Chapter 317 – Too tired, need cuddles

John looked down on an exhausted Nia laying on the pavement. “Me is sleepy,” she said and in a rare display of open emotion drummed her heels on the ground. “I want to pat something…!” she said with forceful blankness on her face.

“Nia, can you puff up your cheeks for me?” John asked, kneeling down at her side. She did, overly so, to the point where her cheeks closely resembled balloons. “Little less air,” he instructed and slowly got her somewhere where she made a cute, annoyed looking face.

Then he made a photo of that, causing Nia, still holding that expression, to tilt her head in confusion. John laughed and pressed the remaining air out of her cheeks.

“Just remember to make that face when next time you are upset and demanding something out of frustration,” he told her.

“Why?” Nia was still bamboozled.

“Because it is an indicator of what you are feeling and makes it easier to socialize with you,” John told her, then he had a stupid idea that might work. “Hey, Richard,” he shouted over; “You fine with calling it quits? She still needs to be in a state to fight tomorrow.”

The Horned Rat checked a clock, “8 PM, yes, this will have to suffice.”

John would have been surprised if it hadn’t. They had beat Nia up for about ten hours straight. Interestingly, with Echo of Destruction fully stacked, he was a match for Nia in melee, at least in pure Stats. She still had more experience, anti-magic weaponry and the ability to purge the buff from him. He wouldn’t want to fight her in an honest engagement. Presumably, the victory would still be his, simply because he had way more magic than she could hope to neutralize before fading away, but it wouldn’t be nice.

“Let’s end it here,” Richard said and fixed his jacket. For today, he actually had kept that appearance on the whole day. Picking up the basket, he went over and placed it next to Nia, who was then granted five minutes of cuddling the fuzzy little mice. Afterwards, the Horned Rat took his leave.“We will see each other sometime next week, wouldn’t want her to stop training before the final fight.”

“Fine,” John said as the Horned Rat teleported away. ‘I want that,’ he thought- ‘Absolutely do I want that. First, I will need enough mana to just be able to use that without really thinking about it though.’

“Can you walk?” he asked Nia who just shook her head. He went ahead and picked her lithe body up.

“You will become known for carrying girls,” Nia pointed out as they went home.

“Second best thing to get known for, after being a giant badass who also has a harem of girls,” John answered and put on a jacket before leaving the barrier.

He called a cab, and then they drove into the inner city, where John visited a supermarket and bought a stack of notecards and a pen to write on said cards. All of this was a bit of a pain while still carrying Nia and everyone was looking very weirded out at them. Well, at him, they couldn’t see Nia after all. To them, he was holding his arms in a weird position for apparently no reason.

“Okay, so here is the deal,” John said as they sat down on the first bench they came across. Placing Nia next to him on the bench, he started scribbling words on the cards. “Until you get properly socialized, we will go with a stupid solution,” he handed her one of the cards, it read ‘Confused’.

He added more emotions to that deck, and Nia, hand still jittery from exhaustion, looked at them with her usual straight-faced blankness. She turned them in her hands to see if there was anything else up with them, the answer was no.

“Whenever you feel something, just hold up the corresponding card,” John explained when she blinkingly turned to look at him.

“Like this?” Nia wondered, presenting the first card he gave her to him.

“Yes. Sure, it is a bit of a crude solution, but until you actually manage to get a set of facial expressions and tones together, it will do,” John said.

Nia just looked at him without any words or gestures for a full minute. Then she said, “Thank you. That is a nice gesture.”

“Hey, I just d-“

Nia interrupted him by holding up the card that said ‘Curious’, “Aren’t you feeling ashamed because you are appearing to speak to yourself in public?”

John did look at the bypassing people, most of which just ignored him with a few glancing into his direction. “I am slightly uncomfortable, but they will just think of me as another insane tourist,” he shrugged. “It’s either that or not talking to you, as I don’t exactly have the skills to create another barrier on top of Rome.”

If he used Create I.D. here, all that would happen would be him entering the already existing barrier that was abyssal Rome. He would be spewed out in whatever the closest entrance location was. “Actually, now I wonder,” John mumbled and googled around a bit.

Although Google actually failed him when he wanted to search for stuff in abyssal Rome instead of the real one. ‘Of all the companies, Discord, Reddit, it is Google who doesn’t have a presence in the fantasy world that is my life,’ John found that slightly ironic. For some reason, he had expected such supreme tech giants to have roots in this world. “Hey, Nia, remember how I said this was a sort-of date?” he asked after he went through another search engine called ‘paying for a pdf tourist guide on abyssal Rome on the Abyss Auction’.

“Yes,” Nia said.

“And remember how you said that you want to pat stuff?” The pariah went through that deck of cards quicker than a cash counting machine went through five-dollar bills.

Holding up the ‘Hopeful’ card, she blankly looked at John and answered with another, “Yes.”

“Would you like to go to a petting zoo with me?”

The blonde’s emotionless face suddenly darted several inches closer, “Yes.”

So that decision was made, and they went into the magical city. “These are pretty impressive from below,” John noted as he watched the flying islands above them, always paying close attention to the pariah next to him, now walking on her own.

“They are not small and fluffy,” Nia informed him of the obvious and dragged him by the hand.

“Do you even know where we need to go?” he asked and then laughed when the blank stopped dead in her tracks.

She just held up the ‘Excited’ card without further commentary. Which reminded John that she would need some sort of bag for that, so he bought her one when they passed a fitting shop.

“Now don’t accidentally dispel this thing, there are some nice enchantments on it,” John warned her as he hung the bag over her shoulder.

It was made from white leather, as pure as possible, but it still looked inadequate next to the literal colour-void white of her dress. At least the straps had the same platinum gold colour as her hair, so it was a harmonizing victory on that front. Overall, it resonated nicely with her looks. John also put the notecards into a silver cassette so that they wouldn’t get worn down or be lost within that bag all the time.

“I’ll cherish it,” Nia promised; this time John didn’t even need a card to notice the earnest meaning in those words. Her upper body, bent slightly towards him, was all the signal he needed on that front. He couldn’t resist and pat her on the head. It turned out to be a good thing that he already had his hand close to her, as she then almost fell down to the pavement.

He caught her in time and helped her into a normal standing position. “Here,” John kept her stable by wrapping his arm around her waist and keeping her lithe body close to him. “I am not just doing this to help you walk straight,” he admitted with a smirk he hoped was flirty.

Halfway through getting out one card, the realization hit Nia, and she dropped it back into the deck to go with ‘Complimented’ instead. “Will this not make more people look at you as a womanizer?” she asked.

“Probably, but they are right, so I really don’t care,” John shrugged it off.

“Okay. What about Lydia?” the blank continued to ask.

“I am respecting her request and keeping our relationship a secret,” John answered, leaning in conspiratorially to discuss this as quietly as possible, “but between me and everyone else is a topic that I don’t need her approval on; I am my own man.”

Personally, he thought that Lydia should just have gone ahead and made it public a while ago. The rumour machine was already running wild, and John wasn’t the type to keep it a secret that he was loving multiple women. As a matter of fact, he was completely happy with making a whole bunch of people jealous because of it.

He had worked quite a bit over the past months to get into this position, so hiding the fruits of his labour felt wrong. Especially as they were such pretty fruits. “If her and Jane’s mom get angry about this, then I will calmly discuss this with the former and tell the latter to get bent, it’s that easy,” John disclaimed.

“Okay,” Nia just accepted that statement, not having strong feelings either way. They went the rest of the way, arm in arm, in relaxed silence.

They finally arrived at a cubic building, with literally nothing on its smooth surfaces, and Nia immediately pushed her disapproval in John’s face. Literally, that was what the thin piece of cardboard said. “This is no petting zoo,” she said in the cold void of nothing that could have been her usual tone or one of such absolute betrayal that it switched into pure wrath.

The fact that her fingers were twitching as if she was about to conjure her dagger did support the second theory. “Calm down, calm down,” John said, touching her butt with the hand that was meant to stabilize her in the process. Despite all his Wisdom, he could be quite the pervert.

The card was now plastered on his face. “Not a petting zoo,” Nia repeated in the same tone.

“No, it is better. Let us go inside and you will see,” John surrendered on trying to calm her down and went with the ‘show over tell’-route.

“Welcome to the secret pet-store, where we secretly sell pets,” a clerk behind the entrance immediately greeted them. John didn’t quite understand why they went with that slogan, seeing that they were disguised solely by having no street sign.

While they were currently separated from the actual pet area by a giant wall, in front of which the clerk sat behind his reception desk, the sounds of meows, chirps, croak and barks as well as mixtures of all of those sounds could be heard quite clearly.

“Hi, I would like entrance for two people,” John said and pulled $20’000 from his inventory. They probably would have preferred it if he paid in the local currency, which John only recently learned Rome even had, but he didn’t feel like going through the motions of changing his money.

The clerk just took that money and handed them two tickets. “Have fun!” he wished them, and Nia immediately darted off. Well, she tried to. After just a few steps, her tired legs gave in and once again she almost met the floor if it hadn’t been for John catching her just in time and then helping her up again.

“No hurries, it’s open until midnight,” John told her as they made their way around the wall.

“They are all crying with the need to be cuddled,” Nia explained. Then her eyes went wide as they entered the building. In good old abyssal fashion, it was bigger on the inside, a lot bigger.

They were surrounded by a giant playpark for animals. Dragon-kittens rolled around their grown parents, fantastical birds flew through the stupendously high ceiling, their multi-coloured feathers cutting through the air. A mixture of parrot and minimized emu was bouncing around their feet, repeating “Hello, hello, hello!” over and over again.

There were trees, sloths, koalas and all kinds of weird, fantasy animals hanging and climbing over them. A hedgehog riding the back of a two-headed, red turtle looked at John with its quivering snout. A herd of piglets with snake tails happily chased after a completely normal dog that then decided to no longer run on the ground but instead go with air as its preferred treading area.

This was really less of a pet shop than an oversized animal park where all animals miraculously got along, and one could buy one of them if they tickled the fancy.

Nia was as lost as John would have been in a strip club when he was still a virgin. There was just so much to look at. “What to pat first?” Nia mumbled, her brain shutting down under the overload of adorable.

 “How about you just sit down here,” John said and manoeuvred her under a tree, “and we see what hap-“

Before he could even finish that sentence, the herd of piglets, unable to chase the dog anymore, picked Nia as her next target. The blank yelped happily as she got overrun by the tiny little things, pressing their snouts on her as she tried her best to pat all of them equally.

Whether the animals were just bored or Nia radiated some sort of natural attraction to them, John didn’t know, but with each passing moment, the crowd of animals besieging her grew until he eventually became unable to even see her.

“Are you fine?” he asked, slightly worried. None of them seemed hostile, but that was still a lot of puppies, kittens and piglets she was currently besieged by. A hand raised from the mass, clenched aside from the thumb pointing at the ceiling.

She was doing very fine.

Two hours later, John was, once again, carrying Nia, this time home. “Did you really have to chase every last animal for the last minutes before closing time? We got out two minutes before midnight!” John asked jokingly. He had to forcefully remove the blank from her hugging some kind of flying whale upon request of one of the staff members that they were closing.

“They needed cuddles,” Nia mumbled, clearly dead-tired now. How she had found the strength to even operate the last two hours was remarkable. Clearly, cute animals were the one true motivator for the pariah.

‘That’s it,’ John realized. He would have hit himself on the forehead if his hands weren’t occupied with carrying Nia on his back (she said she found that more comfortable). “Nia?” he wanted to find out if she was even still awake.

“Ye-aaah-s?” she yawned, even with a completely still face her body couldn’t suppress basic functions.

“Would you come with me to America if I promised you to build a park like that?”

“Where do I have to sign?” she asked, wide awake again for a moment. Then that bit of energy left her again, and she just rested on his back, “Ask me again later.”

“Will do that,” John promised and postponed this talk to another date. A moment later, Nia fell asleep on his back. He had a nice walk back home and thanked the world for the fact that the tournament fights happened in the afternoon.

Once home, he carefully placed her in her bed in the windowless room on the first floor, which she had picked for herself, and let her be.