John returned to their apartment on his own, something Rave immediately picked up on as she pushed her athletic body over the edge of the pool and onto the white deck. “Where did ya leave Aclysia?”

John just placed the food he had brought with him on the table and started unpacking. Aluminium foil was pulled out of the plastic bag and then unwrapped in turn. “Eat that,” he said and gestured at the bread, stuffed with meat, greens and sauce.

“The fuck is that,” Eliza came running at the prospect of something to eat, “and why does it smell like mhrmhrgFUCKkhrm…” Whatever she had been wanting to say was cut short by her greedy little hands clogging up her talking hole with the eating purpose it also had. With a celebratory curse at the taste, presumably.

Rave took the thing with a little more care, “Huh, been a while since I had a kebab.” She opened her mouth wide and then sunk her teeth into it. In the pink lustre of her blue eyes, John saw the same explosion of taste that had hit him earlier.

Sauces, hot and garlic, shocked her taste buds to the core, immediately followed by the richness of well-prepared and slowly cooked meat from the stake, cut into thin slices. A satisfying crunch accompanied every motion of chewing, from the slight crust on the high-quality beef over the salads to the onions, the perfect experience topped off with the soft white bread that held this stack of flavours together and acted as a minor pallet-cleanser, allowing each bite to be a new and wondrous travel down flavour lane.

“It’s gone!” Eliza fell to her knees, sauce and pieces of salad still sticking to her lips, “Damn you, you non-existent fucker, god, just be damned,” she hit the floor repeatedly. “I want another one!”

“Well, good thing I brought more,” John said, pulled another plastic bag out of his inventory and placed it on the table. “Because I ate three of them myself and I just knew that this would happen.” He gestured at the elementals to come closer and, after watching them eat from the pile of kebab he put on the table, got hungry again and got his fourth one.

They weren’t exactly small chunks of bread encapsulated goodness, barely being able to be held in one hand. As someone of lean build, John had never been someone who ate a lot. That had been especially true in the past, when eating was an annoying thing he had to do while gaming. Since Aclysia was cooking for him, and since eating had turned from an involuntary break to a time where he was just hanging out with all the girls he fancied, he had been eating willingly. There was also something to be said about his increased muscle mass increasing his appetite. However, even though that meant he was now eating more, that still didn’t mean he was eating much, and four kebabs was most decisively out of the norm.

‘But they just taste so good,’ John thought as he took the last bite, basically just meat and bread. The pile on the table was reduced to nothing within half an hour, like an open treasure chest in front of a crew of greedy pirates.

Eliza let out a rather unladylike burp by the end of it and fell into a chair. Her stomach, visibly bloated from all the food, deflated in seconds as her inhuman metabolism churned through it and broke it all down into mana. The elementals hadn’t been able to eat much, thanks to their inability to properly digest food, so they looked fine as always. Rave and John, however, looked like they didn’t want to move anywhere for the next hour.

The only person who hadn’t eaten anything, Metra, was nice enough to get them something to drink, even if that something turned out to be just tap water. At least that’s what John assumed until he raised his glass. The sharp smell warned him before he took a sip. “Did you fill pure… I don’t even know,” John wasn’t good on his alcohols so he looked to Rave for help, who took a sip without a care.

“Yup, pure vodka,” she commented. “Good vodka, but not something I would put inside me right now. Can we get something normal to drink?”

“Nonsense,” Metra crossed her arms. “Warriors on vacation should liven it up and for a good feast you need a lot of alcohol. How else are you going to get into a state where you tell your architects to build a monument to your beard?”

John pushed the glass away from him. “For a start,” he retorted, “I don’t have architects.”

“Demonstrably false,” Metra said and pointed at Gnome in her swimwear. “Also I know that there are at least three different Combinations you have that have the skills to create some parts of buildings.”

“That’s architect, singulaaaaaa-“ he stretched his smartass comment in panic as Metra grabbed him by the collar and showed him a toothy, unamused grin, anger seething in her green eyes.

“One fucking smart guy, aren’t you? Want to know what I used to do to people that were this pedantic?” Common sense told him he did not want to know that, so he shook his head and breathed in relief when Metra dropped him back into his chair. She couldn’t actually hurt him, that would go against their contract, but when an ancient war construct warns you, one was better advised to take that serious.

“Anyway, and I also don’t have a beard,” John pointed out.

“Yes, you should grow one,” Metra stated, “full beard, not too long but still existent.”

He wanted to point out that he wasn’t even sure if he could do that, beard growth was one of these things where his male genes failed him (together with penis size, but that had been rectified, thanks to Gaia). Before he could do that, Rave spoke up, “Denied, he ain’t getting a beard on my watch. No scratchy kisses!”

“So, you are the reason why he looks like a naked mole rat?” the berserker babe grunted. “I thought higher of you.”

“If ya wanna have a mouth full of hair whenever ya deepthroat, go chew on some puppies before ya do it,” the funky lightbearer stood her ground. Nia ran over to Chompy and hugged him to her chest before retreating away from the vile woman that was even able to suggest such a thing should be done.

Metra rolled her emerald eyes, “OBVIOUSLY, pubes are a different thing, but what is a man without a certain level of roughness to him?”

“As long as he is confident, doesn’t get on my nerves, funny and gets me off in bed, I really don’t care what he looks like,” Rave stated, “but I like to cuddle with total skin contact and without scratching my face on a beard.”

“The trick is to let the beard grow out of the scratchy stage,” Metra sarcastically revealed as if she had just correctly predicted the next coming of Christ. “If you really don’t care what he looks like, you could at least have him have a beard.”

“Urgh,” Rave threw her hands in the air, “Okay, fine, I do care what he looks like insofar that John right now looks really sexy without clothes and as the gal who actually knew him when he was still a lanky, hairy, unkempt piece of weak-sauce,” in his seat, John cringed at the description of his past self, “I can tell ya that this is infinitely sexier.”

“We can double that infinity by slapping a beard on it!” the dirty blonde shouted, temper rapidly slipping.

“Ya mean half that infinity, ya weird hunk of metal!” Rave shot right back.

“Listen to me, you semblance of dyed pubic hair!” Metra growled and threatened to grab her weapon, at which point John finally decided to put a stop to this before it got really nasty.

“To put a rather easy end to this discussion, I am not growing a beard,” he told them, and Metra just stormed off in a fit of anger without listening to his reasoning. Not that the justification ‘Because Rave’s opinion is more valuable to me than yours’ would have been likely to improve that reaction. It was interesting to see that her emotional control slipped when discussing such mundane a topic. Constantly being on the verge of anger had to make everyone moody.

“Anyway,” John directed the attention back to what was going on, “Aclysia asked to be let into the kitchen to learn from the chef, and after she found her to be not complete garbage, their words not mine, they let her assist. That’s why she didn’t come back with me.”

Eliza, having the courtesy to clean up the mess of plastic and aluminium they made, wiped off her mouth with a stray napkin. “Words cannot possibly express how much I approve of Aclysia learning to cook this kind of ball-busting goodness,” she stated before trying to take all of the trash with her at once. That endeavour was hindered by the somewhat slippery nature of the bags.

“Just take two trips,” Undine advised.

“Two trips are for fuckboys,” the blood mage decided, and tentacles of blood extended out of her fingernails and weaved through the handles of the foil filled bags. She almost got all of them when she made a growling noise, her eyes beginning to shift to their godhood state. The blood fell and splattered on the floor, creating a crimson mess on the pure white background.

“I… hate… you…” the devouring voice of Thana rang out against the resistance of her host. The eyes, one transformed fully and the other merely having elongated dots that darted back and forth like the hands on a broken clock, rested on John. He stared back with adequate fear but mostly concern for the girl that struggled to regain control.

He didn’t want to call out to her when she could do it on her own. It would have been less helpful if he saved her whenever possible instead of whenever truly needed. After a minute long struggle, the one eye returned to normal, dots rotating quickly in agitation, and soon after that the expression of indiscriminate hatred faded completely, and Eliza, heavily breathing from the mental exhaustion extending to physical stress, returned to full control.

“Fucking bitch,” she cursed and looked at the deck. Using her powers only minimally, she gathered the blood into tiny orbs that she absorbed back into her body one by one. “Can’t even use my powers in peace; at least I know she is still in there. AND NOW MY HAIR IS THIS FUCKING LONG AGAIN!” She complained throwing the blue, hip-length hair over her shoulder.

“And she can actually talk,” Rave added.

“That part doesn’t come as a big surprise,” John said. “She spoke before, although It was either repetition of the same phrase or her vowing to kill all of us in those weird power words. Speaking of those, I wonder what exactly those are.”

“They are called Babel-Phrases,” Copernicus strutted by, “named after the tower, although they existed before that. It’s just a fancy word for incantation, really.” The cat jumped on a table and rolled together in the shadow of an umbrella.

‘Unless you are a certain rat god,’ John thought, ‘then you can just drop them into your normal speech.’ “Wonder if I will ever get a spell like that,” he said, still watching the cat as Nia made her way over to do her thing. The blank looking pariah placed Stirwin on her head to have both hands free for scratching. The golden scales of the crocodile harmonized nicely with the platinum blonde of her hair and his mouth stood open in what looked like a smile on a very happy hatchling.

“Some Tier 5’s have them,” Copernicus poured in a relaxed voice. “Although only the most powerful amongst them. It’s usually more like an extension of their unleashed state than anything else, usually. Pretty much all gods have them though.” Seemingly related to the subject of the discussion, Stirwin squeaked.

“Okay, that’s that, we are finding out what you can actually do right now!” John decided he had enough of the infinity elemental’s mystery and got up. Only to fall back once he realized that his stomach was still too full to act with this much energy. “Okay, maybe in 10…20 minutes.”

Rave laughed at him while taking another sip of vodka. “I hope Aclysia comes back soon to make cocktails,” she lamented while they watched Eliza put bag after bag over her arms. “Seriously, just take two trips.”

“NEVER!” Eliza insisted as her arms got completely covered, the dangling bags getting in the way of her putting even more on, creating a spiral of ever increasing difficulty. Eventually she managed, although she could have made the trip four times by then, and made her way over to their apartment where she simply had to dump the trash on the floor for it to be carried away by the slime.

“Anyway, I was thinking we should maybe plan some things,” he said after Eliza returned. “We are supposed to reach New York after a week, so on the 24th; we should probably have some plans of what we want to do while here. “

“Sure,” a barely cooled down Metra said in a very chopped off way after returning to the conversation. “You have anything in mind?”

“Well, I would like to spend at least one day just dating each of you, it’s a nice scenery for that sort of thing,” John said, “like a date Monday or something.”

“That’s a lame name,” Rave complained, “How about fluffy Monday?”

He raised his eyebrows, “What does fluff have to do with going on a date?” Under fluff he understood, to date, Warhammer lore.

“Cause it makes ya feel all fuzzy and happy and stuff,” his girlfriend said as if it was the most logical thing in the world. “So we gonna have dates on Monday, ‘cause I like the idea of having a date, anyone got other ideas?”