A long sigh reverberated from behind the raptor mask. Magoi reached for the cup of freshly brewed tea that Aclysia had poured him a little bit ago. Throwing a fair chunk of the content between the teeth of dinosaur skull, he somehow drank it, as the exhale of held air soon testified. “Why do you do these things to me, John?”

The two of them sat in front of the High Fateweaver’s tower, to the direct west of John’s own home. A simple white table had been carried outside, along with a couple of chairs. Simply a nice place to spend mornings, when the summer invited to use the sun rather than the artificial light of electronics or magic. Aclysia and Beatrice were standing right and left behind John, as was usual.

Leaning back in his own chair, the Gamer couldn’t help but smirk like he had already won the discussion. The tone of the High Fateweaver wasn’t directly dismissive, just complaining about something they both already knew he would agree to. “Well, I do need the help, so it seemed to be the sensible thing to ask, you know?”

“Sensible… sensible… pah,” Magoi mumbled, throwing his arms up in a theatrical fashion. “About as sensible as the smartphones you young people keep staring at. Small displays, you need to scroll every three seconds, why don’t you just get one of these?” He waved around his sturdy newspaper. The ever-updating pages wobbled in the windless warmth of the sun. “Proper pages, something to hold onto and look classy with.”

“Looking classy is a necessity I have long since transcended,” John declared. “I mean, looking classy is just a way to impress the ladies and I have no real need to do that anymore. I have all the girls I could ever need and more.”

“You didn’t ever need more than the one, I would wager,” Magoi pointed out, himself a happily monogamous man.

“Eeeeeeh,” John made a balancing, doubtful gesture with his left hand. “If I hadn’t gotten my powers, I would have probably been happy with just getting one, but my Libido was always above average. Given my parents and their behaviour… yeah.” He ended that topic before he could think about it any further.

Magoi was probably rolling his eyes at that moment. “Sure, sure, people in the west have confined themselves to one wife for generations, but you are special.”

“No, I am not, and no, they haven’t,” John returned with a chuckle. “All throughout history, men, especially powerful men, have gone ahead and slept with additional women, approved by their wives or not. I made sure everybody engaged with me knew this from the start. I would say that at least puts me above people that cheat on their spouses.”

“I will concede that much,” Magoi agreed; his tone, metallically distorted by his mask, made it clear that he was done with the topic. In the first place, the High Fateweaver didn’t actually have anything against John and his practices. He was just playing devil’s advocate. Like the Gamer, Magoi was liberally minded. As long as it didn’t damage anybody else, one was free to do whatever one pleased. Given that this was the Abyss, the ‘not damage anybody else’ part was not as widespread as either of them would have liked.

‘I think I have improved things tremendously in that aspect at least,’ John thought. Time had flown by and he had been active in America for about 5 months now. What he had enabled with his action had drastically decreased violence in most of the areas he had covered. Since Fusion, like all working states, effectively declared that the military and police forces had a monopoly on violence, people suddenly needed to find other ways to solve their differences.

There still was the odd Abyssal who decided a fireball was a proper response to glasses being priced too high, in their opinion, but the law dealt with them pretty swiftly. In general, Fusion’s police force was moving pretty effectively and swiftly. Not only because they could count on being reinforced by much stronger people if things really went south, but also because many of them were used to so much worse. Most of John’s officers or higher administrators were those that had stood with him during the whole New York conquest. To put it mildly, they had been through a lot since.

“So, what exactly do you want?” Magoi finally asked, looking at his pocket watch. Reading the time, around 9 AM, he pressed the metal lid back on the chain-bound, golden contraption and slipped it back into his suit pants. “Time dilation until midnight tomorrow?”

“I would actually prefer the full forty-eight hours,” the Gamer said, “so we would get out on my birthday at around this time. I have a lot of catching up to do. Not the nicest request when you got off vacation so recently, I know.”

“There have been worse,” Magoi dismissed with a wave. “Compared to having to administer for you, or teaching even, sitting in a barrier for 20 days isn’t that bad. It’s just a long time.” The High Fateweaver stroked the chin of his mask, which looked a bit silly. Then again, he was a fully-grown man wearing a dinosaur skull and a top hat with a butler uniform making up the rest of the odd outfit. Oddly enough, it was the green bow tie that tied everything together, pun partially intended, at least as far as John was concerned.

“This will delay the new IBMA, won’t it?” John asked. The anchor atop the former Thorne HQ, responsible for creating the category 3 Hudson Barrier, was not a unique device. It was costly to produce, for sure, but by no means impossible. What it was, however, was intensive in time, resources and skilled oversight. The one they had was, measured against any other device of the same design, a hastily put together thing. It would only last a few years at best before the steady flow of magic ate away at some of the internal imperfections and gradually transformed them into proper causes of system failure.

A few years was good enough to make a few more, though, and John had immediately requested that Magoi would start with that. As an IBMA was the culmination of basically all Fateweaver enchantment and engineering knowledge put into one device, Magoi was using the creation of the second one as a way to teach his Fateweavers. It was also a good way to seek out who had the talent to succeed him in skill, where his son was already supposed to succeed him in position.

A level of nepotism that John wasn’t entirely fine with. Then again, being the leader of Magus Magi, Fusion’s Fateweaver education and administration sub-guild, wasn’t necessarily a job for the most powerful person. As long as Magnus remained competent, something that the overly reliable man clearly was, things should work out just fine. That aside, even if he was only slightly above average himself, Magnus had all the theoretical know-how he ever could have.

‘It’s a real shame that he has all that discipline and determination but none of the talent to properly make use of it,’ John thought, wondering at the same time whether that same lack of talent had produced those other two characteristics. ‘If I had a way to alleviate that talent problem, then I would have someone truly capable on my hands…’

“Well, yes, by at least those two days,” Magoi answered his question. “I took my vacation while I had to wait for everyone else to get their runes perfectly done, since they only had to follow instructions for that; the next part is going to be a bit more complicated. We have to adjust the exact places of the internal frames, then pour concrete over the base layer, then do the same for the second layer and so on.”

“The frame isn’t consistent across all anchors?” John asked. He wouldn’t get involved in the making himself, but he also would never build a nuclear reactor and appreciated at least knowing somewhat how they worked.

“No, you need to adjust for distance to leylines, pre-present barriers, set the strength of overlap protection, maybe program in specific entrance points, all of that,” Magoi listed just a few of the things that they could or had to modify, by the sound of it. “And I am not leaving all of that to the students without looking over their shoulders the entire time. One mistake and we have to pry open the concrete and that’s a massive pain.”

John spared himself the question whether or not Magoi could just continue the classes in the time dilated barrier. For one, he didn’t want a bunch of students running around while he grinded, risking a potential leak about future abilities he might acquire in there. Then there was the nightmare of organizing all of those students to actually come with them. Letting some of them fall behind on their training would have its own series of inconveniences he didn’t want to bother with. Lastly, for the IBMA to be transported in and, after the ‘two’ days, back out, was also quite the hassle.

“Why do you even pour concrete over that thing?” John asked instead, remembering the shape of the IBMA they already had. It was a pyramid of stacked arches, with platforms sticking out at the corners and, at the lowest level, along the sides as well. Thirteen platforms in total, eight at the base, four in the middle, and one at the very top, each big enough for one person to stand on. “Correct me on this, but concrete isn’t magical in any way, so what benefit does it have to encapsulate the whole thing?”

“It’s precisely because it is not magical in any way that it is useful,” Magoi retorted. “If we don’t insulate the individual runes and internal mechanisms, they’re just not going to work the way you want them to. Its kind of like copper wire and making a magnet. We also need proper footing in the proper positions to activate it and standing on the raw thing is not advisable. Something might get bent out of shape… plus all the holes.” The High Fateweaver took another gulp of tea, then jokingly added, “At my age, every fall might be my last.”

“I think you’re a bit sturdier than the average grandpa,” John dared to suggest.

“If only I was a grandpa!” Magoi complained, and as if on cue, his wife opened a window.

Mabirl must have overheard the conversation from whatever room she was currently in, the living room if John remembered the layout correctly, and decided to chime in. “Have you helped Magnus find a wife yet, John? Becoming a grandparent is hard when your oldest son decides to spend all of his days working!”

“Don’t you have two daughters as well?” John wondered, a rhetorical question, since he had met both of those.

“I have a ‘free spirited’ party addict and a brat, yes!” Mabirl shouted back, only half-joking. That was some new information about Stefanie Magus, the middle-child of the family. It explained so much as to why the mother of three knew so well how to handle Rave. Although that woman seemed to have a downright divine level of patience anyway.

“Well, I plan to go drinking with him sometime soon, maybe something will come of it?” John shouted back. Even despite the housewife’s own raptor masked, he could feel her warning gaze. “Yes, I do swear I am not going to put my own dick between him and anything remotely interested in him.”

“Good,” Mabirl approved with a nod, then closed the window again.

“Okay,” the Gamer turned back to Magoi with a solemn expression. “If SHE was my girl, I would probably stay with just one as well. You have a headstrong wife.” Of course, he was joking. Mabirl wasn’t that different from Lydia in those aspects and he got the feeling that, in sixty years and three children later, the queen of Germany would reach levels of stern unheard of.

“I have the best wife,” Magoi returned in amused tone, “a.k.a. the love of my life, a.k.a. me getting supremely lucky.” He finished his tea and then rolled together his newspaper before throwing it into a dimensional pocket. “Shall we go then or do you have anything else you need to get done before? Seeing how we’re wasting ten minutes for every one that passes.”

“Oh no, do lead the way,” John said, and the two of them got up. The I.D. Gate wasn’t too far away. Just the little walk to the heart of the island and then up a few stairs that brought them to the grass covered roof of the star fort on which his proper palace with its semi-gothic aesthetic was resting. They didn’t need to get in there, since the I.D. Gate stood on the lawn. The three doors in a stone wall looked out of place.

Regardless, Magoi opened the middle one and both of them stepped into the pitch black, seemingly endless space behind. The High Fateweaver did something, at his skill level gestures were unnecessary, and the blackness was exchanged with a grassy plain as if somebody had simply switched a light on.

“Alright, my home,” he snapped his fingers and a completely accurate replica of his tower appeared. “Your home,” he snapped again and John’s old house appeared out of nowhere.

“Can’t you make my new house?” John asked with a careless grin.

“Sure, but then you don’t get the time dilation for the next five days,” Magoi responded in a serious non-serious tone. “Replicating that huge a building is difficult. Also I will have to freestyle the internal appliances.”

“Right, I do wonder about that…” John looked around. “How do you get running water and electricity in this place? Can you just will mana generators into existence?”

“No, I can just will a connection to the water and electricity networks into existence,” Magoi answered. “Have you ever seen a fuse box in a barrier?”

“Yeah, a few times,” John nodded, first time had been back at the old arcade, where Jimmy had made it. Then, much more recently, he had witnessed more than a few being installed on the to-be-renamed Savage Island. “You can just replicate those.”

“No,” Magoi denied. “But I can get them to work instantly.”

“…How does that work?” John wondered, since he had seen the amount of manual labour that had gone into actually making those things.

“With preparation,” the High Fateweaver reached into his dimensional pocket and pulled a laptop out of his dimensional pocket. “Without materials, it would be impossible, but if you bring all the necessary parts with you,” he put the laptop back, then snapped his fingers. The laptop appeared on top of a table, “getting complicated things done isn’t that complicated. You just need to know what is simple enough to create and what is too complicated to put all that thought into. I have made so many Protected Space fuse boxes in my day, the details are seared into my brain. As long as I bring the necessary metals in myself, I can just install them inside houses I create without much thought.”

“So, its experience and talent?” John summarized.

“As most things are,” Magoi confirmed and looked at his pocket watch again. John could hear the tiny mechanism for the seconds. It clicked once, then there was a way above usual gap. “One to ten,” Magoi confirmed, putting the clock back into his pocket. “Here are your transitionary gates.” As he said that, the squares of light opened as a row along the landscape. “Do go ahead and do your thing. I’ll be working on my book.”

“Writing down your biography?” John wondered.

“Yes, book four, my modern life,” Magoi shook his head. “I would like to say that you wouldn’t believe how much I have gone through in my life, but I think one could write several books about your own adventures, John.”

“Maybe,” the Gamer wondered how long that story would be, just to this point.