“Okay, fuck it, cut me,” Eliza blurted out after several quiet seconds. “Literally, in the name of every last non-existent almighty god creature out there, make this shit go over without any further headaches.”

“I get more?” Tamara looked like this was the best moment of her life. First her Bloodmother came to visit her, apparently to stay for some prolonged period instead of the short visits Eliza had previously graced her with, and now she was to receive what she craved the most.

“Yes, if you sit down and be quiet for a minute,” John said, and for once, the blood addict listened to him. Even with the intellect of a four-year-old (which could be very smart when they wanted something) Tamara realized that she just had to wait for him to get things in order. “Alright, first things first… how much? Because I am afraid of what might happen if we just give her a glass full.”

If Tamara had received the same doses as Travolta had, then it couldn’t have been much more than a medium sized syringe of diluted blood of Eliza in a much weaker state. Conveying that logic to everyone else, he got a quick response from Rave. “I’d tell ya to go with the German saying ‘Better too much than too little’, but given what I saw… Ja, nein, let’s actually go with just a few drops.”

“I don’t give a fuck, just make my caretaker not retarded please,” Eliza begged with genuine exasperation. As far as she knew, she would be alone with Tamara for a week at the least.

“I want to remind you all,” Aclysia raised her voice, “that the real person behind this ‘caretaker’ might not want to take the task and that we are forced to leave Eliza either in my or redhead’s care if she is no longer capable or willing to fulfil our request.”

“I would literally rather spend that fucking week being repeatedly thrown into a meatgrinder than have this brain crippled creepy cunt call me Bloodmother every twenty seconds like some kind of mentally stuck clock,” Eliza made her feelings on the matter abundantly clear.

“While I,” added John after having made sure the blood mage had finished, “just want to relieve the person behind this shell already. Having her suffer like this for any longer just because we need someone to make sure Eliza isn’t too bored while we’re gone is way outside of my comfort zone.”

Aclysia bowed in her diligent fashion. “I hear and respect, my master. If you’re willing and aware of the consequences, then I have nothing more to add.” Knowing her, John could rather easily guess that she just wanted to remind him that this lowered the chances of them staying together on the trip, even if it was just marginally. Even the weaponized maid had things to be selfish about. Most of these things related to time with him.

“Alright, a few drops of blood… well, I guess they normally got it injected, but drinking will have to do for now,” John scratched his head and went into the kitchen. Plastic crunched under his feet as he quickly fetched a glass from one of the many cabinets. For a knife, the steel utensils around didn’t seem particularly adequate for cutting Eliza’s skin and he wanted to make this as quick and efficient as possible. “Aclysia, can I borrow your dagger for a moment?”

“There is no need to make your own hands dirty, Master,” Aclysia pointed out, but obeyed by pulling the weapon out of the Adaptive Bladery space. It was as sleek as always, looking like it had been cut straight from a sheet of metal in its entire radiant silver, caused by the mithril in its alloy. It lay cool in John’s hands for a few moments. By the time he had brought it to Eliza’s neck, the nearest part of her body where skin was visible, it had turned as hot as his hand.

“I am making this decision, so I should be the one executing it,” he explained his rationale. “A bit esoteric, but that’s how it is. Are you ready, Eliza?”

“You think some fucking slice at the neck is going to even bother me?” the blood mage laughed and just waited for him to get it done. “I’ve been tortured in way worse ways before you were born, asshole!”

John could have answered something to that, but he simply pricked her skin with the razor-sharp edge and then pressed the glass against the open wound. A couple of crimson drops ran into the container, then the wound closed on its own again. Were it not for Eliza willing it, the blood would have just flowed back into her body.

Getting up to his feet, the Gamer looked at the lifeblood, slowly puddling at the bottom of the glass. To think that was the liquid that had defined much of his early troubles in the Abyss. “Surreal,” he mumbled, almost absent-mindedly, as he turned the glass around. It wasn’t calling out to him with any temptation of power; as a matter of fact, the longer he looked at it, the more he felt the urge to get rid of it in a way that was more reliable than washing it down the drain.

That this was the blood of Eliza and Thana disgusted him in two different ways that intermingled to something truly vile and nevertheless fascinating. It was like looking at a rotting carcass, writhing with maggots. Not a pleasant sight, definitely not one to rest his eyes on for too long, but something that burned itself into his mind and stayed there for a while.

Oddly enough, he never had that feeling towards the flowing liquid when it was still connected to Eliza’s or Thana’s body. Even when trying to get back towards her, it wasn’t like this. Only now, that he was about to make someone drink it, much to that person’s consent, did he feel that pull. Although it may also have had something to do with Thana’s rising power.

“What is Thana doing right now?” John asked the blood mage. Although the goddess of genocide hated all of them, the one good thing about her was that she had absolutely no interest in being stealthy about anything. Combining that with Eliza’s ability to at least roughly read her body-sharing deity’s emotions, it should give them an idea if they were about to do something absolutely horribly stupid.

Last thing John wanted to have was some Thana controlled maniac suddenly surging with power endowed by the Bloodmother. This all was way too close to vampires for John’s taste anyway. Made him wonder if vampires and their thralls were actually related to accidentally leaked Abyssal practices. Well, actually, Meddelnick had basically confirmed as much when they had asked him.

“She is as curious as we are… didn’t know that bitch could be curious,” Eliza answered after looking inside. “Aside from the questions about how to best remove someone’s asshole through their mouth or something.”

“At least you have some common interests,” John joked as he went back into the kitchen to fill the glass with some water. It was a worthless attempt at diluting it and more about actually making it drinkable. A few drops of blood would take quite the effort to drink from a glass. He also washed off what little was on the edge of the blade while he was at it, making sure the spillage also landed in the glass. This was a fluid he didn’t really want to enter the water supply in any quantity.

After all, the only way to get rid of it was to let it be absorbed by biological entities and then killing those entities. They had learned this thanks to Eliza and Thana’s first fight, back when Nia had come out of nowhere to give her advice. The bloodstained grass they had left behind had turned red over the following days and resisted even the Guild Halls normalising automations. In the end, they had to go scorched earth on that spot, not because the grass was harmful in any apparent way, but because it was pretty unsightly. Also, John was interested in doing the experiment.

“Well then, let’s hope nothing horrible happens…” the Gamer announced as he turned the sink off and walked towards Tamara.

To the best of their knowledge and precedents set by other entities creating essence-bound familiars or thralls, giving the afflicted more of what changed them in the first place had no more negative effects. It just allowed them to continue their existence without being defined by the constant craving. The trade-off they had to make for access to powers normally outside their reach, the addiction and all the odd things that came with being shackled to an entity of higher power.

John carefully gave the glass to the blood addict, and she took it like it was goblet of gold containing the very essence of life. The first gulp she took greedily, while John gave the knife back to Aclysia. She didn’t dismiss it into her extra space, instead clutching the weapon tightly as they all waited for Tamara.

The second gulp hastily followed. At the third, something in Tamara’s sheepish eyes regained sharpness; she choked, but continued drinking. Concluding the fourth and final one was her lowering the glass with quick coughs. They gave her the time to pull herself together.

“Where…” Tamara, the real Tamara in all due likelihood, said in a tone of voice more befitting a grown woman. With the fresh influx of blood, her regenerative powers revved up, her pale skin becoming healthily flushed, the bags under her eyes disappearing and leaving her as a quite well looking, if still lean, woman. “Where am I… no… wait, wait, wait… I remember, I…” she looked to Eliza. “You’re the source of that liquid…”

“Wow, congratulations, you absolute cumbucket,” Eliza’s tone was dripping with hostility. “You actually found something I find even less flattering than fucking Bloodmother.”

“I’m… sorry?” Tamara blinked numerous times as the memories from her time as a deprived addict kept flooding in. “I… there is… a lot to chew through right now… I started walking one day, without really knowing why, and now… I am here?”

“Well, gather your shit and get up,” Eliza stated in a commanding tone of voice, which only earned her a confused glance and Tamara slowly shaking her head. “There, you happy, John? She evidently doesn’t have to listen to me anymore.”

“Until she hits her next addiction cramps,” John reminded everyone and walked over to Tamara, offering her a hand. “Sorry it took this long to get a decision regarding you. We have a lot on our plate.”

“I… uuhhh,” the blood addict looked at his hand with an understandable amount of scepticism. In the now normal thinking woman’s head were memories of them discussing to potentially murder her. Evidently she remembered that it had been John who had insisted on not ending her life out of convenience. “Thanks?” she nevertheless remained confounded as she took his offer and he quickly relocated her to the couch. “Can I ask who you actually are?” she wanted to know once she was seated more comfortably.

In the background, Aclysia began the process of bringing order back to the room by taking the chairs out of their fortress formation and putting them back at the table. Rave chuckled through the speakers, “That’s gonna be a long talk.”

“Indeed,” John stated, checking the time by looking at a clock on the wall. He still had about half an hour before the time he had planned for this entire event was spent, so he sat down and told Tamara all she needed to know to understand her current situation. From how he himself had learned about the blood of Thana, the death of Travolta and the Bloodfallen’s shady structure, Thana’s death and resurrection, the revelation of Eliza’s true nature and the goddess inside her, to the recent happenings.

Tamara nodded calmly through all of it, like he was just completing the picture she already knew the outline of. Given her rough mental connection to Eliza, something apparently akin to what John had with Metra, going by the description of it, it was likely she had some knowledge of all of these things that she didn’t understand herself.

“I am bound to the goddess of genocide…” she mumbled by the end of it. “That is going to take… a while to chew through.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have drunk my blood, you creepy cunt,” Eliza mewled from the handcart. “Could have just lead a normal fucking life, but nooooo, you had to lust for power like every other corrupted asshole out there.”

“Eliza, I also want power,” John reminded her to keep the hostilities somewhat in check.

“You don’t drink blood and call it ‘some fucking liquid’ though.”

“…Touché…” John had to concede that point. Goals and the ends one would go to to achieve them were a bit different. Although it was arguable that some of the political stunts he had pulled were worse than rationalizing the intake of some red, iron tasting fluid provided by a guild called the Bloodfallen as some power-boosting liquid.

“I just… I couldn’t accept that I had hit the ceiling already,” Tamara whispered, looking at the three people with powers far beyond the average Abyssal in the room. “I don’t think you can quite get how that feels.”

“Well, I know desperation, but not of that kind,” John had to admit. Even in the darkest days in school, there had always been the light at the end of the tunnel that he knew he was smart and could make something out of his life once he was free of the dumbass social dynamics that came with classes. “Anyway, I am not here to fault you for past mistakes and Eliza is just… well, she just has to throw some insult in every sentence.”

“I also think you’re a creepy fucking slut,” the blood mage chimed in.

“Quiet,” John told her. “Be nice to her, at least a little bit.”

“Her sanity depends on drinking my blood, I think I am justified in abusing her shit a little.”

“It means she has to stick around you, so it’s best if you two have some sort of relationship that’s actually functional.”

“Urgh, fucking fine,” Eliza grumbled.

Tamara still looked anything but convinced about this, her brown eyes looking around the room. “So… what do you plan to do with me now?”

“Well, in case you can’t remember, I need a caretaker for her over the next few days,” John pointed at the bundle of cuteness and character flaws. “And I honestly don’t dare to let you out yet because your case is a bit touchy and you know a lot of things through your mental connection that I’d rather stay secret.”

“I do?”

“You have the potential to,” John corrected, since their connection was mostly based on fragments and feelings. “Point is, she can’t move, you can’t leave, and in the interest of not having you two go nuts from being alone for an extended period of time, I think you would profit from looking over Eliza for a bit.”

“I guess?” Tamara answered. “Can I even refuse?”

“Yes,” the Gamer assured her, to the sound of a chair being rammed under the table much more harshly than it needed to.

“I recommend you take Master’s graciousness,” Aclysia chimed in, being invested in Tamara just saying yes already so her journey wasn’t under even the slightest threat.

Rave giggled at this. “As clingy as ever, Aclysia.”

“I will always cling to my master, no matter where he is going or why he is going there…” the weaponized maid had no shame for that. Only if John were to do some incredibly awful things and she no longer was able to recognize him as him would she ever threaten to leave him, this much was established between them.

Tamara sighed. “I guess I need the time to work this out… can I visit the internet from here or did you disable it?”

“You can access it, but you won’t be able to write on some sites,” John made a grimace, he really hated being a censor of any kind. “Security risks and all that, you are in a government building, technically speaking.”

“Alright… I will watch over… what should I even call you?”

“Fucking Eliza, you dumb wench.”

“Alright, ‘fucking Eliza, you dumb wench’,” Tamara returned immediately.

John and Rave giggled, Eliza hissed, Aclysia stacked some empty bacon packages and threw them in a trash can.