Collide Gamer

“What is wrong with my life and whoever made beer taste this good?” Rave asked while moving as little as possible. She was currently sitting in front of the toilet and having her back patted by her boyfriend.

“You are going to be fine,” John promised, reaching her a glass of water. She took it, took a minor sip and then hung her head right back over the porcelain throne.

“Why aren’t YA suffering like a normal person?!” the lightbearer complained about her solitary misery. She was the only person in the house who was pretty much incapacitated from her hangover. Lydia had a headache, yes, and was laying on the couch as she was, shockingly, unable to do her paperwork properly, but she was just feeling weak not sick to the boot.

The Artificial Spirits had recovered remarkably fast, as did the elementals; Nia may have been suffering under the surface but so far that hadn’t been apparent; Eliza just regenerated right back to lunatic normalcy, and Nathalia...

Nathalia wasn’t here anymore. Gaia only knew where she had gone to, but John had more than a mild interest on either finding her or proving himself worthy as quickly as possible to see her again.

But that wasn’t relevant to Rave’s question. “Because I just got a series of hangover debuffs and got to clear them by crossing a bunch of checkmarks,” he explained to her what he had done before she had dragged herself out of bed with agonized groans.

By going down a list of nutrients his status effects told him he was missing, he decreased a brain-splitting headache to a nuisance and finally to nothing. It had involved a very hearty breakfast made by Aclysia, with lots of salt, vitamins, vinegar and water but, at the end he had gotten it all done and away with.

“Your powers are bullshit,” Rave complained and looked at the case of painkillers next to her on the floor; “I wanna just skip hangovers as well!”

“Can you do something about this?” John asked Undine who was soaking in the nearby bathtub.

“Maybe,” she answered with uncertainty and slimed her way over as a diluted puddle of goo with a will. Wrapping herself around a sick Rave, she became slightly green as her healing slime permeated into every bit of the technolover in an attempt to remove all the causes for her current very-much-not-well-being.

“Oh lady Gaia in heaven, thank ya for giving me a boyfriend who has a healer!” she exclaimed and jumped to her feet. Obviously, it had worked. Rave scooped up Undine’s face and pulled her up, which was a mildly discomforting picture because John now looked at half a torso sticking out of a medium sized, translucent blue hill with a very long neck and finally her head. In all fairness, Undine’s deformations were another one of these things that he was mostly accustomed to by now. “Why didn’t ya do that sooner.”

“I didn’t know I could and wasn’t sure to speak up,” Undine apologized in her usual sing-song voice. “Sorry.”

Despite becoming way better at it over the past weeks, it seemed that Undine would always be a bit awkward to communicate with. That was fine, generally, but in moments like this, it stood out. “Well, let’s do the same for Lydia.”

“I feel superb,” the now queen said in surprise, “good job, Undine. Truly, you are the second-best thing about your master.”

“Thank you,” Undine said and, after making sure she wasn’t needed anymore, went back to her bath.

“The best thing would be Aclysia, right?” John asked; “What are the top five?”

“Aclysia, Undine, your powers that I was able to use for my goals, your dick and your company, in that order,” Lydia gave him a very quick answer while heading for the door of the living room to go back to her room. “Anyhow, I have queen things to do; I need to get my administrative apparatus organized, put the first reform ideas on the table, take congratulation calls and so on.”

“Aren’t you officially on vacation until the end of this month?” John asked; apparently Romulus had put something like that into place so that Lydia had enough time to get her personal affairs settled and assemble a cabinet before her regency began while also looking at the reforms Romulus had promised.

“True, but vacation was never my style,” Lydia shrugged, “Anyhow, am I correct in the assumption that we are all going out around 1 PM?”

John nodded. The emperor had told them, through Sol, to meet him at 14 o’clock today. “We are going to find out the backstory of Gaia, that is going to be more than a bit exciting,” he said. Actually, he was completely prepared to be a rather boring history lesson, but, somehow, he doubted that was going to be the case.

“That’s about… 6 hours from now,” Lydia said, they all had slept rather lightly. John wasn’t particularly bothered by that, he worked optimally when having at least six hours of sleep, but he could work with the four he had gotten. “Guess I will take a nap in that time as well. I will await you at the front door once the time has come.” With that the metal mage left the room behind.

‘I will never drink that much alcohol ever again,’ John told himself while thinking about what he would do the remainder of the day. Just because he had been able to heal the pain didn’t mean he looked forward to that ever again. Also, he hadn’t been able to argue with Nathalia properly, although he doubted that would have made a large difference on the dragoness’ decision. It already seemed to have been made by the time he entered the pub.

“What about you, Nia?” John asked the blank who was playing with Copernicus. “Want to come with?”

“No, I already know that story,” Nia answered and left John wide-eyed as she stood up. “It’s not that interesting.” Her expressionless face turned towards the window. “And I need to speak to my mentor and see to my future.”

“Have you decided if you are going to stay in or leave the Illuminati yet?” John didn’t ask about the Gaia thing because he didn’t want to hear the story he was going to get from a much more involved source soon enough twice. Also, Nia probably sucked at storytelling; with her extremely monotone voice, John couldn’t imagine that listening to her for extended periods would have been particularly interesting.

The pariah held up a card that said ‘Uncertainty’. “I have an idea,” was all she said, “and I have been here for too long already. See you again, Copernicus, goodbye, John,” that was a rather abrupt farewell.

John wasn’t quite fine with having two of these in the same day, so he stepped into her way and pulled her into an embrace. “Promise me you will come back to me as soon as you can,” he whispered into her ear.

“Yes, I will rather miss your scratches,” Copernicus commented from the floor.

“I promise,” Nia said, “I will be back as soon as I can.” Raising her head, the two of them shared a long kiss that tasted of nothing. A particular kind of nothing, as John realized, as it was so completely devoid of all taste that it became a taste in itself. He tried to burn this emptiness into his memory, who knew when he would next be able to feel her lips?

“Now go meet that Rat, and if his head is still too big for his body, laugh at him for me!” John told her.

“Sure?” Nia said with a quizzically tilted head as she went out of the door on her bare feet.

John stood in the living room for a few seconds, thinking again about what to do now. Whatever show Eliza was watching today was running in the background, and Rave was churning down that breakfast she had missed now that her appetite was no longer blocked by the after effects of self-poisoning.

“When are you going to leave by the way?” John asked Momo at the table next to his girlfriend, eating small pieces of metal like a freeloader. Which she actually was, now that she had to ask John for money instead of just redrawing it from his inventory as her allowance for being his second Artificial Spirit.

“When you are leaving for America,” Momo gave a precise answer at an indiscriminate time; “Basically, I am staying with Aclysia until the gang breaks apart completely.”

John looked at the house around him and realized that the days in here were now officially numbered. The only reason for him to keep staying in Rome was because he wanted Romulus around until they knew how stable exactly Eliza was. Nathalia and Nia were already gone now, soon Lydia would head north to govern Rex Germaniae, Momo would leave them when John decided that Eliza was stable enough and that’d mean their time here was over.

“These were a lot of happy days,” he mumbled.

“Ja, they were,” Rave said out loud and patted Copernicus who jumped on the table, “but we gonna build something even better, right, tiger?”

The smile she gifted upon him after saying that made him straighten his back and stand upright. It gave him a reason to smile himself and dwell less on the now and look forwards to the future, a future where that smile would still be with him. “Right,” he answered as his brain snapped out of question mode and into action; “First thing I should do is use that last upgrade to-“ He got into full-swing only to be stopped immediately, “Where is my upgrade token?” It wasn’t in his inventory anymore.

“You used it while drunk on your pants, Master,” Aclysia informed him, “Did you forget that?”

“Forget is putting it mildly,” John answered in half a panic. That was just a part that had been cut from his memory by the consuming void of alcohol. At least he used it on the right article of clothing, but what the hell did drunk-John pick?

‘Well, I upgraded the thing like I did my vest, so that’s nice,’ John analysed; ‘But what is Arcane Comet?’

‘That is pretty good, but fuck me, that mana cost,’ John thought and cried over the two other choices that may have been good but that he would never get to see. Well, it was useless to cry about it now, Gaia wouldn’t give him a do over. He would just need to get to a point where 100 mana wasn’t that big of a deal anymore.

“Anyhow, I still have wind in my sails!” he declared; “I am going to go grind for a bit.”

“The fuck would you grind for?” Eliza shouted over the noise from the TV and the crumpling of her bag of chips. “You are on the patch reduction shit! Instead of going and wasting your time on shit, get some rope and tie me up like a proper piece of fuckmeat.”

“As awesome as that sounds,” John said, “and it DOES sound awesome, I have one thing I can grind out without any reduction to anything. Which is that class level I can now get.”

“But that class level doesn’t involve you sexually abusing me,” Eliza complained. “Including some kind fucked up bindings, a vibrator, a gag and a fuckload of swear words while spanking the shit out of my ass!”

“But does it involve kicking something so hard in the balls that its brain explodes?” Metra asked. “Because I am bored and want to beat something up.”

“Well, we will see what the challenges are,” John said and opened the menu.