The door of the stretch limo was opened and John was the first to exit. He could do barely more than look at the surrounding crowds before he turned around and extended his hand to help Lydia out. It was a gesture for the pure show of it, but he enjoyed holding her hand regardless. Once she was fully outside, her almost unfittingly practical shoes planted firmly on the meticulously clean red carpet, the Gamer turned around and offered his elbow.

Lydia took hold with the usual stern expression and the two went down the path in lockstep. As per the queen’s instructions, he didn’t look back. He could only direct his gaze ahead, at her or at the crowd close to them, to give them a friendly wave. That produced a few cheers here and there, but nothing like what their queen got when she gave a simple smile.

John appeared to be somewhat popular in Rex Germaniae, particularly among women and soldiers according to polls, but most people didn’t care about him. The distribution was something along the lines of 60% not caring, 25% liking him and 15% disliking him. Exact results varied between polls, of course.

While he couldn’t use his head to look behind him, the Mandala Sphere following the two of them allowed him to watch the rest of the harem getting out and following them regardless. Rave was right behind him, together with Aclysia, Beatrice, Eliza and Metra. The elementals all moved in a cluster, five beautiful women and one small crocodile that got carried by the green air spirit that darted over to the crowd and shook random hands. Nia and Scarlett walked past Sylph, just chatting about this and that. Everyone else just smiled and waved, letting the cameras take one shot after another.

Usually, John would have walked at the helm with Rave under his arm, but usually didn’t mean much when it came to the Gamer and who he held as he moved. Since he never stopped trying to make every one of his girls feel loved equally (or at least to a level where his slight favouritism for some didn’t cause any jealousy his Charisma couldn’t overcome), he often led the crowd with someone else other than his girlfriend. Rave was fully supportive of this and often relented the position at his side. It was exactly because she was the type to give up that position sometimes that it had even been possible for him to build a harem with her at the start.

Because this was Lydia’s birthday, giving her not only the arm but the lead had been a reasonable and easy decision. There had been a few moments of considering whether or not he should walk with both Lydia and Rave under his arms, he had two of them after all, but this had been dismissed. They considered this a good time to underline the message that John loved the queen as ONE of his girls and not as one of HIS GIRLS. That needed to be repeated over and over again, after all, the people that were against their relationship hadn’t relented yet. At the same time, the presence of the harem signalled that he wasn’t ashamed of his way of life.

Even that twenty metre stretch from the street to the entrance of the building they would be holding the festival in was planned through in such miniscule detail. When dealing with a semi-obsessive perfectionist like Lydia, that was just what happened.

As for that building, it was a large, circular tower of distinctly gothic architecture. It was roughly separated into two areas. The actual main body of the tower, a tall thing covered in stained glass windows, brass ornaments and decorative arches, was where the main festival was being held. Several guards around the entrances kept out everyone who wasn’t invited. Around the base of the tower wrapped a large platform, which was connected to the gardens and lawn around the tower through four flights of stairs. On that platform and through these gardens were spread simple tents and stands for the common people.

Just like John, Lydia had organized her birthday to be something everyone could enjoy.

They climbed the southern flight of stairs and were quick to the entrance. While Reika, who had been following the car in ways eagles preferred to move, landed on Lydia’s shoulder, John allowed himself a final look up the tower. It was a clearly Abyssal structure. Unsurprising, since they had never left the Abyssal side of Berlin. The further up the tower went, the more its walls were made up of stained glass, a truly impressive structure.

Without needing to stop, they stepped past the guards and through the open oak door. Passing the walls was like entering a different world. The outside noise of steps, chatter and camera’s was replaced with the soft fiddling of violins and a piano.

The base floor of the tower was a single room. At the centre of it were two staircases that wound around one another. Their railings were fashioned from gold and inlaid with glowing crystals that spread much of the illumination for the hall. The walls were of cobalt blue, royal purple and simple white, entirely made up of cut pieces of glass that were arranged in numerous images that seemed to tell the history of someone fighting a dragon.

“Are we looking at a real story?” John asked loudly enough that some people around may be able to hear him. Anyone around would have assumed he simply raised his voice so that the rest of the group may be able to hear him. In reality, Lydia had just instructed him to ask. He was to seem interested in the local culture. Not that he, with his steady curiosity about history, needed to be told to be interested.

“No, these walls have simply been decorated for viewing pleasure,” Lydia retorted with a somewhat disappointing answer. “Romulus designed this building after the war. It was finished just this month.”

“Ever the architect, isn’t he?” the Gamer hummed as they went deeper inside the large hall. Although the size and beauty of the tower made it sound incredibly unlikely that the Apex of the Abyss could have had it built in a few months, that was only if John approached it with mundane sensibilities. With magic, great structures could be stomped out of the ground in a matter of hours and decorating them was then done by people who rarely had to rely on simple tools to fulfil their artistic vision.

As beautiful as the structure itself was, the first floor was filled only with those standing tables found commonly in sports bars and festival tents and a couple of portable bar constructions. That was to say that the entire hall was devoid of actual furniture or contents. Taking out what had been prepared for the festival would have left it entirely empty. It was beautiful, but utterly without purpose.

John looked around the room for familiar faces. They had arrived early, but not first. The first familiar person he spotted was Mario, the swordsman that had been crushed by Eliza during the tournament for Rex Germaniae’s crown. The dark-haired Italian only glanced in John’s general direction for a split second, then acted as if he hadn’t seen any of them and continued to chat with a bunch of people that wore a white and grey uniform like him. Fellow masters of the blade, John reckoned.

The Gamer also let his gaze journey on, while the group moved out of the immediate entrance area. Mario was no threat to his or Lydia’s position and he had no interest in being friends with him either – last time they had spoken, he had insulted Eliza and that was enough for John. Their paths had crossed once and now they could just stay away from each other. It had worked so far and would continue to work.

John spotted someone else with a Mediterranean tan who wore a vaguely militaristic uniform, except that his was gold and black. He was a stylish, middle aged man with oiled, backwards combed black hair and a twirled moustache that looked like it belonged into the 18th century. ‘The Knightlord of the Golden March,’ the Gamer thought and continued searching for more familiar faces. Unless they were approached or Lydia saw it fit to introduce them, something she might do depending on what happened over the course of the evening, John and the harem best stayed away from the influential power holders within the empire.

John spotted Maria in the crowd, Maximillian’s older sister who usually went by just Ria. The dark-haired woman had been squeezed into a dress and evidently wasn’t comfortable with it. She kept pulling at the shoulder straps, leaning onto tables and getting a dreamy look that betrayed she would have much rather been somewhere where she could have counted screwdriver sizes, or something else mechanics liked to do.

While he was tempted to approach her, her curvy body looked attractive in that dress whether she wanted to wear it or not, the Gamer decided not to. For one, because she was Maximillian’s sister and he didn’t want to be the hypocrite after all the anger he had felt towards his friend for other familial ties. Just as important a deterrent was what Momo had reported of her brief relationship with the machine-obsessed women.

Nothing that had been said made John think Ria was a bad person – just that she was more in love with her work than she could ever be with a person. At least Lydia clearly loved him, she just took her obligations to her people more seriously than her emotions. He could respect that, because it was a prioritization of one kind of emotion over the other. When it came to her love, he was her only one. When it came to Ria’s loves, he would always be a distant number two behind her current tinkering project. As a man of pride, he couldn’t live like that.

To his surprise, Ria didn’t stay alone for long, though, as Maximillian himself appeared in the hall and joined his sister with some kind of joke, a beer and a hug. He also waved in John’s general direction when he spotted the Gamer. Waving back, John looked around some more and stumbled over a few other people that looked like Lydia had described the power holders. He saw some of the electors, princes and lords that marked their status with red coats that they wore over their suits. He saw Konrad, the leader of Lydia’s bodyguards. The very last person he saw that he knew was someone he hadn’t expected at all. It was a black-scaled lizardman in a suit, who was looking through some sort of dictionary in a bored fashion. Mister Dra, the second of the two announcers of the tournament. He was accompanied by a saurus (a bulkier race of lizardmen), who was dressed like a theologian.

“What’s he doing here?” John whispered towards Lydia, only pointing the direction with his eyes. It wasn’t a question of disrespect, an announcer just seemed highly out of place in this gathering.

Lydia noticed who he was looking at and pulled her eyebrows together for a second. “I do not know. I did not make the guestlist.”

“Who did, then?” John asked; this was a detail he had not been previously privy too.

Lydia was about to answer when the room in its entirety went silent and stared in their general direction. Not directly at them, but at the entranceway everyone else was coming through. This was because a certain, two-and-a-half metre giant of a man had just arrived. Wearing the appearance of a middle-aged titan, the tanned mountain of magical might and muscle towered over every other presence in the room. If anyone had even dared to oppose him, the stare of his green eyes would soon have demanded either surrender or obedience.

John chose to not fight the fight at the moment. To his interest, he found that a rather large part of him was irked by this. ‘Is my pride growing or is it just becoming more prevalent in this situation because I know I’m getting ever close to being a challenge even to the Apex?’ the Gamer wondered. Deep inside, the part of him that loved to fight and test the limits of his ability wondered what a fight between himself and Romulus would look like. Keeping a cool head, he inspected these moods rising and falling inside him. ‘The more about me changes, the more stays the same,’ the amused thought went through his head.

Behind Romulus strode the two goddesses of the prominent celestial bodies. Sol, a platinum blonde with a deeply tanned, copper-tinted skin. She wore a dress of gold, ornamented with metal plates of platinum and silver. None of the addition hid her large bosom or seductively curving hips. Behind her head hovered a disk of fire, confined by a black halo, and even where John stood he could feel the intimidating heat radiate from her body. Luna, with skin as pale as paper and hair of silvery white, like moonlight reflecting on a still pond. Her body was lean, curving in the right areas but to no degree that would have introduced jiggling into her flowing movements. The dress she wore was seemingly translucent in most places, leaving her midriff and much of her legs to be seen. Around her chest and hips, however, the fabric darkened like the midnight sky. Stars and connected constellations were spread around the entirety of it.

One pair of golden and one pair silver eyes scanned the room like John had earlier. One pair of protective and challenging eyes and one pair of analytical and manipulative eyes. Sol and Luna followed their love, their contractor and their emperor, all unified in the same person, into the room. The music, coming from no source on this floor, continued on, while the entire room waited for the Apex to do anything.

“Enjoy yourselves,” Romulus’ voice reached every corner of the hall. It was a command, a request and a joke at the same time, something that could only be spoken by a man with authority beyond doubt. Chatter picked up throughout the room, even as all eyes followed the man over to where Lydia stood. “My congratulations, Lydia,” he told the queen in a familial tone. “I hope this festival to the honour of your young years meets your approval.”

“Thank you, my emperor,” the congratulated responded in a diplomatic tone. “There was no necessity for a festivity of this splendour to be organized by none other than you. Truly, your time and the money would have been more usefully allocated elsewhere.”

“What an interesting way to say that you do not want to be here,” Romulus hummed, his deep voice making that simple sound worthy of being the backdrop of a blues track. “A waste of time and money, you say? The typical Prussian mindset, I see you do not come after your grandfather in this regard.”

“My grandfather had an intense distaste for wasting money,” Lydia said.

“But he did take great pleasure in festivities and large rounds of discussion,” Romulus countered, while extending a hand to scratch one of Reika’s heads. The godly animal nibbled on his hand in a display of trust. Then she seemed to have enough of attention and crowds and hopped off Lydia’s shoulder. Leaving the room on foot, she spread her large wings and flew around once she was past the door. “Let us dwell in memories of my old friend another time. Did the schedule for the evening reach you?”

“It did.” Lydia narrowed her eyes. John could practically see her suspicion rising. The question of why he would bring up something he probably already knew the answer to was answered by what came next.

“Splendid. I must inform you that all of it was a lie.”

Rave opened her mouth to complain about the extensive preparation she had now sat through for nothing. Already putting a hand around her waist, he pinched her softly in the butt to prevent more than a little surprised yelp from ever being voiced. Instead, they were all treated to a very long sigh by Lydia.

“It could have been a perfectly usual day,” she mumbled.

“It will be worth your while,” Romulus promised and gestured towards the ceiling. “The levels of this tower will be my present to you.” John heard that line and adjusted his own plans accordingly. The greatest present should be given at the very start. “A night to remember, even if you may look at it with scepticism now, queen of Germaniae. A great festivity you, your friends, your lovers and the entire empire will find greatly illuminating.”

“I fully hope you are correct,” Lydia responded and respectfully bowed her head, before Romulus walked away.

“So,” Rave finally spoke out, “is being flippant with your liege, like, part of your image?”

“Challenging him is certainly part of my occupation at court,” Lydia retorted. “As the foremost reformer of the empire, questioning the state and embodiments of power structure is what I do. That aside, Romulus will make sure the conversation is interpreted by those who heard it in the way he wishes it – at least when it comes to public discussion.” She raised her hand to her nose and slowly massaged the bridge of it. “Be a dear and get me a beer, my love. Whatever Romulus’ plans for me, for us, are tonight, I will need something to steel my nerves.”

“How about liquor?” Scarlett asked and pulled a small metal flask out of a pocket in her skirt.

“One beer will suffice. It’s a stress drink, not a way to get drunk,” Lydia clarified her intent.