Chapter 366 – An afternoon in Amsterdam

Chapter 366 – An afternoon in Amsterdam

Under the confounded gaze of everyone, Nia slowly munched on the marshmallow. The white body of sugar dissolved as she moved it deeper into her mouth without using her hands. Basically, Nia took three eternities eating a damn marshmallow, but she did so with that cutely tilted head that John just couldn’t help himself and stare in fascination.

“In the name of a pussy-eating slime-gargling-man-whore,” this stream of Eliza’s verbal abuse of the spoken language hurt John personally this time around, “swallow you slut!”

“That’s what he said,” Rave giggled as Eliza pressed the marshmallow into Nia’s mouth who then spent another way too long period of time chewing it before finally doing as the blood mage had commanded. All the while she was still waving at the plane in the distance.

“Bye, queen-friend,” the emotionless voice rang out.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?! Did you bleach your brain together with your skin? Is it sinking through the roots of your obviously fake hair? STOP BEING SO TALL, YOU BLUE EYED BIMBO!” Eliza’s irritation with the blank hadn’t changed, evidently.

“I am not the tallest here,” Nia said and grabbed her white bag to pick the card that said ‘Factual’. The card was immensely crumpled and looked like it had been used a lot over the last couple of days. That made John wonder what kind of negotiations she had been through. “Aclysia is taller than me. So is Salamander right now and this one, who I barely know.”ÚpTodated novels on no(v)el()bin(.)com

“Name is Metra,” the berserker babe introduced herself. At 1,87 metres, the dirty blonde was indeed quite tall, taller than John in fact and the third tallest person in his circle of friends overall, after Nathalia and then Salamander. “I told you that when you got drunk.”

“I got drunk?” Nia raised the card that said ‘Confused’.

“You know, two weeks ago, the Lady Liquor?” John reminded her.

“Oh,” the pariah made a hollow sound and finally stopped waving as the machine took off in the distance. “So that’s why I was suddenly back in the mansion. I only remembered Nathalia. Figured she had intercourse until I was comatose.”

Now John would have loved to say that was a stupid assumption to make, but it really wasn’t. Especially since it had happened before. ‘We don’t think about that night,’ Siena reminded him, and he agreed and turned his thoughts somewhere else.

“Okay, well, let’s talk about the important stuff for a change,” John said as they got moving; there was no reason to hang around in the airport anymore. “Have you decided what is happening with us, Nia?”

“Yes,” the card said ‘Serious’, “I am no longer part of the Illuminati. I am all yours.”





“Just like that?” John asked the blank; “No deals that Richard gave you, some ancient spying device you are supposed to put into my butt when we next have sex?”

“Yeah, lets-a-go,” Rave said, “I wanna party!”

Abyssal Amsterdam, as it so turned out, looked a lot like normal Amsterdam. Wide streets and narrow passages intertwined between old and new buildings (although many much taller than their real counterparts) and waterways that cut through everything in the city. John wondered why this was and, as neither Momo nor Lydia were around anymore to answer his demand for trivia, informed himself.

The truth was pretty sobering. During their exit from Europe at the end of World War 2, the Nazi’s had put the city to the torch while stealing all the boats. One last act of revenge against a German Empire that no longer wanted them.

Afterwards rebuilding everything would have cost more time and resources than just hiring a bunch of Fateweavers, isolate the parts of the barriers where they had still intact buildings of high importance, and then just copy everything else from the inner-city over. The result was a metropolis that seemed like a European capital, from its confusing layout that came from constant rather than planned growth, but also had a few stand-out things.

For example, the water inside the Grachten (that was the Dutch word for the waterways, singular form: Gracht) was cleaner than any channel through inner-cities had any right to be, with basically no filth inside whatsoever. John found the reason for that to be a species of aquatic slimes that ate whatever trash was tossed into the water. Throwing trash was like feeding the ducks around here, it seemed. Instead of cars, hovering platforms waited at the sides of the streets, ready to take whoever stepped on them (and paid the fee) to wherever they wanted via pre-set courses.

‘Huh, so the Dutch thought that slapping mobile barriers on boats was a good idea, interesting,’ John thought as he read how the sea-faring nation came up with the first successful applications of ships in Abyssal commerce after the discovery of the mobile barrier during the age of Enlightenment. Very interesting stuff, really. ‘A shame Magoi isn’t here, he could probably answer for me a lot of these things in more detail than a cheap brochure off the Auction,’ John thought.

The new Supreme Fateweaver had taken to the Himalayas, where the organization’s headquarters lay, and was currently embroiled in how the dissolvement of the current structure was to be handled. The fact that Fateweavers would be no more was a foregone conclusion at this point, at least in their current state. As Magoi had prophesied, they would become something like a union, but the exact dissolvement of the old structures still had to be handled with care, as hundreds of businesses all over the globe would now be privatized.

As a staunch red-blooded American, John approved of this breaking up of an economically oppressive monopoly. He didn’t have a lot of contact with the old structure and didn’t feel like the Fateweavers had been an actually shitty corporation like several cable companies back home. However, he knew that he only stood to profit from this in the short and long term.

Rave also checked her phone, which had been buzzing from a newly arrived message, and groaned. “Well, if there is one annoying thing that came out of all of this,” she gestured at the airport and, impliedly, of Europe, “it’s that mom now wants me to send her weekly updates of my life.”

“You are going to do it like monthly instead, aren’t you?” John asked. It wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that Nariko only wanted to have monthly updates in the first place but set the bar higher so her daughter felt like she was still ‘winning’ in some abstract sense.

“Tops,” Rave said but wrote an answer message as they spoke. “I want to see dad again. Partly because I need to punch him in the face for never telling me the whole story and partly because family stuff is weird.”

“Yeah, I should visit my parents too,” John decided as he looked at the city from above through the eyes of his new sparrow. After his last one had been destroyed and lost during the battle of Warsaw, he had to buy this one as a replacement. Gaia had automatically renamed it to Jack Sparrow again.

The reason for this sudden yearning for parental interaction was the hearing of Lydia’s story. John wanted to cherish what he had for a change, and it would also help him to ground himself more in reality rather than his enormous ambition. He hadn’t told his mother that he was returning to the USA yet, because he didn’t have his story straight.

The basic idea was to tell her that he dropped out of school completely, because he had started a business on the internet and it was going so well that he had the money to just educate himself rather than chase a degree. Problem there was that he didn’t have a storefront for this story just yet.

“Okay, so we stay here today and tomorrow we get a plane back to the USA,” John said as he spied what seemed to be a hotel.

“I am gonna drag y’all into a club!” Rave announced.