“Okay, how about this: martial law can be enacted either by the head of state, being me, or, in case the head of state is absent for a prolonged period, can be voted into effect by a majority in Congress. That good enough?” John asked.

“Don’t forget to give yourself the power to lift martial law as well,” Richard warned. “Trust me, there will be all kinds of political pencil pushers who would love to get there. I have been both on the receiving and abusing end of such clauses.”

“One would think a Shardbound to the face would be enough deterrent for them not to try,” John argued back.

“No,” Lydia shook her head, “because you made the decision to make this a republic. People will come to the conclusion that you are an idealist, not a ruler, thus they will discount the possibility… albeit they won’t discard it either.”

Metra threw in the expected opinion, “Would be fixed if you made this a kingdom, that’d send a WAY different message.”

“I find myself aligned with that option,” Lydia nodded. “Realms headed by royalty tend to be more suitable for people like you, John. Republics work best on small scales.”

“Why do you have to agree with her, Lydia?” John whined, feeling somewhat betrayed. He hoped the queen would see his reasons and, if not support, then at least understand them. “Doing what is easy at every turn would mean I am not holding true to my own values. Principles mean doing what is the hardest because you think it is right.”

“Because it would be easier to persuade my court that I have a relationship with a foreign king than a foreign president,” the noble sighed, “but ultimately, the continuous comments from my political opponents will not be greatly lessened, so do what you want to. You are not wrong about principles, after all.”

“Just run a triumvirate of republic, monarchy and theocracy,” the Horned Rat suggested, only half-joking since that was exactly what he was the partial head off.

“No thank you,” John declared and closed the binder of notes he had for his government layout. Thankfully, they hadn’t had much to say about his basic idea, so the flowchart he had come up with was still largely accurate. “Next topic: why the fuck are you here, Richard?”

That one had been brewing in his mind for a while, but between all the banter he had pushed it back until he felt like he was done with the things closer to his heart. As always, the rat god had to pull out the unsatisfying answer, “Ah, you know, as I told you at the airport, just checking on my bestest of future allies.”

“Yeah, no, but seriously,” John insisted. “Do we need to play our little game of guessing each other’s motives again?”

“I love that game,” the Horned Rat declared wiggling his fingers greedily at John’s head, as if he wanted to crack it open, slurp up the brain inside and taste the secrets. “The better you get at it, the more I feel like I am looking at a kindred soul.”

The Gamer sighed. “Can I at least get a hint?” he asked.

“One sounds fine, what do you want to know?”

“Did you arrive in the same moment as Lydia on purpose?”

That seemed like an odd question, but John could more or less puzzle together the rest depending on the answer. “No,” Richard shrugged with his entire upper body, the palms of his clawed hands pointing at the ceiling, “that was just a happy and funny coincidence. I had no information that she planned to come over – it has been hard to spy on your phone lately.” A much saying glance was exchanged between the god and Scarlett, who downed her third glass of whiskey with an egomaniac smile.

“Alright then, you came here to partake in the public announcement I have scheduled for the day after tomorrow,” John stated. “In order to make sure that the pact I made with you over a defensive alliance is announced to the world.”

“That’s about 40% of it, congratulations,” the Horned Rat applauded. “Truthfully, if it was just that, I wouldn’t have bothered to come myself. I know I don’t look like it, but I am actually a very busy rodent.”

John crossed his arms and laid back in his chair with an exasperated sigh, handing the folder he had closed to Aclysia in the same moment. When she stored it in her inventory, he was reminded that he still had a bunch of private things to do in the near future to increase his powers. At least three of them sprang to mind: Gnome’s evolution to tier 3, the unspent Fateweaver perk and checking what he could do with his GP.

However, he should focus on the now and not let his mind wander too much. “You wouldn’t possibly tell me the rest, would you?”

“It’s because I am the guy that’s supposed to tell Nathalia when she can come out of her exile,” the Horned Rat gave a surprisingly prompt answer. “So I came to look myself.”

“How is she?” John immediately shot up in his seat. “Where is she?”

“Horny, I won’t tell,” Richard giggled, probably feeding on the Gamer’s suffering. “You aren’t there yet.” He laughed some more. “Man, you should see her; when you get to her, she will probably break your hips just because of how much she needs your dick.”

The Gamer narrowed his eyes a bit; he didn’t like that the Horned Rat, technically a fellow male, had access to his draconic love interest. However, not only was his Libido immensely low but he also didn’t seem interested in Nathalia that way, a feeling that John guessed to be mutual.

“Just tell her I miss her, whenever you next see her,” he told the god.

“Sure, although I am pretty sure she won’t be able to hear me – too horny,” Richard was completely serious, and John could believe that Nathalia, after months without sex, was a mess stuck between masturbating, sleeping and eating.

That was when Aclysia reached into her inventory and pulled out a piece of cloth. “Give her this, then,” she asked of Richard, who took it and, deeply interested, spread it out. It was a shirt. “Today’s laundry,” the weaponized maid explained, “certainly, master’s smell will help her get off.”

If the eye-sockets could have had a deadpan look, right now the Horned Rat would have looked like he had just been through a two-hundred-page collection of the worst dad jokes. Wordlessly, he put the shirt into a dimensional pocket.

“Father,” Magnus spoke up for the first time in this entire conversation. “You said it would just be innuendos. I disagree. Their whole existence is dripping in sex.”

“Well observed,” the High Fateweaver spoke in the tone of the uninterested, flipping a page. “But the pay is good, so whatever.”

John looked away from his leading Fateweavers and scratched the back of his neck in a bit of an ashamed gesture. “Okay, yeah… but if you are the one calling the shots there, when will I get to see her again?”

“When I feel like you would survive the entailing tumble,” Richard put it bluntly. “I am not sacrificing you to the hips of the volcano goddess, John Newman, I need your brawn not hers. She may be my friend but she cannot defeat Romulus.”

“Alright then…” John cursed for a second that he was a mage build; if he was physically specialized, he could probably go there a lot faster. It wasn’t worth it to dump his Stat Points into Endurance in a rush to see Nathalia again. Although only barely. Problem was that, once she was sexually satisfied, she would berate the world out of him. Not to mention that he would deal a lot of damage to his own progress as well. ‘It’s dumb, stop trying to justify what your dick and heart want,’ he berated himself. “Moving onto more immediate things,” he changed topics yet again, “Lydia, you are staying for two weeks, right?”

“I am due to return to German soil on the second of May, so it would be more accurate to say thirteen days,” Lydia meticulously corrected her lover.

“Alright then,” John hummed, “I better call my mother then to make sure she expects us,” he checked his phone, it was shortly after midnight. Seeing that, he put the phone back down, “at a less ungodly hour.”

“She lives in Washington,” Scarlett stated, lights dancing in her red eyes like circuits, “can’t quite reach there yet, I don’t have a repeater beacon that far out.”

“I am uncomfortable that you just know where she lives,” John stated.

“If I wanted to, I could have her killed by the end of the week,” Scarlett dismissively stated. “Abyssals don’t make a habit out of making mundane people vanish, usually not worth the hassle, but it’s not hard. Although I assume you have hired a bodyguard.”

The Gamer stared at her, “I did and it is in your best interest that she stays alive, unless you want me to look for someone to blame.”

The blood-soaked technocrat just poured herself a new glass. “Whatever,” she waved off, seeing no value in this discussion. “What I wanted to get at: if you are heading down to Washington, you might as well try to conquer it.”

“She ain’t wrong,” Rave, having spent the whole political discussion playing something on her phone while listening to music, said while rolling up the cables of her earbuds. “Not like we actually control all of New York or New Jersey yet.”

“Lots of things to do,” Scarlett sipped on her fourth drink, circuits flashing up again and the television in the room suddenly switching on and depicting a map of the guilds on the North American east coast immediately surrounding them.

“To give ya the rundown,” Scarlett tapped on the table repeatedly, the short-nerved gesture of a smoker in the need of a fix, “the Niagara, Lower Lake Guilds and Heart of Lakes are so tightly knit that you might as well call them a super guild. I don’t know what they potentially have in store, and even if we assume you are the strongest person in that war, they have more resources than us at the current time. Going directly west is, therefore, dumb as bricks.”

“So we are basically pinned against the sea,” John analysed the situation. Before asking about the southern route, which was obviously where they were going to head, he wanted to know about the rest, so he let Scarlett go on.

“The American-Canadian-Trade or Amacat for short is not particularly rich. They are either what Thorne would have become eventually without your meddling or a much smaller NTC, depending how you want to look at it,” the Technomancer continued. “Pretty certain you can get them on your side without a single shot fired, if we play our cards right.

“The Small Lake Pact is a bunch of mediocre guilds clumped tightly together. They are a regional power largely because they have a good administration that makes good use of their strong strike forces. Easily put, they are independent because they are good at terrorism. That’s also why there’s an unaffiliated bit between all four forces in the area, the Small Lake Pact makes it unattractive to take while they themselves don’t have the resources to really claim that area.

“The Hidden Tradition is a bunch of native American shaman’s that have fled into the mountains when colonialism kicked into gear, go figure. Don’t like that spiritualistic bunch. However, they are strong, because they use unorthodox magic that you probably haven’t encountered and is therefore hard to strategize around.

“Little Maryland are the closest you get to an European style guild around here. Clear government, unified code of law, established borders and around for over two hundred years. As it so happens, located in Washington, D.C., probably not unexpected considering.

“I don’t think the small fry deserve any further mention. They are just guilds busy knocking each other over. If you wanted to, you could probably take them over in a few weeks.”

After that information dump, Scarlett emptied her glass and poured a new one, “That’s the gist of it, ‘boss’. Now go and do something useful with that so I can spread my network.” How she wasn’t getting drunk in the slightest despite the amount of high-percentage alcohol she was throwing into her body was an enigma.

“Not a nice tone to use,” John jokingly complained about her dismissive way of saying boss.

“We didn’t enter an agreement because of my fucking tone,” Scarlett took out the earlier denied cigarette. “We did it because I want to be safe from these fucks,” she gestured at the Horned Rat and Lydia, “who have enough power to end me with a thought if I stayed on my own.”

“It would take me three thoughts,” Richard specified. “One for the scrying spell, one for the teleportation spell and one for whatever I chose to kill you with.”

“Whatever,” Scarlett didn’t care about the empty threat. “Take your bravados to somebody who you pay to deal with them. Can’t imagine anyone listening to you if they have the choice.”

“The funny thing is, you are right,” the Horned Rat giggled. “That’s why I don’t give them the choice.”

Scarlett rolled her eyes and put her black hat on her head. “I am going for a smoke,” she mumbled into her cigarette, already lighting it before she stepped out the door, much to Aclysia’s annoyance. Despite John not having made an announcement on the matter yet, it was pretty clear that there was only one proper way to give Lydia what she wanted, visiting his mother, and also further their ambitions on the continent.

“Okay, so, after the announcement and setting up the basic government so it can sustain itself even without me around, we are going to Washington,” he told everyone. “We are taking over the Little Maryland, through whatever means we have that is the most humane. From there, we should be able to snowball our position.”

That was highly optimistic; reality had a tendency of other states not just watching idly as their competitors, particularly sudden new ones, went to strengthen themselves. If John moved, so would his surroundings. That was just common sense.

However, he couldn’t predict how they would act, so that was more of an art than a science. “Well, that’s everything. Richard, you are going to take some guest room, I assume?” John asked.

“Some small cove downstairs where I won’t hear you,” the Horned Rat unsarcastically nodded, disinterested in hearing the Gamer fuck around.

“Needless to say, I will be staying in your room,” Lydia declared. “Although I’d appreciate a private retreat.” Ironically, the former's request was harder than the latter's.