Angel shook her head at me, “Renee doesn’t hate you. She just doesn’t trust you, and you are sort of standing in the way of her killing things right now, even if you need to do it and she knows it.”
“How do I get her to trust me?”
She chuckled a little, “Time, probably. Honestly, I don’t trust you much either, and it’s probably for similar reasons. You have cleaned up beautifully, and your face is too pretty to be true, especially after you fixed your teeth. But we have had lots of bad experiences, especially with beautiful men.”
“Oh.”
She nodded, “Yeah, oh. Due to where you grew up, you probably haven’t experienced it, but lots of men, especially the good-looking ones, are gazed at with adoration. That’s one of the reasons Charlie hasn’t dragged you out to the city yet and is picking up supplies instead of taking you to get stuff.”
“So most men that are not utterly disgusting have a very entitled attitude. ANYTHING they do is fine, even if it involves being a deceitful, arrogant monster, because ‘us poor female people’ aren’t good enough for it to mean anything, or we aren’t smart enough to figure out what they have done. After all, women are like busses, right?”
“Busses?”
She nodded, “There will be another one coming along in a few minutes. Well, as you healed, you have gotten better looking. You are still pretty short and have some weird proportion things going on, your arms are just a little too long and your hands are a bit too big, as well as having a sort of straddle-legged walk, but right now you could walk into a bar and demand gold for a night, and you would be overcrowded with offers. Charlie is worried that’s going to spoil you.”
I shrugged, “It might have if I wasn’t fully aware that any one of them would happily throw me under a bus.”
Angel grinned at me for a few seconds before I finally asked, “What?”
“Well, if I am like a bus, would you want to get thrown under me?”
I groaned and clutched my head, “Okay, that’s got to stop. I don’t know if you guys are serious or just joking. If you are serious, I am worried about offending you if I say no, and if you are just joking, I honestly don’t get the joke.”
Angel nodded, “Okay, straight up. Lilah is teasing. The more nasty her language gets, the more she’s just trying to get a rise out of you. Charlie is half serious. She thinks you are too young for her, but your adult demeanor cuts through to the fact that in this world, once you are stage two or higher, forty years is nothing.”
“Evolving from a basic to a common class doubles your lifespan, but that evolution cranks your age WAY back… to beginning maturity, somewhere around your twenties, where you stay until you start to get REALLY old.”
“Where she is? Uncommon with two evolutions? She will probably live five hundred years if she doesn’t get killed, and when she advances to rare, it will reset at a thousand. She thinks of herself as an old woman, but she’s not even fifty yet. At her rank, you could reasonably claim that she’s way too young for you, because she’s only lived one-twentieth of her lifespan, and won’t actually start getting old and going through menopause until she’s like nine hundred years old.”
“In my case? I am not really serious, except that someday I want to have babies, and you are the closest I have gotten to an attractive male who doesn’t want to stab me in the back or add me to his exotic women collection in… well… over a decade.”
“Renee though, she had a real family before the crash. She loved her husband very much. She knows damned well that with her lifespan having a new family is very important, but she is terrible at flirting. Her bet about the grope was probably her trying to figure out how to be comfortable around a guy again, and following Lilah’s terrible example. Then again, if she goes any farther than that she might be serious.”
She smiled, “In any case, I will let the rest know that you are a poor confused teenager. If they are serious, they will take off their clothes or grope you or something, otherwise, you can assume we are just poking the bear.”
“Umm…” I looked at the hallway behind her.
“Oh right. Well, except for healing. That might get confusing, then.” she glanced at the apple juice I held, “Do you think you are ready?”
I quickly swallowed it, hoping that the sugar and carbohydrates would help my energy levels. “Yeah, but I am a little worried. I looked at Renee’s shield… I can fix it, but I know that right now it would just leave her with an uncommon-strength shield. I need some kind of trait to actually mend the enchantment, just like I’d need one to make a new potion instead of just improving and stretching an existing one. I was thinking of maybe grabbing Runic Library.”
She shook her head. “Don’t bother. Lilah has that trait, it can be taught, as long as you have a decent memory. She also has an advanced fire library as well as a bunch of protected runes, some of which she might be able to teach you. Based on that soup you made, though, you are more than capable of empowering runes once you fix them, and you might even be able to create and empower them without having to be a runesmith or enchanter.”
“So the soup really had a… magical bonus?”
She nodded, “It really did. I think it was because you use mend. Some substances are naturally aligned towards a particular effect, and your soup, since you applied mend to it? It wasn’t as powerful as a basic restoration potion, but it had a restoration effect.”
I laughed, “It was burning. I was trying to fix it because I am sort of a suck cook.”
She nodded, “Your mend probably ‘fixed’ two or more ingredients that had subtly reinforcing magical effects. It’s not actually that uncommon for crafters who can imbue essence, but most of them can’t use their traits on substances outside of their actual vocation. Still, it might be worth learning a few recipes and finding ingredients that reinforce effects. You may not be an alchemist, but being able to reduce negative effects in foods and activate the boost is a terrific boon.”
I nodded and got to my feet, ready to face my greatest challenge yet… a naked woman who could crush my head like a grape.
When we got into the room, I noticed that there was a healing potion and a restoration potion set beside Charlie’s bed. There was also a medical kit, an old-style one with actual tape and bandages, set next to where she was lying, covered by a sheet, on her belly. The bed was a bit too short for her, her feet hanging off the and, but she smiled at me, her head resting on her crossed arms and her face turned towards me.
“Are you really ready to risk this?” I asked.
She shook her head a little against her arms, “I don’t really consider it much of a risk. Besides, I am the team anchor, I am used to throwing myself into delicate situations fists swinging.”
I sighed, “Just please don’t swing at me, you’d kill me. And this might really, really hurt.”
She laughed and lifted her head, and I saw that her wrists had been roped to the end of the bed, and tied together under hear head. “We thought of that. I might break the headboard, but I don’t have any leverage to get out. My feet are also tied down to the metal bedframe, although I have better leverage… if my legs start swinging, you should have enough time to get away.”
“You aren’t worried I might try something while you are helpless?”
She shook her bald head, “Nope, not even slightly. Maybe I even want you to. Besides, Angel’s going to be here to try and get you out of trouble if you get yourself into it.”
I nodded, and dragged a chair next to the bed, arranging the old medkit at my feet. “I am hoping the tools will help, but I am going to be doing a lot of this by feel alone.”
Charlie stuck out her tongue, and said, “Have at thee!”
***
The scars were actually really easy. Sure, a lot of the ones on her back dug deeply into her muscles, but I could see and feel them easily enough, and despite Charlie’s pained gasps and occasional wriggles, I started thinking less about the woman slowly getting uncovered beneath my hands and more about my work. Her skin was surprisingly soft, I sort of expected with her defenses that it would her skin would be incredibly hard, but I guess whatever magic jacked up her toughness didn’t ruin one of the good parts of being human.
After a while, I simply couldn’t hear her much anymore. It was weird because my empathy was just letting me know that she felt better each time I soothed away the scar tissue that decorated her back like freckles. This part was not too bad, even when I had to start working on her tightly-muscled butt and the backs of her upper legs, but I was a little concerned about if she had stuff on her front that needed working on.
I soothed the scars all the way down to her feet and injected a ton of essence into her arm. The raised scar tissue sort of dried out, and I finally started to use a scalpel from the medkit to peel the dried tissue off, but the muscle on her arm, the huge bulky chunk taken out of her hip, and even the massive streak running down her side seemed to slowly fill in as both my essence and mana replaced the missing flesh.
Okay, the skin was easy, and the muscles were easy. Mostly the skin was easily touchable, and the muscles beneath were just built-up meat, meat I was used to. I was a little embarrassed, but I straddled her butt with my bow legs just because I HAD to get to both sides. After a few minutes, I heard Angel laughing, which sort of pulled me out of my trance.
“Wait what?” I said, “Do I need to stop? Is it too much?”
Angel was smirking, “I think it might be too much, but I think if you stop now, Charlie’s going to kick your ass.”
I glanced at Charlie, and she was panting, her face pressed against the ropes holding her wrists. A sheen of sweat was on her skin, and I had no idea how much this must have hurt. Angel’s attitude was...weird, but I guess gallows humor, especially for a group that had been fighting together and getting hurt together for decades, was sort of mandatory.
“I will try to hurry up as much as I can, but the next part is really hard and will probably really hurt. I am going to try and fix your kidneys, and then you have to roll over so I can get the scars on your front and try to help your lungs, okay? I hate to say it, but it might involve touching things you don’t want to be touched.”
I heard Charlie groan. “Do it… just do whatever you want.”
I dived back into my little half-trance. Fortunately, I wasn’t really feeling much mental fatigue yet. I think that the apple juice helped, and also my empathy wasn’t getting pounded as hard by sensation as I dug my fingers into the muscles of her lower back like I was massaging her.
I kind of was. She had some spinal damage that looked like it could lead eventually to a flipped disk, so I smoothed out the channels and repaired the bone. It was a lot closer to a material than a living organ, which made it much easier to fix the bones. I also ran my fingers along the backs of her ribs that had clearly been broken many times and sometimes badly healed, and smoothed those out… Bones, for some reason, were absolutely the easiest thing I had ever mended, and I didn’t even have to re-break them as their own tissue popped back into place.
I liked bones. Bones were comforting. On a whim, I returned my hands to her lower back and then started running my recognize through her spine, fixing a long-injured coccyx, and it worked! I could feel her skeleton like it was my own, and I didn’t even need to move my hands to feel her skeleton realigning, fixing a busted clavicle, a poorly healed compound fracture in her leg… it was almost too easy, as I could hear Charlie groaning and thrashing under me as the undoubtedly agonizing procedure fixed so many long-healed injuries.
Recognize was doing an amazing job letting me know where she was hurt based on radiating it from her bones, the core of her being, the structural support upon which the rest of her body depended. The marrow within her bones was struggling, so I sent it a cleansing wave of the essence, getting her blood flowing and rolling through her liver and heart, the life-energy cleaning and supporting them incredibly well.
The kidney and liver damage, so near to the bones, were absolutely clear, but with that wonderful base of bone in my power, repairing both was barely a blink. Livers were sophisticated organs, but in the end, they were mostly single-purpose and not terrifically complicated, and neither were the kidneys. I had been worried for nothing, cleaning the antidote potion had been much worse. But I noticed that dealing with a minor, permanent infection in her leg's marrow actually required me to switch the kind of energy to what would kill the infection... Life energy would have just caused the infection to grow and infest the rest of her bone and marrow.
“Roll over,” I said, pulling my leg over so I wasn’t straddling her, “If you can unless you want me to stop.”
“No! No please, keep going,” she said… I guess she was glad for the relief from pain and wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible. I tried NOT to look at her breasts, but sort of had to as I withdrew my recognize back to her skin and started running my hands up her belly. She was a bit less scarred on the front than the back, but when I got to her lower belly, I realized that she had some damage I didn’t want to be wrong about.
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“Charlie?” I asked quietly as my hands rested on her belly, while I tried to ignore what was below them.
“Yes Thaniel?” she gasped.
“Your girl... I mean, your sexual organs are badly damaged. It looks like something halfway ripped your fallopian tubes out and cut into the top of your uterus, tearing up half of your fundus. One of them is utterly mangled, and the other one looks like it could be repaired. You are sterile right now, do you want me to fix one? The other one… there just isn’t enough left to repair, but I could seal it off like it was never there, and maybe someday, when I get my mend higher, I could fix it.”
“Yes please,” she said quietly, and I got to work. Damn. She must have had a healing potion immediately, because this shit didn’t regenerate, either, but then again, sex organs were like that. Even frogs couldn’t regenerate those if you applied a current, although they might be happy you tried.
Still, two fallopian tubes meant that the system was retroactive. If she wanted to have kids again, one should do the trick. I just hated the horrible noises she was making from the pain, but I would man up.
I finally slid my hands down her legs and fixed a few scars on the front and sides of her legs. The muscles were already healed of their scars, which I had done when I was linked to her skeleton, so I slid my way back up, cleaning up damage as I went.
Oh crap, that was a nipple. I shouldn’t have grabbed it, but there was a nasty scar that halfway cut it away, almost like someone had done it on purpose. Still, while it was clearly painful to her, I straddled her again and got to work. Restoring a nipple was surprisingly complex, it had a ton of nerves and blood vessels, which required slow re-linking… just fixing the one took me nearly ten minutes before I moved upwards.
Collarbone scar, fine. Ugh, my hands were covered with dried-up scar tissue that I shook off, and I even managed to wrap my hands around her neck and ease away the scar on the side of her neck that looked like it came damned close to severing her windpipe. She was tensed, but yeah, technically I had my hands around her neck, although with her strength and durability, she could probably shatter my fingers by flexing her neck muscles and lowering her chin onto them.
And then I tried to work on her lungs. Okay, I was able to repair some of the serious scar tissue, which probably increased her lung function, there was a lot of damage deep in her alveoli. I could only restore some of them, but it should make her breathe easier, and without the nerve and tissue damage, she should both feel a ton better and breathe better. Her lung function should be about seventy percent, which was a huge improvement over the barely forty percent she had before.
I finally slipped back over her hip and flopped into the chair, dropping the bandages, alcohol, and scalpel I had been holding back into the case’s bio panel for cleaning or disposal.
“I am done. Gods, I hope that worked, I am completely and utterly wrung out. Charlie, are you okay?”
She pulled the sheet up to her throat and grinned at me hugely, “Oh, so far beyond okay it’s not even funny.”
“So you feel better? I couldn’t fix your lungs all the way, but with your regeneration, they might be able to fix themselves.”
She looked at me deadpan, “I feel better, right this second, than I have ever felt in my entire life. Your mend might be only basic, but it…. Was amazing. I need a shower, badly.”
Angel was just snickering, and I noticed all the flakes of dried-out tissue all over my clothes and hands and the sweat that had soaked into my clothes. “Good grief, I do too. I had no idea that it would get so messy.”
Angel couldn’t help it and burst out in laughter, guffawing and dropping to the floor as she laughed. “Oh goodness! You are so right. I think that’s the messiest I have ever seen!”
“Huh?” I asked.
“Go take a shower, Thaniel.” Charlie said, glaring at Angel, “Angelique and I have something to talk about.
***
Angelique snorted at Charlie as she stepped into the shower, “Seriously? You don’t want to tell him?”
Charlie shook her head. She felt… amazing. Truly. Like she’d just had the best sex in her life, and magnified it by like… ten. She had no doubt that if she’d let him work on her head, she’d probably have regained a full head of hair… and a hairpulling kink, to boot. She was washing tissue off, and… erf. Well, that tattoo had been utterly wrecked by a scar anyway, his removing it was probably all to the good, and if she was serious, she’d probably change the name from Manuel to Thaniel, anyway. Damn that boy!
“It was like a full-body orgasm everywhere he touched. Especially when he did… whatever, to my bones. Honestly, it was a transcendent experience, and if any girl experienced that while he was healing her, we’d probably have to kill her to keep her from kidnapping him. I am not even slightly joking.”
“It was that good?”
Charlie nodded, “Even better. If he DOES decide to join the team permanently, well, you will probably find out. I won’t even be jealous, although I really, really want to be. Can you believe the whole time he thought I was squealing in pain? The pain I can handle. I must have had a dozen orgasms just from him healing my nipple.”
“I am an old woman, Angel. We both are. And I have never been that thoroughly used and put away wet. We already had to keep his healing a secret, but this makes it even more important.”
Angel snorted, “You are not an old woman, Charlie. I am almost three years older than you, and I refuse to be an old woman. Look at you, you look like a superhero in her early twenties right now, and did you notice? He even took away your stretch marks and wrinkles from your baby, AND the ones on your overly-large boobs. I think they are actually perkier.”
Charlie smirked a little, “You are just jealous.”
Angel nodded, “I really am. But the system can’t change your genes, and my mom was as Japanese as they come. Still, I am going to give you my advice, and you will listen, even if you take it with a grain of salt.”
“Go for it.”
“Okay, have you seen how big his hands are? And how disproportionate he is?”
Charlie nodded.
“Well, I grew up with starvation. I have seen the effects of long-term malnutrition in Madagascar, Tuvalu, the Congo, and Haiti. Heck, YOU have seen it more recently too. If he is able to fix his stunted growth, he’s going to be a giant. Even with a non-combat class, he’s going to be damned near as big as you, maybe bigger, and with the way that Renee has been pushing his growth, he’s not going to be skinny either.”
“The boy is an unparalleled asset, but utterly radioactive. My foot is almost healed. That cunt Aster already knows at least part of what he can do, which means she will be looking for him, and pretty soon hiding him will be impossible. My suggestion is that we grab a ship and head north, maybe even as far as Saint Mary, and then find a run of unclaimed delves to level his ass up to at least uncommon, maybe even rare.”
“And what are we supposed to do about shrines?”
Angel shrugged. “Screw the shrines. Let him evolve his vocation naturally. Hell, you could do it naturally too. If he winds up evolving his mending a little more, which he seems inclined to do, he probably wouldn’t even want to shift vocations, and you won’t need to shift to a heavy brick either. You love being on the pugilist path, but I know you were ready to sacrifice it all to be a better tank… if he continues, you won’t have to.”
“So you want to just… keep vocation-shifting away from him?”
Angel laughed, “Have you seen the kind of slots his class has been giving him? Aside from how much you like pounding heads, would you give up even a basic class like that? I wouldn’t… I’d shift to it in a heartbeat if I knew how, even with the advancement penalties. So would Renee. He gets extra combat slots as a utility vocation, Charlie… he got one at level three. NO ONE does that. His utilities are a little weak because he doesn’t seem to get any free vocation traits, but at his gold circle, he’s still going to have one more utility slot and God knows how many combat and magic slots more than most pure utilities.”
“If he gets one combat slot per three ranks, he’s just one slot below most basic combat classes, and if he gets one magic slot per two ranks as he has, he will be a slot ahead of most combat casters… and nearly up there with utility mages like Lilah. Heck, I don’t even know what his gold circle gift is going to be, but I bet it will be ridiculously overpowered.”
“Ridiculously overpowered?”
Angel smiled, “Sweety, he’s combat, mage, utility, and crafter rolled into one. Of course, it will be overpowered. It almost has to be to make up for all the innate traits he isn’t getting. The boy will be an absolute black hole for traitstones, but if we head to Saint Mary, we can hunt, buy, or trade everything we need.”
Charlie nodded, “Honestly, I am sort of surprised that the Grays didn’t restrict his path. I mean, he’s a street kid. Sure, he seems to know more than most, but that’s the kind of thing that they should have locked behind an impossible paywall… and yet he got it as a basic from a basic shrine.”
Angel nodded, “The Grays are basically lazy fuckups. We all know it. They let their greed wreck everything. They probably never even noticed, or figured he’d become some kind of super-crafter they could exploit. Look at Lilah, they are still trying to compensate for what is essentially a commonplace affinity. Lots of crafters have elemental affinities, and yet somehow she managed to snag a magic vocation."
“And how do we pay for a ship? And the traitstones... I mean, he gets what, one point per rank? and between two and three slots? That means, if he needs rare, he will need multiples of the same kind to get traits to a useful rank. Most vocations rank up their innate traits as you raise your level, but since he doesn't get them as part of his vocation, he's going to be expensive as hell to advance.”
Angel smiled evilly, “First, we are an uncommon team… if any captain wants to go north, he’d probably pay us to go with him. Secondly, your new boy toy is going to pay for it.”
Charlie let the shower run over her head, and then said, “Hmm?”
Angel fished a little bottle out of her pouch. “Check this out.” and handed it to Charlie.
Charlie started sputtering, “What in the world? Three percent?”
Angel nodded, and laughed, “Renee said she’d let him feel her up if he could reduce a potion’s toxicity. He did. And he stretched it out to three full doses. I guess he must have been impressed. Hell, if I’d made that bet I’d have offered him a handy and a cigarette. What do you figure an antidote, which, by the way, is now effective against all organic poisons rather than just necrotics, would be worth? Especially since it doesn’t appear to be rank-limited, as his mend seems to strip off rank restrictions?”
“It’s not particularly strong. It probably wouldn’t work well against anything higher than common.”
“So?” asked Angel. “You bought those crappy expired antidotes for less than a silver because you thought you could survive its toxicity, and when you got bit, you almost died from the combined poison and toxicity. Again, how much do you think a potion, heck, any potion, with that low toxicity, would be worth? Think about it, safely stacking haste, strength, and invisibility… what would someone pay for that before trying to take a rift boss?”
Charlie thought about it, handing the potion back to Angel and scrubbing herself. Gods, it was like losing the last twenty years, and her body hadn’t felt this good since she was a teenager… or looked this good either. “I think… considering how safe it would be to use even if you already had a high toxicity, maybe ten gold.”
“Ten friggin gold! And that’s on the cheap end. If you could get the right noble family…”
Charlie growled, “The right noble family would sic a team of hunters on us to find our supplier, murder us all, and turn him into a production slave. They are fond of eliminating competing middlemen.”
Angel sighed, sitting on the toilet. “When you are right, you are right. So I run it through the black market with cutouts. Get a bunch of expired or newbie garbage, turn around and sell it for five gold in bulk, burn the cutout, and then in a week or less we are set up on a cruise ship north.”
“Can he work that fast?”
Angle shrugged, “Honestly? I don’t know. He was talking about working out his brain, but he seems to have some casting limits like Lilah that aren’t tied into his mana. Affinities are amazing, but the silhouette doesn’t understand them, so we don’t have any hard numbers on how they work.”
Charlie sighed and gave herself one more rinse, before stepping out and accepting a towel from Angel. “I am going to miss this place, but I guess it’s back to living the dream. Let Renee and Lilah know not to talk about vocation changes. We will hold off until he’s uncommon and can defend himself. Make sure Lilah knows though… she’s good at keeping secrets as long as she knows that they are secrets."
“Go ahead and see what you can do with his potion enterprise, but be paranoid, and see if you can hold off on Renee’s hand and his… problems until we are underway. I will go ahead and check into ships after I get off of work tomorrow. Oh, and Angel?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I know you're intensely curious, but please try to hold off on seducing the boy until we are a lot safer. I know how you can get. In your own way, you are even more jealous than Renee, and he will probably be worth waiting for. That includes getting intentionally injured.”
Angel stuck out her tongue at Charlie. “You are no fun.”
Charlie shrugged in her towel, “Usually I can’t dare to be.”