“Thank you, Miss Newman,” Eliza said, once she had finished the cake. It had been a thick slice of the dark chocolate cream variety, with a strawberry on top. Although a bit quivering in their execution, the blood mage had kept her table manners for once.

The addressed woman rolled her eyes in amusement. “I insist that you call me Brenda,” she stated, gently wrestling the fork from Eliza’s still tense hand. Forcing herself to relax, the little bundle of character defects let it happen. “I am not that old yet,” Brenda added.

“I am really fucking sorry,” the blood mage, lowered her head. “I didn’t want to make a scene, I was just nervous and shit and then I remembered some assholes faces I’d rather not and…”

“Ahhh, shuddit ya adorable little mess,” Rave went ahead and grabbed Eliza by the shoulders, standing behind her chair. Then the techno lover began shaking her like a ragdoll. “We’re used to your scenes.”

Metra nodded with crossed arms. “Knowing a bit of your story, I have seen people broken worse by less. You should take pride in only breaking into tears.”

“Don’t bottle up the trauma,” Lydia kept it short.

Brenda put the fork on the empty plate and took it off the table. “John, can you help me in the kitchen?” she asked sweetly but with an undertone that didn’t allow for any backtalk. Even if John had any, his mother was already heading out.

Taking a short look over his shoulder to Eliza sniffing one last time and giving him a nod, the Gamer followed after Brenda. If she had any rebounds of that episode, John felt that the girls could handle it.

“Sorry for that,” he said once they were in the kitchen, a large room with light furniture and dark surfaces. It could quickly be described as a U shaped corridor around a central work isle, upon which an array of prepared foods was currently loaded.

Obviously, his mother didn’t need any actual help in the kitchen. All she had to do was load that one plate into the dishwasher, so what she wanted to do was talk to him on his lonesome. “Sweetie, don’t be sorry about that,” she said, straightening her back after pulling the front of the dishwasher back up. “I am so proud of you.”

That came unexpected, given the situation, “You are?”

“When you said you had landed big money, I thought that this whole harem business suddenly made a lot more sense,” his mother admitted, continuing with comments that made him cringe for his past self. “Back when I left you in Springfield, I was already disbelieving that my little boy could insist on living on his own. All you ever did was watch porn and play videogames. You never struck me as the popular type in school either, given that you never brought friends over.”

“I really wasn’t…” John wanted to change the topic as quickly as possible. Having never told his mother about the bullying he had gone through, he didn’t intend to suddenly come out about it now that he had the power and wisdom to deal with it himself.

“Yeah, you really weren’t,” Brenda agreed with her own point, to underline how unlikely she found all that. She opened the fridge and pulled out a jug of orange juice. Some things just never changed. “Which is why I already found it odd you managed to suddenly score a girlfriend as cute and nice as Jane. Still, I was sceptical when I heard you managed to get another dozen girls around to your side in such a short amount of time.” She poured both of them a glass, John took his and began sipping. “The money was a pretty good explanation.”

She took an awkward pause, probably struggling to put things into nice terms. One for the straight message, John helped her out, “You were afraid that, aside from Jane, I would have a bunch of cheap girls with me that I only care about because they look good and they only about me because I could buy them some bling, is that it?”

He wasn’t offended by this; if he were his mother in that situation, he probably would have come to a similar conclusion. Lots of guys would drown themselves in meaningless sex if given the money. If he hadn’t found Rave as quickly as he did, followed by being stuck in a pinball machine of misery and promises for a few months, chances were he would have taken to a life filled with grinding and frequenting whatever whores tickled his fancy. Springfield’s red-light district, the Ruby Road, would have surely given him some choice in that regard. The route he had taken, filled with sex with a regular cast of girls that fancied him just as much as he did them, seemed ultimately the better one though.

“Yes,” Brenda nodded, thankful that her son wasn’t giving her a hard time with this. “So, seeing you care about that Eliza girl even when she suddenly breaks into tears makes me proud. If you cared nothing for her, you would have just told her to leave.” She motherly pinched his face, “I raised a good little sweetheart.”

“Mom, please,” John chuckled and forced her arm aside, “I love them, even if they all have their flaws, small and big.”

She nodded, lowering her hand and resting it on the edge of the counter she was leaning against. “I hope they feel the same for you. There are some terrible, money-grabbing whores out there. Wouldn’t want one of them to break your heart.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” John assured her, finishing his orange juice. They headed back into the living room.

At that point, Eliza’s outburst was only visible anymore by the slight red surrounding her brown eyes. “So, where are the other girls?” Brenda asked once they sat down again. “I was promised six or seven, I only see four.”

“Two of them will come here soon,” John promised, “the seventh felt like her business was more important, so she refused to come.”

“One of those girls, huh? Ah well, variety is the spice of life, so they say,” Brenda waited for a second and then asked the real question. “Who of you is willing to grant me grandkids?”

Eliza’s arm shot into the air like a catapult, except that she was flinging her hopes and dreams rather than a stone. “Here, fucking me, I want to be the breeding sow for the Newman dynasty!”

“Just that there is no dynasty,” Metra grumbled under her breath, a comment that went unheard in the grand scheme of things.

Brenda looked at anyone else keeping their hands down, only Rave had hers raised halfway up, palm wiggling in an undecided motion. “Ask again in a few years, Bren,” the Lightbearer said.

Other mothers would have probably wanted their son to wait a few years, or at least get into wedlock, but Brenda Newman was both swinging together with her husband and had her son at the ripe age of 19. Her standards were slightly different from the norm. “So, when are you knocking her up, John?”

“Yeah, when the fuck are you knocking me up, John?!” Eliza was taking full advantage of having the authority of Brenda behind her.

“Mom,” John massaged his temples at the sudden assault on his plans, “I am young and you just saw that Eliza isn’t the most stable of people.”

“One more reason to become a mother, if anything!” Brenda stated. “Nothing gets you fixed faster than having someone you can love and care for yourself.” John let out an exasperated sigh.

“Listen to your mother, you son of a whore!” Eliza slammed her hand on the table, then realized what she had just said and turned to Brenda, “Fuck, sorry, I mean.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” mother Newman chuckled, waving off. “We are on the same team here, let your bloomy language run free.”

John’s sighs intensified as he was battered with a number of comments for several minutes, all aiming at tearing down his resistances. It was a rather unorthodox play on the ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine as his mother kept using reason and niceness while Eliza cussed him out and demanded her fallopian tubes be undusted. Eventually, a thoughtless comment slipped past his lips, “Should have just kept the first one.”

“There was an abortion?” Brenda sounded anything but approving. Being a liberal didn’t stop her from finding the practice questionable at best.

“No, no fucking abortion, got rid of it less than twenty-four hours after insemination,” Eliza stated, her extensive knowledge about reproduction coming in handy in this situation. “It doesn’t count before the egg successfully nests in the womb. Unless you want to count the morning after pill as abortion.”

Brenda blinked multiple times, “How did you know you were pregnant at that point? You sounded really sure of it a second ago.”

‘Shit,’ John thought; he could save this but there was no real medical explanation to Eliza being able to scan her own womanhood for the status of her fertilization. “Just intuition,” he presented a pretty terrible lie.

“I just knew I was super fucking preggos,” Eliza agreed hastily, realizing herself that they were in mundane territory.

Brenda looked from one of them to the other, in obvious wait of a better explanation. When nothing came for several moments, she took a long inhale and let the air out in a disapproving way. The fact that she wasn’t being told everything was not flying over her head, but she dropped the topic. “Well then, I demand grandkids sooner rather than later. It’d be funny if you had a kid while you get a sibling.”

“Have I missed any news?” John asked a similar question as his parents had at the entrance. The answer was just similar.

“Oh no, we aren’t trying right now. If we do, we’d have to make sure it was from him,” Brenda omitted the problem there, being that going off birth-control while fucking with an array of other guys reduced the chances of getting a second child from her husband tremendously. “Maybe next year, we are thinking about it.”

“I, for one, fucking love the idea,” Eliza chimed back in, but the topic went nowhere after that.

It wasn’t until a few minutes later that John looked at his clock and went, “Alright, we should check out the backyard.”

His mother looked understandably confused, “I thought this was my house?”

“Well, it is, but I have a surprise,” he said, rising up and asking for his mother to guide the way through a bowing gesture. Still confounded, she did and everyone followed, already knowing what would happen next. “See, I had a deal with a few people and I just needed to distract you for a bit.”

“A deal? This isn’t some hidden camera prank, right?” Brenda was getting more suspicious by the second; opening the glass door that connected the back of the entrance hallway to their yard, she took the lead when stepping outside.

It was a rather nice backyard, big, but not huge, just like the house. An odd-shaped pool filled the middle of it, looking like someone had taken two bubbles and captured them in the middle of melding together. Currently, a plane was spanned across it to keep the wind from blowing stuff into it. Aside from that, the yard was mostly defined by the furniture under the veranda and trimmed hedges. It seemed John’s mother had relatively recently begun taking an interest in gardening.

Brenda took a look around and finally spied the surprise when looking to her left. “How… I mean when?” she asked when looking at the large, white monstrosity of a bathtub. There was enough room for ten people to set in the bubble embrace, there was even a fixed piece of plastic in the middle that could be used as a table.

“Told you I would bring a jacuzzi,” John smirked.

She looked generally pleased, but his mother was still looking highly confused as to how this had just happened. Before she could ask and force her son to give a long-winded answer, one he was quite proud of in its ingenuity, the doorbell rang and rained on John’s parade. His perfect composition fell apart.

‘I thought you were still on the way?’ he mentally reached out to Aclysia.

‘We are,’ the weaponized maid confirmed. ‘ETA, 20 more minutes.’

Then who was ringing? Well, his mother was heading hastily for the front door to find out, and he, with his moment of glory ruined, followed slowly in her footsteps. A familiar voice reached his ears long before he was able to see the person in the doorway. “I wasn’t aware your last name was Newman, Brenda,” the voice was noble, controlled and swung with both charisma and a hint of arrogance. The familiarity with which he spoke let little doubt over this being the man Brenda had invited.

“Is that important?” John heard his mother ask as he sped up his footsteps.

“Oh no, I just know a person with the same last name, he is a…,” Maximillian looked up from Brenda’s magnificent cleavage and right into John’s eyes, the rest of his words trailing on as if he was seeing a ghost, “…buddy… of… mine...”