Under the confounded gaze of everyone, Nia slowly munched on the marshmallow. The white body of sugar dissolved as she moved it deeper into her mouth without using her hands. Basically, Nia took three eternities eating a damn marshmallow, but she did so with that cutely tilted head that John just couldn’t help himself and stare in fascination.

“In the name of a pussy-eating slime-gargling-man-whore,” this stream of Eliza’s verbal abuse of the spoken language hurt John personally this time around, “swallow you slut!”

“That’s what he said,” Rave giggled as Eliza pressed the marshmallow into Nia’s mouth who then spent another way too long period of time chewing it before finally doing as the blood mage had commanded. All the while she was still waving at the plane in the distance.

“Bye, queen-friend,” the emotionless voice rang out.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?! Did you bleach your brain together with your skin? Is it sinking through the roots of your obviously fake hair? STOP BEING SO TALL, YOU BLUE EYED BIMBO!” Eliza’s irritation with the blank hadn’t changed, evidently.

“I am not the tallest here,” Nia said and grabbed her white bag to pick the card that said ‘Factual’. The card was immensely crumpled and looked like it had been used a lot over the last couple of days. That made John wonder what kind of negotiations she had been through. “Aclysia is taller than me. So is Salamander right now and this one, who I barely know.”

“Name is Metra,” the berserker babe introduced herself. At 1,87 metres, the dirty blonde was indeed quite tall, taller than John in fact and the third tallest person in his circle of friends overall, after Nathalia and then Salamander. “I told you that when you got drunk.”

“I got drunk?” Nia raised the card that said ‘Confused’.

“You know, two weeks ago, the Lady Liquor?” John reminded her.

“Oh,” the pariah made a hollow sound and finally stopped waving as the machine took off in the distance. “So that’s why I was suddenly back in the mansion. I only remembered Nathalia. Figured she had intercourse until I was comatose.”

Now John would have loved to say that was a stupid assumption to make, but it really wasn’t. Especially since it had happened before. ‘We don’t think about that night,’ Siena reminded him, and he agreed and turned his thoughts somewhere else.

“Okay, well, let’s talk about the important stuff for a change,” John said as they got moving; there was no reason to hang around in the airport anymore. “Have you decided what is happening with us, Nia?”

“Yes,” the card said ‘Serious’, “I am no longer part of the Illuminati. I am all yours.”

“Just like that?” John asked the blank; “No deals that Richard gave you, some ancient spying device you are supposed to put into my butt when we next have sex?”

“Whaddaya think the Horned Rat is, an alien probe?” Rave laughed at her boyfriend.

“No, but I am also not not saying that,” he returned.

“He had several demands. I declined on all accounts and then just left,” Nia told him, uncaring about the pairs usual banter; “Mentor got a bit angry but then I told him that the only way to stop me was to get in bad graces with you. He got very quiet. Then he said fine and let me go. That was that.”

“Wow, ya scaaaaary,” his girlfriend said and kissed his cheek, “your name alone makes a god tremble.”

“Well, I think he just weighed my potential and usefulness as an ally against Nia on his side and came to the conclusion that he needs me more as an ally than Nia as a soldier,” John said and used his hand not currently on Rave’s waist to pat Nia. “I promise we will get that petting zoo as quickly as possible.”

“You best,” the line was delivered with the normal, emotionless voice, and her clear blue eyes stared into his for the usual, absolutely weird, longer than necessary timespan. However, something about it felt like a threat, probably the ‘Insistence’ card that was pushed right into his face. Then, in continuing Nia fashion, she first calmly put the cards away, then gave him a quick kiss and finally pushed her face against his chest and took a few deep breaths. All of this took almost a minute, during which they stood next to the exit of the fairly crowded airport.

Sure, being Abyssal meant that there were less people, but that didn’t mean that there were few. In the first place, Abyssal dwelling people inside the empire’s borders were more likely to move. It was like the EU or the USA where travel between the member-states was basically unhindered. With living basically guaranteed thanks to the absurd amount of resources floating around the magical underbelly of the world, taking a vacation half a planet away just because you felt like it wasn’t unusual.

And many of the people that were passing by looked at John. Just a quick glance, he wasn’t quite famous enough to attract interest rather than just attention. His widely known achievements boiled down to fighting in a tournament where the enemy gave up in the end and getting himself encircled in the middle of enemy territory. The whole Graz situation had been widely credited to Maximillian, as the king had been the official commander of the situation, although anyone who researched it for 20 seconds would find out just how much exactly John had done for the swift victory in the area. Still, aside from his involvement in the operation to save Lydia, his main claim to fame lay with the queen that had admitted to having a relationship with him.

Now that Lydia was gone, most people didn’t really care. Chances were that he would be pretty much forgotten in a few years time and only people that were interested in his Combination skill would remember.

“Are you the one that massacred the whole enemy invading force?” someone asked a certain blood mage.

“No, that was the genocidal fuckeress in my head, and if you don’t move the fuck on in the next one second, I will unleash her on your ugly ass face!” Eliza exploded into the guy’s face, “FUCKING SWAMP GERMAN!”

“We are no swamp Germans! We be Dutch! Proud and cool Dutch! Hashtag reclaim Oceania! Hashtag SUGAR!” another man said in passing. He soon was hindered from walking on further as Eliza grabbed him by the neck of his shirt and pulled him down to her level. “You are pretty small, scary person.”

“Hi, I am Eliza, I am now really fucking angry, congratulations, what is your name, you unwise asshole?” the hostess of the great filter asked with a sweetly insane grin and dots turning at the speed of rage.

“” Instantly after that answer was given, he turned into a flying dutchman, getting tossed straight through the open doors and crashing into the floor outside the airport. The people just went about their business, and John, worried, kept an eye out for the man until he simply got up, dusted off, and limped up to the next hotdog stand that also sold health potions.

“Sturdy bastard,” the blood mage growled as she held her head, hiding one of her eyes. The other, still visible one was struggling in its transformation from the normal state, with the seven golden dots, and the seven lines that meant that Thana assumed control.

“Eliza,” her name was a mantra in situations like this, and so he whispered it to her, and a moment later the change halted completely and reversed. “Can’t even do this much?” his thoughts slipped out, and the blood mage lowered her hand.

“Evidently fucking not,” she growled, pulling up the hood of her black robe; “Whatever, I want to get the fuck out of here. Too many people, way too crowded, it’s like everyone wants to stick their foot up somebody’s ass in here.”

“Yeah, lets-a-go,” Rave said, “I wanna party!”

Abyssal Amsterdam, as it so turned out, looked a lot like normal Amsterdam. Wide streets and narrow passages intertwined between old and new buildings (although many much taller than their real counterparts) and waterways that cut through everything in the city. John wondered why this was and, as neither Momo nor Lydia were around anymore to answer his demand for trivia, informed himself.

The truth was pretty sobering. During their exit from Europe at the end of World War 2, the Nazi’s had put the city to the torch while stealing all the boats. One last act of revenge against a German Empire that no longer wanted them.

Afterwards rebuilding everything would have cost more time and resources than just hiring a bunch of Fateweavers, isolate the parts of the barriers where they had still intact buildings of high importance, and then just copy everything else from the inner-city over. The result was a metropolis that seemed like a European capital, from its confusing layout that came from constant rather than planned growth, but also had a few stand-out things.

For example, the water inside the Grachten (that was the Dutch word for the waterways, singular form: Gracht) was cleaner than any channel through inner-cities had any right to be, with basically no filth inside whatsoever. John found the reason for that to be a species of aquatic slimes that ate whatever trash was tossed into the water. Throwing trash was like feeding the ducks around here, it seemed. Instead of cars, hovering platforms waited at the sides of the streets, ready to take whoever stepped on them (and paid the fee) to wherever they wanted via pre-set courses.

‘Huh, so the Dutch thought that slapping mobile barriers on boats was a good idea, interesting,’ John thought as he read how the sea-faring nation came up with the first successful applications of ships in Abyssal commerce after the discovery of the mobile barrier during the age of Enlightenment. Very interesting stuff, really. ‘A shame Magoi isn’t here, he could probably answer for me a lot of these things in more detail than a cheap brochure off the Auction,’ John thought.

The new Supreme Fateweaver had taken to the Himalayas, where the organization’s headquarters lay, and was currently embroiled in how the dissolvement of the current structure was to be handled. The fact that Fateweavers would be no more was a foregone conclusion at this point, at least in their current state. As Magoi had prophesied, they would become something like a union, but the exact dissolvement of the old structures still had to be handled with care, as hundreds of businesses all over the globe would now be privatized.

As a staunch red-blooded American, John approved of this breaking up of an economically oppressive monopoly. He didn’t have a lot of contact with the old structure and didn’t feel like the Fateweavers had been an actually shitty corporation like several cable companies back home. However, he knew that he only stood to profit from this in the short and long term.

Rave also checked her phone, which had been buzzing from a newly arrived message, and groaned. “Well, if there is one annoying thing that came out of all of this,” she gestured at the airport and, impliedly, of Europe, “it’s that mom now wants me to send her weekly updates of my life.”

“You are going to do it like monthly instead, aren’t you?” John asked. It wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that Nariko only wanted to have monthly updates in the first place but set the bar higher so her daughter felt like she was still ‘winning’ in some abstract sense.

“Tops,” Rave said but wrote an answer message as they spoke. “I want to see dad again. Partly because I need to punch him in the face for never telling me the whole story and partly because family stuff is weird.”

“Yeah, I should visit my parents too,” John decided as he looked at the city from above through the eyes of his new sparrow. After his last one had been destroyed and lost during the battle of Warsaw, he had to buy this one as a replacement. Gaia had automatically renamed it to Jack Sparrow again.

The reason for this sudden yearning for parental interaction was the hearing of Lydia’s story. John wanted to cherish what he had for a change, and it would also help him to ground himself more in reality rather than his enormous ambition. He hadn’t told his mother that he was returning to the USA yet, because he didn’t have his story straight.

The basic idea was to tell her that he dropped out of school completely, because he had started a business on the internet and it was going so well that he had the money to just educate himself rather than chase a degree. Problem there was that he didn’t have a storefront for this story just yet.

“Okay, so we stay here today and tomorrow we get a plane back to the USA,” John said as he spied what seemed to be a hotel.

“I am gonna drag y’all into a club!” Rave announced.