Saved Vacation Days

The morning came bright and early for John's world - literally, as the faux sun rose high in the distance. John stirred from his bed with a light stretch, an effort only mildly complicated by how he, Farrah, and Sophia had all entangled themselves in their midnight tossing.

"Nice thing about this upgrade to Gamer's Body is not being groggy,” John mused to himself as he sat up and slid out of bed.

"Ugh... Father? What happened? Were we attacked?"

John turned to see Sophia stirring as well, one hand on her head as she blearily looked around.

"No, we weren't attacked," John said with a smirk. "How was your first taste of ****?"

"The taste was excellent. I regret only the effects. I apologize for anything I may have said that was... out of line."

"You were absolutely fine, Sophia. Nothing to apologize for at all. It was actually kind of nice seeing you relaxed for a change."

"I will admit, it was somewhat liberating… though I do not like in hindsight knowing that my guard was not as raised as it should always be,” Sophia said, frowning slightly.

“As I said, it was nice to see you relax for once. Though I appreciate your awareness, it’s important we all get some rest now and then,” John replied quietly. He opened his inventory and started re-dressing himself as Sophia stepped free of the bed and Farrah finally began to wake.

“Mmm… is it time to get up? Oh, this bed is so much nicer than all those motels,” Farrah said, stretching lazily in the midst of the tangled sheets. “I don’t know how you manage to get out of it so easily.”

“You’ll get used to it. Don’t worry, I promise life isn’t always as uncomfortable as sleeping in seedy motels.” John chortled.

“Seedy? Like plants?” Farrah mumbled, then her eyes widened a little in remembrance. “Oh, Sophia, now that you’re awake, are you going to explain that ‘sex’ thing you were talking about? You fell asleep before you finished answering me.”

Sophia said nothing, but John saw her tense up slightly. A blush – a genuine embarrassed blush – spread across her cheeks, and she very pointedly turned her eyes away from the bed.

“I had… forgotten about that for a moment, Father. My apologies.”

“We can have that conversation some other time, Farrah,” John said, sighing at her curiosity and inability to let a new topic drop. Farrah pouted in response, crossing her arms on the bed.

“You said that last night too,” she huffed. Twinges of a joke that Farrah wouldn’t even understand touched at the corners of his mind, but John **** them away as he turned to the doorway.

“If you remember to ask me when it’s your day, we can talk all about it,” John promised as he strode for the door, praying that Farrah would find something else to distract her before that ever happened. While Farrah was still getting herself out of bed, John opened the door and was out into the hallway with Sophia not far behind him. He wanted to avoid the conversation as well as keep himself from staring as Farrah slid out of the sheets wearing nothing but a pair of panties. Living in his private world where most of his creations opted for nudity over clothing, he should have been used to such sights by now… but there was a certain allure to any new arrival, one that would’ve made for another awkward explanation if Farrah noticed it.

“Speaking of which, you keep mentioning each of us having a day, Father. Have you decided when each one shall be?”

“Yeah, more or less. I didn’t want to create any fuss over the order that people get their ‘day’ in, so I wanted to use something neutral. I figure the order that everyone joined me is probably the easiest. Then every couple of days, I’ll probably take a day to go back to the old world, talk to Moira, Kim, take care of some work in Springfield, all that.”

“You sound very casual about this, Father. Usually preparing for a battle has you on edge. Has your confidence reached a new height? I am proud of you for believing in us,” Sophia said, her chest puffing out with pride in a way that made her naked breasts bounce slightly and her abdomen glisten in the light of the morning sun. John tore his eyes away from her with an effort, focusing on her words rather than her body as best as he could.

“Maybe I’m just getting numb to it… or maybe I know we’re already locked on this path, so I’m not doubting it for once,” John mused. It was true that he hadn’t felt a sense of dread about a war that was only a month away, at least not yet. Perhaps it was still pending, perhaps the tensions of the journey to the west coast had rendered him a bit numb to this new impending doom… perhaps he’d simply been through too many life-or-**** situations to feel that kind of stress and worry.

“Whatever, the reason isn’t really important. I’ve already missed most of a month away from almost everyone here, except you and Vallya. If we’re just going to cruise from one catastrophe to the next for all of eternity, I’m going to make time for those important to me. If I can’t spare half a day to spend with the people that I love the most, then to hell with the consequences. I live and die on my own terms, no one else’s.”

Sophia said nothing, but John couldn’t help notice a slight smile crossing her face as he spoke. He didn’t say much else for a while, until they were nearly upon the common room of their living quarters.

“Regardless of the impending war, I suspect that quite a few of the people here will choose to train for at least part of their day anyway,” John said at last. “You, for instance. And I intend to give the kittens their own day split among them since I was away for so long. Mika and Miya are a bit more playful, but if I know Magnus, he’ll insist on finally getting to go into his first-”

John paused mid-sentence as they descended the stairs into the common room. The sight immediately before him wasn’t all that unexpected at first glance – a mostly empty room with only the empty chairs and sofas to greet him. But even distracted by a conversation, John was no fool. He could see the twitching of tails barely peeking over the edges of fabric, could hear the low-level thrumming of barely restrained purrs. Hell, he could almost feel the tension in the air, the coiled muscles ready to spring into action.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” John said loudly. “Should I pounce on him? And the answer may surprise you-”

“Get him!” Moira cried, the red-haired little Neko the first one to clear her cover as she sprinted from behind the far sofa.

With a battle cry that was half yowling and half human screams, all six kittens charged from their “hiding” places, bounding on two legs or all fours in equal measure, each of them barely getting in a full stride before they were airborne toward the Gamer. John felt weight after weight added to his own body as six sets of scrabbling paws latched onto him at varying points.

“Noooo, I won’t… let you… win!” John managed to eke out just before allowing himself to collapse on the floor, a motion he was quite familiar with when the kittens were around. He still wasn’t sure whether it was a form of play like real cats practicing for fighting as adults or if they just enjoyed the sight of their father being forcibly tackled to the ground, but all six of them burst into joyous laughter as they nimbly moved to remain on top of John, avoiding being caught under any of his flailing limbs.

“We got him! We got him!” Midoriya cried victoriously, clinging on to John’s left arm.

“Nyaa!” “Nyaa!” Mika and Miya half-mewled, their teeth playfully digging into his shirt sleeve as they clung to his right side.

“Okay, okay, everyone, calm down,” John finally called out, grinning as he extricated himself from the Nekos one by one. They reluctantly settled down as he physically removed them from his person, setting them down on the floor. Despite their eagerness to pounce him and the frequency with which they did so, the kittens at least understood when it was time to behave – as best as they could. They were still a bit impertinent, but with them being somewhere between teenagers and cats, John was just grateful they had any sense at all.

“Now, what are the lot of you doing up and waiting for me so early, anyway?” John asked, grinning.

“We heard movement from upstairs, Papa! We wanted to surprise you if we could!” Miriam said, grinning as only a cat could. “This is a welcome party for Papa now that he’s back home again.”

“And how long have you been waiting around for me to ‘move around’ upstairs?” John asked, voice laden with suspicion.

“Not long! We were napping here anyw- ow!” Midoriya gasped a bit as Mika and Miya pinched him from both sides.

“We were up all night waiting for you!”

“We missed you so much, Papa!”

Mika and Miya covered for their **** of their brother in unison, causing John to quirk an eyebrow. The lie wasn’t the least bit believable. The kittens were active at most times of the day when he was around, but John had heard from most of his lovers that whenever he wasn’t in the room, the kittens were much like normal cats – napping, with the occasional play or burst of energy. Not unlike Maera and Mithra, actually.

“Mika, Miya, you two wouldn’t be lying to your Papa, would you?”

“N-no!”
“No way!”

The words weren’t convincing on their own, but paired with the panicked expressions and blushes on their face, John couldn’t possibly have been less convinced. He fought back the urge to roll his eyes as he closed in on the nervous sisters.

“Because you both know what would happen if you were lying to your Papa, don’t you? You understand the kind of punishment that liars get?”

“No, Papa! Please, don’t-”
“We’ll be good Papa, we swear-”

“Too late, tickle attack!”

John laughed almost as loudly as Mika and Miya did as he lunged forward, latching his hands around the two yellow- and orange-haired sisters by their sides, tickling wildly at their midriffs as they struggled to free themselves. Since John only had one arm for each, they quickly escaped and retreated to the same corner of the room, somehow looking both amused and hostile at the same time, lightly pawing the air as if they could reach John from across the room.

“Myaster, you awake now? Yay!”

Rather than a tackling dive, Maera appeared from the upper halls with a gleeful leap, placing herself across John’s chest with her arms and legs propped on him in such a way that – even if John’s arms hadn’t instinctively curled outward to catch her – she could have easily supported herself on his body. Mithra followed behind her more rambunctious twin sister, curling up against John’s other side a bit more leisurely.

“Ah, so you two are hanging around after all,” John said, grinning. He wasn’t all that surprised – even though they had a bit less energy for ambushes than Mithra’s kittens, Maera and Mithra rarely let the kittens wander too far or get into too much trouble without them being close behind.

“Of course. Myaster hasn’t been home in so long, we can barely sleep now that he’s back,” Maera said, tucking herself close to his body. “Can’t wait for our day with Myaster.”

“We do wanna spend lots of time with Myaster, but…”

Mithra’s voice was as sure as Maera’s, yet both of them glanced toward the kittens in a way that John couldn’t help but notice. Casting his gaze toward the young ones, John saw that all of the young Neko kittens were staring up at him with wide eyes, not daring to speak out quite yet, but giving John a look as if he were denying them the very water of life itself.

"Myaster, maybe you should let the kittens have the first turn," Maera said, stifling a giggle at their **** of cuteness. “Not sure Myaster can handle those eyes for a whole day.”

"We don't mind waiting,” Mithra offered, nuzzling her head against John's neck. “We’re happy as long as you’re happy, Myaster.”

"Alright... the kittens win, you get the first day," John said, laughing as the faces of all six kittens lit up in unison, and they all began shouting for joy at once. "What do you want to do?"

Six voices filled the room at once, and John immediately realized his mistake.

"Alright, alright, that’s my bad,” John admitted, shaking his head. “All six of you want to do something different, so we’re going to compromise. Each of you gets to pick something to do, and we can do that for an hour before we move onto the next one."

”Hopefully after six hours they’ll all be so tired they’ll be begging to be left alone anyway,” John thought wryly, for once grateful for the kittens’ limited bursts of energy.

"Who gets to go first?" Magnus asked, looking impatient.

"Well, I think I can guess what you're going to say, Magnus, and that's going to be the last thing we do." Magnus' face immediately fell, so John reached out and ruffled his hair to ease the sorrow of the young lad.

“I’m not saying that to be unfair. It’s because you’re going to want to finally do a dungeon run, aren’t you?” John asked, and Magnus quickly nodded. “I’m willing to allow it, but you know as well as I do that anyone who goes along for that is going to be tired and maybe even a little hurt. So I’ll finally allow you to train – but in exchange, we’ll do that last so everyone can rest up afterward. Sound fair?”

“Sounds great!” Magnus roared, pounding one of his fists into his open palm. “I’m ready, Papa! I’ll destroy that dungeon!”

“I’m sure you will! But for now, we’ll do something else. I actually think I already know what most of you are going to ask for,” John said, grinning as he glanced over the eager eyes of his inhuman children. “I’m going to try to pick them in the order of least to most exhausting for all of you. Let’s see how accurate I am. Let’s start with… you, Miriam.”

Miriam’s eyes glittered as John called out her name…

...and were still glistening even almost a full hour into John’s story.

Miriam had always been a curious and rather lore-centric Neko, a trait not shared by any of her brothers, sisters, or even her mother or aunt. She loved any moment that John was willing to spare to share his account of events in the old world, real world, or her most common descriptor of it, the “event world”, given that it was usually after a return from there John had something new to talk about.

Of course, John’s stories were always a bit lacking in real detail, since especially as of late they had details too adult or too complex to readily explain to a Neko, even a teenaged one with a love of stories. He didn’t feel like telling her of the kinds of people they had actually been fighting before his year sealed away, nor teasing Magnus with tales of the dungeons they visited.

So instead he simply read her books, or occasionally even showed her manga. Collecting them from the old world was easy enough to do when he made the rare trip back, and they made her so incredibly happy. She didn’t even seem to care much about what genre the stories were, so long as they were well-written and entertaining.

With the others in attendance, John had chosen a Shonen manga – Mika and Miya were barely listening anyway, and it kept Magnus and Midoriya a little more interested in the story, instead of getting into trouble. John had to stop a few times to settle down one of the kittens when they got particularly rambunctious anyway, but the interruptions were hardly enough to disturb the story – Miriam’s eyes glistened every time they passed over the page, every time John read a new line aloud, as if seeing into a new world all her own.

“You’re it!”

“You’re it!”

“You’re it!”

Mika and Miya had insisted on using both of their hours together, for a non-stop, endless two hour play session. John would have objected and insisted on at least separating each hour to give the others a break, but he’d already guessed at what they would request – and how it would end. The other kittens gave it a good effort, but after around an hour they were all quite bored and tired of playing the litany of games that Mika and Miya came up with.

Of course, as John predicted, that barely slowed the two of them down.

With energy only the other could match, Mika and Miya were dashing around the river banks and continuously returning each others’ tags with joyous laughter filling the space between their callouts. The other kittens sat around John’s crossed legs in various states, with Midoriya panting for breath, Magnus lazily pawing the grass for some vague form of entertainment, Moira smiling as she watched the two play, and Miriam snoring softly from behind John, with her head resting on his spine as she leaned against his back.

“Well… at least they’re having fun,” John said with a wry grin.

“Why did they insist on us all playing for two hours if they were fine playing alone?” Magnus grumbled.

“They know we’re here, they know we’re there for them, they know that we care,” John said patiently. “Sometimes… sometimes that’s all that really matters.”

“And as you enter the massive chamber… a big giant dog appears! A DOG WITH THREE HEADS!”

Miriam’s voice echoed across the table as she slammed down a miniature of Cerberus at the end of the long room the others had just entered. Mika and Miya grabbed each other and shivered, Moira gasped, Magnus slammed his fist on the table with excitement, and Midoriya started frantically glancing over his character sheet. Miriam laughed evilly as she turned to her notes, reading something from them in such a way John was sure she’d prepared it well ahead of time.

“The three heads all smell at once, before their eyes turn to… you, Jax!” Magnus just grinned as Miriam turned the three-headed miniature toward his character. “It can smell the blood on the key you got from the guards upstairs, and it knows you must have hurt them! The doggy begins to step forward, and all three heads growl together! Roll for initiative!”

“Out of curiosity,” John half-whispered, leaning over toward Moira as the others began preparing for combat, “what was your plan if Mika and Miya tired themselves out playing tag, or if any of the others didn’t want to play this campaign?”

“I have a whole list of games I’d love to play someday… I, um, I keep a list of who would like what games, how many players they need, and…”

Moira trailed off, a slight blush appearing on the Neko’s face as she realized what she was admitting. John leaned over and gently placed a kiss on his daughter’s forehead, only deepening the crimson color of her cheeks.

“We’ll have a lot more time for playing those in the future. But for now…” John said, smiling as he tossed his d20, “let’s put this dog down!”

“My, my. Are you sure that you want me to teach you? What about your father?” Vallya said, grinning down at the green-haired Neko boy standing before her.

“Um… I know Papa is powerful and all, but I really want to learn cool magic! I want to know how to make illusions and pretty light shows, and make people go ‘wow!’ with my magic. You always talk about taking care of all of us, and protecting us, and being a hero, and then you show us such amazing things with your magic… I want to make everyone smile like you, Vallya!”

“You know that my kind of magic isn’t exactly… just for entertaining children?” Vallya asked, quirking an eyebrow. John gave her a cautious glance, but Vallya waved his concerns away behind Midoriya’s back. “You only see what I let you see, here in John’s new world. My magic can hurt people. It can make them question what they see, what they hear, even their own thoughts. And even the magic that seems harmless can do some scary things when it’s used in the wrong way. Knowing all that, why would you want to learn magic from me over anyone else?”

“W-well… your magic might have some kind of scary uses,” Midoriya said, his voice a little shakier though his confidence was still there, “but so do the others! And the fact that you don’t use it in that way… you really understand the kind of things you can do, the way you could hurt people, could scare them, and you turn it into something beautiful when you’re around us. You use scary magic in ways that amaze people, that help them! You’re an amazing person, I want to learn to use magic like you!”

Silence followed the young boy’s announcement. John’s face was broken by a soft smile he couldn’t suppress, while Miriam – the only other one of the kittens to stick around for Midoriya’s desired way to spend his afternoon – was staring wide-eyed while frantically writing in her notepad. Vallya’s face was a more neutral expression, though her shock was evident.

“You… you’re quite sure about all of this? You have an hour your father promised you to do as you wish, and you want to spend it learning magic from me?” Vallya asked quietly.

“W-well, I mean, not the whole hour,” Midoriya said bashfully, wringing the hem of his shirt. Vallya’s face was tinged with disappointment for only an instant before it was masked behind an understanding acceptance of his words.

“Of course not. Just enough for a boy your age to toy with their ambitions, then move on to-”

“I was hoping that for a while, maybe just a few minutes at the end, would you- um… wouldyoupleasecarrymeandtakemeflying?!” Midoriya blurted out, the last words a jumbled mess John took several seconds to actually separate and be sure he’d understood. Vallya paused in mid-rationalization, her words failing her as she stared at the young Neko.

“You want me… to take you flying?” Vallya asked, voice laden with disbelief. In his embarrassment, Midoriya couldn’t meet her gaze as he half-whispered his next words.

“It just… looks so cool when you’re flying above the house. The way you slip through the air, the sparkles that come off your tails. I can’t imagine what it actually feels like – the wind in your hair, the sun on your back, the whole land underneath you. I just… I want to feel that. I want to really know what it’s like.”

For all her bluster, for all her confidence, even Vallya couldn’t hide the way her smile almost broke as she blushed and nodded deeply at the young green-haired Neko.

“I promise the greatest flight of your life,” Vallya swore, giving Midoriya a self-confident nod. “It’s settled then! An hour of magical tutoring, and then we’re flying Air Star Guardian!”

“Is it time?! Is it time, Papa?!” Magnus shouted, eager and bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“Yeah, it’s time,” John said, grinning despite himself. “Mika, Miya, you sure you’re both okay with staying here?”

“Nyaaa, go away.”

“Yeah, go away!”

John rolled his eyes at the twin sisters who were napping half-entangled with each other, not sure why they’d bothered to show up at all since they quickly fell asleep after arriving.

“Then let’s go! We’ve only got an hour, I wanna cram in as much fighting as I can!”

“Let’s set some ground rules before that,” John said, reaching down and pinching the back of Magnus’ neck. The toned kitten immediately froze, hands stopping in mid-air-punch, his body reacting to the pressure in its immediate and natural fashion. “Three major rules here. One, you follow my instructions. To the letter. This is going to be a low-level dungeon, but that doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you, so if I tell you to do something, you do it without question. Two, nobody goes off on their own. I need to be able to keep an eye on all of you, so no one is allowed to split off and make me choose between following them and sticking with the others. Three, if anyone breaks the first two rules or if anyone is in imminent danger, I will end the run instantly and punish whoever did it. Are we clear?”

“We’re clear, Papa! I just wanna have fun and make you happy,” Magnus said, not quite wincing, but clearly looking helpless until John finally released him.

“Good. Is everyone else ready?”

A chorus of affirmations filled the air as Midoriya, Moira, and Miriam all voiced their assent. John was mildly surprised at how easy the group had formed. Moira was interested in combat as well as good stories and fun times, so John had already assumed she would want to tag along. Midoriya wanting to be a part of something so physical and violent was definitely a surprise, though. Miriam coming along had been even more shocking, though John was sure she had no plans to fight anyway, and would end up mostly watching and writing her own version of a story about whatever events happened within. Mika and Miya bowing out to take a literal cat-nap was about the only thing that saved John from having to make a hard set of choices due to group size.

John had also been worried about the opposite, to some extent. If, for a variety of reasons, no one but Magnus ended up interested in the dungeon run by the end of it, that would have been a rather unfortunate outcome. Magnus was stubborn enough to overestimate himself and go any battle alone, and John was sure that any intervention he made in a dungeon would be seen as a failure by the headstrong young Neko boy. Even though John had no intentions of raising the Dungeon over Level 1 difficulty, he couldn’t entirely dismiss the possibility of something going wrong. Back when John had completed his first dungeon – the very same one that had resulted in the creation of Maera and Mithra – the twin mini-bosses had barely reached levels 2 and 3, and John had what could only be described as “bullshit” late-bloomer abilities. While John was sure that any difficulties within the dungeon would be easy enough for him to deal with by himself, he couldn’t deny that he was grateful for Magnus to have some proper backup.

“Alright, then. I’m going to form the dungeon now. Everyone be ready – we’ll be inside it as soon as it forms,” John warned, as the world began to warp around them.