Chapter 630 – Gamer grinds again 1 – Press Any Key to Start

Chapter 630 – Gamer grinds again 1 – Press Any Key to Start

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.Cheêck out latest novels on n/o/ve/l/bin(.)c/o/m

“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.

“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.