Endless Possibilities

The sky was awash with the hues of dawn as John approached his front door with a heavy heart. His feet trudged across the grass-covered hill with **** and a sense of resignation, the grim dawn chasing away the last vestiges of delusion and hope. He hadn’t intended to stay out so late, but sometimes… sometimes when he visited her, it all came pouring out. John had talked until the first rays of light broke through the sky and colored his world with foreboding promises of tales yet untold.

The sound his palm made upon the door seemed far too loud, all the more so when he was greeted by the silence of the room within. Aclysia sat in the exact place he had left her, all but unchanged save for the lack of materials in front of her. Her gaze had been focused blankly on the table, but when she noticed his arrival, Aclysia immediately turned to face him… though her gaze remained as empty as before.

”Creator John. You have returned.”

“Yeah, I… sorry, I didn’t mean to be out so long. You must have been bored out of your mind, sorry for making you wait.”

”You do not need to apologize, Creator John. You asked me to wait, and so I waited. I have felt no boredom.”

“Yeah, but I-”

John cut himself off, taking a moment to contemplate the look on Aclysia’s face. It was the same as it had always been, as unmoved by his absence as his presence, and the loyalty within not diminished in the slightest for it. He could have told her to stand in the corner and not move for days, and she would have obeyed without question. He wasn’t entirely certain if she would have even defended herself if he began to break her apart with his bare hands. John had no need to apologize to her no matter what he did.

But that was not John, and may Gaia smite him if he ever became that kind of man.

“...but you deserve better. I get that you don’t really understand it right now, but I still owe you an apology,” John said, pursing his lips. “If anything, I owe you more of one since you don’t know better yet. So I’m sorry, and I’ll do better in the future. I just… needed to visit a friend.”

”Another friend of yours, Creator John? Should I meet her so that I can familiarize myself with her?”

“...Maybe one day,” John said quietly, not elaborating further. “Everyone else should be waking up soon. I’ll have Farrah give you a tour of the house, and we’ll work on getting you a room soon.”

”I’m fine in whatever space you have available for me, Creator John.”

“Which is exactly why I’ll be in charge of determining if the room is good enough for you, instead of letting you do it yourself,” John said, rolling his eyes. “You’ll understand one day, Aclysia.”

”If you believe so, Creator John.”

John left it at that, already hearing the stirrings of the others in their various rooms. The kittens were active at all hours of the night, often sleeping in a pile or small groups and wandering off for an hour or two before going back to sleep in an entirely different location, but everyone else was usually up not long after the false dawn of John’s world.

It didn’t take long before a crowd had started to gather. Lerianna arrived first, followed closely by Sophia, and the noise of their arrival attracted the rest before too long. Unlike the day before none of them left, save for Orria who gave quick greetings and a few empathetic hugs before trudging off toward the east, a slightly less enthusiastic glimmer in her eye than normal. John watched her until she was out of sight, frowning softly.

“Father, she will be alright. Even if Vallya-”

“I know, I know,” John said, as he turned and gave a reassuring nod to Sophia. “I just don’t like having to do this at all.”

“Well, it is what it is. Let’s make the most of it, yeah? If we’re training to make up for yesterday, I’m interested this time,” Lerianna said, lazily resting across their sectional.

“We’re not training. It’s just going to be a missed day, much as I hate that with everything else going on,” John said, sighing. “Today I need to get back to the old world for a little while. I have a lot of things to discuss with Moira and Tricia, plus I’m sure Kim is annoyed at me for not stopping by when I returned – again. And I still don’t know what Layla has been up to. We can make up for the day we lost later with a little more effort, but I don’t want to push things back any further than we have to.”

“So why are we waiting around?” Lerianna asked, impatience evident in her tone.

“Because I happen to like most of you, and wanted to see you before I left,” John said, a wry smirk ghosting at the edges of his lips. Lerianna rolled her eyes, but before whatever snark she was working on could manifest, John continued, “Besides, I told Aclysia that I would get someone to give her a tour. Farrah, would you mind?”

“Are you sure, John? I mean… I’m still very new here, I don’t really know your world like Orria does,” Farrah said, looking as if she were trying to make herself smaller.

“She just needs a tour of the house and the surrounding area, if that’s okay with you. If something goes wrong and I need to call on the others, I don’t want Aclysia to be left alone with no warning because I wound up in a fight.”

John didn’t want to assume that he would somehow wind up battling for his life, but it was also hard to deny how often that ended up happening. More importantly, mentioning the possibility of a fight seemed to send a jolt through Farrah, her eyes widening and her body jerking into a reflexive nod.

“Y-yeah, I can handle that,” Farrah said with a soft nod.

“Ooh, Lord John, may I assist?” Yvara asked, leaning in with a wide smile. “I know the lands around the house and the paths out to the Temple quite well; once the tour of your home is complete, I can show her the surrounding lands so that she need not worry about getting lost!”

“Ah, I-” John stammered, conflicted by the offer. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted Aclysia out wandering his world at large with things as they were, especially considering she was currently weaker than a newborn. He was inclined to push past that reasoning for the sake of not locking themselves away until Vallya was more stable, but then there was the matter of her mannerisms. John already felt awkward enough with Yvara herself praising him. If Aclysia learned that from her…

But the look in the dragoness’ shy, eager eyes nearly melted him.

“Alright, that sounds fine. Just don’t go too far, or if you do, meet up with Orria. She can teach Aclysia about some of the plant life around here, and show her our food groves.”

“That’s a wonderful idea, Lord John!”

“That’s fine, I didn’t want to help anyway,” Lerianna said, rolling her eyes. “Got better things to do than give tours.”

“I want you to be available because I want to talk to Tricia about you.”

Lerianna’s look immediately changed, cycling through surprise and happiness before flicking back to mild annoyance. “Well, geez, how was I supposed to know you actually cared?”

John just smiled at the repressed bunny-girl, before turning back to the others. “Maera, Mithra…”

“We’ll be okay. You go ahead, Myaster,” Maera said, making a shooing motion with her hands. “We got lotsa playing to do today!”

“Bring us back lunch. More burgers!” Mithra demanded, nodding excitedly.

“I think I can handle that. Sophia, are you ready to go?”

“At your word, Father.”

“Take care, everyone. We should be back before sunset, depending on how much Moira wants to chew me out.”

A cacophony of goodbyes were the last thing that John heard as he wrapped his hand around Sophia’s and warped them across worlds. Their arrival at the Brighton Manor, mere moments later, was relatively quiet.

But it was certainly not unnoticed.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean-nnn toooo… interrupt… uhhh…”

They appeared in the same place they’d left it – Lord Brighton’s war room, the chamber for only the most important of meetings and strategy formations. The room was being put to good use, though the purpose was far from strategic. As they arrived, John saw movement out of the corner of his eye and began his apology. He had assumed he might have barged in on an important strategy meeting, perhaps even a call with Adantia.

What he found instead were two young-looking Knights, around his own age, ones he didn’t recall ever having met before. A young man with jet-black hair, and an auburn haired girl at most a year or two older than her partner. They looked at John with wide, gaping eyes, and he suddenly realized they might well have been recruited in the last year with no knowledge of him.

“Hey, listen, this is all well and good. Teenage romance is a beautiful thing, I’m happy to be on my way, so if you could just not-”

A bloodcurdling scream broke the air as the two of them reached for swords they were not wearing, with fingers as unpracticed and shaky as John had ever seen from Order troops. Not Knights, then, but recruits after all. And already, John could hear the sound of distant clanking as metal troops hurried toward the disturbance.

“Just once I wish I could show up here without causing some kind of a panic,” John grumbled as the shouts grew closer.

---

"John Newman, just once I wish you could show up here without causing a panic," Moira groaned from across the room.

"What can I say? I guess it's a talent," John replied, rolling his eyes at Moira while he paced around the war room’s table. "Why are your recruits sneaking off to make out anyway? No PDA in the mansion?"

"No, it's because they were supposed to be training," Moira sighed. “We had finished all of our meetings for the day; I suppose they assumed this was a safe place for their little tryst. They’ll be disciplined soon enough for skipping and for traipsing about in our War Room uninvited, so I suppose I can at least thank you for helping to keep our recruits in line.”

“Tryst? Who actually calls it a tryst in the twenty-first century?” John asked, fighting back a giggle at Moira’s perpetually dated vocabulary.

“I’d be lying if I said I missed your snark, but I’m glad to have it back all the same,” Moira replied, not even flinching at his barb. “Now, is there a reason for your unannounced drop-in?”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I know I probably should’ve announced it. I’m not really used to re-appearing where… other people are.”

A beat of silence fell between the two, even Moira caught up in memories. Then her face hardened and she returned to her chastising ways.

“Ahem. The reason, John?”

“R-right. I have a few things I wanted to talk to you about in private. With Tricia around, if she’s available.”

“She’s in her lab. I’ll ask her to meet us here as quickly as she can.” A few taps on her phone and Moira’s attention quickly returned to John. “Is it about the war?”

“Eh… some of it is,” John said, still a bit **** to discuss Arista’s transformation into Farrah, especially when he knew he’d have to repeat it once Tricia arrived. “The first thing I wanted to discuss involves Lerianna, and some… hormonal issues she’s having.”

“Ah, that was the rather muscular bunny-girl that you created, wasn’t it?”

The look on Moira’s face was calm, but only barely so. There were cracks in the facade, and not particularly difficult ones to spot. Compared to others like Vallya, John almost had to actively try not to read Moira.

“Yeah. I’m surprised you remember her.”

“W-well, it’s just that… the last time we met was in combat, and she sort of…” Moira trailed off, blushing furiously.

“Ah, right. She said she made out with you.”

“S-she did no such thing!” Moira blurted out, her face turning a deeper shade of red as if to compete with her own hair. “She merely… kissed me. A chaste kiss. Mostly.”

John thought of teasing the Warden further, but decided against it. John worried that if he started antagonizing her before the difficult conversation about his Purify ability had even begun, he’d only be making things harder on himself in the long run.

“Well, whatever it was, it helped her win that fight. I’m no biologist, and I don’t have the degrees she does, but from the way Lerianna described it, her species have extremely active hormones, and a lot of them are closely linked. Boosting her arousal also boosts her fight or flight response and floods her body with endorphins to enhance her combat prowess. Or… something like that. All I really know is that the hornier she gets, the stronger she gets. And weirdly, vice-versa too.”

“H-how can you say that so casually,” Moira said, flushing and turning her head away from John with the look of a woman who’d just been called out. “You’d better not go around telling people about the effects of the Blessing so easily…”

“Oh? Are you worried I’d tell everyone your secrets?” John said, grinning. His earlier thoughts about teasing her too much still rang in his head, but the scarlet coloring Moira’s cheeks had deepened so much he couldn’t fully hold himself back. “It’s probably been hard for you this last year, without anyone to help you find release, yeah?”

“It’s been hard for… a lot of reasons. But that was one of them, yes.”

Silence reigned again. John’s eyes widened, while Moira’s narrowed with a cringe that John could almost feel. Their gazes met halfway, apologies already dancing on their tongues.

“Sorry, that was insensitive. I was just trying to be playful-”

“N-no, I knew that. I got too serious, I’ve just been under a lot of-”

“I apologize for the delay. My experiments were running a little behind schedule; I wanted to ensure that my alchemical components were stabilized before I…” Tricia trailed off, her gaze passing over both Moira and John for a moment. Tricia saw their expressions and their proximity, and very quickly seemed to come to either a very accurate or very inaccurate conclusion as to what they’d been doing.

“Am I interrupting something?”

Moira stepped away before John had done more than smirk, though that likely only made their positioning more suspicious. “No, Tricia. We were waiting for you to arrive, actually. John said he has something he wants to discuss with you first.”

“Right, I was hoping that you could help with a problem Lerianna has been having,” John began, trying to get his train of thought back on the rails. “See, she’s got an issue with her hormones that cause her to-”

“Her species appears to have a particularly overactive libido, combined with extremely active adrenal glands, gonads, and hypothalami. It’s a bit more complex than that, but that’s the most direct comparison I can make to human biology,” Tricia said, her eyes lighting up only slightly as she met John’s gaze. “Was that approximately what you were going to say?”

“Well… yeah, more or less. Did you get all that from your scans?” John asked, though he already suspected otherwise.

“Mostly. I didn’t have a first-hand accounting of her exact symptoms and reactions to her altered biology until recently. Yesterday she accosted one of my drones and made contact with me directly to begin developing a plan for how to address these hormonal extremes – she said that you had given her the idea and approved of seeking a remedy, as such.”

John offered a firm nod as confirmation. He hadn’t really expected Lerianna to be so proactive about her situation, but he had no problems with it. If anything, it was a bit of a relief to have so much of the issue dealt with already.

“I’ve begun preparing a prototype device based on my own suit and external inhibitors. It’s difficult to judge its effects properly without field testing, so for now, I’ve restricted its effects to what should be a relatively safe level. I trust that with your Siphon ability, you should be able to adjust it as needed if it is over- or under-tuned for her biology. I should have it ready within a week, and any fine tuning can be done remotely from there, unless I’ve made some drastic miscalculation and have to rework the hardware itself.”

“Oh. That’s… wow. I wasn’t expecting this much progress to have been made. You continue to impress, as always,” John said, shooting a smile at the bodysuit-clad genius. Tricia only let the faintest smirk emerge before it was shunted away into a dull calmness once more.

“I still owe you a great deal, John. This is the least I can do.”

John would’ve liked to correct her, but before he could even open his mouth, Moira was already quirking an eyebrow at him.

“So then, John, what were the other issues you wanted to address? You still seem quite nervous.”

”Shit, I guess I’m as easy to read as she is.”

John swallowed as subtly as he could and did his best to steel himself before continuing. With both Moira and now Tricia staring intently at him, he could think of no subtle way to broach the topic.

“Tricia, with your drones freed up, you’ve… probably noticed the other new creations around. Since I disappeared a year ago, you’ve probably already noticed all four of our new arrivals. There’s Orria, the blonde elf, Shishun, the white-haired Naga. Both of them were created several weeks ago, before I first returned to the Manor and left for Himiko’s territory.”

“Yes, I’ve already completed some preliminary analysis of them,” Tricia confirmed. “I’ve tried to avoid invading your privacy around your home, though.”

“I do appreciate that… not that you aren’t welcome, but it’s nice to not have drones constantly flitting about,” John said, voice managing to come out a bit lighter than he felt. “More recently, we added three others to our numbers. Aclysia is a new woman you probably haven’t had a chance to see on your drones yet. There’s also Yvara, a dragoness who built the temple you’ve probably already found, and… then there’s Farrah.”

John paused, hoping for something – an interruption, a question, a distraction of any kind. Moira seemed caught off guard by his sudden pause, not speaking but simply narrowing her eyes more the longer he went without speaking. Tricia seemed to fully know what he was referring to – her eyes glistened with unspoken questions, her curiosity unending but just barely kept at bay well enough to avoid blurting out some questions.

Reluctantly, John sighed and continued.

“Farrah is… she seems to be a normal Abyssal human.”