“This could be a much easier affair were you the owner of a private airport,” Lydia stated as they stopped in front of the security gates. People stepped around them, wanting to check in themselves. To that end, John and his harem were slightly in the way, but not enough that anybody asked them to move.

“I’ll put it on the list of future Guild Hall Buildings,” John assured her.

“That option exists?” the queen asked, raising an eyebrow. Before her lover could answer, she furthered the thought herself. “I suppose it does logically follow, as evident by the Harbour’s existence. Would there also be an option for cars, to complete the triumvirate of vehicles?”

“Yeah, haven’t built any of them yet because I wouldn’t get a lot of use out of them,” he answered and then yawned. That sleep he hadn’t gotten was slowly taking its due. ‘This is why I shouldn’t be fucking until four in the morning one day and try to get up at a sensible hour the next. Well, I can sleep a bit in the next few hours.’

“You should consider the option heavily in the future. It would make visits to your home a lot easier. Albeit, I don’t think this is going to be a problem for us two anymore, would it?” Lydia asked and mustered him with an iron gaze.

“Whatever could you mean?” John asked and grinned so broadly that the ‘lie’ immediately was discovered.

Crossing her arms, the queen shook her head heavily enough for her masterly made braid to peak past her back for a moment. “Your antics have been noticed, John. I know your mood when you have to say farewell to one of us and you are not replicating it believably.” She raised one finger to his chest and stabbed at his ribcage. “You think me a fool that can’t decipher the most obvious of situations?”

“I just thought it would be funny to see your face,” John admitted, doing his best (and purposefully failing at the same time) of looking guilty. “You know, when you say goodbye to us and I say goodbye to all of them,” he gestured at the rest of the harem following the scene. “Could have been funny.”

Lydia went back to a crossed arms stance. “I am no item for your amusement, John.”

“The fuck is going on exactly?” Eliza asked. She wasn’t entirely alone in her confusion, although it was only her, Metra and Sylph that had absolutely no idea what was going on. Everyone else was either in the know or could also guess where this was going.

“Our beloved and quite irritating Gamer here,” Lydia turned to the blood mage to explain, “has recently upgraded his Guild Hall to a higher quality. With it came the capability to place more long-range teleport outposts…”

“Oh, alright, I get it,” Eliza spoke up. “Fucker has to fly over to Germany now to place the broken-ass station over there and thought it would be funny to get on the same plane as you.”

John shrugged, the only thing he felt bad about was that he didn’t obscure things better. “That about sums it up,” he admitted. “Lydia and I have been talking about giving Fusion an embassy space in Berlin anyway. All it takes is for the pre-agreed place to be officially given to me. Once the prepared paperwork is signed and the land belongs to me, it belongs to Collide and therefore I can place one outpost over in Germany. Only thing I don’t know about is what happens to the outpost if the contract gets broken and the territory is technically no longer mine.”

“A question of no current concern,” Lydia dismissed and looked at one of the clocks that were everywhere in the airport. “Come then, John, we have a flight to catch.” Looking over to the rest of the harem, the queen only gave a respectful nod. “I would prolong this farewell further. However, as it stands it will be open to me to return without long travels from this night onwards. As such, I will simply say until later.”

“Laterz,” Rave waved and the rest of the harem followed suit, as John and Lydia turned to the gate to actually check in.

“You know,” John spoke up while they stood in line for the security checks. “You can’t actually come through the teleporter at will. Only members of Collide can use it.”

“Is this another futile attempt to get me to join your guild?” Lydia’s tone had a sharpness to it that made it clear she was not having this discussion for the third time. “I said it clear and I will stay true to my oath, not even in name or for convenience shall I swear fealty to someone else than my people.”

“No,” John tried to dissuade her through strong words and gentle gestures, putting an arm around her shoulders. It worked, Lydia’s blue eyes taking a familiar grey tone. “I wanted to remind you of that, nothing more. You’ll have to send me or someone else a message whenever you want to come over.” They took a step as the queue moved forwards. “Since you already saw through me, I guess you made arrangements to that end already?”

“Selbstverständlich,” Lydia answered, using her German completely consciously this time around. More often than not, when she slipped into her mother tongue, it was because she was worked up about something. “Aclysia and Beatrice are both easy to reach and convince to accompany me, should I desire so.”

“They would be the logical choices,” John agreed. “Our biggest problem will be the time zones though. You are six hours ahead of me. When you want to come over for dinner, it’ll be lunchtime here.”

“I honestly don’t care about such administrative obstruction,” Lydia let him know. Getting on her toes, she placed a kiss on his lips. Her hair smelled of citrus. “I will take the wonder of being able to see you at my leisure, despite an ocean parting our homes and countries.”

“It sure beats phone calls,” John agreed, then they had to part momentarily to get through the security check. Since neither of them had any luggage, the process was quite quick. Although the Gamer was actually a bit confused when Lydia stepped through the metal detector without any issues. Only when they were out of hearing range from the security, he asked, “Isn’t half of your body technically metal? How did you get through there?”

He knew for a fact, from fights in the tournament, that her hair was made from a fair chunk of copper. It was easy to forget that Lydia wasn’t technically a full human, but half an elemental. That aspect of her background only surfaced in very specific circumstances.

“Two things intertwine to this end,” Lydia explained. “The metal as it is part of my physiology is too magical to be detected by mundane scanning equipment. Even if it wasn’t, I believe the traces of metal in my system do not amount to enough to be noticed. Metal detectors don’t outline your veins either.”

“I just wish the Artificial Spirits could get through that easily,” John mumbled as they continued through the labyrinthine airport. “I have my ways for Aclysia and Beatrice, but having to bribe Metra in will lead to trouble at one point or another.”

“I am not aware of any easy solutions to this, although this also isn’t my area of expertise,” Lydia admitted. “Did you have any luck finding a solution?”

“An immediate one? No,” John responded with a heavy sigh. “Seems like metal detectors are too new and Artificial Spirits too rare to make this something Abyssals bother to research. I would guess someone out there knows a solution, but it’s just hard to dig up because it isn’t mass-produced. The best way I have found to deal with this is to put Scarlett and Metra on the same flight and she takes care of it. Aside from that, well,” he shrugged, “I think I should just get a private machine already to eliminate these issues.”

“That would be the best way to go about this indeed,” Lydia agreed and they walked on in silence for a little while. When they arrived at the waiting area for their flight, they still had twenty minutes to pass before they could board because that was how things worked at an airport. She asked a sudden question, “Are you even certain that you can actually place an outpost on territory that was leased?”

“Absolutely certain? No,” he answered truthfully. “I tested it by buying property in the Little Maryland before, but that didn’t work because I owned the property, but the property was still part of another guild.” Lydia was already inhaling deeply to give him a lecture, but John just continued on. “The way the thing is worded makes it quite clear that it should work if I own the land. As long as you actually transfer ownership of a few square metres to me, it should work. Otherwise, I implore Gaia to warn me right now, before I have to take a flight back somehow.”

They both waited for several seconds. John for any windows to open and Lydia for John to react to any windows. She could also read them herself in theory, given that she was in his party. Finally, something popped up.

“There we go, the supreme deity confirms it,” John stated and moved the window so Lydia could easily read it. In doing so, he gestured around in a way that looked quite odd to the people sitting around them. Not that the content of their words didn’t already make them look a bit looney. Gaia had a tendency to make people forget about talks like this in a more natural way. Less mind-wiping and more ‘what did I eat last Sunday?’

It was one of the services she supplied for free. John had gotten liberal usage out of it back in Springfield, without even being aware of it most of the time. Namely because Aclysia used to run around as the most attractive cosplayer in town. White hair alone would have garnered her all the attention, but wearing the dress of 2B from Nier;Automata as well should have propelled her to town or even internet fame within a few weeks. Neither happened, because Gaia kept interest on a logical low. Not eliminated, just reined in.

“You are lucky, John Newman,” Lydia stated after reading through the Achievement. “Were it not for that, I would have forced you to stay here. Establishing experimental connections should not trump attending a peace deal.”

“The Lake Alliance can seriously fuck off.” John didn’t bother to hide his irritation. “Coming to the peace deal like 5 hours late to make them sit on hot coals for that time is a risk I was very much willing to take. Feels like an adequate reaction to all the stuff they have put me through.” Once again, Lydia seemed ready to berate him, but the Gamer raised his hand. “Look, I am not thinking logically on this, I know, and I won’t do anything that’s actually going to harm anybody. If getting a direct line to visiting you was delayed by weeks, potentially, because they had to assault my home, that would raise my irritation to unhealthy levels. Look at this as some form of venting.”

Lydia instead exorcised her berating through a long sigh. “I see your point, my love, I do,” she just admitted, and they turned to more pleasant topics in the remainder of their waiting time. They boarded the plane without further complications. During the trip, sitting with ample space in first class, they talked a little bit, slept a little bit and made out a little bit. Given that it was an official flight, Lydia wasn’t comfortable doing anything else and John had no particular urge to do something on the plane toilet either.

They could have probably gotten away with doing things right there in their seats, since all of the other attendants of first class were part of Lydia’s bodyguards, but that was a whole other category of uncomfortable.

After landing and checking out of the airport, they immediately entered the Abyssal side of Berlin. Like Rome or New York City, the German capital was a type 3 barrier, meaning that a massive Protected Space contained its own city. Apparently it wasn’t terribly old, not even 200 years. Given Berlin had, for most of history, been quite unimportant, that wasn’t too surprising.

They got into a limo and were driven over to Lydia’s residence. John spent much of the time looking out of the window, fascinated by the sight of yet another place he hadn’t been to. Fascinated and, in some ways, appalled. Berlin had an overly visible distinction between rich and poor districts. Of course, even the poor lived better (in a material sense) than their equivalent in the mundane world. If that hadn’t been the case, they could have simply left. Still, districts were separated by broad roads or even walls. Buildings on one side were gold and gem-encrusted, on the other grey and in need of repainting.

Lydia let it be known with few words that she hated every bit about this and John understood her wish for reform more than ever. Everything had the touch of complacency to it, a society that had grown fat on traditions and gotten enough of a cushion to not think about making changes before the whole thing inevitably collapsed.

Odd in this was Lydia’s home. It was its own district, by all accounts, surrounded by a simple park and a few additional buildings. While it was indeed a palace, it was one of the most moderate ones John had ever seen. For the most part, it looked like an apartment building. A very big apartment building with an uncharacteristically high amount of decorations, but still in the ballpark. Long walls with equally spaced out windows in stacked rows. Compared to some of the aristocratic mansions in the adjacent districts, of course nobles centred their households around the seat of power, it was almost humble – but only almost.

There were four things about it that were quite imposing. In order of least to most remarkable, in John’s opinion. The decorations on the rim of the roof were pleasingly symmetrical and the bronze statues standing on the corners were artfully crafted. The large dome tower, beset with more statues and golden ornaments. The gate underneath it, a massive thing of stone, pillars and masonry, covered in heraldry and art. Lastly, the thing that he was looking at was a building that should no longer exist.

The Berlin Palace had been damaged in World War 2, deemed repairable but subsequently torn down by the communists in East Germany. “You know, once upon a time,” John admitted while they walked through the courtyard, “I thought of socialism as something that sounded pretty nice. The principles still sound pretty humane. Yet, every time the ideology gets into power anywhere, they only bulldoze the past and enslave the future.”

“Socialism and communism is inherently seductive because it is so utopian,” Lydia responded while they walked on through the building, preserved by putting it into a barrier long before that whole political thought was even formulated. “Its flaws are not immediately obvious. You know the saying, no heart he who isn’t a socialist before his twenties, no brain he who still is one in his forties.”

“Not sure that’s the exact wording, but that sounds about right,” the Gamer responded. “Well, not like the ideology has done only bad.”

They stopped in the middle of the courtyard as Lydia gave him a long stare. “What good did it do, John?”

He only now realized that he was talking to a woman who had lost her father to the Blood of the Proleteriat. ‘Bad move,’ he scolded himself, but he had already walked into that landmine, so he might as well state what he meant. “It created the pressure needed to birth many social programs, such as health insurance. You won’t catch me saying communism is something to base a government on, but some of the underlying principles can be used to achieve some positive results.”

“I entirely reject the notion that we have socialism to thank for these things,” Lydia spat the words out like they were poison. The moment she realized her tone, she closed her eyes for a few seconds and gathered herself. “Although I suppose you can observe the history as it has happened to interpret it that way. Giving the credit to that abhorrent miscalculation of a worldview seems like a terribly unilateral analysis to me.”

“I would need to dig deeper to debate that,” John dropped the argument, since that was his actual stance there. “It might very well be that it was just the time that made those things popular, with early industrialization and what not.”

“That appears closer to my view on it,” Lydia stated, and they continued moving, dropping the topic like a hot potato.

‘I guess I will have this talk in a calmer atmosphere,’ John thought to himself, since he was actually interested in having it. Seeing what good one of the most destructive forces ever had brought was a fascinating topic to try and tear down with someone else. If he warned Lydia beforehand that this would be the topic of a discussion, she would probably be happy to have it. Be it only to tear everyone else a new one. ‘I guess she could have a great time preparing with Scarlett on that front…’

They left the building on the other side and arrived at a place that had not belonged to the original construction. A house of late renaissance design but clearly built with modern materials. With a fresh coat of azure blue paint and a little garden attached to the front of it, it appeared like a nice place to stay. Although it was rather small, particularly between the Berlin Palace and the houses of the Abyssal aristocracy that stretched out behind it.

“My grandfather used this as the house for spurned guests, as he liked to put it,” Lydia informed John. “Those who he deemed necessary to be in close range but too obnoxious to have them sleep in his palace.”

“They do say Frederik the Great was an odd fellow,” John mumbled, scratching the back of his head. He couldn’t imagine people were generally too offended by being put there. Truthfully, it looked like a much nicer place to stay than some room inside the palace. “What does it say about me that you’re making this the embassy?”

“That I am not my grandfather. I don’t make the court convene here in the first place. This is strictly my home and workplace – and it’s awfully large.” Lydia took a little pause to glare at the aristocratic houses in the distance. “Were it not for this awful need for prestige, I would have moved into a practical office building months ago. Regardless,” she reached into her own pocket dimension to retrieve a piece of paper, “sign this.”

John took a moment to look at the contract. Only minorly to inspect what was written, he trusted Lydia, but to inspect the artistry of the whole thing. The dark blue ink on the creamy colour of the paper looked like someone had dipped their quill in the night sky and used it to write into a desert. Aside from Lydia’s own signature, there was also Romulus’s name in the bottom area. As Rex Germaniae was still technically part of the empire, that was a necessary step of this whole thing.

John took the pen that Lydia offered him and added his own signature to the contract, a second copy for Romulus and a third copy for himself. It was a pretty quick affair, without any onlookers to make it feel official. He actually preferred it that way, since he wanted to get this concluded quickly. Once all of it was done, John simply placed the teleporter outpost next to the house and that was all it took. Given that it looked like a dark, wooden pavilion with a blue glass floor, it actually fit quite neatly into the scenery.

“As always, it has been a pleasure to visit you, John,” Lydia let him know once the thing was in place. Evidently, she was under the impression he was going to leave immediately.

“You know, I do have some time before I have to leave,” he said with a smirk and gestured towards the house. “What do you say, you actually show me this new embassy you gifted me?” He liked to believe the implication was quite clear.