Chapter 419 – Smooth sailing from there

Chapter 419 – Smooth sailing from there

It was already late in the day, one might say early in the night, when everyone got together. “Okay, problem number one, how do we get down there?” John asked everyone. They had neither the safety vessel nor an awake higher dragon to carry it with. ‘I almost have to admire Tilgun’s sleeping skills.’

“How about not being a giant fucking pussy and just jumping?” Eliza suggested.

“That could work,” Rave unironically answered. “It’s gonna hurt a lot, but it’s a way to get down. If you can heal us afterwards.”

John looked over with a raised eyebrow. Aside from the issue of jumping far enough to reach the yacht, they were close to the top of this swimming hotel. In other words, they were like 180-190 metres up.

The fact that diving into the water from that height didn’t scare Rave was marvellous and chipped away at the little normal common sense he had left. It made sense, skilled divers weren’t afraid to jump from up to 35 metres height and they didn’t have supernatural powers to back it up. Then again, free fall was an ongoing acceleration to the pull of gravity, so just saying somebody with twice the stats could fall double the distance was going to work was probably false.

“Even if that works, how are we going to get back up... wait, to the factor of gravity?” everyone looked at him funny as he commented his own thoughts. “Of course, that’s how we get over there.”

2 minutes later.

“Do I have to?!” the dulled voice of Maximillian rang through the door of his bedroom. “I was about to have some fun here.”

“Come on, Max, do it for me!” John pleaded, realizing too late how gay that sounded and then ignoring a mumble from Eliza and a follow-up giggle from his girlfriend. “You can bring whoever is in there with you, gives you an opportunity to brag a bit.”

“I don’t need that, buddy, we are already in my bedroom, no more need for flirting or anything like tha- ouch! Feisty one, aren’t you?” Male and female laughter echoed through the door. John assumed that there had been some pinching following the commentary of the king. “Come back in like 15 minutes!”

30 minutes later.

“Whu,” Maximillian stretched as he stepped out of his half of the VIP apartments. “That was a nice break.”

“Buddy, we have been doing this -this being varying female partners- for almost five days now. The hell do you mean ‘break’?” John wanted to know, after having had the decency to wait until Maximillian actually came out on his own. Of the many things John didn’t want to be, someone who knocked on doors mid-coitus was somewhat high up there.

“Point taken, but also: after 20 years of being born and bred to rule and then ruling, trust me when I say that this is indeed a nice break.”

“Point taken,” John responded in kind.

“Anyway, what did you want?” Maximillian asked, looking at the whole crew of John’s assembled harem. He was wearing swimming trunks and an unbuttoned Hawaiin shirt, showing off a body that was more toned than John’s, which was a good reason in the Gamer’s mind to invest in more Strength sometime soon. It wasn’t the only reason. Together with the three-day stubble Maximillian had going on and the sunglasses he put on a moment later, he had that typical ‘self-made artist star’ look.

“THAT!” Metra said out loud, stomping over to the cherry-smelling king. Grabbing him by the chin, she lightly pinched his soft cheeks. “There, look at this guy,” she then let the very much confused German go and slapped him on the abs. “At least a bit of beard, great abs, better sense of style. THAT is what someone sexy looks like. Although you both could use more chest hair.”

“Met, no, ewwww,” Rave intervened with a series of disgusted complaints and sounds, sticking out her tongue as if she was about to throw up. “Chest hair, what’s next, pubes and unshaved ass?”

That was one of the weirdest places John had to de-hair. The appreciation Rave had shown for that, in the form of occasional light taps on his naked ass that were weirdly nice and other even greater things, was worth it though. Once more his thanks went out to the magical shampoo that kept all of it from growing back. He also thought about the fact that they still hadn’t found the body-oil Nathalia had put on him. What had she murdered to get her hands on that? What kind of tree must one process?

“Shut it, Jane, you have about as much taste in looks as Tiamat had skill in raising her kids,” Metra snapped back. “You don’t even allow him a beard. I also insist that he works out more.”

His girlfriend hummed, “I can kinda get behind the latter one.”

The bridge was interesting in that it was the only truly isolated living quarters in the ship. A semi-circle shaped room with all the technical things one could ever need was dominating that part of the ship. There were a lot of consoles John didn’t understand, but he would learn soon enough, and for the moment the few sailors that were keeping a lookout on behalf of captain Sealy were doing a fine job at sitting there drunkenly and watching the automation doing its thing.

The bridge also came with a lot of screens. The larger ones were hanging on the wall, roughly corresponding with where on the ship the camera had been deployed whose footage they were displaying. Exception to that being the one screen that showed what was behind them, being in front of John. It gave a pretty much perfect view of the seas around them.

Smaller screens on consoles showed footage from within the ship. Nearly everything could be watched from there, except the inside of the bedrooms.

Attached to the bridge was a spacious living quarter that could be easily summarized with the word pompous. Giant bed (without any linen as John quickly realized, those must have had some importance to the crew), soft carpet, a kitchen, two bathrooms (toilet and bathtub were separated in spacious rooms, which was just a giant sign of decadence, and there were actually two toilets in the one room) and an elevator that didn’t activate without a key card. Said key cards they had to get from the drunken seal sailors. There were supposed to be five and he was given five. Unless the former crew kept duplicates, that meant they had been fair enough to give him all of them. Even if they didn’t, John made a mental note to replace the security system with a new set of codes at the very least whenever he had the time and the money for it.

Next was the upper deck, most of the space of this one was reserved for not one but two conference rooms. Well, one conference room and one halfway outdoors conference area with a ceiling and corner walls, both equipped with flat screens that hung from opposite sides of the same wall. The circular tables were of a dark oak, the seats a deep-sea blue. Everywhere were small indications of things having been removed, including a place where, judging by the feathers, they had kept a parrot. There were more seats and couches than people could have possibly fit inside the beds.

There was also a music room, the V-shaped pool at the nose of the ship, a small bridge going over the middle part of it to a platform at the very tip of the boat where one could imposingly stand some bedrooms and a normal living room. Important to not forget was the circular greenhouse, whose roof Rave had noticed. It wasn’t big, a one-metre wide middle section with a narrow walkway around and another one-metre wide outer rim. It really wasn’t big, but it also wasn’t small, and it was also a small garden on a yacht. John didn’t quite know what to use it for yet, maybe he would just give it to Aclysia and she could grow fresh tomatoes or something. The lack of soil and plants indicated that Boss Senior and consorts had taken with them whatever they had been growing here. By the smell in the air, he guessed that it was some sort of marijuana. He left the greenhouse after opening some windows.

The main deck was the least mentionable, consisting largely of a cantina and large-scale bedrooms. The cantina was, design-wise, the essence of the whole ship boiled down into one room. Darkly coloured furniture, lightly coloured floors, black-tinted windows and white walls painted with depictions of squids doing heroic things. John fully intended to get rid of that last part. The cantina had enough tables that no one was forced to take their meal in a large group, there were even a few tables that were positioned, likely on purpose, in a way that made it hard to listen in without being noticed. Aclysia marvelled at the frankly gargantuan kitchen next to the cantina, being as well equipped as the kitchen of the Rising Tide, on a tool stand-point at least.

When it came to the lower deck, it was dominated by two things. First, the multitude of smaller bedrooms, which were still all equipped with their own bathrooms, situated in the narrowing front of the boat. Second, and this was just generally agreed on for being awesome, there was an in-door dock with two safety vessels, which would have qualified as normal hobby vessels for the normal person, and jet skis. One of the two safety vessels was packed with stuff, so that was the one the former crew would take with them. Now John knew why Senior had asked for one of those, they were actually good for more than just rowing onto land.

Lastly the machine deck was exactly what it was advertised at. Mana generators and batteries, the shield generator, the water and electricity management systems, they were all down there. For once the space around them didn’t seem wasted for the sake of showing off just how much space there was on the boat, but actually because so that if something blew up it wouldn’t cause a chain reaction.

“I thus declare this our temporary guild hall!” John said by the end of it, sitting in the central swivel chair of the indoor conference room. It was the kind supervillains sat in but everybody knew was super comfortable. He even did the evil turn around with his fingertips tapping while saying it.

“Ya must feel so great right now,” Rave pointed out with a giggle. “Lemme be the cat to that villain!” with that she jumped on his lap and then kissed him passionately.

“I don’t think the cat is supposed to do that,” John mumbled in between.

“The cat is also not supposed to have a boyfriend who owns a giant yacht,” Rave whispered back. “Is it bad of me that this makes me love you more? Don’t wanna sound like a gold digger, but success is sexy.”

“No moral qualms about how I got this?” he asked her.

“Come on, ya joined Collide in the first place because ya didn’t want to deal with ALL of the moral shit. We have our standards, they are just way more liberal,” she pointed out to him. “And as ya yourself said, they tried to steal from us first.”

“That also means you all got no grounds to complain if someone steals it from you though,” Maximillian said to them, spinning endlessly in a slightly smaller swivel chair.

Hawpler was the one to stand against that, “Except if they don’t attack somebody. This ship was exchanged more as a peace deal than actually stolen.”

“Do I pay you for talking to me in that tone, you blackest of traitorous holes?”

“You don’t pay me anything,” Hawpler countered in his sober, booming voice.

There was some laughter from every side, except from John. It was probably smooth sailing from there, but he still had some news, minorly bad but mostly neutral. “Max, can you help us move our stuff over here tomorrow?”

“Sure thing, not like you have a lot,” he answered, surprisingly easy to convince. It seemed he knew roughly what John had in mind then.

“Okay, great, let’s go back and relax some more then, tomorrow is the last day of the cruise after all.”