They parked in the outskirts of the city. Springfield was one of the rare type two Abyssal cities in the centre of the USA. Even when he had just been randomly wandering around, with nothing but some basic infamy as a local upstart to his name, he had run into Illusion Barriers owned by small guilds, locals, or international organizations here and there. Driving through with a Mobile Barrier would doubtlessly reveal more. He didn’t want that. In case negotiations with the Golden Rose fell through, or some other local decided to try and target him, he wanted the location of his base of operations to be obscure.

As for why Springfield was such a hotbed of activity, John had no idea. Obviously nowadays it was the main base of the shield branch of the Order of the Golden Rose, so that brought in a number of interested parties. However, the Order and its expansion especially were a quite recent development. What brought them there specifically was a mystery. What had brought all of the other people there was questionable too. There was some unusually high leyline activity, so that served to lure some people in.

Chances were, it was just a factor of compounding interest. Springfield was a city in a fairly rural area of the country, with a navigable river and railroads making long-distance shipping a good option even before the infrastructure switched to cars over the last hundred years. A couple of Abyssals settled, then they attracted more Abyssals for one reason or another, then that attracted more Abyssals, then the Apothecaries and Abyss Auction put up local outposts, and at that point it was the centre of attention in the entire area. Looking at it like this, the Golden Rose making it the capital of their continent-spanning operation was the logical next step in the rise of any place of importance.

John was about to put a dent in that development. Felt a bit odd to do that to his home, but he would lie if he said he had any qualms about that. ‘I guess ‘place of origin’ is more accurate than home,’ he thought and stretched. Finally, he left the bedroom.

In the living room, the majority of greatness of his life was gathered. Some of them were deciding what clothes to wear, a process that only took a considerable amount of time courtesy of them not knowing how long John had wanted to stay in his private retreat. Generally speaking, his haremettes weren’t one for lengthy display preparations. Part of this was because none of them needed to put on make-up, they were all naturally gorgeous to an unfair degree. The other was that very few of them cared much for clothing and of those even less hadn’t figured out a limited set of outfits they were happy with. Plus, it was winter. Whatever they put on, it would be hidden under their winter jackets anyway.

John entering the room was noticed, but nobody immediately moved in his direction. That pleased him. As attractive as the submission they displayed when it came to sex was, he did not want them to venerate him as some sort of centre of their lives. Well, he did want that, as much as any man wanted to be recognized and loved, but if he thought about what was good and healthy in a relationship, them all being their own people was the wiser path forward. He was the de-facto reason this harem existed, but they didn’t live just to please him (with the possible exception of Aclysia) and so him entering the room had no situation-altering effect on the room. They just kept doing what they were doing.

“Maybe if you make a braid?” Undine suggested.

“I told ya many times before, Hollmey hair can’t be braided,” Rave responded swiftly. “If the Christmas teddy can’t do it, I sure can’t.”

“Bind it into a ponytail?”

“And look like my mother? I’d sooner give myself a buzz cut.”

“Nothing against buzz cuts!” Salamander complained.

John sat down next to Momo and, while the discussion continued, asked, “What’s this about?”

“What hairstyle goes best with the top,” the sassy support responded sassily.

“Who is she even dressing up for?” John wondered. Regan was out of town. Even if they visited Rave’s old place, which was definitely planned, they wouldn’t meet her father there. Consequently, the only answer was him or herself. Rather than tell him which one it was, Momo rolled her eyes.

With him in the room, the dressing preparations quickly finalized. Rave wore a green, long-sleeved shirt and dark blue pants. Unusually muted colours for the feline Lightbearer. A choker hid her cat features. Aclysia, Beatrice, Metra and Momo went with fairly similar and simple outfits: sweaters and tight pants. The differences between them were the balance of colours. Aclysia wore primarily black, Beatrice primarily white, Metra more of a grey blend, and Momo a balance of black and white. Eliana stayed with her classic goth aesthetic, choker, t-shirt, and leather pants. That she still wore the harness underneath the top, nobody needed to know. Nia spared herself the dressing up, not even the people they ran into in the streets would see her. Scarlett exchanged her pants for a pencil skirt and put stockings on against the cold, but otherwise stuck to her suit. Lee wore a buttoned-up, dark grey shirt and plain jeans. Perhaps the most unusual of all to see in clothes was Nathalia, who had toned down her godly appearance to that of a redheaded Latina, wearing black leather pants and an orange blouse.

The elemental girls did not dress up whatsoever. There was a simple reason for that: neither of the cars were big enough for them all. The faux-Cadillac only fit around 5 people; the jeep was considerably more spacious and could transport 10, 12 with some squeezing. Even with both cars, they could just about transport all of them and that would make things awkward. Better to just let them follow ephemerally.

John was a bit miffed that he couldn’t drive back into his hometown in the more impressive car. Between travelling with style and travelling with his loves, there was no real choice though. They all put on their jackets and went outside, where they first got the vintage car, then the jeep off the trailer.

“Aren’t ya going to put the song on?” Rave asked, taking her rightful spot right of the driver. Aclysia was one further over.

“Only when I’m in the back of the other car,” John denied and put his hand up. “Alright, I hope you all have your disguises up. We’re leaving.”

Regularly they would have needed to keep someone in the Illusion Barrier, otherwise it would collapse after several hours and take anything inorganic in it with it into the proper abyss. However, thanks to Lee, the Mobile Barrier had already been reinforced into a Protected Space. John could do that himself, provided it remained stationary, but it was a more involved process. She was strictly better at it than him. Since Velka remained there, it also wasn’t completely necessary.

They exited the barrier and took the vehicle with them. Standing on the side strip of the road regularly reserved for emergency stops, they may have raised some eyebrows. That was preferable to spawning in the middle of moving traffic. This was the transitionary area between highway and city, so cars still went fast enough that any crash would be devastating. Not that John wanted to be inconvenienced in all the other ways that even a minor incident brought with it.

It was early afternoon, which made for low traffic hours on this particular road. Without hassle, John turned the wheel and became part of the ordered advance of automobiles into Springfield.

They entered the city from the south, which meant they started in the segment of the city where the Gamer had grown up: the suburbs. Because it was the nearest attraction, they turned right on the first major intersection and drove to John’s house.

It was a thoroughly unimpressive little shack, worse now that its tiny lawn had been left untended for a year. It had two stories, was painted white, the windows were the cliché four panel design and the blinds closed. Nothing about John’s house was unusual, just like nothing about his life had been particularly unusual before all of this started.

Most of the harem had a distant familiarity with the house’s shape. Some had stayed there, others knew it because Magoi had often conjured this house as a stay during grinding sessions. “Now, it should be right where I left it…” John said and pulled his wallet out of his pocket. The house key that had been sitting in his inventory for a long time had wandered into his mundane pockets only a couple hours ago.

Oddly, he was nervous for a moment whether or not the key would even fit. A click assuaged that fear and the door swung inwards. The harem poured into the house, cramping the hallway like a college party. They left their shoes by the entrance and continued into the dusty living room.

Nobody had been in the house since John left it over a year ago. A piece of evidence lay squarely on the counter: the carton of a frozen pizza. It was the last meal John had had in these four walls. It was before Aclysia had picked up her culinary expertise and so this had been a regular source of sustenance for him.

Doing an emergency check, John was pleased to find that he had least brought out the trash before moving out. Same could not be said for paper or plastic, but those didn’t cause a stink. “It offends me to see this place in this state,” Aclysia said, looking around. “May I clean it, Master?”

“Agreement,” Beatrice echoed.

“Not sure what good that would do, but knock yourself out,” John allowed them. After they left, the property would continue aggregating dust and weeds until his parents finally decided to sell it off. “The vacuum is…”

“Upstairs,” Aclysia recalled before he did. There had been a time, between him discovering his powers and him leaving for Europe, where he had lived alone in this house with Aclysia. Brenda had moved to Washington after John’s father got their current house there. That John had been allowed to stay had been the result of him pleading to his mother and her agreeing because he managed to land a girlfriend. “Cleaning should begin with your room, Master.”

“If you say so,” John chuckled and they made their way up. Just to tease his first servant, John stopped by the bathroom. “And this is where Aclysia learned that masturbation feels good.”

“And where she made steady use of that knowledge,” Rave added.

The weaponized maid got a bit red in the face, but generally kept her embarrassment in check. “Showering lets me stay clean and there is little to do under the water other than some deliberate stimulation. Especially when my John was otherwise occupied.”

A couple more steps on, not even enough that the entire row of people following John could make it up the stairs, they ended in front of his door. “Let’s see if I left anything embarrassing lying about,” he thought out loud and pushed down the simple handle on the equally simple, white door.

The room of his adolescence was boring. Dull, unimpressive, standard, the grey of rooms, the den of a nerd, all of these things and more applied. On one wall there was a bed that he couldn’t dream about using nowadays. It was barely wide enough that two people could comfortably lie in it and the metal frame did not invoke confidence that it would survive anything more than cuddling. Opposite was John’s desk. Although the three screens on top of it and the large tower underneath were somewhat impressive, the table itself was a typical IKEA piece, worn down after prolonged usage. It had some drawers, all of which were filled with old CDs, unnecessary cables, and other such things. Cables in general were all around the table, chaotically ‘managed’.

There was a trash can, a cheap office chair, a closet for fresh clothes, a large cardboard box that John had used to gather his laundry for his mom, and a laminate floor that creaked softly every other step. Before John had gotten his powers, the room had always been dirty, covered in worn underwear that he didn’t bother throwing into the box and all sorts of packaging/dirty tissues that he didn’t discard properly. That, at least, he had fixed before Aclysia came to be. Without the trash, the room felt even more empty though and the only piece that gave the room some character was the shelf filled with video game figures. They, too, were dusty and a conspicuous gap marked where the A2 figurine that became Aclysia had once stood.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Lee said, when they all were finally in the room. It was barely large enough that they all had their own place to stand. “Looks practically identical to the room I had back at the Mountain of Time.”

“Just that you had sex toys instead of figurines?” John suggested.

“Yes,” the young Fateweaver answered confidently, even as a bit of red showed around her ears.

“It was good to have left this behind,” Nathalia stated, grabbing the frame of the bed and giving it a soft shake. The entire thing rattled. Having sex on it must have been a warning signal for the entire house. Looking back, it was really good that his mother moved out when she did. The blowjob he had gotten on that bed the morning of the announcement had been as loud as it had gotten while she was around. Not that he and his girlfriend had been in a habit of staying at his place anyway.

“It was a pretty simple time, which was nice,” John gave a bit of pushback, before shaking his head. “You’re right though. It was good to leave that behind. I was wasting my time and accomplishing nothing.” He let out a long sigh. “Could have spared myself a lot of trouble if I had just told my dad I didn’t want to go to Ashcroft.”

“But then we wouldn’t have met, so it worked out,” Rave grinned.

“Oh please, you would have found me anywhere,” John chuckled. “You love odd things too much to not have sought me out. As did Travolta.”

“I find it regrettable that we cannot visit the old arcade,” Aclysia confessed. The base of Collide, the old Collide, had been taken out of existence by Jimmy when they had buried the old guildmaster in there.

“Not like a lot of it was left after what happened,” John responded, remembering the fight against the blood-addicted man. Maybe Jimmy was still around these parts. Even if he was, the Gamer wasn’t sure he wanted them to meet. They had never been real friends to start with. He had joined Collide because Rave had been a hot piece of ass with a charismatic attitude. Jimmy just happened to be in the same room most of the time, as did Travolta. They were an alliance of convenience and similar values, not a group of friends. Putting their relationship aside, Jimmy had wanted to opt out of the Abyss. Meeting John might drag him back in, just by proximity. ‘Better to leave such things in the past.’

“Pretty good start into life though,” Metra observed, looking back out the way they came. “Humble compared to where you are, sure, but safe compared to other kings I served.”

“Yeah,” John agreed in a toneless voice. “It would have been a pretty good life, had it not been for Vanessa and school in general… speaking of which,” he forced some enthusiasm back into his words, “let’s give the maids the room to clean and then keep going.”