Queen of hindsight

“I demand an immediate explanation!” the aggregated voice of Lydia blasted into his ear. “I further want it to be good, precise and extensive. Why has Salamander been subjected to Lorylim, why are you letting her run around with those obvious marks, why isn’t she contained in some laboratory? Encompassing all of this I just need answers to a lot of why’s, John!”

“How do you even know that?” John returned a question himself. “I just sent you the photos I took with everyone at the Atlantic Fuse. Which, granted, was set-up for this exact conversation, but I still didn’t explain to you where the marks came from.”

“Yes, you did…?” Lydia now sounded confused. “I received the text a few minutes ago.”

“But I didn’t send anything, I didn’t even have my pho- SIENA!” he put the phone to the side to give the nightmare elemental a pissed stare. “And that just after I said I trusted you.”

“Admittedly, bad timing on my part,” Siena didn’t look like she felt guilty at this in the least, sitting in a seat made from a network of shadowy tendrils that sprouted from her back, balanced on three purple blades. “But you were planning to do this anyway; I just thought it would be funny if it happened to you unexpectedly.”

“You are getting into the maid outfit later,” he growled. “Guess I have to use one of those rules again.” Sure, forcing Siena to obey everyone’s orders for a few hours was the classical punishment, but it was the classical punishment because she still hated it, it was effective. At least that’s what her unwilling grimace and mental wave of unhappiness indicated. Something told John that wouldn’t prevent future instances of little pranks like this, but he couldn’t leave it unpunished either. He decided to just be happy that this was the actual worst she had done to him in a while.

“Okay, I am back,” John said to the sound of Lydia hitting the deepest note on her piano repeatedly. The note was cut short, she was listening. Not wanting to keep her waiting further, he started explaining. “So, remember that video chat sex session we had two days ago…”

_____________________________________________________________________

“You are a moron,” she stated.

“I know.”

“An absolute idiot. Are you fine? Any lasting problems?” the fact that Lydia asked that for the second time in 10 seconds made it clear just how worried she was. The queen wasn’t one for repetition, much less for information that was so easily summarized.

“I am fine, I have a scar like Undine’s now, I think you can see it on some of the photos, but I also got a resistance skill out of it,” he thus did summarize it and received, after a semi-long pause, a distraught sigh.

“I really wish you wouldn’t mess with things I don’t even understand,” she said.

“Yeah, about that,” John was finally done charging a mana battery, so he pulled his left out of the metal case it had been in for the past three hours. The condensed sweat covered it in a damp layer, and he got a towel from his inventory to wipe it off. The phone stuck between his shoulder and ear. “I think I am starting to understand those things.”

“…I hope you mean on an analytical level,” Lydia wanted clarification.

“Yeah, obviously I am not saying I am getting on their side. It just has become evident to me that you have perhaps overhyped their threat due to never encountering them before. They are certainly not something that is unbeatable,” John told her. “Although, much like the myth of porcupines being able to spray their quills, I guess it’s healthy for everyone to think that. Most people are not me, after all.”

“What are you getting at?” Lydia wanted to know.

“That they aren’t any reality warping , just one that would like to see everything closer to their image. Thus treating them as anything but a disease would be false,” John explained. “Long story short, I can kill them and I will wherever they get in my way.”

“I certainly hope your assumption is correct and that you stay in the clear of unnecessary trouble,” Lydia commented.

“Well, I am not going to fight the Old God before getting ready for raiding.” As that joke didn’t land with the non-gamer queen, he explained, “It’s World of Warcraft things: Old Gods are tentacle alien, slime, thing monsters that are the end bosses of dungeons that you need to be max level for. In other words, I am going to try and reach Eliza levels of strong before I challenge anything that looks like a higher Lorylim, like whatever that Izha thing actually is.”

“I see,” the royal got the message. “In my estimation that is still a moronic scheme, but it is not like you are going about this with the wrong mindset. Just be careful and don’t turn North America into the next sunken continent, and do take care of yourself. I do still… love you.”

She said that last part in a tone that sounded more like she was talking about monetary debt, with just a little cute pause in the middle. Silently, John hoped that she was blushing on the other end of the line.

“For the moment my primary plan is to avoid them like the plague,” John assured her. “I have other affairs to get through first. I am just thinking about what will happen if I inevitably clash with them again.”

“Inevitably?” Lydia asked.

“They have ripped a part out of themselves to try and corrupt Salamander, they once succeeded in partially corrupting Undine, and I also bear the scars already. So there is this thing about me being a tasty target. On the flipside, you think that in the whole of the unsupervised USA, there will be no one to play around with powers he really shouldn’t?”

“A fair point, although I wouldn’t say all of the USA is unsupervised. There are several mid-tier guilds around there, albeit few even reach the upper echelons of that broad category, and the Order of the Golden Rose branch over there has been expanding lately.”

“Wait a second,” John remembered that name, “The Golden Rose is important?”

“Important in what regard? Compared to the overarching forces at play in the world? Not currently, maybe in a few years’ time, if they continue to have success in the USA, which I doubt with you arriving on the scene. Historically they have played quite the role, especially in their homeland of Britain. They come from a long line of female warriors that hold a very special innate ability, one of the incredibly few that is truly inheritable. They have been something akin to an inquisition in the Abyss. Put simply, it is their self-declared mission to keep people in the Abyss from becoming heinous villains or, alternatively, contain whoever already is corrupt in their eyes. If that doesn’t work, they are not above killing.”

“I know them more like moral busybody police, sticking their noses into people’s business who don’t fall in line with their own moral code,” John countered. “Remember that they had their American base in my hometown?”

“Ah, correct, I did actually forget that,” Lydia admitted. “With your potential, you would be on their list of people to watch. If you had kept your hands relatively clean, I doubt they would have moved against you.”

“How would you know?”

“There is a local branch here in Germany, so I deal with them from time to time. They were not happy when I announced our relationship.”

“So, what you are saying is that they are moral busybodies,” John joked. “No, but seriously, I don’t think they are bad people, just pretty rigid in their beliefs.”

“I would agree to that; as I stated, they are quite inquisitive,” Lydia told him, “but I don’t think you will have to necessarily be enemies with them. If you can convince them to follow the rules you lay down and that those rules don’t interfere with their mission at the heart of it, they won’t be of harm to you. You may even be able to convince to serve as some sort of special police in whatever structure you will build. You will have to negotiate that with whatever Warden is leading them when you get to them.”

In John’s mind an image of Moira popped up. The redhead with the green eyes that he had picked Rave over at the start of this crazy journey. ‘Well, that will be an interesting meeting,’ he thought. “I think I can do that; she has been pretty reasonable when I spoke to her in the past. Even if she wasn’t happy with my life choices. I wonder how they got to be anything influential though.”

“Remember how you dismantled the heart of the vassal network that kept them playing whack-a-mole with the local guilds, leaving it in an easily conquerable state, whilst fulfilling your wish to save a certain blood mage?” Lydia said with dry sarcasm.

John’s answer was interrupted by a series of terribly loud interference signals that hurt his ears. “Christ, what was that?” he wanted to know, having to wait for Gamer’s Body to take care of that annoyingly loud beeping sound.

“Thanks, now I am deaf on my left ear for the next hour or so,” Lydia scolded him, her voice going from relatively quiet to normal levels as she changed her ears. “NEVER teleport while having a phone conversation.”

“I will remember that,” he promised. “Do we have anything else bad to talk about?”

“I am done complaining, if that is the knowledge you seek,” Lydia informed him.

“Do you have a minute or two? I want to talk to you about some non-serious stuff.”

“I don’t,” she said while hitting a few keys, a light-hearted little melody in the background, “but I am sure I can be late to a meeting for once. Any particular topic you want to know about?”

“Just how you have been doing,” he told her. “Just tell me what springs to your mind.”

There was a slight delay, with her strumming along to a melody she hummed, then she spoke up again, “My room has been starting to be mildly messy, much to my dismay.”

“Really?” John asked in a disbelieving voice. “YOUR room? I thought there was a physical law that it couldn’t become disorderly.”

“I have been attempting to still govern my old areas in the same way I did before attaining rulership over the rest of Rex Germaniae,” she sighed deeply. “There are not enough hours in the day. I felt the stress building up and was to recognize that I cannot continue like that. As such I started delegating work, but finding the right people to give work to is also work. So, I have had little time to clean my room, a state that will likely continue until the end of next week. Ah,” she stopped, “but this is a sort-of serious topic once again.”

“No, no, keep going,” he hastily ensured her that this was fine, going to the fridge and pouring himself some orange juice. “I am happy to be your complaint box. So, what are you giving away, just your old direct governances?”

Lydia gladly took the opportunity to rant a bit. “I have a two-tier ordering system where I rank the importance of my work based on how broad they are and whether they are my private ownings or Rex Germaniae’s lands. Generally, I am pulling out of most of the more detailed management, however. With my new role to be the judge over federal conflicts, I just don’t have the opportunities to sit down for an extended amount of time to calculate or think about the most efficient solution to anything. Thus, I am putting ministers and mayors on it. As stated earlier it is really hard to find the correct people for the problems at hand. For example, Maximillian’s sister, Ria, is doing a superb job at broadly governing her realm, but she keeps pulling money from the funds that should go to reconstruction efforts to just construct something else entirely.”

“Like what?” John blinked.

“I don’t know; she tried explaining it to me, but all I found out was that she desired way more Wahr-Bronxe than anyone could ever need for anything.”

John remembered that being loot from one of his dungeon encounters, “You might want to check if she is building a steampunk city anywhere.”

“I am in the process of doing exactly that. Maximillian is on the ship with you, correct?”

“Yes, why?”

“Whack him over the head from me for leaving me alone with this crazy technocrat. I would much rather deal with his bravado than her constant unwillingness to govern. She does it, but she keeps complaining about having skipped the line of succession exactly for this reason.”

“Give me a second,” John said, emptying his glass of orange juice and then going outside. Finding Maximillian in the arms of Stef wasn’t all that hard. The Gamer hit the back of the king’s head with the back of his hand.

“What the hell, buddy?” Maximillian looked up to him with a startled glare.

“Sorry, following orders from your queen, she complains about having to deal with your sister,” he told him and then marched off.

“Tell her to shove it up her ass!”

“Heard that?” John wanted to know.

“Yes, I won’t honour that with a response,” Lydia told him, now in a slightly better mood. “Also tell Aclysia I miss her tea. I could really use her here right now.”

“Just her? What about the rest of us?” John spoke in an obviously fake offended way.

“Whilst I would enjoy your company, you are also poison to a successful work environment. Between the sex, the chaos and the overall discord you would cause, governing would become a hard time,” she answered in the Lydia typical honest stoicism. The piano melody in the background ceased, “Ah, but now I am stretching the amount of time I can justify to lose to the council.”

“What’s it about?” John was kind of unwilling to let her go, so he tried to have her talk just a few more words before he was going to be deprived of her voice again.

“The correct allocation of the rebuilding funds and what sections that were destroyed should be looked at for improvement rather than restoration. Ria was very enthusiastic about this one,” she sighed. “It will be an interesting one. Speak to you soon again?”