacoby staring at me… at Vellenia and I, out of the corner of her eye. She looked away when I glanced towards her.
I was pretty sure Jacoby and I were going to end up in bed together, just as I was pretty sure Savannah and I would never end up in bed together. It was just a feeling I had.
I was glad she could communicate directly into my mind, because the roar of water moving this gigantic ball was deafening. It was like standing inches from Niagara Falls.
You’re in luck, Zarelle told us. The opening is slated to arrive very soon. After that, it should approach every evening about this time.
‘Very soon’ ended up being almost forty-five minutes, though I had no real complaints. Although I wanted to heal the fighting aspect claiming the other five Nakamamon Jacoby found, it was her rodeo. She’d ordered the evacuation of the swamp site.
The opening slowly came into view, showing that the town had been built all around the inside the shell of this enormous sphere. Gravity… did not seem to mind. I noted trees, houses and larger buildings as the opening approached.
A whole lot happened in a very short time. One, we stepped into a huge, crate-loaded raft and were shoved into the water just as the opening came down to our level. It was wet, loud, and exhilarating. Two, we were surrounded by cheers of townsfolk of all types. Some looked like bipedal salamanders of purple with blue stripes on their backs. Two creatures looking just like Shakindria—Mindelas—offloaded most everything telekinetically. All the crates anyway, were lifted up onto a secure and dry platform. Three, the streets were instantly flooded with the rushing water.
“That… has to be normal. That’s normal?” I asked. The force of the water was enough to stagger me. My new friend Flora climbed onto me and Vellenia, suspended between us and peering down at the flooding. Sёarch* The NôvelFire(.)net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
Vellenia clearly wasn’t bothered, nor were the citizens living in this area of the town. A whole district’s worth of houses simply rose up on stilts as I watched. The gardens out in front of their houses seemed to grow rows of stones that served as borders between the streets and the homeowners’ property.
That flooding was quickly picked up by what appeared to be huge tree roots nearby, but which were actually pipes. These collected the water and sent it shooting out all over the place.
The strangest thing was how half the sphere was simply transparent. More of this world’s magic rendered it invisible so the lower half could get sunlight. This immediately made no sense, as the opposite part would always be on the bottom of the sphere when it was night outside, and therefore would never have functional agriculture due to the ever present night.
Again, magic was a thing, and therefore anything could be okay. The HQ castle was constantly turning over and over in the air, with twin gravities simultaneously. Glumpdumpkin’s houses were built on angles and get none of that mattered. It had a river that ran up against the pull of gravity. My brain needed to accept that this worked… somehow. The somehow was magic. The details could be gotten as we went along.
“Appears we have a problem, boss lady,” Oz said conversationally.
“What’s that?”
“Never seen it like this, sure as,” he said, and pointed.
Across the huge sphere, maybe a half mile directly across from us, the whole district felt off. At first glance, it just seemed dark, decrepit, and run down. Further inspection told me it was deserted. No garden plants, no Nakamamon tending to them, or going about their business.
“It’s always something,” she said. “They’ll handle their problems, we’ll handle this.”
“And when their problem intrudes on our problem?” I asked.
This is Christopher getting a heavy, heavy eye roll.
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