“Father, do you truly feel I should be the one in charge for this?” Magnus asked. ‘This’ being the returning of the four ferries Bearings had so brazenly stolen.

Personally, Magoi had a lot of grumbling to do. To see Fateweavers disrespected like that a mere few months after the dissolution was absolutely disgraceful. If the monolithic structure of the original guild had still been standing, they would have made a public announcement that working with Bearings was now unsanctioned.

Every licensed Fateweaver would then have stayed away from any contracts handed out by that drug-using boat abductor. Then he could have had a great time trying to find some solo-operating Fateweavers, the kind that was usually very, very, very bad at their job.

“Father?” Magnus’ voice was now a bit concerned, looking over his shoulder from the steering wheel. Being just two Fateweavers, they couldn’t have moved all four ferries over at the same time, so Magnus was steering this one while Magoi watched. They were taking it to where the owners of them were supposed to have their shop. Granted, they might have been removed entirely from the premises or life, but Magoi liked to stay optimistic about this.

He turned a page on his newspaper. Looking at the same page he had looked at thousands of times already, but it was filled with different words. This was his trusty magical newspaper after all; he had brought the thing in 1967 and not gotten rid of it since.

“Yes, Magnus, I am certain,” Magoi answered, reading about disgruntled seniors in Styria saying they didn’t understand the current queen’s architecture whatsoever. “I am just here for moral support. You go and be a grown man.”

“That is not the problem,” Magnus, ever the stern stickler, didn’t let it go as easily as his father would have preferred. “As leader of this new ‘Magnus Magi’ sub-guild, you should be leading the first negotiations.”

“He totally should,” Mabirl chimed in, having checked the engine room. It was true that Mabirl was exclusively a housewife and had been for the past seventy years or so, but she was a learned archano-tech engineer. That’s how the two of them had met in the first place, with him teaching an advanced class as a guest professor.

In the morally correct way, they had started dating only after she had gradua- Okay they had their first date right after that class. The Abyss wasn’t particularly hostile to teacher-student relationships (inside the age of consent). Anyhow, she had graduated and then become his housewife. She didn’t have a lot of practical work experience, but she still knew about the theories.

“See, Father, you…” Magnus began.

“But you will,” Mabirl finished up, putting down a toolbox and then peeking over her husband’s arm. “Any interesting articles, honey?”

“Not really, Hetreckson held a speech, but that’s not really affecting us anymore,” Magoi answered. Said speaker was the new Supreme Fateweaver. A title that didn’t mean particularly much anymore, aside from getting the heavily enchanted mask that Magoi had returned to the treasury upon his return.

“I request an explanation,” Magnus pulled a lever, locking the course and allowing him to turn around.

“The explanation is that I want to retire in the next one to ten years,” Magoi answered quite easily. “So, I am going to give you basically all the work and just check on whether or not you do it well. Once I decide that you make next to no mistakes, I am just going to throw the headmaster title at you and be done with it.”

Mabirl nodded with her own raptor mask on her face, “We have this world tour thing in planning. Oh hey, that thing looks interesting,” she pointed at an article about a restaurant where the Heavenly Emperor sometimes ate at. “We should put it on the list of places we will visit.”

“Ah, too bad I don’t have the book with me… sorry, newspaper,” Magoi folded the corner inwards. That would maintain the current page.

“So you made this deal with John Newman to give me a job?” Magnus suddenly put two and two together.

“No,” Magoi rolled his eyes behind his mask. “I made the deal to give you and your siblings a job. And your kids. And their kids. Speaking of which, where are my grandchildren, Magnus!”

“Yes, Magni, where are our grandchildren?” nagged Mabirl. Acting like she was tossing a toddler in the air and catching it again, she added, “We have been very patient and you are over thirty. I want some cute baby that calls me grandma!”

“But no hareming around like Newman!” Magoi warned. “I tried that in the late 19th century, trust me, that’s only something for young and energetic fellows.”

“Yeah, get one nice lady and put a ring on her!” Mabirl demanded. “Make sure she is a proper housekeeper, I can’t imagine you will be a stay at home dad and somebody has to run the household. Even that Newman fellow understands that, with his Artificial Spirit and all that.”

“Spirits,” Magoi corrected. “He made a new one. She is also a housekeeper.”

“Is he having sex with her too?”

“Do you really need to ask?”

“Ahhhh, Magnus, I demand you move out of the Guild Hall when you have kids, I do not want them corrupted by that man’s influence. Nice as he may be, he has… how many women does he have again, honey?”

“Oooof, that is a tough question, darling,” Magoi rummaged through his brain. “I want to say fifteen in total. In his defence, they seem very happy with their situation.”

“For all I care, they can be, I am just saying he should be nobody’s role model,” Mabirl stated. “Fifteen women and how many grandchildren has he got his mother? He could at least do that! Magnus, get into the dating game already!”

Magnus sighed heavily and ignored the two of them. The typical strategy of a child without satisfying answers, wait until the parent petered out. Soon enough, he got an excuse to change the topic. “Sensing the endpoint barrier,” he told his father.

Magoi nodded. “Yes, and what do you do now?” It was an unneeded question. Magnus may not have had the necessary talent to become a High Fateweaver himself, but to say he was anything but skilled would do him an injustice. All that Magoi wanted to do was probe his son a little bit.

“Driving in and anchoring,” came the stoic answer. That was the right, if overly simplified, answer.

“What about the angle of entrance?” Magoi tried to tickle some more information out of him.

“The tools of this ferry are already allocated to enter at the correct one. If I didn’t have that tool, I would create a large, decaying barrier around this boat, overlapping with the target. That would give me the ability to see the anchorage in advance.”

The nose of the raptor mask went down and then up again as Magoi nodded. All of that was correct. ‘Now,’ Magoi thought in a self-bemused tone, ‘to do the cold-water thing and say absolutely nothing for the entire negotiations.’

They anchored and, much to Magoi’s relief, the original owners came stumbling out. Sure, they were a bit bloody around the nose and had others signs of a scuffle, but largely they seemed okay. The Magus family came strutting off the ship, two with canes and one marching ahead with military precision. They must have been quite the interesting sight to behold.

‘That makes me think back to the time I put on this mask,’ Magoi thought. It had been a cold night, a dark night, a cold, dark night. From his chair in his apartment, drinking hot chocolate, Magoi had looked out the window. Archaeology had been all the rage recently and so a program about it had been running on the television. ‘That looks neat,’ he had thought, took a photo of a raptor skull and had gone to his favourite mask maker the coming summer.

Mabirl had laughed at him and then said she wanted one too. ‘Good times,’ he mentally mused and put a kiss on his wife’s cheek. Or, rather, bopped the snout of his mask against the side of hers. In the foreground, Magnus explained the situation to the local Fateweavers. As he was doing quite the good job at summarizing the deal they had with John and telling the ferry owners what was going to happen in the near future, Magoi needed not to chime in.

Instead, his mere presence and name did everything needed. Magoi wasn’t a grand schemer, he was smart but he didn’t like making convoluted plans. He left that squarely to the people that had a larger agenda. Personally, all he wanted for himself and his family was safety and fulfilment.

The reason why he had come with Magnus, aside from the stated one, was that this way when people asked, “Magus? Like Magoi Magus?” and Magnus answered, “The same, he is my father and head of the Collide Fateweavers.” They had no choice but to believe him. Once word got out that this was authentic, he could just sit around all day and act like a figurehead only.

He would be there only to sign paperwork and occasionally help John in his barrier. The rest of the time he would spent lying in the sun, writing his biography, eating nice food and having sex with his hot wife. It would be the dream pension life.

“We have an agreement then?” Magnus asked the boss of the eight strong group of local Fateweavers. “You join the Magus Magi and the greater Collide collective.”

“Once the war is over,” the boss specified. “Look, I hope you smash Bearings into next week, but we always had good business with Thorne. I don’t want my business getting into the crossfire or for it to be destroyed if you guys should lose.”

“You understand that we will have to renegotiate a lot of the terms and breaks I just gave you, if we repeat this talk with Collide’s position as the sovereign guild of this city?” Magnus asked a contractual sounding question, causing the boss to stop and think again. The intent was clearly to make it sound like it was in their best interest to agree now.

With how this war was supposed to go, it actually would be too. Magoi just wanted more Fateweavers on his side as early as possible, since Collide currently had only two and a list of requests that was far beyond what two people could stem. For the moment, the High Fateweaver was paying money out of his own, very deep pockets to hire colleagues within the city. He also advertised his new guild to them in the process.

John wasn’t the only one growing his influence at every opportunity; Magoi was deeply trying to leave behind a power structure for his son that he only needed to maintain. 400 years of life experience had to amount to something useful aside from money. Money, after all, could vanish rather quickly. A society out to help its members maintain their wealth was way sturdier.

That was another reason why he cast his lot with John. The Mandate of Heaven was heavily bureaucratic, the Roman Empire immensely aristocratic and the Nazis really weren’t an option. By exclusion, helping build something and shaping the part he wanted how he wanted in the process was the greatest opportunity Magoi could have been given at this point in his life.

Magoi liked to think he was a friendly, quirky old man, but he also wasn’t doing things for the hell of it. He had reasons like everyone else.

“We will still stay neutral,” the boss finally announced, tensing up as Magnus intensely stared at him. “W-will you still return our remaining ferries?”

“Of course,” Magnus nodded. “You will have to come with me to the island though. As you can see, I came with only one ferry and my father refuses to navigate one.”

“We have a date,” Mabirl chimed in, winking behind her mask. “So we are unavailable.”

“You have my word that nothing will happen to you,” Magoi added, visibly easing everyone amongst the unaffiliated Fateweavers. Several lifetimes of cultivating a trustworthy brand did help in moments like this.

A couple of them boarded the ferry. Before Magnus could follow them, Magoi took him aside for a moment. “Want a tip, son?”

“Is it asking the quiet slime lady to heal them and then ask again?” Magnus asked in return.

Magoi didn’t need to remove the mask for his son to know he was smiling proudly.