John was ripped out of his sleep by the sound of fists banging on his door. Well, that was not quite accurate. The banging just caused him to get that slight bit aware that he was awake, the state where he could either wake up by moving his heavy limbs or just ignore any impulse whatsoever and seamlessly drift back into sleep.

So, what ripped him out of his sleep instead was the wrath of his weaponized maid directed at whoever was drumming at the door and didn’t stop. It felt like something he shouldn’t ignore, unless he wanted to wake up to the sight of Aclysia mopping up some suspiciously red liquid. Immediately, he was faced with the idea that dealing with the aftermath of her murdering someone would be less of a headache than his hangover.

Images flashed up in his head. The cantina, then the toilet, the contents of his stomach, then more alcohol. ‘Why did you do that?!’ he scolded his past self. ‘Why the hell would you keep drinking after throwing up?’ There were some other broken pieces of imagery all of which included naked females and some sort of liquor or beer. ‘Why do I even keep running into alcohol like this? I hate hangovers, yet I somehow drink again after some time!’

As he heaved himself out of bed, a window informed him of his predicament in greater detail.

He just mentally mailed the list to Beatrice, whose upper body suddenly shot out of a pile of cushions behind him. Completely robotically, as if a mechanism had suddenly catapulted her back upwards to make her display a perfect 90-degree angle between torso and legs. “Acknowledged: will fetch these things. Question: will efficient intake suffice?”

With an almost broken voice, John answered, “Yes… I will just throw it into my mouth…” He absolutely had no appetite, so whatever great meal Aclysia could have made out of the stuff he needed, right now he just wanted this headache and nausea to disappear. Even if that meant drinking one of Beatrice’s sludge meals.

Anyway, that wasn’t the only window he got. A whole bunch of shit that his eyes strained to read and his brain needed multiple attempts to decipher was laid down in front of him. At least his bedroom was comfortable, even though there were about five times more cushions around than before, many of which were torn.

“What the fuck did I do last night?” he groaned as more figments of memory came back to him like a bunch of puzzle pieces. He already had the frame completed, but all of these flashes still had to be put in the right order. At least there was solace in the fact that there was no ‘you sucked your first dick’ achievement, so nothing gay had happened while his inhibitions had been lowered.

Another random memory flared up: him trying to pick a perk for Lover Boy but being unable to read the swirling letters, followed by him deciding to press a button at random, but his legs suddenly decided they wanted to move backwards. Then his back on a mattress, the window closing, and a drunk Gnome jumping on his dick, throwing stuttering pornstar lines around like the most reluctant but clearly horny slut on the planet.

That was a memory he wanted to spend more time dissecting, but he heard continued arguing from the door that connected his captain’s apartment to the outside. Aclysia’s voice was controlled, for now. Annoyance was clearly rising through their mental connection. He managed to put his clothes on through sluggish movements in his menu, then move out of bed with a similarly low level of vigour, stepping around the gooey puddle on the floor that was a completely deformed Undine.

“What is going on?” he asked as he blinked against the uncomfortably bright daylight. Suddenly he found himself missing winter. “Who is making a fuss?” he scratched his head and yawned loud and wide, showing all of his teeth to anyone around.

“President Newman,” a respectful but somewhat afraid voice reached him to the sound of heels clacking together. “Lieutenant Klum of the Little Maryland army estate, pardon the intrusion!”

Upon hearing that, John tried his best to not look hungover, or at least not like an addicted hobo that had found an oddly fitting and clean suit in the dumpster. Standing straight, however, caused his stomach to rumble, and he let out a very unprofessional burp. “Excuse me,” he stated, raising a hand to his mouth as rancid air escaped his stomach and he had to fight against the acid travelling along side it. “Could you come back in like… three hours?”

He needed to throw whatever Beatrice would bring him into his system, take a long shower and brush his teeth for like ten minutes. His body felt sticky all over – it was highly likely his abs had been used as a delivery system for alcohol – and his teeth weren’t just covered in plaque, they felt like they had entirely become it.

“I am afraid we have already been more than patient, sir,” there was that respectful yet fearful tone again. “We hope you have enough honour to at least let the ship go; even if you kill us here, all preparations have been made for your actions to count as a declaration of war.”

“Declaration of whaaa?” John felt his headache explode as he tried to think. “Ow- ow- ow- ow… okay, please give me a second, I need to… BEATRICE!” he shouted out loud accidentally when he had just wanted to send a mental message. The trio in front of his door took defensive posture as if they expected an attack. In the room behind him, John heard the pained groan of his girlfriend waking up. “Note to self, hangover’s make mental communication difficult,” he mumbled and just hoped the passive maid would hurry up. “Sorry for that… why are you so tense, what is this about war?”

The soldiers exchanged a couple of glances as they somewhat relaxed. “Yo… this guy is famed as somewhat sly, right?” one of them whispered. “Does he seriously think we believe this?”

“Quiet!” the lieutenant shouted, causing John to experience yet another dash of pain and Aclysia to draw her knife. Again, the soldiers went into a defensive posture.

“Aclysia…” John managed to croak that one word, then Beatrice tapped him on the shoulder, holding a glass full of a blue sludge. “Oh thank god,” he said and quickly gulped it down. It was every bit as disgusting as he thought, like munching on snails that had gone through a blender. Thankfully, there was a thick carpet on his tongue, so he tasted basically nothing of it as his Greater Hangover +3 went down to a Normal Hangover. He still needed to rehydrate something fierce, but at least his brain cells felt like they belonged inside his skull again.

“Do I understand then that we are to be your hostages?” the lieutenant asked in a tense voice, eyeing Aclysia’s knife. “Or can we take the remains of the generals with us? We will go down with honour!”

“Okay, relax!” John stated in a much firmer voice and finally straightened his slouched back. His synapses snapped together as he realized the situation. The visit of Chemilia and the other generals had been supposed to be over at 10 PM. It was almost twelve hours after that and the crew of the boat hadn’t seen or heard of their generals since they started drinking – which they didn’t know was the reason for this delay. As time went by, they must have gotten more and more nervous and finally decided that they were dead – put into a trap by the host. “Your generals are fine, you don’t need to worry.”

He was met with a very sceptical look. “Where are they then?” the lieutenant asked. That was a good question actually. John still had to sew together his memories.

“I will locate them at once,” he assured. “You can accompan-“ he stopped, that was a terrible idea. Under the presumption that they were in a similar state as he was, showing them the naked, obviously thoroughly fucked, in all senses of that word, bodies of their generals was probably a bad idea. “I mean wait in the cantin-“ he stopped yet again, remembering that Aclysia and Beatrice had both been in the same room as him when he woke up, meaning that the yacht still needed to be cleaned up. ‘Is there some clean part where they can wait?!’ he asked Aclysia in a semi panicked fashion.

‘The sun deck should bear no visible traces of yesterday’s happenings,’ the weaponized maid reported. Which meant that they still had done something there. This was the part where he would have sent Siena to check if that was true but, like all other elementals, all he felt from her was comatose silence. Whatever Rave’s suggestion to make out had started had escalated way too far.

“The sun deck!” John quickly spoke. “You can wait on the sun deck. Please, I assure you that I have no plans for a hostile takeover of your guild!” He really didn’t want to have gone through all of this scheming only for a drunken party to put everything in jeopardy. It would be a false, short-lived jeopardy, since the generals were still alive somewhere in this yacht. ‘Most likely,’ John thought, examining all the holes in his memories of the latter stages of the evening.

With basically no other choice and some sort of emergency protocol clearly in effect, the soldiers obliged and John begun his search. “Undine… heaaaal meeee…” he heard his girlfriend cry out for help against her hangover. Too bad the slime girl was unlikely to awaken for the next few hours, so there was no relief for his girlfriend just yet.

“Aclysia, please attend the needs of our guests, Beatrice, show Jane where we have the painkillers,” John designated his maids to their tasks and then quickly stormed into the bowels of his ship. He almost slipped several times and had to jump over a pile of glass that came from the brilliant idea of bowling with empty beer as the pins and use a vodka bottle as the projectile.

From his memories and the quest text, he could stitch together that they had ended up in the sex room eventually, so there was a chance the generals were right there. With hasty steps, he arrived there and was immediately thankful for the fact that they always burned incense in there. Otherwise, the combination of cold semen and alcohol would probably caused him to vomit after all. As it was, those two smells were suppressed by sandalwood and orange, a much better duo for his nostrils.

As for sounds, there were two, some trashy Bollywood music that ran on repeat and the buzzing of the Sybian. John was afraid they had forgotten someone on top of that torturous pleasure device, for a moment. It was simply buzzing on its lonesome when he actually saw it. He walked over and pressed the off button, then he looked around in more detail. Since their little fetish den was a repurposed luxury apartment, there were several rooms to check out.

Pretty quickly, he found Terkal on the floor, leaning against the wall between two shelves holding gags and arm bindings respectively. His head was lowered, chin pointing at his naked body. There was a cropped whip loosely in his hand, his arms transformed into that of some muscular animal. John could guess what dom he had awoken for his quest.

More importantly than that quest he didn’t even remember accepting, however, was whether he could move Terkal to do anything. “Hey… Hey!” John said, shaking the guy’s shoulder. Of course that was a terrible thing to do to someone in the state Terkal would awake to, but John really needed to avoid a war here. The situation was a bit more important than uncomfortable awakenings.

All he accomplished was to get the tall man groaning, instinctively moving away from John and moving in his position to lean against one of the shelves. There was no way to force him to wake up aside from doing something painful to him and John wasn’t quite that far yet.

‘Well, if he is the sadist, than Imerella is probably the sub,’ John thought as he peeked into the bedroom, to find his expectations inverted and Ted bound to the bed inside, all limbs spread out and with his wife lying on top of him in a position that looked like she had legitimately rode his dick until she passed out. ‘Ooookaaaay,’ John thought and walked backwards out of that room. ‘Those two aren’t waking up either, I reckon.’

Slowly he had to consider the painful option. Only Imerella was missing now. The shortstack was nowhere to be seen. Not expecting an answer, John knocked on the bathroom door, the only place he hadn’t checked yet. “Who is there?” he got a surprisingly chirpy voice answering him.

“It’s John,” he returned.

“Up already? Well, come on in!”

The Gamer had expected her to either sound almost dead or tell him to wait, but since this was how it was, he wouldn’t say no. Gripping the handle, he pushed to door open and was greeted by the smell of vanilla soap and the sight of the shortstack general soaking in the bathtub. “I could return that ‘up already?’ bit,” he said as he walked up to her.

“Mhm, I think you already guessed I am part water elemental,” she mused and he nodded. “I had the wisdom to fall asleep in this tub, so I only had to put on the water when I woke up. Been recovering since. How did you get better so quick? With what you drank, I was actually half-expecting you to die.”

“Bullshit Gamer powers,” John explained, seeing no harm in sharing that little information. “I got a window that told me what nutrients my body was missing, just needed to get them back into my system… All of that aside,” he got to the actual thing, incredible thankful that at least one of the generals was looking well, “your subordinates think I have trapped and or murdered you and are currently threatening me with sending message to Washington putting our countries at war if I don’t open the Harbour.”

“Oh, right, those are around,” Imerella gave him a carefree smile and stood up. She had no shame about showing her curvy body, so John had none ogling it either. Not like he hadn’t seen it extensively the past night anyway. “Well, I would like to keep bathing a bit longer, but I guess this is more important… You wouldn’t happen to know where my uniform was left, would you?”

“One moment,” he transferred the question Aclysia, who told him it was in her inventory. She quickly excused herself from the soldiers, which must have looked really suspicious. “It will arrive here shortly,” he told Imerella, who dropped back into the bathtub.

“Well, I can be here a bit longer then… thank you.”

“Thank me for what?” John was confused. “All I did was play along to my girlfriend pulling off a crazy stunt.”

“Thank her then,” the country looking girl laughed and kicked some water into the air. “I have been trying to get Terkal to see more than his superior in me for ages. This was rather effective.” That was one way to put the combination of raw forwardness and alcohol. “You have no idea how hard it is to date when you are over a century old and famous. Even the guys in their thirties think you are some untouchable legend.”

“I don’t know, he looked rather forward about everything,” John pointed out; the tall general had been pretty vocal about wanting the whole making out to happen.

“I have been whining to him that I wanted to fool around with some girls for years now in the hopes he would find that attractive, guess he got the wrong message…” she sighed like only a person that couldn’t give up on someone that annoyed them could, “…he is pretty dense sometimes.”

“The titfuck definitely did it though,” John pointed out.

“That and him whipping my ass for ten minutes. Thanks for THAT by the way, you gave very good instructions,” she winked, “haven’t been abused like that in years.”

‘Guess I can’t ‘awaken’ an already self-aware masochist,’ John realized as he made a final check mark on the sensemaking behind his quest. “I don’t remember that part,” he admitted. “I hope that he doesn’t get embarrassed and acts like this whole thing never happened, then.”

“Don’t jinx it,” Imerella warningly raised a finger out of the water, then dropped deeper into the tub. “But yeah, let’s hope that.”

“If it doesn’t work out, there is always room in my bed,” John half-joked. He wasn’t quite into girls this thick, physically speaking, but attractive was attractive. Imerella had a cute face and a massive, smooth ass combined with an attitude that seemed happy-go-lucky. He wasn’t actively looking to expand his harem, but if she wanted in, his dick certainly would be happy about it.

She chuckled again, but shook her head. “Not a girl for a harem policy of your kind. I want either complete swinging or just my man and he has just me. Yesterday was fun, but nothing long-term.” She gave him a more serious look, “And I can’t even consider it until the current situation gets resolved. For a quick romp every now and again, as long as I am single, I will think about it.”

“I can respect that,” the Gamer said and then heard his weaponized maid approach. “I will give you the room to change,” he said when she began piling the general’s clothes on a stool. The bathroom was more than big enough for three people to move around, but it was a symbolic thing.

Yesterday had brought up the question how the harem would handle girls that were just visiting John’s bed, so to say. Although he hadn’t quite figured everything out yet in that regard, it seemed very context dependant. He was at least clear on not sticking it into girls that were chasing another guy. He hadn’t yet fucked Imerella and he didn’t plan to flirt around anymore than he already had.

Imerella waved after him. “If I get fed up with trying, I will definitely consider it,” she said, “‘cause holy moley, I want to try the dick where that semen came from!”