John looked at the clock in the living room. The arms for hour and minute, standing at 19 and 54 respectively, moved sluggishly compared to the constant movement of the one indicating seconds. John found the clock extremely irritating. He was used to the hands moving with sudden jumps; the fact that they were all moving continuously and steadily was, for the lack of a better term coming to mind, alien.
The clock was just a thing to keep his attention away from pacing about impatiently. The ladies in the house had called it quits a mere twenty minutes ago. Everyone was back to their routines.
Thana was watching crap TV, Rave was relaxing listening to music on her MP3 player, Lydia was doing work, Aclysia was cooking, the elementals had taken to their respective relaxing activities, some of which meant screwing the dragoness. There was a certain unease in the house though, centred around the one person not even pretending to follow any sort of normality.
Momo was sitting on the front lawn. She did not even have the patience to get herself a chair and a book to make herself comfortable while she waited for the Horned Rat to arrive. She would have stood right next to the mana street if they didn’t share the sentiment that Richard would get John before doing whatever he needed to do to fix up Momo.
The artificial support was radiating such intense impatience, sitting with her legs crossed on the cold ground, that John felt like his mind was right next to a small sun. “Ya should probably go talk to her,” Rave, pulling the plugs from her ears for a moment, commented on her boyfriend’s continued gazing inwards. How she knew what he was thinking about continued to be a mystery.
John made a grimace as his girlfriend raised her legs to allow him to stand up. Her wonderfully long legs high in the air, she raised a pink eyebrow.
“Whad’are’ya’waiting for?” she slurred. “Go get her, tiger!”
“I just, don’t really know what to say,” John confessed.
“What did ya raise Charisma for then? Just say something, was good enough to get me around,” Rave pointed out.
“Yeah, but you are like…” John thought about it for a moment, “we are the best unlikely pairing in the world, you know? Like the hot cheerleader and the shut-in nerd.”
“And she’s the president of the book club. Now, go talk to her about nerd stuff, so I don’t have to listen to it,” Rave demanded and stubbed her big toe in his face. John grumbled something unsure but stood up.
He looked down at Rave as her legs fell back on the couch. She smirked and gave him a thumbs-up at the same time Aclysia peeked out of the kitchen. “Food will be ready in 35 minutes,” she announced and smiled at John as well; “Please have Momo inside by then, Master. I will patiently await your return.”
His heart fluttered pleasantly as he felt the support of the two most important people in his life. They barely knew what this was about. Obviously, he had told them what the ‘Broken Wings’ thing was about, but he had been vague on the details. He did not regard it as his place to try and explain Momo’s feelings to everyone. They did understand that this was important to the solitary support.
“I will be back soon,” John promised.
Aclysia tip-toed her way over to him with quick steps. Rave rose from the couch. The guardian’s pale, pink lips pressed on his left cheek, softly, full of a desire for him to succeed in his goals. The techno-lover’s glossy, full lips pressed on his right cheek, energetically, full of a wish for all of them to be happy. John, stuck between, reminded himself how lucky he was as he wrapped his arms around both of their waists and just spent a moment basking in their warmth.
Then he went to get his winter clothes.
Dirt crunched under his feet, as he stepped off the paved path and onto the lawn. The grass had seen better days, being slightly spotty in the December climate. “I would ask if you are cold,” John said as he stepped close to Momo and sat down right next to her on the freezing cold ground, “but I know it never bothered you anyway.”
Momo looked at him with a disappointed side eye and said nothing.
“What?” John wanted to know, despite being well aware.
“No Frozen jokes,” Momo stated her demands; “None. Never. And don’t dare to sing.”
“Fine,” he agreed, having successfully broken the ice. Singing was a thing that would be categorized as a war crime if he did it anyhow.
“I brought you this,” John said and gave her the book he had last seen her reading. It had been left at the dinner table.
“I finished that yesterday,” Momo pointed out, leaving John’s hand, wrapped in the pink gloves Rave had made him buy, hovering in the air.
“Oh,” he made a surprised sound before stuffing it back into his inventory.
Three awkward seconds.
“But thanks anyway,” Momo muttered underneath her breath and shifted into a slightly more comfortable position, eyes firmly set on the blue light of the mana street in the distance. Beyond it lay the star filled night sky, intercepted by flying islands and blue-glowing streets. It was a serenely scenic beauty. They couldn’t enjoy it fully, not with the tension going on.
“So, what is the first thing you are going to do with your wings?” John tried to start the conversation again.
Momo groaned, “Use them to have a better balance when I ride your dick.” A pause, for emphasis. “What the hell do you think I am going to do? I am going to fly through the dead of night.” Her harsh tone made John chuckle. “What is so funny?”
“You,” he said, honestly; “I am going to miss you when you leave me behind.”
“That’s a while off now isn’t it, Master?” She sighed, not impatiently, just as a form to make her conundrum audible. Her gaze turned to the sky above.
“But it is going to happen,” John said.
“It is going to happen,” she agreed. “You know what the first thing I am going to do is?”
“Nope.”
“I am going to go far, far away from all cities, somewhere where there is no light pollution whatsoever,” Momo smiled ever so faintly. “And then I am going to lie and look at the starry sky.”
“If Richard keeps his word, you can soar through it as well,” John said and raised his head to look above with her.
He wrinkled his eyebrows; the stars had vanished and left the sky pitch-black, only the moon sent a pale light. It was additionally unsettling because it was a new moon.
“That looks ominous,” a man, kneeling at John’s side, commented. With elegant looks, a sharp jawline and short cut, black hair, the man was the perfect example of a suit tailored into a human person. Which was incidentally also what he wore.
Both Momo and her creator jumped from the sudden appearance, and they turned as they scrambled away in unison. “Hello,” the man grinned in a familiarly devilish way.
“Richard?!” John spoke instinctively.
The Horned Rat, wearing the hull of a human, gave John a thumbs-up. “That’s what you call me. Don’t be alarmed by the sky by the way,” Richard answered and pulled his suit into position until it was completely flawless; “It’s a side effect of the spell I use to hide my presence from the ruler of this space.”
“So, you are completely hidden?” John made sure. He really didn’t want to get into even worse graces with Romulus. Generally, he didn’t want to be affiliated with the Horned Rat more than necessary. Although he had a question to forward to the god that would probably change that. One thing after the other, however.
“There is no such thing as complete invisibility,” the Horned Rat spoke. “Especially because I have to not only hide my presence but fool all of the sensors into thinking they are actually still watching reality. Just erasing this spot from everyone’s monitor would just be waving a flag around that screams ‘come get me’.” He started cackling, “So, instead I erased twenty other spots all over the city from perception. The authorities will have fun with that one. If I had to warrant a guess, though, there are two forces still watching us. One is hiding in that brush over there.” Richard pointed at one of the many hedges.
A quiet, cursing, “Deus Vult, we have been found!” could be heard, followed by the rattling of armour.
There was no reason to be concerned about that, the Knights of Teuton had been informed about the god’s coming. Then Richard pointed at the celestial body above. “Also Luna is looking at us, I’d bet,” he seemed to feast upon the sting of panic that hit John upon hearing that.
“Isn’t that bad for you?” John wanted to know, the moon goddess’ dislike of the Horned Rat had been quite obvious on her last visit.
“She can’t rat me out, pun intended, without making Romulus aware, very aware, of Nathalia’s presence, and I don’t plan to stay long enough to have her be able to conspire against me,” the Horned Rat informed him.
“Okay, are you done now?” Momo interrupted their talk, she had waited as long as her patience could sustain. “Fix me!” The demand was quite clear.
“Sure,” the Horned Rat agreed suspiciously easily.
‘Just what is your endgame?’ John wondered as he saw Richard raise a hand. The air rippled, his hand disappearing in a dimensional pocket for a moment. He pulled out a tip of one of his horns.
“Eat it,” he tossed it at Momo. The support caught it but looked understandably distrusting. “The spell I weaved into your core is made to fix itself when you ingest a large amount of my mana,” the Horned Rat explained. Happily, he added, “Of course it will also increase the amount of power and the clarity of information about John I get through you.”
The Gamer grit his teeth and glared at the Rat, who looked back with a knowing glint in his eyes. ‘I wish I would be a giant asshole sometimes,’ John thought. Caring for others made it way too easy to be played at times like this. There was no way he was going to step in and tell Momo that she couldn’t fly. The Horned Rat had put everything in place just so John would be perfectly aware that the god was always watching over his shoulder.
But why? Why did Richard want John to know he was being watched?
Momo looked over at her creator with a sorry expression. She knew that what she was about to do would be bad for him in the long run. With a pained nod John signalled to her that he wasn’t happy about it, but that he understood. She swallowed the horn with a disgusted expression.
John ignored the other windows that popped up, asking him to select the item bonus. Instead, he watched as Momo unfolded her wings for the first time.
In the dark, black night, the white, hexagonal feathers of pure energy were gleaming softly. John could see how the cracks were mended, how the broken panes grew complete and their energy rose in intensity until the gleaming turned into a bright glow. The black extensions of Momo’s back that these energy fields were attached to straightened in a series of snaps, until they were fully symmetrical.
As if someone had suddenly flipped the light switch in a dark room after a long night of gaming, the hexagons flashed once as power pulsed through them freely for the first time and then slowly dimmed. They stabilized in a state where the individual cells were a pure white frame that turned milky, somewhat see-through, towards the middle.
Momo stretched her wings, unsure what to do despite her earlier bravado. Slowly, her heels rose from the ground. Panic flickered over her features, as if she herself wasn’t sure what was happening, then she hovered in the air. She turned around her own axis at a crawling pace. A tiny bit higher, she rose.
She blinked. The wings folded and quivered, feathers of power changing their angle in response. Her body tensed up, limbs slightly pulling towards her torso. She landed on her feet. Then she jumped, and her momentum resisted the pull of gravity with ease.
First, she shot straight upwards, towards the dark moon in the silent night. There was a whirring sound, akin to the buzzing of a power plant’s turbine put through an electronic filter, as she cut through the air. A simple readjustment of her wings and she made an overly sharp turn, heading straight back towards the island but with the wrong side of her body pointing at the ground.
Hurriedly, she tried to adjust her course. In a series of janky curves and turbulent swerves, she managed to avert imminent crashing by leaving behind the island and then nosediving over the edge, vanishing from sight.
John sent Jack after her, but before the sparrow even arrived at the edge, Momo appeared again. With a wonderful smile on her pale lips, her white eyes filled with joy only the fulfilment of a long-standing wish could bring, she twirled through the air. The long poncho fluttered, a multitude of lights sparkling behind Momo as her fireflies spread throughout the empty sky and replaced the stars. A trail of red, green, blue and white lights followed Momo as she learned to fly with her mended wings.
The sight, the feeling of her freedom, beaming happiness that spread through John and everyone else that was connected to his mind, all of that made this worth it.
“Uh, uh, uh,” Sylph flew by, “that looks like fine fun. Great fun. I want to join, I wanna to join!” A streak of green, the air spirit whizzed after Momo.
“You airhead, it’s ‘I wanna join’!” Salamander, appearing from somewhere as well, quickly followed and added to the beauty in the sky as they flew further and further away.
Eventually all John could see was a white comet, drawing a trail of stars and orbited by a green and a red streak. Without a doubt the people below had seen more wondrous things in their time here.
“They are still within your protective sphere, right?” John asked the Horned Rat. He didn’t want to rain on their parade, but reality was still a thing. He selected the new bonuses for Momo as he talked to Richard.
There was no choice there.
“Yes, they are,” Richard assured him. “I might be an unsavoury individual, John Newman, but I am not going to deny a girl her first flight in peace.”
“As long as you don’t gain anything from it,” John added, and the Horned Rat shrugged innocently.
“Well, that concludes my business here,” the Horned Rat announced and turned to leave. “Visit me announced next time.”
“Would you be interested in a deal?” John asked without looking up from Momo’s character window, spending her newest points on Intellect. Only after that did he turn his gaze to the Horned Rat.
The human head on top of the suited man’s body flickered like a mirage and made way for a downscaled version of the rat skull John was used to. The red dots flared with power, and the dry, revealed teeth creaked as his face contorted into an unnatural grin.
“Would I?”
John looked at the clock in the living room. The arms for hour and minute, standing at 19 and 54 respectively, moved sluggishly compared to the constant movement of the one indicating seconds. John found the clock extremely irritating. He was used to the hands moving with sudden jumps; the fact that they were all moving continuously and steadily was, for the lack of a better term coming to mind, alien.
The clock was just a thing to keep his attention away from pacing about impatiently. The ladies in the house had called it quits a mere twenty minutes ago. Everyone was back to their routines.
Thana was watching crap TV, Rave was relaxing listening to music on her MP3 player, Lydia was doing work, Aclysia was cooking, the elementals had taken to their respective relaxing activities, some of which meant screwing the dragoness. There was a certain unease in the house though, centred around the one person not even pretending to follow any sort of normality.
Momo was sitting on the front lawn. She did not even have the patience to get herself a chair and a book to make herself comfortable while she waited for the Horned Rat to arrive. She would have stood right next to the mana street if they didn’t share the sentiment that Richard would get John before doing whatever he needed to do to fix up Momo.
The artificial support was radiating such intense impatience, sitting with her legs crossed on the cold ground, that John felt like his mind was right next to a small sun. “Ya should probably go talk to her,” Rave, pulling the plugs from her ears for a moment, commented on her boyfriend’s continued gazing inwards. How she knew what he was thinking about continued to be a mystery.
John made a grimace as his girlfriend raised her legs to allow him to stand up. Her wonderfully long legs high in the air, she raised a pink eyebrow.
“Whad’are’ya’waiting for?” she slurred. “Go get her, tiger!”
“I just, don’t really know what to say,” John confessed.
“What did ya raise Charisma for then? Just say something, was good enough to get me around,” Rave pointed out.
“Yeah, but you are like…” John thought about it for a moment, “we are the best unlikely pairing in the world, you know? Like the hot cheerleader and the shut-in nerd.”
“And she’s the president of the book club. Now, go talk to her about nerd stuff, so I don’t have to listen to it,” Rave demanded and stubbed her big toe in his face. John grumbled something unsure but stood up.
He looked down at Rave as her legs fell back on the couch. She smirked and gave him a thumbs-up at the same time Aclysia peeked out of the kitchen. “Food will be ready in 35 minutes,” she announced and smiled at John as well; “Please have Momo inside by then, Master. I will patiently await your return.”
His heart fluttered pleasantly as he felt the support of the two most important people in his life. They barely knew what this was about. Obviously, he had told them what the ‘Broken Wings’ thing was about, but he had been vague on the details. He did not regard it as his place to try and explain Momo’s feelings to everyone. They did understand that this was important to the solitary support.
“I will be back soon,” John promised.
Aclysia tip-toed her way over to him with quick steps. Rave rose from the couch. The guardian’s pale, pink lips pressed on his left cheek, softly, full of a desire for him to succeed in his goals. The techno-lover’s glossy, full lips pressed on his right cheek, energetically, full of a wish for all of them to be happy. John, stuck between, reminded himself how lucky he was as he wrapped his arms around both of their waists and just spent a moment basking in their warmth.
Then he went to get his winter clothes.
Dirt crunched under his feet, as he stepped off the paved path and onto the lawn. The grass had seen better days, being slightly spotty in the December climate. “I would ask if you are cold,” John said as he stepped close to Momo and sat down right next to her on the freezing cold ground, “but I know it never bothered you anyway.”
Momo looked at him with a disappointed side eye and said nothing.
“What?” John wanted to know, despite being well aware.
“No Frozen jokes,” Momo stated her demands; “None. Never. And don’t dare to sing.”
“Fine,” he agreed, having successfully broken the ice. Singing was a thing that would be categorized as a war crime if he did it anyhow.
“I brought you this,” John said and gave her the book he had last seen her reading. It had been left at the dinner table.
“I finished that yesterday,” Momo pointed out, leaving John’s hand, wrapped in the pink gloves Rave had made him buy, hovering in the air.
“Oh,” he made a surprised sound before stuffing it back into his inventory.
Three awkward seconds.
“But thanks anyway,” Momo muttered underneath her breath and shifted into a slightly more comfortable position, eyes firmly set on the blue light of the mana street in the distance. Beyond it lay the star filled night sky, intercepted by flying islands and blue-glowing streets. It was a serenely scenic beauty. They couldn’t enjoy it fully, not with the tension going on.
“So, what is the first thing you are going to do with your wings?” John tried to start the conversation again.
Momo groaned, “Use them to have a better balance when I ride your dick.” A pause, for emphasis. “What the hell do you think I am going to do? I am going to fly through the dead of night.” Her harsh tone made John chuckle. “What is so funny?”
“You,” he said, honestly; “I am going to miss you when you leave me behind.”
“That’s a while off now isn’t it, Master?” She sighed, not impatiently, just as a form to make her conundrum audible. Her gaze turned to the sky above.
“But it is going to happen,” John said.
“It is going to happen,” she agreed. “You know what the first thing I am going to do is?”
“Nope.”
“I am going to go far, far away from all cities, somewhere where there is no light pollution whatsoever,” Momo smiled ever so faintly. “And then I am going to lie and look at the starry sky.”
“If Richard keeps his word, you can soar through it as well,” John said and raised his head to look above with her.
He wrinkled his eyebrows; the stars had vanished and left the sky pitch-black, only the moon sent a pale light. It was additionally unsettling because it was a new moon.
“That looks ominous,” a man, kneeling at John’s side, commented. With elegant looks, a sharp jawline and short cut, black hair, the man was the perfect example of a suit tailored into a human person. Which was incidentally also what he wore.
Both Momo and her creator jumped from the sudden appearance, and they turned as they scrambled away in unison. “Hello,” the man grinned in a familiarly devilish way.
“Richard?!” John spoke instinctively.
The Horned Rat, wearing the hull of a human, gave John a thumbs-up. “That’s what you call me. Don’t be alarmed by the sky by the way,” Richard answered and pulled his suit into position until it was completely flawless; “It’s a side effect of the spell I use to hide my presence from the ruler of this space.”
“So, you are completely hidden?” John made sure. He really didn’t want to get into even worse graces with Romulus. Generally, he didn’t want to be affiliated with the Horned Rat more than necessary. Although he had a question to forward to the god that would probably change that. One thing after the other, however.
“There is no such thing as complete invisibility,” the Horned Rat spoke. “Especially because I have to not only hide my presence but fool all of the sensors into thinking they are actually still watching reality. Just erasing this spot from everyone’s monitor would just be waving a flag around that screams ‘come get me’.” He started cackling, “So, instead I erased twenty other spots all over the city from perception. The authorities will have fun with that one. If I had to warrant a guess, though, there are two forces still watching us. One is hiding in that brush over there.” Richard pointed at one of the many hedges.
A quiet, cursing, “Deus Vult, we have been found!” could be heard, followed by the rattling of armour.
There was no reason to be concerned about that, the Knights of Teuton had been informed about the god’s coming. Then Richard pointed at the celestial body above. “Also Luna is looking at us, I’d bet,” he seemed to feast upon the sting of panic that hit John upon hearing that.
“Isn’t that bad for you?” John wanted to know, the moon goddess’ dislike of the Horned Rat had been quite obvious on her last visit.
“She can’t rat me out, pun intended, without making Romulus aware, very aware, of Nathalia’s presence, and I don’t plan to stay long enough to have her be able to conspire against me,” the Horned Rat informed him.
“Okay, are you done now?” Momo interrupted their talk, she had waited as long as her patience could sustain. “Fix me!” The demand was quite clear.
“Sure,” the Horned Rat agreed suspiciously easily.
‘Just what is your endgame?’ John wondered as he saw Richard raise a hand. The air rippled, his hand disappearing in a dimensional pocket for a moment. He pulled out a tip of one of his horns.
“Eat it,” he tossed it at Momo. The support caught it but looked understandably distrusting. “The spell I weaved into your core is made to fix itself when you ingest a large amount of my mana,” the Horned Rat explained. Happily, he added, “Of course it will also increase the amount of power and the clarity of information about John I get through you.”
The Gamer grit his teeth and glared at the Rat, who looked back with a knowing glint in his eyes. ‘I wish I would be a giant asshole sometimes,’ John thought. Caring for others made it way too easy to be played at times like this. There was no way he was going to step in and tell Momo that she couldn’t fly. The Horned Rat had put everything in place just so John would be perfectly aware that the god was always watching over his shoulder.
But why? Why did Richard want John to know he was being watched?
Momo looked over at her creator with a sorry expression. She knew that what she was about to do would be bad for him in the long run. With a pained nod John signalled to her that he wasn’t happy about it, but that he understood. She swallowed the horn with a disgusted expression.
John ignored the other windows that popped up, asking him to select the item bonus. Instead, he watched as Momo unfolded her wings for the first time.
In the dark, black night, the white, hexagonal feathers of pure energy were gleaming softly. John could see how the cracks were mended, how the broken panes grew complete and their energy rose in intensity until the gleaming turned into a bright glow. The black extensions of Momo’s back that these energy fields were attached to straightened in a series of snaps, until they were fully symmetrical.
As if someone had suddenly flipped the light switch in a dark room after a long night of gaming, the hexagons flashed once as power pulsed through them freely for the first time and then slowly dimmed. They stabilized in a state where the individual cells were a pure white frame that turned milky, somewhat see-through, towards the middle.
Momo stretched her wings, unsure what to do despite her earlier bravado. Slowly, her heels rose from the ground. Panic flickered over her features, as if she herself wasn’t sure what was happening, then she hovered in the air. She turned around her own axis at a crawling pace. A tiny bit higher, she rose.
She blinked. The wings folded and quivered, feathers of power changing their angle in response. Her body tensed up, limbs slightly pulling towards her torso. She landed on her feet. Then she jumped, and her momentum resisted the pull of gravity with ease.
First, she shot straight upwards, towards the dark moon in the silent night. There was a whirring sound, akin to the buzzing of a power plant’s turbine put through an electronic filter, as she cut through the air. A simple readjustment of her wings and she made an overly sharp turn, heading straight back towards the island but with the wrong side of her body pointing at the ground.
Hurriedly, she tried to adjust her course. In a series of janky curves and turbulent swerves, she managed to avert imminent crashing by leaving behind the island and then nosediving over the edge, vanishing from sight.
John sent Jack after her, but before the sparrow even arrived at the edge, Momo appeared again. With a wonderful smile on her pale lips, her white eyes filled with joy only the fulfilment of a long-standing wish could bring, she twirled through the air. The long poncho fluttered, a multitude of lights sparkling behind Momo as her fireflies spread throughout the empty sky and replaced the stars. A trail of red, green, blue and white lights followed Momo as she learned to fly with her mended wings.
The sight, the feeling of her freedom, beaming happiness that spread through John and everyone else that was connected to his mind, all of that made this worth it.
“Uh, uh, uh,” Sylph flew by, “that looks like fine fun. Great fun. I want to join, I wanna to join!” A streak of green, the air spirit whizzed after Momo.
“You airhead, it’s ‘I wanna join’!” Salamander, appearing from somewhere as well, quickly followed and added to the beauty in the sky as they flew further and further away.
Eventually all John could see was a white comet, drawing a trail of stars and orbited by a green and a red streak. Without a doubt the people below had seen more wondrous things in their time here.
“They are still within your protective sphere, right?” John asked the Horned Rat. He didn’t want to rain on their parade, but reality was still a thing. He selected the new bonuses for Momo as he talked to Richard.
There was no choice there.
“Yes, they are,” Richard assured him. “I might be an unsavoury individual, John Newman, but I am not going to deny a girl her first flight in peace.”
“As long as you don’t gain anything from it,” John added, and the Horned Rat shrugged innocently.
“Well, that concludes my business here,” the Horned Rat announced and turned to leave. “Visit me announced next time.”
“Would you be interested in a deal?” John asked without looking up from Momo’s character window, spending her newest points on Intellect. Only after that did he turn his gaze to the Horned Rat.
The human head on top of the suited man’s body flickered like a mirage and made way for a downscaled version of the rat skull John was used to. The red dots flared with power, and the dry, revealed teeth creaked as his face contorted into an unnatural grin.
“Would I?”
