“To summarize my disappointment in your failure to inform me earlier: every second matters,” the princess ended her five-minute lecture about why John should have called her immediately.
‘All that just because I started with the phrase, ‘about half an hour ago,’’ he thought, ‘better not tell her that is already a downplay.’ “Didn’t this lecture cost you more time than it was worth?” John asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lydia’s stern voice was underlined by the constant scratching of several pens. “I can do my finances while telling you exactly why you are wrong. My productivity has not been hindered in the slightest.”
The rustling of papers, the soft sound of a piano, both of these replaced her voice for a moment as she fell silent. Then she spoke up again and these noises were pushed into the background. “Any other news worthy of my attention?”
“My girlfriend is coming,” John told her.
“The girl who was with you in the hospital? Pinkish white hair?” Lydia asked, likely just to be sure.
“The same, although her hair is back to a bright pink,” John mused, “You are going to let her fight too?”
“Princess,” Lydia said, her voice as hard as iron.
“What?” John genuinely did not understand what she meant.
“Going to let her fight too – princess,” she explained her correction, “I know that you are from a different continent but I demand an understanding of our situation, Newman. You’re in my debt and acknowledgement of the difference in our stations will serve you well.”
‘Ah, right,’ John thought, he had heard that before. It was an overblown insistence for his American sensibilities, but he was not in the situation to barter. “I ask for your forgiveness, princess.”
“You are forgiven,” her voice softened up to a stern tone. Then, she continued. “Probably, yes. We will speak about this in person. Do you have a date for when she arrives?”
“Two days from now,” John told her.
“What time?”
“No idea yet,” he admitted.
“Send me a text on the when and where, once you do,” the princess instructed him. “Anything else?”
John considered for a moment, then said, “No, that would be it.” Immediately, he heard the click of her phone being put down. He raised an eyebrow, then shook his head and sighed. “The girl is seriously weird,” he said and sat down on the table, across from Mono, and started complaining. “On one hand she can be very understanding, on the other she takes everything so seriously you think she might be discussing the possibility of nuclear warfare.”
“Maybe you’re not taking anything seriously enough, dude?” Even as Mono sassed him, her white eyes raced over the pages. She was almost through that book now.
“I think I’m plenty serious,” John pushed back.
“You also think that it’s fine to make out with four women at the same time.”
“That’s not just fine, that’s a glorious privilege,” John defended with a smile. Mono rolled her eyes for one moment. Their conversations usually went like this, much to John’s enjoyment. The support had a sassy note to her that made banter ever a pleasant back and forth dance. “How is the book?”
“Predictable – like most of these detective stories,” Mono responded.
“Only if they are well done,” Herman chimed in as he came back from the kitchen. He stopped in the doorframe and awkwardly scratched the back of his head, when the attention of the Gamer and his Artificial Support turned to him.
“Why would they be well done if I can predict the outcome?” Mono asked, between genuine curiosity and confusion. “That makes it boring.”
“Pardon me, but if that is your opinion you might not be the target audience,” Herman meekly responded. “Detective stories are…. How do I put this?” He crossed his arms and gathered his thoughts. “The joy in them is for the reader to feel smart, either because they figured out the riddle ahead of time or by making them feel they learned something by gently pointing out the mistakes in their train of thought as the detective lays down the truth. It is a big puzzle and when the author gives you enough information to figure everything out yourself he is doing a good job. Of course, there is a fine line to walk between putting too much or too little hints in there.”
“I like detective stories, but not the ones that make it easy,” Mono said after pondering about what Herman had said. “I want those that also throw in misinformation that can throw you off the right track.”
“Also, very tricky,” Herman passionately said, “Make somebody out to look completely innocent and you either get an annoyed reader - who feels betrayed by the sudden shift - or a very obvious bad guy. Throw in too little misinformation and you just succeeded in making it so everybody is thinking about that character. Everybody suspects the guy that is ‘definitely’ innocent. Balance is key.”
“You have thought about that a lot,” John threw in there and in response Herman actually turned a little red.
“Yeah, sorry, I just really like detective stories,” he mumbled.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” John said, “I know how it is to be passionate about useless stuff, I am a gamer…wait, no, I am The Gamer. Capital T, capital G.”
Herman laughed, Mono sighed. There was another laughter in his head. ‘I check on what you are doing and you are making bad jokes,’ Salamander said, ‘felt your power coming back, we looked through the notes ourselves. Wanted to…’
‘I FEEL THAT IS MEAN!’ Sylph interjected, ‘We now cost percental mana, that is mean, I think Gaia is mean. Also, you are mean John!’
'Why me?’ he asked.
‘I want another gummy bear! I have forgotten what they taste like!’ Sylph exclaimed, ‘I demand gummy bear! Bear gummy! Gum-gum Bear! Gumo-Gumo n-.‘ There was a blubbering noise. John could imagine what just had happened: Gnome had taken Sylph and stuffed her into Undine’s body.
‘E-ehem,’ Gnome stuttered even while clearing her throat, a feat only she could possibly accomplish. ‘We wanted to know what we will do now?’
‘What do you mean?’ John asked.
‘What we do now, you dimwit!’ Salamander shouted at him, ‘Are we going to grind more? Are you just sitting on your ass? We have stuff to do! Don’t get me wrong, fucking all the time is fun, but I need something else to do!’ Undine sent a feeling of pure boredom as well, Sylph added ecstatic hyper-activity to that and Gnome a cautious wish to get out and do something. Salamander just kept cursing. ‘Fucking idiot, this wouldn’t happen if Nathalia was around, granny would make stuff interesting,’ she said.
That reminded him: he had not seen the dragoness ever since they had separated in the barrier. Which was weird, he had expected her to show up the following week. Was she bored of him or did his lack of Instant Dungeons make it impossible for her to find him? She had not bothered Rave either, which was where she would be expected to pop up, considering Aclysia was with her.
Nathalia had just vanished for the moment, leaving John with a strange sense of longing. He had just started to feel a genuine connection to the dragoness. No doubt, however, she would pop up when he least expected it.
John looked at the clock. It was already past 8 PM, so doing anything else today was not worth it. ‘I will relax until tomorrow, look at our new stuff in detail then and then we meet up with Rave the day after that. Then, Lydia will likely want to meet up and I have a lot of questions for her… and she probably has a lot of orders for us.’
‘Boring.’ Salamander separated from his surface thoughts with that final complaint. The other elementals closely followed.
Truly, John did not know if he felt like grinding at all. The month he had spent 12 to 16 hours a day in constant combat had been a taxing affair. After his two month vacation, he was somewhat ready for it again. ‘I hope I don’t have to do such an intense stretch again,’ he thought.
“The elementals?” Herman asked when John came back to reality.
“Yeah…my facial expression?” John asked to find out how the apothecary found out.
“You usually don’t start making random grimaces,” Herman confirmed, contorting his lips and eyebrows in a number of entertaining ways. John cackled at the display.
Eventually they ate half of the lasagne, put the rest away for tomorrow and John then went up the stairs for the night. He extended his hand to the doorknob. Then he stopped.
Mono’s light steps stopped behind him. “When will you stop freezing at the door?” she asked.“It is just an item.” John let out a dry laugh. “What is so funny?”
“I said the same thing to Aclysia on two occasions,” John admitted before pushing open the door.
The rooms in the second story were all the same. There were three of them, same wooden floor as below, same blue wallpaper, same furniture style. The reason John didn’t spend a lot of his time in his room, aside from the lack of a comfortable couch, laid on the table next to the bed.
It was a spine-like piece of metal, spikey rips extending to the sides and a longer, smooth part curving downwards. The entire thing was slightly shorter than the top of a small woman’s head. The thing that had been stuck in Thana’s brain. John, like virtually every other day, picked it up and turned it in his hands. At first, he had looked at it with sadness or anger, sometimes both. Nowadays he just looked at it as a memento of worse times and with curiosity.
John refused to give this thing away. He had no idea what other hands would do with it. He wasn’t even sure what it was capable of. He couldn’t store it in his inventory, the metallic piece simply didn’t pass the dimensional barrier. It was like he was trying to push through cement with another block of cement. Neither could he use Observe on it, whenever he tried to he just got a headache.
‘Maybe now that it is patched it will work?’ John thought and was rewarded with an exploding pain behind his eyes. “Urgh,” he groaned and breathed in sharply, counting to ten. The moment he arrived at six the pain was suddenly gone. The same tended to happen when he used Craft or Enchant. The only other idea he had was to have Mono eat it but he had decided that that was a bad idea. If it gave him a headache for just looking at it wrong, what would it do to an Artificial Spirit that tried to eat it? John didn’t dare to imagine the worst-case scenario.
He looked at the underside of the sturdy middle-piece. His eyes fell on the same words as always. “Mengele-Project01: Subject-El-Blood-Abysswalker,” he muttered to himself. Most of this was self-explanatory or easily theorized. Josef Mengele, Project Number One: Subject is a Bloodmage and Abysswalker. John did not know what El stood for however. He didn’t even know if that was an l or an uppercase i. Could even have been a Roman numeral.
Same as everyday, he placed the object back on the table and groaned. Thana had been dead for a longer time than he had known about her or prepared to fight her even. Yet still John felt that this incident would haunt him for a long time to come. ‘Hard times make hard men, isn’t that what they say?’ John wondered.
He would lie if he said he felt less experienced after the whole incident. It had taken the part of his naivety that had allowed him to just waltz into the Bloodfallen HQ the way he did. The part that had told him he was strong enough, latently or at this very moment, to just fix everything. Reality disagreed, however. Ironically, John had since found a bit of a connection with the classical Superman. Much like Superman’s abilities still did not let him fix the heart attack of his father, so too did John have to accept that he could not perfect the world. That naivety had left him. The whole affair had also left him knowing the brink of death, although he doubted that he learnt anything valuable from that particular experience, aside from not wanting to repeat it.
Whatever the case may have been, John didn’t regret what he had done, only how careless he had been about it. If he could have redone it, he would have looked deeper into Thana first and prepared for the eventualities of failure. It was a German General's saying that now came to mind: ‘Plans never survive contact with the enemy.’
He ended his reflection for the evening. It was over and done with. Hanging on to the regrettable past would not help him in any way. Yet he would probably find himself staring at that piece of metal again, wondering what he could have done better. Hanging on to the past was not helpful, but learning from it certainly was.
He threw himself onto the bed. “So, Mono, anything interesting today?” he asked.
“Same as every day,” she said, which essentially meant no, and extended a hand. John gave her his phone and put his clothes into his inventory. Another part of their routine. Mono, like Aclysia, did not sleep but unlike Aclysia she did not take pleasure in doing chores. She browsed the net when he was sleeping instead.
She had the decency to hide the glowing phone screen by pushing her head and the phone under her black poncho. After pulling her legs close as well, John was left with a black and white folded girl on his floor. It was equally ridiculous as it was cute. For a moment, she poked her head out. Before she could speak up, John assured her, “Too tired tonight to start fucking.”
“Okay, good,” Mono popped her head back down. She typically left the room when he did it with the other girls. It was just noise to her.
To that thought, John closed his eyes and celebrated the end of the past weeks of monotony.
“To summarize my disappointment in your failure to inform me earlier: every second matters,” the princess ended her five-minute lecture about why John should have called her immediately.
‘All that just because I started with the phrase, ‘about half an hour ago,’’ he thought, ‘better not tell her that is already a downplay.’ “Didn’t this lecture cost you more time than it was worth?” John asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lydia’s stern voice was underlined by the constant scratching of several pens. “I can do my finances while telling you exactly why you are wrong. My productivity has not been hindered in the slightest.”
The rustling of papers, the soft sound of a piano, both of these replaced her voice for a moment as she fell silent. Then she spoke up again and these noises were pushed into the background. “Any other news worthy of my attention?”
“My girlfriend is coming,” John told her.
“The girl who was with you in the hospital? Pinkish white hair?” Lydia asked, likely just to be sure.
“The same, although her hair is back to a bright pink,” John mused, “You are going to let her fight too?”
“Princess,” Lydia said, her voice as hard as iron.
“What?” John genuinely did not understand what she meant.
“Going to let her fight too – princess,” she explained her correction, “I know that you are from a different continent but I demand an understanding of our situation, Newman. You’re in my debt and acknowledgement of the difference in our stations will serve you well.”
‘Ah, right,’ John thought, he had heard that before. It was an overblown insistence for his American sensibilities, but he was not in the situation to barter. “I ask for your forgiveness, princess.”
“You are forgiven,” her voice softened up to a stern tone. Then, she continued. “Probably, yes. We will speak about this in person. Do you have a date for when she arrives?”
“Two days from now,” John told her.
“What time?”
“No idea yet,” he admitted.
“Send me a text on the when and where, once you do,” the princess instructed him. “Anything else?”
John considered for a moment, then said, “No, that would be it.” Immediately, he heard the click of her phone being put down. He raised an eyebrow, then shook his head and sighed. “The girl is seriously weird,” he said and sat down on the table, across from Mono, and started complaining. “On one hand she can be very understanding, on the other she takes everything so seriously you think she might be discussing the possibility of nuclear warfare.”
“Maybe you’re not taking anything seriously enough, dude?” Even as Mono sassed him, her white eyes raced over the pages. She was almost through that book now.
“I think I’m plenty serious,” John pushed back.
“You also think that it’s fine to make out with four women at the same time.”
“That’s not just fine, that’s a glorious privilege,” John defended with a smile. Mono rolled her eyes for one moment. Their conversations usually went like this, much to John’s enjoyment. The support had a sassy note to her that made banter ever a pleasant back and forth dance. “How is the book?”
“Predictable – like most of these detective stories,” Mono responded.
“Only if they are well done,” Herman chimed in as he came back from the kitchen. He stopped in the doorframe and awkwardly scratched the back of his head, when the attention of the Gamer and his Artificial Support turned to him.
“Why would they be well done if I can predict the outcome?” Mono asked, between genuine curiosity and confusion. “That makes it boring.”
“Pardon me, but if that is your opinion you might not be the target audience,” Herman meekly responded. “Detective stories are…. How do I put this?” He crossed his arms and gathered his thoughts. “The joy in them is for the reader to feel smart, either because they figured out the riddle ahead of time or by making them feel they learned something by gently pointing out the mistakes in their train of thought as the detective lays down the truth. It is a big puzzle and when the author gives you enough information to figure everything out yourself he is doing a good job. Of course, there is a fine line to walk between putting too much or too little hints in there.”
“I like detective stories, but not the ones that make it easy,” Mono said after pondering about what Herman had said. “I want those that also throw in misinformation that can throw you off the right track.”
“Also, very tricky,” Herman passionately said, “Make somebody out to look completely innocent and you either get an annoyed reader - who feels betrayed by the sudden shift - or a very obvious bad guy. Throw in too little misinformation and you just succeeded in making it so everybody is thinking about that character. Everybody suspects the guy that is ‘definitely’ innocent. Balance is key.”
“You have thought about that a lot,” John threw in there and in response Herman actually turned a little red.
“Yeah, sorry, I just really like detective stories,” he mumbled.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” John said, “I know how it is to be passionate about useless stuff, I am a gamer…wait, no, I am The Gamer. Capital T, capital G.”
Herman laughed, Mono sighed. There was another laughter in his head. ‘I check on what you are doing and you are making bad jokes,’ Salamander said, ‘felt your power coming back, we looked through the notes ourselves. Wanted to…’
‘I FEEL THAT IS MEAN!’ Sylph interjected, ‘We now cost percental mana, that is mean, I think Gaia is mean. Also, you are mean John!’
'Why me?’ he asked.
‘I want another gummy bear! I have forgotten what they taste like!’ Sylph exclaimed, ‘I demand gummy bear! Bear gummy! Gum-gum Bear! Gumo-Gumo n-.‘ There was a blubbering noise. John could imagine what just had happened: Gnome had taken Sylph and stuffed her into Undine’s body.
‘E-ehem,’ Gnome stuttered even while clearing her throat, a feat only she could possibly accomplish. ‘We wanted to know what we will do now?’
‘What do you mean?’ John asked.
‘What we do now, you dimwit!’ Salamander shouted at him, ‘Are we going to grind more? Are you just sitting on your ass? We have stuff to do! Don’t get me wrong, fucking all the time is fun, but I need something else to do!’ Undine sent a feeling of pure boredom as well, Sylph added ecstatic hyper-activity to that and Gnome a cautious wish to get out and do something. Salamander just kept cursing. ‘Fucking idiot, this wouldn’t happen if Nathalia was around, granny would make stuff interesting,’ she said.
That reminded him: he had not seen the dragoness ever since they had separated in the barrier. Which was weird, he had expected her to show up the following week. Was she bored of him or did his lack of Instant Dungeons make it impossible for her to find him? She had not bothered Rave either, which was where she would be expected to pop up, considering Aclysia was with her.
Nathalia had just vanished for the moment, leaving John with a strange sense of longing. He had just started to feel a genuine connection to the dragoness. No doubt, however, she would pop up when he least expected it.
John looked at the clock. It was already past 8 PM, so doing anything else today was not worth it. ‘I will relax until tomorrow, look at our new stuff in detail then and then we meet up with Rave the day after that. Then, Lydia will likely want to meet up and I have a lot of questions for her… and she probably has a lot of orders for us.’
‘Boring.’ Salamander separated from his surface thoughts with that final complaint. The other elementals closely followed.
Truly, John did not know if he felt like grinding at all. The month he had spent 12 to 16 hours a day in constant combat had been a taxing affair. After his two month vacation, he was somewhat ready for it again. ‘I hope I don’t have to do such an intense stretch again,’ he thought.
“The elementals?” Herman asked when John came back to reality.
“Yeah…my facial expression?” John asked to find out how the apothecary found out.
“You usually don’t start making random grimaces,” Herman confirmed, contorting his lips and eyebrows in a number of entertaining ways. John cackled at the display.
Eventually they ate half of the lasagne, put the rest away for tomorrow and John then went up the stairs for the night. He extended his hand to the doorknob. Then he stopped.
Mono’s light steps stopped behind him. “When will you stop freezing at the door?” she asked.“It is just an item.” John let out a dry laugh. “What is so funny?”
“I said the same thing to Aclysia on two occasions,” John admitted before pushing open the door.
The rooms in the second story were all the same. There were three of them, same wooden floor as below, same blue wallpaper, same furniture style. The reason John didn’t spend a lot of his time in his room, aside from the lack of a comfortable couch, laid on the table next to the bed.
It was a spine-like piece of metal, spikey rips extending to the sides and a longer, smooth part curving downwards. The entire thing was slightly shorter than the top of a small woman’s head. The thing that had been stuck in Thana’s brain. John, like virtually every other day, picked it up and turned it in his hands. At first, he had looked at it with sadness or anger, sometimes both. Nowadays he just looked at it as a memento of worse times and with curiosity.
John refused to give this thing away. He had no idea what other hands would do with it. He wasn’t even sure what it was capable of. He couldn’t store it in his inventory, the metallic piece simply didn’t pass the dimensional barrier. It was like he was trying to push through cement with another block of cement. Neither could he use Observe on it, whenever he tried to he just got a headache.
‘Maybe now that it is patched it will work?’ John thought and was rewarded with an exploding pain behind his eyes. “Urgh,” he groaned and breathed in sharply, counting to ten. The moment he arrived at six the pain was suddenly gone. The same tended to happen when he used Craft or Enchant. The only other idea he had was to have Mono eat it but he had decided that that was a bad idea. If it gave him a headache for just looking at it wrong, what would it do to an Artificial Spirit that tried to eat it? John didn’t dare to imagine the worst-case scenario.
He looked at the underside of the sturdy middle-piece. His eyes fell on the same words as always. “Mengele-Project01: Subject-El-Blood-Abysswalker,” he muttered to himself. Most of this was self-explanatory or easily theorized. Josef Mengele, Project Number One: Subject is a Bloodmage and Abysswalker. John did not know what El stood for however. He didn’t even know if that was an l or an uppercase i. Could even have been a Roman numeral.
Same as everyday, he placed the object back on the table and groaned. Thana had been dead for a longer time than he had known about her or prepared to fight her even. Yet still John felt that this incident would haunt him for a long time to come. ‘Hard times make hard men, isn’t that what they say?’ John wondered.
He would lie if he said he felt less experienced after the whole incident. It had taken the part of his naivety that had allowed him to just waltz into the Bloodfallen HQ the way he did. The part that had told him he was strong enough, latently or at this very moment, to just fix everything. Reality disagreed, however. Ironically, John had since found a bit of a connection with the classical Superman. Much like Superman’s abilities still did not let him fix the heart attack of his father, so too did John have to accept that he could not perfect the world. That naivety had left him. The whole affair had also left him knowing the brink of death, although he doubted that he learnt anything valuable from that particular experience, aside from not wanting to repeat it.
Whatever the case may have been, John didn’t regret what he had done, only how careless he had been about it. If he could have redone it, he would have looked deeper into Thana first and prepared for the eventualities of failure. It was a German General's saying that now came to mind: ‘Plans never survive contact with the enemy.’
He ended his reflection for the evening. It was over and done with. Hanging on to the regrettable past would not help him in any way. Yet he would probably find himself staring at that piece of metal again, wondering what he could have done better. Hanging on to the past was not helpful, but learning from it certainly was.
He threw himself onto the bed. “So, Mono, anything interesting today?” he asked.
“Same as every day,” she said, which essentially meant no, and extended a hand. John gave her his phone and put his clothes into his inventory. Another part of their routine. Mono, like Aclysia, did not sleep but unlike Aclysia she did not take pleasure in doing chores. She browsed the net when he was sleeping instead.
She had the decency to hide the glowing phone screen by pushing her head and the phone under her black poncho. After pulling her legs close as well, John was left with a black and white folded girl on his floor. It was equally ridiculous as it was cute. For a moment, she poked her head out. Before she could speak up, John assured her, “Too tired tonight to start fucking.”
“Okay, good,” Mono popped her head back down. She typically left the room when he did it with the other girls. It was just noise to her.
To that thought, John closed his eyes and celebrated the end of the past weeks of monotony.
