“Why do these fucking creepy ass hospi-shits have doors anyway?” Eliza wanted to know as they walked further down the shore. “What dumbass reason could those scalpel-brains have to place doors anywhere?”

“Mhm,” John thought about that for a second. “I would say because unconscious people cannot enter or exit barriers, but if there is a physical entrance, they can be carried inside.” He had seen at least one case where that would have been necessary. “Which reminds me that I should probably get one of those myself to allow people to be carried OUT of the barrier. Gotta ask Magoi when he arrives.”

“Any word from him?” Rave asked.

“He is done with his business at the Fateweaver headquarters, he says,” John told her; he had just learned that earlier today. “Apparently there will be an official statement on Monday, but Magoi is now gathering up his family and coming over. He says he will be here on Wednesday.”

“I have made sure all rooms are in peak condition, so he can choose whichever he wants,” Aclysia informed everyone. They were pretty much all staying in the one-person suite next to the bridge. The bed there was large enough for all of them. That Rave and John stayed in the same room was self-explanatory. Aclysia and the elementals also were logically staying there. Eliza didn’t want to be alone, even though she did pick a room for herself where she never stayed but theoretically could if she wanted. Metra just didn’t care, and when she didn’t feel like cuddling, she just patrolled the barrier for the night.

The one exception was Nia who, except on nights she wanted to have sex, generally spend all of her time in the Menagerie. As a matter of fact, she spent almost too much time there. They hadn’t seen her for a period of five days last week, during which she had barely eaten or drank anything. If Aclysia hadn’t checked in on her, chances would have been she would have died happily between all the fluffy and cute things besieging her.

Much against Nia’s wishes, she was now forbidden from staying inside there longer than 16 hours a day. She had been ignoring him for two days following that new rule, enforced by actual settings in the menu that made it impossible for her to open any doors inside the building if she violated it. What finally got him in her good graces again was the creation of a Otototo, which John could best describe as an angelic otter, a being with feathered wings as its front-legs, that could fly like a winged serpent but also swim like an otter. It was quite cute, thus why Nia talked with him again.

He checked Google Maps and laughed. “You know, as the guy who made the decision to put his base on Liberty Island, I shouldn’t say this but I still will, the names around here are so stupidly American it hurts.” He had never been to NYC before, so this was a big learning experience for him as well. “Liberty State Park, Freedom Way… okay, that’s actually it, but those two are bad enough.”

“I like it, has the force of ‘MURICA!” Rave exclaimed and acted like she was punching some villain.

“By the way, we are at point 3 now,” John told them, and the group stopped. He had to say ‘point 3’ because this was just the edge of the aforementioned park, there was nothing special here to mark it. Also, because this was the point he liked the least. Nevertheless, John raised his arm and they entered an empty barrier. “Okay, nobody claimed this point, going to keep that in mind. Onto the next scene!”

“Only if you carry me!” Eliza suddenly demanded and then laughed out loud when he actually did it. “Finally stopped giving a fuck?”

“Pretty sure that switch flipped when I fucked you in the pool the other day,” he told her.

Across yet another bridge and they reached Black Tom Island. John took some issue with calling this an island, it was more like an outgrowth. The word peninsula worked perfectly well. As for what was on it, it was largely a grass covered square, four trees standing at the edges of a little plaza at the middle of it, on that stood a memorial to WW2 in the shape of a soldier carrying a concentration camp survivor.

“This is strangely poetic,” John mused, standing in front of said memorial and still holding Eliza, who he then kissed before she could ruin the moment. With her largely pacified, he put her down to see whether or not there was a barrier there.

The answer to that question was yes and came in the shape of what John could only describe as a slum. People were using different magics at low levels in tandem to get one of several fires going, one guy growing some small twigs, the next drying them out with some water magic, the last one then igniting it once enough had been put on a pile. They seemed to repeat that game for every small place between the tents and the shoddily build homes they could find. The only thing looking fresh or intact was the pretty old memorial.

From the size of it, John guessed there were about a hundred people here. When they noticed him, they did so with the slow disinterest of a people who knew they ran into no risk of being robbed on the basis of having nothing. Exception being the wood-drier amongst the trio of fireplace providers, who quickly made his way over to John.

“P-please, we seriously have nothing!” he immediately jumped to the worst possible idea, which would be that John just knocked over anything in the search of some valuables. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“Great, I am not here to bring any,” he told them. The man looked at him expectantly as if he was going to follow that up with ‘So strip, I don’t believe you,’ so that insurance failed to produce any wanted results. He decided to thaw relationships for a start, making sure they didn’t perceive him as hostile. Looking at the man in great detail provided him with an easy way to do that.

“Look, I recently took over Liberty Island,” John said in a friendly tone as he watched over the camp. He had thought it literally impossible for slums to exist in the Abyss. “And I am just scouting the surrounding areas because I need to set-up something. I had hoped to do that here.” Pulling from his inventory a box filled with three days’ worth of compressed food, not the tastiest stuff but nutritious, he offered it to Seth. “Why don’t we talk about it over some dinner?” Seth, between distrust and desperation, eventually picked the latter.

He had seen pretty bad cities, like Abyssal Warsaw, but living there had been bad because the Blood had been forcing everyone to work in a continuous war economy and everyone who was part of the Abyss caught outside the barrier was swiftly executed. How could that happen here, without such a force in place? The easy answer was: it couldn’t.

The people here had nothing because they were the ones that the lack of a coherent society spewed out at the end. They had cast their lot with one economic faction in the city, taken a gamble or something else had happened. Either way, they all ended up in debt or the bad side of particularly cruel organizations. As long as they kept their heads down, stayed out of the inner city and scraped together some money for the collectors they were left largely alone.

“We are waiting until the market inevitably rolls them over as well,” Seth finished, throwing a tiny piece of grass into the large fire that John had put together by doing with Nadine and Salamander in a few second what had taken the trio of Seth and his two helpers several minutes per fire. “Once they lose their grip, we can get back into the city. Just a few months of misery.”

“Why not just leave the city or the Abyss?” John asked.

“I don’t have a public record for the last 15 years, going to be hard to find a job that pays anything,” Seth told him. “It’s like that for most of us. Either that or we are just too stubborn to leave behind the city we grew up in. Fucking shithole it may be, but it’s our fucking shithole.”

John could respect that. The box he had brought up had been shared amongst the whole Enclave and quickly turned empty. ‘So, this is why, these people are stacked up at zero,’ he thought as he wondered what to best make of this situation. It seemed to him that he was seeing the effects of a completely unleashed market, with no shackling laws or morality to keep it in check. They had played Monopoly and now they had nothing more to play with until somebody flipped the board and they could scramble for the pieces.

“And if they find you in the inner city? I can’t imagine that every square metre down there is taken already,” John was sill curious.

“Depends who finds us: if it’s strangers, they will just shoo us away; if it’s the loan sharks, they just take everything from us they can find… if we are far behind the payments; they will sell us to a mana factory…”

Mana factories in the USA seemed to rely a lot on forced labour. Maybe a union would help there. “What about Thorne?” That was his last question on this topic.

“I am not THAT desperate,” Seth was quick to deny him. “The only way somebody like me is getting into the Thorne apparatus is if I am fine with them replacing half my body with electronics. I would never leave the Abyss again.”

John wanted to say that that didn’t sound like the worst of trades, seeing how he was currently stuck in a helpless situation.

“Also, as seldom as I get use out of it, I do like my penis.”

“They cut off their soldiers’ dicks?!” John now completely understood.

“That’s what I was told,” Seth answered.

‘Ah, rumours, better take that with a grain of salt,’ the Gamer mentally scolded himself for jumping to conclusions. ‘In summary, these people get pushed down but they also cling to a way of life that clearly isn’t working out for them… Still though, this society, or rather lack thereof, is not healthy.’

The more he learned about how New York ran, the more he was convinced that the take-over would be violent. Thorne did not seem to be an organization that strived to change any of this. There were so many question John had for the person running that guild, mostly about why they weren’t using their powers to better society at large.

John could theorize two possible ways: Number one, this was a fish in the water situation. Whoever was sitting atop those headquarters in the dock, they were probably used to the world just working this way. If they were and these people at the bottom around John were, then most of the people in New York likely were railroaded into a way of thinking that this ‘everything is fair game in love, war and economics’ motive was just how things were supposed to be.

If that was how it was, just waltzing into Thorne and forcing change on the whole landscape at once would become a street war. They were not a government, all he would leave behind was a power vacuum in the market. His intention was not to turn anarcho-capitalism into just anarchy, he wanted just capitalism. The conversion should be possible if he just dangled a large enough carrot around.

The second theory was that Thorne was trying to do what he was doing, but from the top down. They were ruthlessly tearing down the competition until there was no more competition, and then, when there was no one left to oppose them, they would change tactics and erect an actual government. The problem with that was that it would be bloody and leave a lot of misery in its wake, like every revolution did.

But those were all theories. John needed something graspable before he could take any of this as truth.

Whatever was right, he himself still believed that the bottom up solution was the better one. If he could just show people that economics with some morality was better for everyone involved and slowly spread his influence through the city by having more and more people pledge allegiance to him, then that was a take-over with as little blood spilled as possible.

It put him into a bit of a weird position, because he couldn’t imagine that the currently dominant forces would just let him do that. The haves were always weary of change. He would be on the offensive in territorial expansion but on the defensive in waiting for the enemy to react. ‘If I were them and looking at this trend, I would band together into a large alliance trying to crush this invader – me,’ John weighed his choices.

The smartest things to do would be to keep his head low until he was so strong that none of this would be a potential danger to his life. How long would that take though? A year? Two? How many people would suffer in the meantime, right before his doorstep?

“I want to make you an offer,” John finally said, as morality won over wisdom and self-insurance. He just couldn’t sit on his island and watch; the process of taking control of the ground would take so long that he would just have to grind at the side.

“Is it one I can’t refuse?” Seth looked like it finally came to the thing he had feared in the first place.

“No, you are entirely in your rights to refuse. Let me tell you something: I am going to take over all of this,” he gestured westwards. That could have meant the camp, the city, or the whole country, John was purposefully vague about the true extent of his ambition. “I don’t aim to do it violently though, so here is my offer: I will clean all of your loans, I will make sure you can stay here forever, I will provide some better shelter and give you work.”

Seth looked at him like that was all too good to be true. Doubt was there too, but with a glance at the hovering Salamander above him and the tree Nadine had grown to provide the firewood in the first place, the man was pretty convinced that John had at least the potential to keep those promises. “In return, this space will be owned by me and my guild, your businesses will follow laws that I set up. Basically, you agree to accept me as your governing body.”

“…Who are you?” Seth finally asked.

“I assume you haven’t been hooked up to Abyssal news recently,” John leaned back in the chair made from scrap and plant roots he was sitting in. “I fought in the tournament for German succession and the Roman-Blood war. I also have a unique ability that makes me one of the potentially strongest people on this our wonderful planet. My name is John Newman, I am a late bloomer, let’s put it like that,” he allowed himself to boast a bit, there was a need to impress here. “You haven’t heard a lot from me yet, but trust me, you will.”

Seth fell silent. While John really wanted an answer from him today, just to put his teleporter up, he didn’t want to hurry along a pretty important decision for his personal convenience. He could probably relocate the teleporter from point 3 if they decided to take the offer.

“I can only speak for myself right now… best is I get everyone’s opinion,” Seth told him.

“That would be the best,” John agreed. “How much time do you need?”

“Give us an hour.” That was way quicker than John had even hoped, but desperate people made quick choices when it came down to it. Thus, he nodded and left Seth to it, the group leaving the barrier.

“Why are we going away?” Rave asked.

“Don’t want to stand there all imposing; Metra alone could tear that camp to shreds and I am pretty sure they are at least subconsciously aware of that,” John told them. “Being there would just make them needlessly worried.”

“Ah, well, what are we going to do in the meantime?” she asked.

“Search for a place that sells hot dogs, I am hungry,” John answered.