Time to sleep and chill the fuck out

“GAME!”

“GRENINJA WINS!”

“Oh, come on!” Mavis shouted out, tossing the controller onto the bed. “I swore I had you off the map!”

“It’s called recovery. You gotta learn how to counter that,” John said with a smug grin on his face, putting his controller down on his lap. “But hey, you did pretty good. Almost had me at the end there.”

“Yeah. I almost killed you one time. You still would have had two more deaths before we were ANYWHERE on equal footing.” She sighed, rubbing her temples. “I still have no idea why the hell you like this game so much.”

“You just need to get a bit better at it,” Talia said, sipping from her water while cuddling into John’s side. “Get a bit better and you’ll see how fun it is.”

“You don’t really have a place to talk. You got killed well before I did, and one of those deaths was your own fault.”

“It’s been a while since I played Bowser! I forgot how his down smash worked.”

John leaned back, sighing contently as Mavis and Talia continued to bicker and debate. While he hadn’t talked about everything with them, they had been able to come to a bit of a conclusion.

Firstly, John was to talk to them if his father’s voice said that John should do anything that even came close to the ideas of self harm. While they weren’t sure if that would happen, both Talia and Mavis did not want to take that chance so they ensured that there would be something in place if John needed it.

Secondly, the three of them would look into an Abyssal therapist for John. Talia had heard rumours that there were some medical professionals that were esteemed enough that they owned illusion barriers that were accessible to those with a key. It wasn’t a literal key, or at least Talia didn’t think it was. Mavis said that she had heard of dumber things that Abyssal mages made so it was at least possible it was an actual key.

Point was that the three of them decided that it would be best if John were to see a professional therapist and find some solution to his hallucinations. Whether that’d be through therapy, magic, or medication, the two girls had confidence that John could make it through this.

John and, by extension, his father were less optimistic.

Then there was the third conclusion that had taken a bit of arguing to get agreed upon. John wanted to stay with the mission of finding Lifthrasir. Even if he could convince Lord Brighton to let him off the hook (which Mavis was certain that he could do considering that Moira kept blushing whenever she looked at him for a prolonged period), John wanted to keep up the hunt. He told them how he needed to find closure on this and get some justice against the man who framed him and got him arrested.

Talia, who was wholly against John continuing the fight, told him that going out into more battles and getting more trauma was probably going to be far worse for his current mental state than help it. The Abyss didn't earn that name for nothing, after all. It was a pretty fucked place with pretty fucked up people who did pretty fucked up things because they could. There was something to be said that the two main groups were either criminals or inquisitorial assholes from the Order, aka, assholes on both ends.

Plus, if John got into any form of trouble with the Order while out fighting for the Order, there was a high likelihood that he would be in far more trouble than he would be if he were to just bow out now.

John, however, countered with a pair of points. Firstly, the Order would not just let bygones be bygones with him. Likely they would demand something to have him prove his “loyalty” to the Order that would be just as terrible and not nearly as cathartic as catching Lifthrasir would be. Secondly, and also building on the first point, John really wanted to catch that son of a bitch, and figured even if it wouldn’t help him as much as resting and healing would, it was something that had to be done and it had the very high likelihood of feeling amazing.

So it had been decided that John, along with Talia and Mavis and Sigmund, would continue to aid the Order in their manhunt. However, John’s mother decided at that moment to interject, as she had gotten home during their talk and had been listening in. She demanded that if John was about to go on some wild hunt for a criminal that could take him to god knows where, he was required to do three things.

1. Be open with his communication with Talia and Mavis, The two girls had cemented themselves in Brenda’s heart over the month that John had been imprisoned and she trusted them to look after her son with only the best intentions. So if he ever needed someone to talk to, John was to talk with them.
2. Call her. Brenda lost her son for a month and didn’t want to lose him again, but she also understood that keeping John away from the closure he needed and the vengeance he craved was a tall order (she again had mentioned something about a Mexican **** cartel but refused to elaborate).
3. If he ever wanted to just come home and call it quits, he was more than allowed to do that and Brenda would do everything in her power to keep John safe. Even as Mavis pointed out that Brenda was a mundane and couldn’t really keep toe to toe with the more powerful mages, Brenda had been keen to point out that the six cartel bosses thought something similar of her since she was an American white woman. A few months later, the FBI arrested five bosses and dug up the remains of the sixth one. Brenda would be fine against a few boys playing wizards and sorcerers.

And that's where things pretty much came to a close. They all went into the dining room to have dinner, which John's mom had picked up on the way home, and spent a decent amount of time recapping what had happened in Alfheim to her (obviously excluding the sex with Naoto and the whole hallucination problem). Then afterwards, Mavis offered to help John’s mom clean up which ended up being a whole group activity with everyone washing dishes or helping with other general household chores in the kitchen area, the lot of them spending more time telling dumb jokes and laughing than getting anything done. Aside from John, who also spent a decent chunk of time blushing out of embarrassment from Brenda telling stories about him as a child.

(He was just thanking his lucky stars and the myriad of gods looking out for him that she did not regale them with the “chocolate pudding scandal” from when he was eight. She loved to tell people about that and John knew it was a story he could never live down.)

Finally, the three younger adults decided to retreat to John’s room. Not for, as what one would expect, sexy times, but instead they decided what John could use was some additional winding down and relaxation after the rather rough few hours/past month he had had.

Which brought them to the present time: the three of them sprawled out either on John’s bed or the floor playing rounds of Smash Ultimate. Currently they were on round 5, with John having gone undefeated (though he came close to losing when Talia self-destructed as Bowser with John in a belly flop. Thankfully, it counted her **** before his.)

“I gotta admit, though,” John said, stretching his arms while releasing a small yawn, “after fighting through a skaven army twice and using so many runes, I am starting to get a bit tired.”

“Of course you would wanna quit now,” Mavis said with a smile. “Just as I was starting to get the hang of it.”

“Well, you don’t sleep. So you can feel free to practice with the sound on low all night if you wanna take down the champ.”

“Good luck with that,” Talia said. “I tried getting good at it forever ago and just decided it wasn’t for me. Hence why I play nothing but meme characters.”

“You sure you’re not using that as an excuse for coming in last every time?”

“You know, you don’t have to say the quiet part out loud,.” Talia said with a smile and a light punch on John’s arm. “We can just leave my lack of skill unsaid and pretend I actually have something resembling skill.”

“Uh huh,” John said with a smug grin. “Well, if you two lovely ladies don’t mind, the champ is gonna go get ready to sleep.”

“Careful going out,” Mavis said with an eyeroll. “If your ego gets any larger, then I don’t think the champ is gonna be able to get out the door without a swift kick in the ass.”

John gave a small chuckle at that, quickly moving to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Fifteen minutes later, he had his teeth brushed, his face washed, and was snug beneath the covers. Five minutes after that, Talia joined him under the covers, snuggling up to him and offering a satisfactory sigh. Two minutes later, Mavis also joined the two of them, deciding that she would rather snuggle than play more Smash Bros.

And less than a minute after all of that, John fell fast asleep.

John had started to get used to the idea of being whisked away by some unseen entity when he fell asleep.

Granted, most of the time that was Mavis wanting to spend time with him in his soul room, letting his body and most of his mind sleep while the two of them would just… talk. He might reminisce about some more modern things to her to help bring her up to speed on what she missed over the past few centuries, or sometimes they would just talk about random crap. Sometimes they wouldn’t even do that, and they would just relax in John’s soul room.

Plus, that did give him more experience with having his soul manipulated whenever someone wanted to talk. So when, for example, Surtr wanted to chew him out for not burning all of Alfheim to the ground (three days after John had gotten back from Alfheim the first time around), John knew that the tugging on his soul and the movement meant he was in for a trip, and the slight heated burning sensation revealed it to be Surtr.

The funny thing was that each god felt a bit different but the same. With Surtr it felt like his soul was being pulled out from his body, like he was a stick from a blazing fire being shoved into a chemical fire. He felt cold and alone for a few moments, but then feeling insanely warm in just all the wrong ways. But with someone like Odin, it felt more like John’s soul was wandering somewhere for no reason, but he couldn’t refuse the chance to wander into wherever Odin wanted him to be.

That all being said, as John felt his soul being corralled somewhere else, he had to say that THIS time around felt so different, it almost confused him.

At first he thought it was Surtr, with the way his soul was being tugged on and pulled from his body. But this felt… wrong. Like there was no other word to describe it. Surtr had the feeling of heat and contained malice, but this thing just felt all kinds of wrong. The tendrils that latched onto his soul felt alien and wrong, and made John want to retch as they tugged him through the aether to an unknown location.

Actually, that was another thing that was confusing for John. Whenever Surtr pulled him to talk, John would feel the heat of Muspelhiem ahead of him as if he were standing in front of an oven. With Odin, he would never be able to tell where he was going but he could always feel the anchoring of Yggdrasil around and beneath him. But this time, John could feel that anchor leaving him behind.

He was being pulled to something beyond Yggdrasil. Something that wasn’t even in John’s own definition of reality.

Where the hell was he going? What the hell was calling him? What god existed outside of reality-

Oh shit, was this gonna be a Cthulhu thing?

Before he could even ponder that for more than a second, the world froze around him as the pull stopped. But John didn’t want to open his eyes. He had read some Lovecraft. He knew what would happen. One glance at the unknowable and he would probably be slapped back into a cell with a straight jacket-

The guards grabbed John and shoved him back into the chair, slapping leather straps onto him that dug and bit into his skin. He knew resisting was a terrible idea. He knew that it would only make things worse. But he saw the needles, he saw where in his head they would stab, he saw the blood staining the chair and the liquid mana in the tubes. He knew the pain that would come. He knew the pain. He couldn’t do it again. He couldn’t do the pain. He couldn’t he couldn’t he couldn’t he couldn’t he-

John’s eyes snapped open as he tried to pull himself out of his memories. Whatever was out there would have to be better than being in that hell again. Even if it would be filled with a tentacled octopus bat creature, or a being of tendrils and teeth with a name that you aren’t supposed to say out loud.

But rather than being in a hellscape filled with flesh and tendrils and racism, he was just in a cave. A rather large cave, easily reaching 20 ft tall at the highest point, but just a cave nonetheless. The oddest part about the cave was the mist that covered the ground. It was olive in hue, reminding John of the gas used in movies right before the hero was poisoned by a German stereotype of a villain.

John knew he had nothing to fear in that regard. His talks with Surtr regularly had him in lands of smoke, brimstone, sulfur, and burning flesh. Yet the smell would always be faint at its strongest, and never cause even a slight cough. Mavis told him that while gods or powerful beings could cause direct damage to his soul if they concentrated, simply being in harsh places would do nothing to his soul self.

John took a tentative step forward, looking around at the environment he now found himself in. But so far, there was nothing really interesting or crazy about this cave. Just rocks, smoke, stalactites and stalagmites, and-

Oh. There were piles of bones littering the ground.

That was something to pay attention to.

John walked over to one of the larger piles near him, noting that there wasn’t just one species of creature in the pile. He could see some skulls and other bits that were clearly human, but there were also rats, lizard-like creatures, wolves, birds, hell, even a rib that was easily the size of John’s leg.

John was pretty sure his soul self couldn’t be eaten. Or even if it could, it probably wouldn’t offer the same kind of nourishment that these dead things would. Plus, why would something single him out just to eat?

Still, that didn’t stop him from slowly backing up and trying to will his soul back to his body.

“Leaving so soon?”

John quickly turned to look back down the cave, and standing there was the being that brought John here. Said being stood about four heads taller than John, but stood far enough back that he did not have to crane his head back to look it in the eyes. The figure’s body was muscular and covered in black grey fur, betraying its skaven heredity. However, unlike the other ratmen that John had fought up to this point, this being stood up straight and tall rather than being hunched over. The being had a singular rat tail that split into several ends, each one writhing and snaking through the sickly green smoke. Its fingers ended in nails that were more akin to talons, sharp enough to bisect a man with a single strike.

However, its face was where the true terror of its appearance lay. Its head was not skaven, but rather it was more akin to the skull of a monstrous rat with strange green runes carved into the top of it that glowed with the powers of decay and sickness. Its eyes glowed with eldritch power, two pools of eternal orange fire that boiled within the eyeholes of the off white skull.

The creature looked at him, and John watched as the skull contorted into a smile. Its arms slowly raised up, and the creature began to give John a round of slow applause.