Momo took things surprisingly well. That was to say, she didn’t have a strong emotional reaction to any of it. She didn’t pry at things too much, didn’t make any long comments about anything. Her whole attitude towards his tale, his victories and his injuries, was quite clearly that she had nothing to say that he hadn’t heard already. Through a number of heavy sighs and sarcastic applauses, she did let him know that she cared though.

The combination of those two factors was all John could really ask for. He wasn’t looking for another berating. Neither did he care for being treated dismissively. She listened, she understood, she felt empathy, she knew he was talking about past events that she wasn’t entirely in the know about. Although the layers of sarcasm and banter could hide it, Momo was still a supportive person at heart. Having that character trait included, in optimal cases, knowing when one was best advised not meddling.

The conversation ultimately ended with Momo saying she would try to stay in contact every now and again, but ultimately would keep the phone in her inventory most of the time and preferred to be unavailable. Not exactly how John would have wanted it, but it was an improvement from no contact whatsoever.

Once the phone wandered into John’s own inventory, the little morning orgy they had continued, with Rave now in the sheets with them. After cumming two more times, satisfying the harem present in the process, they moved out of the bedroom. They checked on the kitchen very quickly, where Aclysia was preparing several things of a more complicated or time intensive nature. Evidently, she was taking advantage of John’s ‘busy’ morning routine.

He headed to the bathroom, then the shower, checking up mentally on the elementals in the process. They had headed out to their respective Elemental Island, wanting to check those things out. John was likely going to join them there later, since he wanted to actually inspect all of the things he had built in person. Knowing their effects was one thing, knowing what those effects looked like in practice another.

As for Scarlett, she was actually waiting in the bathing room, soaking in the hot tub like a wet noodle in a boiling pot. There were purple marks, most pronounced on her throat, all over her body. Nothing that looked like she was getting a beating on the regular, but quite possibly painful. She told John that she had skipped on the opportunity to get them healed immediately, because the little pains were actually quite exciting.

Which caused John to give her a (definitely less rough) morning fuck. That just checked all the sadist boxes. Back out of the shower, all of the girls were in the living room, surrounding the table on which Aclysia had built the weirdest buffet of breakfast, lunch and birthday treats. Most important of all was the three-layer, orange-chocolate cake in the middle. Luckily, they all had the necessary appetite to go through such a meal. The energy expenditure yesterday had been quite extensive, after all.

“I heavily apologize that you had no birthday cake yesterday,” Aclysia stated, as she cut into the brown, sugary mass. “My original plan did not calculate in that I wouldn’t have the night before to bake and I lacked the necessary facilities within the barrier to prepare everything satisfyingly.”

“The 2 days in Instant Dungeons were rather spontaneous and on me, so no reason to apologize,” John stated, as he had a piece of cake loaded onto his plate. “As they say, better late than never. Do I have anywhere to be, Scarlett?”

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The Technomancer detached from Undine, now bruise free, and yawned while she answered, “Only the closing ceremony, rest is voluntary.” Her teeth snapped shut and she slightly shook her head. “I think I am going to take another nap after this. I didn’t sleep that well – for some fucking reason.” She glared over to Rave.

Not missing this, the Lightbearer perked up, fork in her mouth. She cleaned it of cake before asking, “What are ya looking at me for?”

“You kicked me.”

“I did?”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t sound like me.” General coughs and mumbles all around the table were had as people tried their best not to directly mention Rave’s terrible sleeping habits. “I didn’t steal any blankets at least!”

Lydia shook her head. “It’s summer and the combined body heat of everyone in Master’s… Pardon,” the queen cleared her throat to get the behaviour that had been fucked into her last night out her system, “…John’s bed is more than enough to make a blanket superfluous.”

“You know, you can continue calling me Master, my lady,” John tried his hand at charming his queenly lover.

“I will do so when it pleases my erogenous desires and this is not the case as of this moment. Take what you can get, John, you will be happier for it,” Lydia responded, trying to sip her tea, but noting that her cup was empty. “Aclysia, may I bother you for a refill.”

“Give me some too, while you’re at it,” Gaia said, also making a plate hover in John’s direction. “And give me some of the cake, while you’re at it.”

There was just a few moments of baffled silence, then movement around the table just resumed as normal. People in the Abyss were hardened to sudden happenings, people around John doubly so. That the supreme deity decided to just drop in without any sign was surprising but failed to produce more than a second of proper confusion.

“Normally you announce yourself by opening a portal first,” John pointed out, as he loaded a piece of cake onto her plate. The second the dark treat lay on the porcelain, a green glow encapsulated it and made it hover back to Gaia. She had simply appeared in one of the empty seats.

Gaia grabbed the plate and the glow waned. Light brown hands, the tone most commonly affiliated with Europeans living along the Mediterranean, carefully placed it down. Her appearance had not changed further since the last time they had met. She was still rather short and petite. Save for the ass and thighs, of course, so marvellous that the naked squish drew all eyes to it. That they were so easy to see, with the four strands of hanging cloth that made up the ‘skirt’ of her one piece dress either hanging down or hiding her crotch from view, only further emphasized their attractiveness.

She knew exactly where he was looking, shifting a bit, then crossing her legs in a painfully calculated motion that almost let him see the promised land between her legs. Instead he only got to pay attention to the milk-coffee coloured curve of her butt twisting a bit more into the foreground. That Gaia had taken the seat next to Eliza by tactical means was basically self-evident at that point since John was able to look over the short blood mage.

The Gamer forced himself to look up from those thighs, slid over the skin-tight, lightly glistening, surface of her black dress with its colour-shifting runes, and instead looked into the green eyes in her attractive, round face. The long strands of whirly hair, their colour an intense green, seemed to flow in an almost mocking fashion as she grinned at him.

“I did want to visit you yesterday, but when I found the time around midnight, you were in the middle of something,” she stated, taking her first bit of cake. “Fantastic,” Gaia exclaimed, wiggling in her seat in a fashion more adorable than sexy, “you’re easily the best thing I ever indirectly created, Aclysia.”

“I wouldn’t have complained if you dropped into my business there,” John put forward with yet another charming smile.

“Yeah, right.” Gaia only gave him sass for it though. “Like you can charm the goddess of everything into an orgy where all your fangirls agreed to tell you how great you are. You couldn’t even handle me alone, like I would trust you to separate your attention and still manage to actually get me off.”

“Like that was a problem last time…” John grumbled, remembering her orgasm expression quite clearly. Well, everything around that expression was hazy or missing entirely, but he had at least one mental picture of it, so he was quite certain it had happened. “But fine, point taken. With the way you waltzed in here, I doubt you’re in the mood now.”

“Aren’t we smart?” Gaia wondered, looking at a bottle of milk. Through the translucent container, John followed the liquid lowering by a few centimetres, just as it rose from nowhere inside the glass in front of the supreme deity. An absolutely casual use of reality bending powers.

“Couldn’t you just will milk into existence?” John wondered.

“Sure, I could, but why would I do that when some is right there?” Gaia asked, taking a sip and contently munching on some more cake. “Anyway, I am just here to answer your question really quick. I have things to do, reality to oversee, free will to respect, such things that make your little lives worthy of living, you know?”

“I have a bunch of questions though,” the Gamer responded.

“Yeah, tornado-fuck,” Eliza cussed her way into the conversation. “What fucking question are you going to answer. Whether you’re wearing panties today or not?” With a snip of her fingers, Gaia teleported Eliza from her seat over to the couch. Two metres above the couch, to be exact, leaving a short-lived stream of “Fuck, cunt, ass, piece of shiiiiit,” to be followed by more muffled curses as the blood mage was forced to lie with her face down in some cushions.

“Not talking to you, disrespectful cum-bucket,” Gaia said.

Despite the pillow, John could hear the insane laughter, basically spelling out that Eliza did not take that as an insult. “Anyway, could we stay on topic?” John asked. If time was limited here, he wanted his answers sooner rather than later. “…Do tell me that wasn’t the question you’re going to answer.”

“Would be worth it to say yes just for the look on your face, but no,” Gaia quickly finished her slice of cake and then leaned back. “I am here to answer the one question that only I can answer, the answer to which won’t change anything about the things you do. Consider it my last birthday gift.”

“I can’t ask for something practical like, what the Lorylim are or how I could achieve world peace in three years?” John was presenting that more jokingly, but he was genuinely curious if he could get such information out of her.

“That would be more direct involvement in the course of history than I want,” the supreme deity simply pointed out. “Go ahead, ask the question.”

John put his cutlery down. It felt awkward to ask one of the most important questions about the origins of the Abyss at break-lunch, but that was just the way things went in his life. “What is Gaia – what are you?” The rest of the table, all of which had either been there when Romulus told his story or been informed afterwards, listened carefully to the answer.

“That’ll be a long answer, but that’s exactly what you want anyway,” Gaia mused, a joking glint in her green eyes. The rings with the seven lines in her irises were circling ever so slowly. “The Gaia that you know, this body, was enabled by Remus. What you heard was true, this is the body of an infant that Remus used as a target of his god-making powers. Gaia the force was not made by Remus, he had no ability to create Faith. His power was to concentrate it in a single suitable vessel, nothing more. Gaia the force in reality stems from the world’s rules as they’re written.”

John leaned back in his chair, slowly going through what he had heard there. It was basically what he had known already, just confirmed. Things certainly lined up, as far as the mechanics of them were concerned.

“That might not be all of it though,” Gaia continued and made him turn his head in quick motion.

“Might?” he asked, the mere presence of the word confused him. “Is there something you don’t know?”

“There is something I avoid to know,” Gaia told him and looked around the table, then at nobody and anyone that might be watching her speak. “If you have ever dreamed lucidly before, you will know the feeling. You know that, if you stretch your mind, you will be able to wake up. You will be able to confirm this is all a dream and just wake up. That is the feeling that overcomes me when I think about the question of whether or not I was before I took this body.”

‘And the great Lady, resting on the pebble of gold, might just be more than ten millennia old,’ John remembered the line from the Horned Rat’s recent prophecy. It had been quite direct already, but now he knew exactly what it meant. Resting referred to the act of sleeping, while ‘might just be’ went further than the usual prophecy ambivalence. It was that Gaia herself did not know.

“Why not confirm it?” Lydia asked, her eyebrows furrowed.

“Because I enjoy this state,” Gaia answered, looking down at her hands, clearly uncomfortable with the subject. “This dream, if it is one, is going to end when I decide to take that knowledge. The only thing that’s strong enough to limit my omniscience is me. Just like I make the decision to not read and guide the minds of humans, just like I decide to not make this a deterministic universe, I may have decided to forget this. Once I decide to learn the truth again and that I am done playing human in pretend…”

The supreme deity snapped her fingers and everyone in the room found themselves in an endlessly dark void. The concept of gravity itself was gone, they just hung around the area. Then they didn’t anymore, John could feel his own mind unravel along with everyone else’s into nothing but absence. It was the utter non-existence where not even silence was allowed. Before they were consumed fully, they were back at the table. Gaia grabbed her plate, on which a new slice of cake had appeared.

“…this dream ends,” she continued, stabbing the sweet treat without any intent of eating it. “And with it, all of you. This might simply be one of many worlds that I dream up. I just decided to tie myself in more closely in this one. Perhaps there are things Outside of me. Perhaps I am just thinking about nonsense and this is all real. The sheer infinite powers I have might just stem from my place as the logical extreme of the rules of magic and Faith. If you want my personal take on it - I doubt it. I am standing at the edge of memory. Luckily for everyone here, I enjoy this state, so I won’t take the drop.”

And suddenly, she was gone.