Collide Gamer

The sad reality of being the host of any large event like this was that he got to enjoy less of it than most. Regular rich people solved this issue by hiring organizers. John solved this by having several bodies and haremettes that could deal with a lot of the issues for him. Being who he was, he insisted on doing a lot of the work himself though.

‘Maybe not enjoying the event myself is part of my enjoyment of the event… revealed preferences and all of that,’ the Gamer thought. ‘If I hated it, I would find ways to weasel out of it all.’

John thought about that when he had a rare free minute. After the conference with the other world leaders, they had scattered, to ruminate on the revelations. Setting up the festival grounds finally relaxed. Now that matters were actually in motion, construction work diminished. People either had their stalls up or just surrendered to the fact that they would miss this day’s business.

‘Only one thing to do while I have free time,’ John thought.

John returned to his apartment. Once more, the scent of the room hit him with the force of a potent aphrodisiac. There was a delightful note of sexual desperation in there. Well, he imagined he smelled that. It was debatable if his nose could pick that up, but he knew it was there anyway.

Steeped in the scent as the room naturally was, it currently was occupied by only two of the harem’s number. Nahoa was one of them, greeting him at the door with the ritualistic bow of one of his maids. “Greetings, Master, how may I aid you?”

“I was thinking about taking whoever I find here out for a spontaneous date.” John’s eyes wandered over to the Couch. An assortment of snacks on the table were in arm’s reach of the stretch of padded leather that the axolotl demigoddess had presumably just occupied. The TV was on, a movie paused.

A grey hand reached up from the floor, blindly tapped around the table, until it found an open bag of crisps. Loud crinkling later, the hand retreated out of view again. John took a few steps to get Lyndell into his line of sight.

The mushroom woman wore an oversized, black shirt. Unlike Nahoa, who was sporting basically the same look, hers was not one of his worn articles. John would have known if he owned an Ergo Proxy shirt, an anime that he generally knew about because of its aesthetics but had never watched.

“You know, we have cushioned furniture, Lyn.”

“I like the floor,” the forlorn woman responded. Her tongue stretched out to receive the crisp her hand was moving towards it. Liquid adhesion did its work, the slice of potato retreated alongside her tongue, and the ancient entity crunched down on the snack. The spices upon it introduced a sparkle of will into her eyes, just enough to put up with the next second of existence.

‘God, why are goth girlfailures so hot?’ John asked himself.

Lyndell fuelled her way to live with a couple more crisps while John stood there, enchanted by her unashamed oddness. She lay on her back, on the floor, between table and Couch, her eyes fixed on a tablet she had placed on a standing frame constructed from her mycelium. This way, she could read whatever she was reading without moving any part of her. It was the peak efficiency of laziness.

“Would you like to keep lying there or would you like to go out with me?”

“Hmm…” The hum was a quiet, one-note sound that expressed a deep struggle between preferring the darkness of the room and soul to the brightness of the outside, yet also seeking the warmth of shared time. “Can we lay on the floor together?” she requested.

“Another time.”

“Hhhhhhhmmmm…” Lyndell groaned like an annoyed animal. Her mycelium began to retreat. An unwise order of operations. The tablet dropped, no longer supported by anything, and smacked her in the face.

John felt the blood rush into his face. Pressure got stuck, as he held his breath in a desperate attempt not to laugh.

The last remnant of the precursor civilization picked up the device she had clumsily let fall on her nose. Without a change in expression, she put it on the table, then lethargically rose to her feet. Crumbs of her snacking fell to the ground in a light rain.

“I can be lonely later,” she settled. “How presentable should I be?”

“However presentable you want to be,” John told her. “It’s our event, we can do what we want.”

Lyndell gave a sluggish nod before moving past John and to the bedroom. Nahoa emerged from it simultaneously. The axolotl maid had changed while they had been talking, now sporting a dark green summer dress with a long skirt.

“I borrowed it from Sylph’s pile.” Nahoa did a playful twirl, causing the skirt to fan out artfully. It settled back down. “Barely needs resizing.”

Casual exchange of their clothes was one of the many signs that his harem was harmonious. John loved to see it in effect. Sylph wore a lot of cutesy, traditionally feminine sort of dresses, which went against Nahoa’s usual preference for her tribal garbs.

“Here I am,” Lyndell came back out of the bedroom at record speed. She had exchanged one black, slouchy t-shirt for another and put on a pair of equally loose pants.

“You look like a couch potato obliging a date,” Nahoa pointed out.

“I am a floor mushroom obliging a date,” the primordial Lorylim corrected lethargically.

They headed out as three, making their way over to the limited festival grounds. John had no desire to mingle with the wider population. The Awakened had not yet been sufficiently browbeaten into the social etiquette he expected. Certainly, most people, mundane or Abyssal, had the common sense to either politely ignore it when they met someone famous on the street or, at the absolute most, ask for a quick photograph.

Alas, there was always a percentage of entitled morons who wanted more. Said percentage had been cowed into submission by persistent action from Aclysia. The new crowd needed to learn of the first maid’s reputation and that it was justified before John would be willing to show his face openly again.

For now, he would move among the guests.

His arrival there was barely noted. Certainly, there were some congratulations thrown his way, but for the most part people just saw the three of them and thought nothing of it. There were more people present than his guest list would have implied, which was in large part because of the ‘+retinue’ option on the invitations. Still, to say that there was a crowd would have been massively overstating the density of the people. Even walking down the busiest parts of the festival ground was akin to an inner-city street outside of the rush hours.

John had his arms around his women and his hands on or near their butts. Temporary abstinence would not deny him the tactile glory that was the shifting of muscles beneath cushioning fat. Though, putting a hand on Nahoa’s ass was difficult to impossible while walking. Short women had so many adorable traits, but they were also bad for his spine.

“Food!” Nahoa grabbed his arm and dragged him in the direction of her nose.

“Coffee!” Lyndell stirred from her forlorn lethargy to pull John another way.

“Ladies, ladies, neither of you are getting anything this way.” The Gamer pulled them both in, kissed them, then freed his hands. “Let’s flip a coin real quick. Heads, we get coffee first.” Both women followed the up and down of the withdrawn Token. John caught it, smacked it on the back of the other hand and declared the outcome, “Heads it is.”

“But my food…!” Nahoa lamented.

“It’ll still be there in a few minutes.”

They approached the coffee stand. It was a facsimile of a wooden house, though no bigger than a trailer and with a large service window that replaced most of one wall. Inside, a variety of apparatuses guided a chemical process to make a very specific kind of coffee.

“Three cups, please,” John requested.

“Of course,” the man on the other side of the counter said with a smile. The Token John put on the counter was a gesture of generosity. He had already paid for all the coffee he could see and more. “Anything extra with that?”

“I wish for the special,” Lyndell said and pointed at the decorated top of the menu. The ‘super chocolate coffee’, it said.

“Same!” Nahoa declared.

“Just plain coffee for me,” John said.

His cup predictably arrived first. One of the luxuries of the Abyss was being handed a proper, double-walled, metal mug with grip and everything. John fully understood why coffee sellers handed out cheap combinations of paper and plastic, but he very much preferred this.

The creation of drinks for his women was more elaborate. The coffee was siphoned from the apparatus, then poured into another. Cocoa essence and other liquids were added, the final product heated again, and then poured into a considerably larger mug. Cream and chocolate sprinkles were added on top in moderate measure.

Nahoa and Lyndell grabbed their treats, eyes sparkling. They both took a sip and shifted adorably. Even Lyndell almost jumped at the taste.

John shepherded his women to the stall the demigoddess had originally aimed for. It was a hotdog stand. Swift, he made the order for the three of them. He did not need to ask the women with him what they wanted. A simple hot dog with ketchup, mustard, pickle slices and roasted onions for him, a simpler hot dog with only ketchup for Lyndell, and a monstrosity with everything that could fit on it for Nahoa.

Once they had acquired them, John manoeuvred his food-hypnotized partners to a bench and sat down. They ate quietly, too focused on the delicious coffee and hot dog to consider talking. There was a world of difference between the regular, fast food hot dog one could get on street corners and this delicious thing. The bun was freshly made and toasted, the sausage actually consisted of mostly meat, and all the other ingredients were of similarly high calibre.

They sat there, on a stone bench beneath a large tree, and enjoyed the moderated warmth of the space. Keeping the Weather Tower running was taking a moderate investment of Maybel, but that was a price John was willing to pay. Though it was her wedding, John had managed to insist Lorelei got control of the thermostat over Rave. The result was a pleasant 21 degrees in the sun, 18 in the shade, and just the tiniest amount of cooling drafts.

“Fantastic.” John burped, meal completed, and downed the rest of his coffee.

“So uncouth.” The fungal woman’s tone made it impossible to ascertain whether she was being sarcastic or not. She licked a bit of ketchup off her fingers, having already finished her hot dog.

Nahoa was less than a third through hers and just mumbled something between bites. Her gluttony was on full display, tamed only by the tactical necessity to aim her bites with care, lest her stacked monstrosity of a meal turned into a mess in her lap.

“What were you reading anyway?” John asked.

“Harry Potter fanfiction,” Lyndell responded.

John was happy that he had already finished drinking his coffee, otherwise he might have choked on it from laughter. “Really?” he croaked.

“Everyone kept talking about the books. I read them. I liked them. I wanted more of that world. I looked up fanfiction.” The forlorn woman gazed into the distance. “Neville deserves happiness… I am not sure if he needs a game system to achieve it though.”

Nahoa took a long enough pause between bites to say, “There’s a lot of game systems in the fanfic department.”

“Not much of a surprise. Most of the people reading them are nerds in some form, so they like game systems.” John tapped his heel on the ground in a playful rhythm. “Also wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of fanfic writers also have a hobby in system design.”

“You are the one that really got that power,” Lyndell said.

“Indeed, I am,” John said, without boasting. “Is it weird to read about people that have the same powers as your boyfriend?”

“Hmm… no.” After finishing the rest of her coffee, Lyndell leaned against his shoulder. As per usual, there was some care involved with not getting stabbed by her curved horns.

The ‘nom nom nom’ by their side gave the idyllic silence a humoristic interruption. Nahoa devoured the rest of her hotdog. One would wonder where she left that entire thing, without knowledge of her true nature.

“So, you’re reading trashy fanfic now?” The gluttony demigoddess put on her best, ditzy ‘mean girl’ impression. “That is, like, sooooo pathetic! You should watch, like, these soap operas with me and Eliana instead. They have the best drama!”

“Do they have Neville being happy?”

“Noooooo, but, gurrrrrl, there is that one series where Ashley gets into a love pentagon and it's, like… sooooooo dramatic.”

“I don’t want dramatic, I want satisfying.”

Nahoa laughed at that point. “It’s no fun when you argue earnestly with the parody.”

“Oh, that was parody? I thought that was just you.”

“…Are you being insulting or sarcastic?”

Lyndell smiled very slowly.

“Sarcastic, got it.” Nahoa smiled back, the sharp expression coming across as malevolent on instinct. “So that was nice… how are you feeling, John?”

“Is the single bed too lonely?” Lyndell asked.

“It is lonely, but not too lonely. I haven’t gotten that pampered that I can’t even sleep alone… Matter of fact, I think I learned to sleep in basically every situation over my time in the Abyss.” He thought back to the battle of Warsaw and the time they spent besieged there. “Loud noises, no noises, enemies, floor, bed, it doesn’t really matter. When I am determined to sleep, I can sleep… It’s only emotional turmoil that ever keeps me up.”

“No emotional turmoil about getting married?” Nahoa asked. “I hear cold-feet are common on that front.”

“They might be, but… common is not what I consider when I think about my relationships.” He bumped shoulders with both of them and smirked.

A buzz in his pocket pulled him out of the simple happiness of the date and back to the activities of the day. He checked the message, then raised an eyebrow.

“Well, I am being summoned by a certain empress… the green one,” John clarified.

“We know who you mean,” Nahoa pointed out. “We never call Jane by that title and Lydia still goes by queen, mostly.”

“Fair enough.” Two kisses were put on two cheeks, then he stood up. “I’ll see you later.”

“Hopefully,” Lydell sighed.