It's a beautiful morning!

It was bright outside by the time that John finally popped back into existence on the front lawn of his mother's house. He appeared in the yard with a wary spring in his step, the sun shining down on his pale, firm chest... and standing still clad in an outfit that a barbarian might wear.

"John?" Her voice surprised him when he finally started to walk back up to the house. It was a woman's voice, and it was familiar to him... and croaky, but it wasn't Moira, thankfully. John turned around as slowly as he could, as if the speed might somehow make a difference or hide him when he finally faced Mrs. Mortimer, one of the older ladies that lived in John's neighborhood. She stared at him, confused and dressed in a simple, pink spandex outfit for her power walk, but... at least it was better than what John had on.

"I-it's um..." He gulped and looked down at himself. Even with his bath from earlier, a part of him still smelled like ale and sex. He looked ridiculous in his suit of mismatched armor, and if not for his leggings, the outline of his cock would have still been blatantly visible. He looked like a nerd again. "...Renaissance fair. Iforgotsomethinginsidebye!" he shouted and then turned and ran back to the house. There was a pause just as John reached the door and opened it, and in that moment, he heard his neighbor mutter out a soft statement from the sidewalk behind him.

"Oh... kids thes-..." The door slammed shut before John could hear the rest of her sentence.

Achievement Unlocked! 'FREEEEEEDOOOMMM!'
You thought up a lie pretty quickly there, Conan. Looks like that Charisma is really coming in handy.
+1 Charisma

John tried to do everything he could to get ready for the Marathon. If a weapon, piece of food, or bottle of medicine even seemed like it might be viable, he took it. He changed clothes, sprayed a bottle of deodorant over himself like he was standing in the middle of a rain forest, and even tried to add some hair product before he left. However, when he saw that the change to his hair didn't give him a boost to his charisma, he turned right back around and washed it out.

Even after scavenging through the whole building, John didn't get much from the house. He had found a baseball bat, and while it was decent, it didn't do anymore damage than his Infused Strike did. The bat, with its apparently weak construction, only added four damage to each of his basic attacks, whereas his powers could add six more points of damage. The bat extended his reach, but his unarmed attacks got stronger and stronger with each level of Infused Strike.

He also found some simple pain medication. It didn't do much for him, other than add a couple of hit points immediately to his health bar, and he could only take a couple of them before it started an overdose effect and began to hurt him instead, but one or two points could make all the difference. The rest of what he found was basically leftovers. They were small things, like bowls of chili or lasagna and only increased his mana or health regeneration by small amounts. The food wasn't anything he could have actually used in a fight, but he thought it was a good idea to keep some on him anyways.

+5 Food Rations

He didn't find a lot to help him, and when he finally walked out of the house, his stomach felt like it actually hurt because of how nervous he was. Moira was nowhere to be found after the previous night, but he was still anxious, and he continued to feel that way even as he took a bus all the way across town.

It was actually a long trip to get to the park that the Marathon started at. Springfield had never truly seemed like a big town to John. He had traveled throughout most of the city on his own, mostly in the past few years, but it had never felt as big to him before as it did that day. The world had never even felt that big. Yet, as the bus took him Northwest, skirting along the edge of the city and the river that almost circled all of it, he couldn't help but start to look at his home in a different light.

If the world had groups like the Frozen Flame and the Golden Rose in Springfield at the time, then what else did it have? The Frozen Flame was a group that was largely mobile, but the Golden Rose... they had bases. They ruled over specific areas for large amounts of time, so it only made sense that there would have been other groups to rule over other places too.

Were they all going to try and hunt him at some point?

When he finally got to the Marathon's starting point, it wasn't just John who got off the bus after it finally came to a loud, squeaky stop on the outskirts of the Crescent Meadows Park. Most of the people who were on the bus stepped out to join the events that most of the town had come to gather for. He heard people talking and greeting each other as they stepped out onto the local grass, and many of the conversations he heard ended up skipping or cutting off at certain parts as John walked through the crowds. In a way... it was like flicking through the channels of a radio. Some people would talk about their kids, some would ask if someone else was okay after an event in their lives and hug, others would just walk by... or on a rare occasion, John would catch one or two mentions of the Abyss and would almost immediately try to find the person talking about it. Hundreds of people surrounded him though, and the most he could ever manage to catch was the occasional familiar face from school or flashes of hair, often in an exotic color, so it was almost impossible to find the source of the one topic that could distract Joh-

Okay, there were two things that could steal away John's attention. John actually couldn't keep himself from getting distracted whenever he heard somebody talking about a good video game too. The combination of those two different things diverted John and pulled him away from his task so often that he almost forgot about finding his friends and the barbecue that they had arranged. Though his concern for locating the others actually did disappear when he noticed Moira and Cassandra standing on the edge of the park.

Both girls stood almost completely still as John walked further and further away from them, towards the inside of the park. They were perched, almost a hundred feet apart from each other, on the southern side of the Crescent Meadows. They faced outwards from the park, while another girl with straight, short blonde hair framing her face nagged into one of Moira's ears, leaving John to simply walk right past them while they both just... waited. They were almost like a pair of immovable statues bound in place by their own senses of duty.

They were waiting for him, John realized.

They were watching the areas where they assumed he might have tried entering the park, and he would have gone through there too, if he had not taken the bus to the Marathon. He would have jogged right into their grasp and whatever they had had planned for him if not for the fact that he had been late... if not for the fact that Dullong had held him up.

Dullong's attitude might have even saved-

"John!" Grace snapped suddenly, and his vision clarified. The voices of the people around him fell abruptly silent, the sun seemed to grow a little bit brighter, and the rest of the world suddenly fell back into view. He blinked, pulled his gaze away from the two women standing at the edge of the park, and looked down at the pop-ups blinking open in front of him.

Cassandra Mannilow has used Seclusion!
Gamer's Min- ERR Gamer's Mind failed to resist the spell’s effects!
Cassandra Mannilow has used Seclusion!
Gamer's Mind- ERR Gamer's Mind failed to resist the spell’s effects!
Cassandra Mannilow has used Seclusion!
Gamer's Mind- ERR Gamer's Mind failed to resist the spell’s effects!
Cassandra Mannilow has...

The messages just went on and on, like a horrible siege of pop-ups that John couldn't manage to completely close out of. They continued until, finally, Grace put a hand on John's shoulder and the messages changed! The message about Gamer's Mind suddenly finished, and he resisted enough to completely snap out of the haze that had fallen over him. The park's population abruptly doubled, and people simply appeared around him, like the rest of the world had merely been invisible. He looked up from his screens just in time to see Cassandra and Moira disappear in the crowd’s sudden materialization.

"John, what are you doing here?" Grace asked again, her voice now clear and audible for the young gamer. He could still see the pop-ups appearing around him with every passing second, rushing and struggling to infect him again with the spell's effects, but now that he knew about it, his Gamer's Mind could resist it.

"I, uh..." he paused and slowly turned away from the direction of the other two woman. He looked at Grace and the way she nervously tugged on her upper lip before he answered her. "Michel asked me to come. He..." His sentence died off as John really took a moment to look at her. Unlike how she had dressed over the past few days, Grace had not covered herself up for the Marathon. She was wearing her normal outfit, the one that John had quickly become accustomed to and then missed when she changed it to try and hide the bruises that had been given to her. Now, she was wearing her spandex uniform again, complete with the Gym's logo written down the length of her thigh on her tight pants. The only difference was that her normally dark uniform was now dyed to be as bright as possible. Her ass-hugging pants were a shade of bright, neon blue and barely managed to contain the shapely swell of her firm, round bubble butt. Her top, on the other hand, was pink and just as bright as her pants. The bright color helped to draw emphasis to the message that had been written across the tight sports bra.

She shifted back as the two of them stood there, slowly crossing her arms protectively over her stomach as John read through the 'It’s not alright' statement written boldly across her chest, and then stared down to the image of her bare, naked stomach. She was still just as fit as the day he had met her, her abs were rigid and hard like a sheet of smooth, solid steel, but they weren't unblemished anymore. Instead of the smooth, olive skinned tone that John had grown to love, her stomach was covered in a spattering of horrible, nasty bruises. Sickly purple, yellow, and black splotches were left dotted across her belly and sides. Some bruises were old and fading, but others... others were fresh and new. They were marks that had been placed deliberately on her torso so they would have been almost invisible, even the ones that were high up on her chest, if she had just chosen to cover them up with a sweatshirt.

The sight of her hurt and those new wounds made John's chest tighten and caused the muscles in his neck to start tensing. She even had a fresh split in her upper lip, a mark that she had tried to hide by pulling on her lip when she walked up to John. He stared at them, feeling the urge to repeat the beating he had dropped on her abusive boyfriend, and then remembered the harsh conversations and how they talked to each other over the past few days… Specifically, he remembered how she had talked to him about the fight he had picked with her boyfriend.

Had she snapped at him the other night because Chad had hit her again?

No. He pushed the thought away almost as quickly as it had appeared. She had been mad at him before that night, and in a way, it had been stupid of him to attack Chad. It clearly hadn't solved anything, and he had risked exposing his powers because he hadn't been able to control his anger. He swallowed, feeling his stomach start to turn over the idea of what she wanted him to ignore, and then tried to push forward. Fighting against that kind of **** was one of the reasons for the Marathon. They weren't only there for Michel, they were there for Grace too.

"Listen..." He swallowed again, struggling to get past the dry lump stuck in his throat. "I-I wanted to say that y-you were right about everything you said the other day and the other night." John stumbled as he spoke. His mouth felt like it was failing him, betraying him even as he **** himself to say it all. He considered letting his anger rule him and run rampant again. He thought about dragging Chad by his feet if necessary, through the streets, and all the way up to the local police station to try and get him to stop. It might not have solved anything again, though, but the thought at least felt a little more satisfying than the stuff he had to say to try and fix things with her. If Grace wasn't going to try to fight against Chad, if she thought John was like that... then he couldn't do it. He had to show her that he was different.

John straightened, resolving to try and fix the problem he had accidentally helped to create between them... and Grace's skin paled as he kept speaking.

"I-it was wrong of me... to do that. There's no excuse for it, and I'm sorry. It-" John had to pause. He struggled with the last part of his apology, it was like he could feel a hollow pit opening up in his chest as he spoke. Every word felt like it should have been poisonous. "It won't happen again." Grace's eyes glistened as John spoke. Her long, black braid of hair hung down over one shoulder, barely moving as she opened her mouth to say something back and then stopped as Michel's trainer shouted over at the two of them. The old, grumpy man pointed and waved his arms around as he spoke, directing the two of them over to a nearby picnic table to work on food preparation.

There wasn't much work for them to do, most of it had been done beforehand, but they still tried doing everything they could do to help. They opened up packages of plates and cups, and chopped up veggies with a simple kitchen knife that someone had brought with them whenever the food was brought over to the table.

"I..." Grace's voice squeaked when she finally managed to make herself talk. At first, it was like she barely even managed a thready whisper. "I should not have talked to you like that last night." John shook his head and started to try and stop her before he saw the barrage of tears welling up again in her eyes. "I-I-I didn't mean that. I was... hurt and i-it was the wrong thing to do. I-I... I didn't mean it, John! I didn't. I-"

John actually had to stop her from continuing at that point, mostly because she actually did start to cry. It was only a couple of drops, and she clearly tried to hold them back, but after John had pushed himself in the way of her work and **** her to take a moment to step back, she finally started to breathe a little easier. Her chest heaved as she worked through the tightness constricting her whole being, and after a couple of awkward seconds, John spoke up again to help relieve the pressure for her.

"It's fine," he said, and she started to breathe a little heavier. "No, really. I-" he paused for a moment as he carefully considered his words, but he felt like he knew what he had to say. "I-I already know that you didn't mean it." John lied... or mostly lied. The truth felt a little muddy to him with their particular circumstances. He knew on a small, certain level that she wasn't being serious when she had said it to him, but that was mostly because she had just told him that. He didn't give her time to consider his lie, though, or enforce what she was trying to tell him. He just changed the subject, and at the same time, he tried to **** them both to accept what had just happened. "Did you see Michel's match the other night?"

"...Yeah." It took a couple of seconds for Grace to sniffle, wipe her tears away, and answer him. "Unfortunately."

"No kidding, that was a harsh match," John said, and Grace slowly began to move back over to stand beside him.

"That's an understatement," she said, and John's brow furrowed. "Michel's faced 'The Frame' a few times before," Grace explained, "but this was the first time that that punk won." John winced, and Grace nodded. As John quickly learned, it hadn't just been a normal loss, but it had also been a hit to Michel's winning streak against that particular fighter as well. For Michel, it was one of the matches that was supposed to have been a sure victory... except it wasn't. Somehow, 'the Frame' had come into the ring hitting harder than anyone expected him to. A lot harder.

Truthfully, it sounded a lot like John's most recent experience with his powers and his own increase in strengt-

You have been pulled into a Trap Barrier! Defeat everything inside to escape!

After a brief flash of light, everything and everyone slowly faded from John's vision. The crowds of people gathering up for the start of the Marathon became translucent and then outright disappeared. The world shifted and wavered before his very eyes as entire buildings moved from their original positions. The various towers, trees, and landscapes of John's home all changed until, finally, he was left standing in the midst of a new barren world with collapsed, aging skyscrapers all around him. He gasped and straightened up, no longer standing in the middle of a park but in the middle of a cracked street where plants grew wildly through the broken, unkempt asphalt. He blinked and went to look around before his eyes suddenly landed on the only familiar sight he needed to see.

Cassandra was there again, standing only a few dozen yards away, dressed up in all of her battle gear again. Her eyes glimmered behind a focused red beam of light as she looked at John... and scowled.