John only possessed a fishing rod to have something to store in one of the many side-rooms of his Palace. After throwing it into his inventory, he and the girls soon made their way up. Scarlett wasn’t amused about her usage time being cut short, but she accepted it given the situation at large. They all met with Magoi, Mabirl and Lee on top of the Palace’s fort foundation, at the agreed time.

The initial meeting was cordial and cold at the same time. Lee kept her distance, likely due to the overbearing presence of her mother, standing between her and John with her arms crossed, while Magoi had a soft smile on his face and a patient glint in his eye. The unusual thing about all of this was that neither of the two Magus parents wore their mask.

The meeting was torture, because absolutely nothing unusual happened. Magoi simply opened up the barrier, created the houses and the gates of light that let John create his Instant Dungeon attached to the Intermediary Barrier, and then told him to get a good night’s rest. Mabirl stomped off wordlessly, Lee gave him a little wave, and Magoi just walked away, tapping his cane.

On his own, John would have failed to sleep that night. Surrounded by his loves, however, the Gamer’s mind was at ease. Whatever happened with this, he would still have all of them. There was great solace in that fact, found in the arms that embraced him as he slumbered.

The next morning, after breakfast, there was a knock on his door.

Dressed and already awaiting something like this, John opened the door for the three waiting outside. “Good morning, John,” Magoi greeted, carrying a fishing rod in his left and a crate of beer together with his wife. Mabirl, for her part, seemed less disgruntled today than she had the day before. Lee, however, seemed annoyed at something. Perhaps at all of this taking so long. “Care to join me on a fishing trip?”

“I mean, sure?” John knew that this was where things were going, but was no less confused about why this was the route being taken. Going with the flow, he offered, “Want me to take that?” He was referring to the crate.

“If you would be so kind.” Magoi let out a relieved sound when the physically superior, younger man took the beer from him.

“Thank you.” Mabirl sounded a bit choppy when she said that, but it was honest gratitude.

“Can we hurry this along already?” Lee wanted to know.

“You be quiet, young lady!” her mother snapped back immediately. “We’ll take this at the proper pace.”

“Proper, sure,” Lee rolled her eyes. “Whatever pace you find proper.”

Clicking her tongue, Mabirl tilted her upper body to look past John and into the room. “Would it affront the other ladies if we were to come inside for a cup of tea?”

“Nah, is all good,” Rave shouted back. “Right, Aclysia?”

“I would be delighted to serve the finest tea I can offer,” the weaponized maid confirmed.

John stepped out of the house, letting the two women join his harem for their talks. “Good luck,” he couldn’t help but say to Lee.

“You’ll have the easier job,” she whined and glanced over to Magoi. “I like him in one piece, Dad.”

“I’ll leave him in one, then,” Magoi responded.

John could have pointed out that there was no way for the High Fateweaver to harm him anyway. It wasn’t good manners, however, to put down a father before their daughter, especially not a friend. He swallowed his cheeky pride. The door to his house closed behind Lee. He turned to Magoi.

“Let’s go fishing then,” the High Fateweaver said and nodded towards one of the many gates of light.

“Sure.” Holding the crate of beer in front of his chest, he followed after Lee’s father. He could have deposited it in his inventory, but it did hold some symbolic value. The clinking of the glass against the plastic accompanied his every step.

They stepped through the gate and into an already fabricated Illusion Barrier. It was a serene lake, wonderfully blue and clear, settled in a rocky green landscape that was surrounded by hills and boulders. The scenery could have served well for an Irish vacation advertisement. A fish jumped out of the lake, sending sparkling water flying into the moonlit night. Even this space was beholden to the law that the movement of celestial bodies was parallel to their real equivalent. The temperature was nice and mellow.

The fish, a silver-scaled thing, splashed back down into the water. “How are there fish here?” the Gamer couldn’t help but wonder.

“People often forget it, but Fateweavers can mimic Natural Barriers.”

“Right,” John recalled. It had been a while since he had considered that. The unnatural part of his instant Dungeons was not that he could make barriers with monsters in them but that they scaled to be so incredibly powerful and that they left behind items. “I guess we can’t eat these fish then?” he asked.

Magoi laughed. “No, we kill them and they dissolve.” With another gesture, he directed John towards a large rock that jutted out of the shore and created a small cliff. It was almost unnaturally smooth. Little wonder, since Magoi had created this landscape with certain goals in mind. Most of it was likely put together by mental shortcuts, with few additions being deliberate to ease accessibility.

“What if we bite them while they’re still alive though?” John wondered.

“The magic burns your gums,” Magoi explained. “Best case, you spit it out, worst case, you swallow what becomes dust and magical energy. I almost starved once and made the attempt. It doesn’t work.”

“When did that happen?”

“When I was about your age.” Magoi pulled two folded chairs out of a dimensional pocket, placing them down with about a metre between them. “I hadn’t yet been discovered by the Illusion Protectors and the Abyss where I grew up was rather unfriendly. Staying alive as a barrier maker wasn’t easy back then and the mundane world had less food in the late 18th century. Particularly in north Crimea.”

“Huh.” John couldn’t help but respond to all of that with that simple sound. It had never occurred to him that Magoi could have been from such a badly off part of the world. At the time he grew up, Crimea would have just been conquered by the Russian Empire, after hundreds of years of being an Ottoman vassal. Complications that grew from such conquests aside, the Cossacks would have held influence in the area. That was only looking at the mundane side of the equation, with the Abyss doubtlessly having its own dangers.

Magoi having led an eventful life was well known already. Every time John heard something new about it, he couldn’t help but wonder just how much the old Fateweaver had seen. Whenever Magoi did finish his memoirs, the Gamer would eagerly read all of it. “Do you know how to fish?”

“I think?” John placed down the crate of beer between the chairs. “Cast out the line, wait for something to bite, gently reel in the fish, that about it?”

“That does sound like the basics,” Magoi chuckled, only to pull a box out of his dimensional pocket. “There’s a bit more to it though. Here, let me show you.”

Thirty minutes passed during which the bald, scarred man showed the much younger Gamer a number of tricks. Quick as he was on the uptake, John enjoyed being shown what a bobber and a floater were for and how to secure them on the line. Listening to Magoi talk about the advantages of live and plastic bait, about stories of the biggest fish he had caught and sipping on cold beer during all of it was a pleasant way to spend the morning.

John underestimated sometimes how human he was. For all that he had come to be, having someone he respected talk to him in a fatherly tone about useless things was still soothing. Guidance was not something he was used to and, as a young man, it was nice to have it every now and again.

Eventually, they both sat in their camping chairs, a beer in the holder of the armrest, their fishing rods propped up by additional utensils Magoi had brought. They looked over the water. Nothing bit. The moon glowed above. The windless air was only disturbed by the jumping fishes, rising and falling from the shining, smooth surface of the lake.

“When I first learned that my wife was pregnant,” Magoi eventually spoke up again, “do you know what I was feeling?”

“Joy?” John took a shot in the dark.

“No,” Magoi chortled, “panic. To this day I couldn’t tell you why exactly I was so afraid. It wasn’t an accident that she was with a child. We had been trying. That was its own series of events, to convince me that I wanted even one kid. Regardless of why I was so afraid, I realized that men are never truly prepared to become fathers. That doesn’t change that becoming one is… it’s fulfilment.”

‘Of the biological imperative,’ the cynical part of John thought. He tangled with it, then shushed it away. It didn’t really matter if the fulfilment was a purely pre-programmed emotion. The human urge to eat was also a base instinct and eating something delicious was, generally, not something sinful.

“I never knew my father,” the High Fateweaver continued. “Even if I had, he would have likely died young, like my mother, long before he could have ever seen his grandchildren. Partly owed to how late in life I had them. After Magnus, I knew I wanted another kid fairly quickly. After Stefanie, we continued to try for a third. We weren’t blessed with Lee for a dozen years. Now we’re both too old to hope for a fourth one.”

Magoi reached for his beer and raised it in John’s direction. The two clinked their bottles, likely sending every fish that was getting interested in their bait swimming away at the unknown noise. They drank. Sat there. John waited for the High Fateweaver to continue.

“My little Lee,” Magoi sighed. “She was always an odd one. She always loved her computer more than people and I was afraid that she would grow up to be a complete loner. The problem was that she was never bratty. She never demanded anything or even asked for much. It would have been easier for me to raise her if she had been flawed, I must say. The only way I could have forced her away from her electronic wonder-box would have been to be a tyrant. I love my children too much to be a tyrant. Magnus was odd himself, starting as a horribly loud kid but eventually turning around to be the disciplined man you know today. Stef… well, she liked her freedoms a bit too much. Because she overstepped boundaries so often, I had ample justification to punish her. Lee, Lee just sat around alone. When Mabirl tried to shove her out the door, we would find her sitting on a park bank, reading something or playing on her mobile console.”

“I’ve honestly been pretty similar,” John dared to chime into the monologue.

“I can imagine, Gamer,” Magoi chuckled back, exchanging his empty beer for a new one. “What I’m trying to tell you is that I care a lot about my children. They are my world. I am invested in Fusion not out of an obligation for you or for my own welfare, but to give them a space to flourish in. To make sure that my grandkids have a stable foundation from which to start their life from. Do you understand that?”

John nodded. Him not having children yet was due to similar reasons. While he was still conquering and expanding his realm, that foundation didn’t strike him as firm enough to start a family on. Especially since, once he had the first kid, he expected at least a small cascade to follow. It wouldn’t stay the one and it wouldn’t take long, between over a dozen women, for the second one.

“My objections to your lifestyle, when it comes to how many women you love, they come from two places. One is the logical one. A society cannot function if polygamy is the norm.”

“Frustrated young men burn down a society that doesn’t serve them,” John nodded, “I know. It’s hypocritical of me, but I’m going to continue advertising monogamy for the masses. It’s going to help them, ultimately. I don’t think that the average man can handle more than one woman.”

“Most of us don’t deserve more than one,” Magoi put it another way. “To grant you that much, limited polygyny can work and I don’t think your harem is a soulless breeding institution.” He opened his new beer. “My second reason to object to your lifestyle is emotional. My father had many women, so my mother told me, and I never got to know him. I don’t want my son to turn into an absent father or my daughters into abandoned mothers. Least of all, I want to leave another child born into this world with the uncertainty that comes with never knowing one’s own parents. Without any help or wise words from imperfect men.”

Magoi turned the beer in his hand. “Do you trust me to be there for her?” John asked.

“Otherwise, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” the High Fateweaver said. “Lee would already be sitting in a plane back to the Himalayas and I would be in a hurry to set up a marriage for her. I know a few people who have raised good lads. Maybe it wouldn’t be love, but at least she wouldn’t die alone, with a son too unruly to appreciate what she has done for him.”

The Gamer had nothing to retort to that. It would be a horrible situation and Lee would probably despise her father for it for years to come, but he fully understood where he came from. Leaving her in the Hudson Barrier, around John, would inevitably lead to an outcome he wouldn’t approve of, in the scenario they were currently contemplating.

“My wife shows it more openly, but she actually feels less intensely about this than I do,” Magoi confessed. “They’re probably having a splendid time over there. Mabirl wants to know who she is leaving our little girl with… Meanwhile, I am tormented. I like you, John. I like you a lot and I think you’re a decent person. The boyfriend of my daughter, though? I have a difficult time digesting that.”

“I understand,” was all John could say.

Magoi took a slow breath. In and then out. “It’s not like I’m so naïve I didn’t think this could happen,” he mumbled. “That she showed interest in you from the word go was surprising though. I guessed you would be unable to keep it to yourself all the time. A couple charming words at a party or perhaps connecting over your videogames, that’s how I thought this would go. Warhammer, maybe, since that’s about the only hobby of her old man that she was ever interested in. Instead, she went right to you.” He kicked a pebble into the water. “As her father, I have every right to stop her.”

“…Do you?” John couldn’t help but ask.

Magoi gave him an amused and berating stare. “You will understand, whenever you have children, that they’re incredibly stupid and that they stay stupid until they’re in their thirties. Young people don’t make good decisions. Which is fine, mistakes are how you learn. The greatest challenge of being a parent is to let those you love the most stumble, fall and to only help them up when they need you to.” He sighed again. “Which is why, after all, I will let you two try. I trust you enough to not leave her on her own, if you do work out. You will love her, because my little girl is a lovable one. Even if she is a bit of a tomboy.” Sipping from his beer, he gave the Gamer a long stare. “If you don’t work out, she will be wiser for it. If you hurt her…”

“I’ll deserve everything that’s coming for me,” John finished for the Fateweaver.

“You will indeed.” Magoi put his beer down. “And you better treat her with some romance!” he declared, reclaiming his joviality. “If I hear you just went straight back home and tainted her right then and there, I will do something bad!”