Making Our House A Home

With a little poking and prodding around, as well as some experimentation, I manage to figure out a couple of things about this place. Our palace (heh I love being able to say that), is mostly made out of a thing called Glacite. I can’t figure out exactly what it is, I can’t find anything online about it except for references to a Minecraft server called Hypixel Skyblock. All I know about the material is that it’s incredibly strong and durable.

It also turns out that we have a small basement. Our basement houses something called an Infinity Gem. I’m not entirely sure what that is either, but the observe says that it’s a legendary item and is the thing that provides the mana needed for electricity and running water to the entire place.

A weird quirk of the temperatures in the barrier is that none of us seem to be affected by them. Me being comfortable is no surprise; I love the cold and I have a skill that makes cold temperatures more comfortable anyway. After some looking around in menus, I find that everybody in my party is affected by a buff called ‘comfy cold’, and it’s an easy guess as to what that does.

This comfort in the temperature despite how cold it is, also extends to all of us being nude, much to our delight. We get all the benefits of the cold with none of the drawbacks! I also take some time to experiment with the new Kingdom menu that has appeared along with everything else.

I’m listed as the owner of the barrier, and it turns out that I can change the day/night cycle. I can also change the weather and there’s even a greyed out option to change the entire landscape. Not that I’m going to be using either of the last two, this is perfect, but it’s nice to have it there. The current day/night cycle is set to 10 hours of daytime and 14 hours of nighttime, which if I remember correctly, is about the normal amount of daylight during Australian winters.

Fiddling around with the settings a little, I find that I can reduce the intensity of the sunlight. I’m really happy about this option, because I often find myself getting overwhelmed by the intense sunlight that I’m used to in Sydney. I set the daylight intensity to be quite low and cloud filtered. After consulting with my girlfriends and getting their agreement on the change, I lower the hours of daylight to only 8.

It also turns out that we have perfect reception in here which gets me really excited as I realise that we can turn one of the empty rooms into a large gaming room. With the excited agreement of Mia and Skylar to start furnishing the room, they both begin to shop on the abyss auction. I mentally check where Ivy is and I find her looking out the window of our bedroom. I walk upstairs to join her, sit down next to her and put my arm around her.

“Are you okay?” I ask her. She sighs, looking at me and smiling sadly. “I just really hope we’ll be safe here.” Rubbing her back gently, I comfort her. “I think we will be. Something feels…special about this place.” She nods. “I feel it too.” A thought strikes me. “If you like, we might be able to go down to the local Fateweaver outpost and see if they’ll check it out here, make sure it’s safe.”

Ivy’s face lights up. “I’d love that! I didn’t know we could do that.” I kiss her on the forehead. “I’m not a hundred percent sure if we can, but we can always try and see what happens. Nothing lost if they don’t offer those services and if they do, then we get peace of mind.” Ivy pulls me close, holding me tightly. “I love you Gemma. I want us all to be safe.” She kisses me on the forehead and I smile. “Me too honey.”

It turns out that we have an option to get things delivered from the abyss auction straight here. With that in mind, after moving all of mine and Mia’s things from my apartment into our new home, we set about ordering a bunch of furniture. By 11am, we have most of the things we could want in our new home set up.

A Wi-Fi router, the spare bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a storage room of sorts, and a few different rooms for any of us to retreat to if we want some alone time. We also get the gaming room fully set up, with a high end PC for each of the four of us, and every gaming console that Mia and I could think of.

We rapidly build a collection of all sorts of physical games, just for the fun of it. We also set up proper RGB lighting, fluffy pink rugs and beanbag chairs in the gaming room, along with custom desks with enough leg room for somebody to fit under the desk, in case one of us ever feels like ‘supporting’ another. We also hang the trans flag, the lesbian flag and the polyamorous flag around the room for decoration and good measure.

Skylar decides that she wants to build a library, so we allocate a room for it and let her at it. As Skylar happily shops around the auction for books, we sit back and take a look at our handiwork. In just a couple of hours and with a few hundred thousand dollars, we’ve transformed our amazing and pretty but bare bones palace into a home for the four of us, that we each adore.

After checking with Mia, it turns out that we can indeed hire a Fateweaver to fortify existing barriers. She tells me not to worry about the cost, that she’d cover it. We get Skylar’s agreement to drive us back there, but she asks for some time to keep working on building her library first, which we’re happy to give her. While we wait for her to do that, I decide to finally check out the class system.

The error message sends a stab of anxiety through my stomach, and I take a second to calm down. The last time I saw an error message, things didn’t end well. Upon reading the window once more, I shrug and choose the cryomancy option. The window disappears and new ones appear in its place.

“This system is cool! It’s going to help me, quote ‘expand the scope and power of my abilities’.” I remark, and Ivy giggles. “Alright test it! Let’s see what you can do with it!” Mia says, itching to know what happens. Eager to test it myself, I look through the list of classes and decide to spend a level on the Queen class.

I read over the window, then pass it onto Ivy for her to read. “Queen of the cuteness! Queen of the cuteness!” She chants immediately, upon reading that one. I giggle at her reaction. “Slow down, at least consider the other ones first!”

“NO! FLUFFY!” She responds loudly, pouting. I kiss her softly as Mia reads the window. “Why would you even want ‘queen of the aggressive’?” She asks. “I suppose they would be good for either training or guards.”

I wait for Mia to finish looking over the window and give her input. “It’s gotta be queen of the cute, right? Cute animals roaming around this place sounds awesome!” Smiling at the enthusiasm from both of them, I give my opinion. “Agreed. Although this has also reminded me: we have space and a home for cats now.” I turn to Ivy. “Today or tomorrow, want to buy a pair of kittens?” I ask her.

Her soft and happy expression hardens into her dom face and my heart starts to beat faster. “If we don’t get them today, I will ruin you until we do.” I feel my face reddening and a lewd smile spreading across my face as I look at the ground. “Yes ma’am.” Ivy lifts my head up with one finger to look her in the eye. “Good girl.” She says and I start giggling happily.

Once I’ve calmed down a little, I press the queen of the cute perk option and we head outside together to see if we can spot the different species of animals that have spawned. Immediately, bunnies hopping lightly over the snow catch my eye. I swoon and Ivy joins me a moment later, gushing over how cute they are.

Just then, out of the treeline, comes a beautiful wolf, padding it’s way out gently. It raises its head into the air and howls before disappearing back into the trees. A spot of colour catches my eye and I look over to see an animal I don’t recognise.

It’s extremely colourful and looks something like a fox, but with large ears that are sticking up straight and an extremely colourful tail like a peacocks’. It’s a stunning creature, and it sniffs the ground a bit before bounding away. I manage to get an observe off before it disappears, and observe pins it as something called a mana fox.

“Definitely a good choice.” I remark, happy that I picked it. “Agreed. Ugh, I can’t wait to get the cats!” Ivy pouts and I giggle. “Later today honey, we have a few things to do first.” We walk back inside for the moment to look over the rest of my classes. After pondering for a bit, we decide to spend the next of my 9 remaining class levels on the cryomancer class.