“Then again, the fact that you decided to go with Collide meant you likely had a flawed character from the start,” Moira continued in the same breath and crossed her arms. “So, it’s the raw power that likely corrupted you further. Both of you. You were at least decent enough to keep clothes on in public, Jane Hollmey.”

“Glad to see ya too, Moira,” Rave chattered back. “Reminds me that I never asked: how mad were you when you found out that was me?”

“Mad? I had no reason to be mad. You were a third-rate threat, both by courtesy of your groups low power and the fact that you didn’t dabble in any arts too dark – until Travolta decided to ally with the Bloodfallen, of course. An issue that solved itself, much to the unnecessary hurt of everyone.” Moira sighed and shook her head. “That aside, I have to admit, I don’t ever recall meeting you in the hallways, so all your name got us at the time was an easier time to track you down whenever you did cross the line.”

“I did a good job laying low and, ya know, skipping school,” the Lightbearer joked and exchanged a glance with her boyfriend. They had a short, silent conversation with their eyes, then Rave got off his dick and both of them got clothed again.

When dealing with the kind of people that disapproved of the Gamer’s ‘degeneracy’, there were two paths to take. They could either continue as they were, effectively rubbing it in the face of the complaining party and riling them up, or they could stop (for the moment) and oblige the issues raised. Generally, John preferred to do the former, but he wanted to appear reasonable to the Warden.

“If you want to, we can have a more in-depth discussion about things,” he offered and waved at a nearby chair.

Moira raised one of her elegantly swung eyebrows. Although covered, the groin areas of both John and his girlfriend were an open display of perversion, being raised in a tent and drenched respectively. It was remarkably difficult to convince his dick that NOT plunging right back into Rave’s pussy was the right course of action. Until Source of Satisfaction switched to ‘regular’ mode and drastically debuffed his Libido.

Even with his boner slowly deflating, there was still the naked endflame elemental watchinging everything. They had stopped adding new food to her curves, so she had rolled onto her side to better follow the situation with a giant grin. John was pretty surprised that, at no point, Moira had blushed or looked startled by what was going on. She may have been strict, but she wasn’t sheltered when it came to erotic matters. The same couldn’t be said for her company, who had turned almost as red as the Warden’s hair.

Since an Observe on that companion had failed, John wasn’t surprised when it also bounced off Moira without an effect.

“I came here with the goal to talk to you, but… not in these surroundings.” Two tables over, an unrelated woman screamed ecstatically her demands to get taken up the ass. Elsewhere, someone shouted that he wouldn’t buy geodes at that price. Salamander cackled, Rave shrugged, John scratched the back of his head.

“Yeah, I can get that… well, I’m basically filled up anyway. Aclysia, see to it that the payment is made.” Aclysia obediently lowered her head and walked away, while he got up and straightened his clothes. “A walk then, Moira? I would say we have a lot to talk about.”

“We can talk in a minute, after Jane has changed her clothes,” Moira suggested, evidently taking issue with the Lightbearer’s state of legwear. “I suggest we meet at-“

“Just gimme a second,” Rave interrupted, after rolling her eyes, and proceeded to strip on the spot. It drew the attention of the majority of the room. There were videos of her naked body available, so the more porn-consuming members of the crowd had likely seen her curves already, but watching a woman with her curves and perfect bubble butt nude in person was something nobody wanted to miss. John just grinned and leered throughout all of it. They could watch, as long as they understood she was his and his harems to touch.

Once naked, ignoring any complaints from Moira, Rave slipped back into her pink sneakers and they turned semi-liquid. Over the course of a few seconds, the pink crawled over her body and manifested into a stretchy, neoprene-like material. The bodysuit hugged tighter to her curves than any other clothing could have. It was basically like a second skin that closed in a turtleneck and left everything else covered while making her round ass seem absolutely fantastic.

It was an Artificial Spirit in itself, created with much weaker cores and programmed without any sort of actual consciousness. This had the advantage that the bodysuit was self-repairing and could be upgraded by feeding it newer materials. Something that John had engaged in relatively recently.

Torso, upper thighs and the majority of her arms stayed with the same pink colour as always. The fibre in those areas was enriched with L-Baelementium, providing a natural resonance with Rave’s light-based powers. A few darker lines cut through here and there, breaking up the monotony of the semi-shiny surface of tightly knit strands.

The cover on her hands had been reinforced since she had gotten the suit, but her legs now followed that trend, being covered up to the middle of her thighs. Those areas were black and a bit thicker. The colour coordination came courtesy of Rave herself and had little to do with the metals that were part of the suit.

“Everything alright?” John asked, while his girlfriend did a few stretches.

“Sits like a comfy full-body glove,” Rave answered, grabbed her discarded clothes and tossed them at Beatrice, for them to be washed later. “Just distracting myself from being horny. How does my ass look in this outfit?” she asked, fully knowing that John had to give her bubble butt a smack afterwards. “Good as always, got it,” she moaned.

“Are you mocking me with this show?” Moira wanted to know.

“A bit,” Rave returned and threw her arms around John’s neck. “’Cause I got this man and ya don’t and that makes me want to show off, ya know?”

“See, she says she got the greatest ass in the world,” the Gamer turned to give the Lightbearer a quick kiss, “but I’m not sure whether she means her backside or her attitude.”

“Maybe I mean you when I say that, tiger, ever thought of that?”

“I’m more of a dick then an ass. Anyway,” John started to move and Rave switched from hugging his neck to his right arm so they could move more easily. “Shall we go for that walk?” he asked, already taking the lead. Beatrice followed immediately and Aclysia was on her way back. For the ease of things, Salamander went incorporeal and followed things mentally instead.

Moira shook her head, but followed as well. “Lorelei, return to our room,” she instructed her white-haired companion. “I think it’s best for you if you aren’t around this man for too long.”

“With all due respect, honoured Warden,” Lorelei commented, “I feel like I have to be present for this and it’s the kind of feeling I have been taught to heed.”

“Are you seeing something?” Moira asked in the kind of tone that made it clear there was more to ‘seeing’ than for a normal person. Not that the ritualistic metal ring around her head didn’t make this abundantly clear already.

“I’m seeing the influence of the Lady in this man, and his aura is brilliant to behold.” The messy-haired woman took a trembling breath that almost struck John as turned-on. “I want to keep watching him and see how she has blessed him.”

“Then you can come along,” Moira agreed, sounding surprisingly warm and in no way paranoid.

‘Not big on the secrecy, it seems,’ the Gamer analysed, while they left the cantina of oddballs. ‘At least those two, I shouldn’t make any generalizations about the entire Golden Rose on the back of their behaviour.’ On the topic of what Lorelei actually had said, John wasn’t comfortable with some sort of seer, or whatever she was, rummaging around in his aura for information, but if that was just the way she saw things, it wouldn’t serve him to insist she couldn’t tag along. That aside, if he voiced it, he would only open himself for the hypocrisy argument.

John guided the small group out of the building. The cover of clouds made the beach attached to the Paradise building deserted and as private a place as could probably be found. Only a few people were taking the break between waves of rain to set out and take a swim. The Gamer steered away from them and they just quietly went along. Wet sand crunched under their feet as they wordlessly distanced themselves, neither party willing to start the conversation despite agreeing to have it.

They finally found a nice place to sit, a grouping of large umbrellas that shielded an arrangement of tables and chairs around a public BBQ place. It was deserted and dry, exactly the combination they needed. Once seated, John broke the silence.

“So,” he started in a casual tone, “how are things back in Springfield?” It was a fairly general and impersonal question. Although Moira had left an impression on John, given how early in his Abyssal late-blooming she had appeared, he actually knew fairly little about her. They had only had very few encounters, none of which John would have categorized as pleasant or unpleasant, before he had left for Europe.

“Under control,” Moira said two simple words. “Oddly enough, thanks to you, in part. The Order of the Golden Rose had consolidated its new base of power in Springfield about the time you created a local power vacuum by setting free Thana. An optimal starting position to spread our influence.”

While that confirmed what John had thought had happened, he had to take a pause regardless. “You knew about Thana?”

“Not in the necessary details at the time, but we had some intel and we combined it with what we learned later.” The Warden shook her head. “My word probably seems like little more than virtue signalling after an entire year, but had we known what exactly the Bloodfallen were doing, I would have pleaded for my father to give you the support of the Order. With our help, it might have been less of a naïve rescue attempt.”

John thought about what that would have entailed. With the help of the Golden Rose, they probably could have gotten the tank out of there without damaging it, thus not setting Eliza free and instead handing her over to Herman. That could have easily led to a timeline with a whole lot more suffering for the pretty little psycho. “Don’t beat yourself up over it, it is how it is,” the Gamer therefore said. “It all worked out, somehow.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Moira stated and her fingers danced over the surface of the white table. “After all, it produced you and you’re a bit of an issue, all around. A latebloomer, rising highly even for someone among your kind and with no limit in sight, continuously amassing power of all kinds. Your personal magic ability, your political capital, your web of relationships, your wealth, it just continues to grow and you use it to build a massive federal state that promotes your kind of perverted decadence.”

“I have people in my administration that would condemn you for opposite reasons,” the Gamer countered and laid back. “A guild that expands and rules only through hammer diplomacy, squashing whoever practices the kinds of magic they don’t approve of and forcing their moral code on everyone in the mission to rescue humanity from the darkness. Also, your economic policies are horrible, as I’m being told.”

“We do what we must to ensure that warlocks, necromancers and other practisers of dark arts do not harm the innocent,” Moira pressed back.

‘I wonder if she is the virgin that Nashara was referring to,’ John caught himself thinking, at the mention of warlocks. In an effort not to derail the conversation, he instead continued on the topic. “We disagree on what must be done to ensure that. Regardless, you have to admit that the lands under Fusion are closer to what you would like to see than what I have found when I got there.”

“Yeah.” Rave raised her hands to list off a few things. “We abolish slavery wherever we go, promote civil rights and freedom of speech, we’re condemning practices that kill people and we enforce an equality under the law that the Abyss just can’t have unless you have an ultra-powerful nerd with a softie heart in charge. We don’t immediately bash someone’s head in because they summoned a demon or fiddled with some ‘corrupting’ powers, if that’s your issue.”

“I’ll admit that you aren’t a terrible influence on the world.” Moira seemed to have gone into this discussion willing to concede this from the start, given how easily those words passed her lips. “If I thought you were absolutely horrible, I wouldn’t have any interest in talking to you at all. I think you are just as misguided as the people in charge here.” She gestured at the Paradise reaching up into the sky behind them. “Debauched, perverted, insolent, with no respect for a proper society and well-mannered behaviour, but, ultimately, not an issue at this time.” Her green eyes fell back on John. “Creating a society on indulgence, however, will lead to decay and arrogance. The generation that follows the current one will be used to living in excess. For people like that, every taboo becomes a seductive thing to be broken. Your wish to just do whatever you want, your ambition, could pave the road to a resurgence of people that do not care for what you have built, because a society that indulges becomes selfish and those who are selfish will dabble in arts best left alone.”

John felt an unpleasant tingle in his spine. Not because she had hit the nail on the head with 100% accuracy, but because she was raising a very valid concern. “That could happen,” he conceded. “Given that you found me fucking in public, I guess you have good reason to dismiss me when I say that I’m not mindlessly gorging myself on the good life I’ve managed to make for myself. I’m reading philosophy, I’m listening to the people and I try to give credit to my critics when they’re right. Again, what you say could very well happen, but treating it as a foregone conclusion will only get us on another path.”

“And which one would that be?” Moira challenged.

“The one where we do whatever you want,” he asserted. “Where your Order becomes the only acceptable authority on everything. If you want to protect people from themselves, you have to continuously control more and more of their life until liberty dies.”

“We would only get involved as much as we need.”

“Can you tell me exactly how much that is?”

“Can you tell me exactly how much you can indulge without it becoming the road to ruination?”

“No,” John conceded immediately. “That’s why I made a parliament instead of keeping dictatorial power. I may have the intelligence to figure it out if I had all the data, but I cannot have the awareness to grasp every stream that flows through the culture. Even then, I have my biases, like everyone else. The ship sails best in the middle of the channel and I don’t trust myself to be the sole navigator of everything. Whether we run aground on the shore of tyranny or anarchy doesn’t really seem to matter to me. I’m more concerned about keeping afloat. I think having every single viewpoint out there will have the ship sail in a very odd way, but it should generally keep us around the middle.” He switched to a joking tone, kissing his girlfriend on her adorable cheek. “That aside, I don’t want to work that much.”

Letting out a long sigh, Moira rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I understand that idea; I’m not sure if your methods will bring you there. I don’t think another word than degenerate is fitting for the way you eat.”

John shrugged. “Then we should agree to disagree at this current point. Unless you think we can sort all of our differences in a talk right here and right now, it’s useless to shout at each other.” He gave both of them his most charming smile. “I would be happy to negotiate your integration into Fusion.”

Despite being blinded, Lorelei blushed intensely. She clearly had some way to, if not actually see, then to perceive things accurately.

“If you were to redeem yourself, it might be possible,” Moira carefully suggested. “Fundamentally, the divine mission the Order and the Wardens have been given is one of protection of humanity. We do not seek to rule, only to keep things safe. If there was a sovereign we trusted would not hinder us in our mission, we could make some concessions on independence, if need be.”

“Is that so?” John asked. “Well, how would I go about showing that I’m a good boy.”

“You would need to dial back on your impure lifestyle,” Moira began. “At best, you would disband your harem enti-“

“”No deal.”” Those two words were spoken, with wildly differing levels of enthusiasm, by John, Rave, Aclysia, Beatrice and all five elemental girls, suddenly popping up only to make their disapproval known.

“Then you’re right and we should just agree to disagree – for the moment,” Moira, slightly taken aback by the intense pushback she had just received, ended the argument. “I came here in a diplomatic effort to talk to Florida. Since they’ll apparently join you in a week, I decided to see how reasonable you were. Well, that and I wondered how you had developed.”

“Your evident distaste for my sexual appetite aside, you like what you see?”

“Spare yourself the flirts, you disqualified yourself as a potential partner the moment you found yourself unable to stick to one woman,” Moira snapped back at his joke in an extreme fashion. “The Golden Rose cannot be shared with the unfaithful.”

“Sorry, sorry,” John made a mental note that the redhead was off-limits, “I wouldn’t say that I was unfaithful at any point, but I’ll take the pointer.”

“If nothing else, you’re tolerable.” The Warden calmed quickly, having made her point, and leaned back. “We may have gotten along well, if you had made a different choice.”

“I honestly don’t see myself going down any path that doesn’t involve at least a small harem, so I think we always would have had issues.” The Gamer shook his head. “Anyway, how are things at Ashcroft? Are Vanessa and Frank still in charge of everything?”

“I had to discontinue my education there a month after you left,” Moira told him with a shrug. “I never had time to care about those two before and I haven’t had since. I was there to learn and to keep an eye on Wentworth. Since that witch has kept her activities low for the longest time now, I haven’t kept up with school affairs. My duty as a Warden meant I had to travel and purge all threatening elements we identified.” Her greyish green eyes focused him without any further words, the silent warning clear in the hard expression on her face.

‘Let’s hope they all deserved it,’ the Gamer thought and only nodded.

The redhead seemed happy with that reaction and pushed herself off the table. Once standing, she announced, “Well, I’ll follow the other six challenges as closely as they let me. Show your best, John Newman, I’ll tell my father and the council what my impression of you is by the end of it.”

“I don’t think you’ll find anything new.” John shrugged. “I’m pretty consistent when it comes to my public record and I won’t change now, not to look better to you and certainly not for some potential gain.”

“Your unwillingness to change is frustrating, but at least you’re honest.” Moira clicked her tongue and then turned to leave.