36 Master's and Familiar's love

Mandy was shocked and looked up at August, afraid of how he would take it, but the only expression his face had was annoyance.

He let out a long breath, then spoke up. "Gather up, I'll now demonstrate how a master's and familiar's love looks like."

Eh?

Both Leum and Veri had 'oh shit' written on their faces.

The still frightened future travelers showed some confusion, but also not as much fear as before. They did, like August asked, gather closer.

Tiamat looked amused, some expectation of entertainment on her face. There was one more face with a similar look on it - Marcus. For some reason he was blending in with the time travelers again, this time, though, Stephanie wasn't next to him.

"My most trusted and beloved familiar Leum," August started. "We share an unbreakable bond of warmth, right?" He asked.

Leum had the eyes of a dead fish. Veri looked somewhat relieved although a bit apologetic too. Mandy could tell that Leum would be the one in deep shit, not Veri.

Well, yeah. Looked like for some reason August knew what Leum had told the kids the day prior... hm? Right-- this fog. Mandy had somewhat forgotten and passed this detail over, but true - this fog was a part of him? He knew what happened in this fog. Was he perhaps following along with the main events despite doing something else at the same time?

"Right," Leum confirmed looking sideways. He was scared.

"My dear familiar whom I can't help but cherish unconditionally, are you perhaps a Terrean at soul?"

Those words made Veri, Tiamat and Marcus crack up. Although they stifled any laughter that might come out.

Leum looked embarrassed, but he couldn't retort.

"Terrean?" Mandy asked.

Albus had popped up next to them, but Mandy only noticed when she said something. "Higher rank Terreans are famous for withholding information with the goal of letting others jump to wrong conclusions."

She also added. "When August asked if knowing about the future would be a useful reference, Leum replied with - 'A warning tale against trying to do everything on your own without relying on those around you, but you are relying on us, so--' Leum did not say it was not a useful reference, as you can observe."

Albus was looking at Leum with a cold look. She was angry, Mandy didn't think she had ever heard someone's voice contain as much ice as Albus's did at the moment.

"Leum, did you know Mandy was the titan who would end the world?" August asked.

"Yes," Leum replied.

August sighed and let out a breath, releasing his presence. This time his hair did not grow longer, but his presence was a lot like a raging storm. He felt like a sea with waves as high as skyscrapers.

But even so, the hand that held Mandy's was warm.

The future travelers looked both awed and frightened, but they could neither move nor avert their eyes.

"Kneel," August said to Leum.

And it seemed like the very air in the atmosphere pushed Leum down on his hands and knees. A divine order. Everyone felt in their gut that nothing and no one would be able to go against an order like that.

August picked up Mandy while both she and everyone was in a daze similar to observing lightning strike right next to them.

Then August went to take a seat on Leum's back.

Eh? Something was totally wrong here. Mandy didn't want to join in on this kinky punishment game!!!!!

August drew a breath and his presence returned to normal. "That's the detail my most trusted and beloved familiar forgot to share - familiars can not resist orders their masters give."

That snapped most of them out of their daze and they exchanged wry smiles with each other. But the bright side was - none of them looked all that scared now. But-- eh-- hmmm---

Was Mandy imagining it or were they now looking at August with more warmth than before? H-h-how exactly that happened? He just displayed some scary disturbing and also kinky punishment game, how the hell could that improve someone's impression of you?

Tiamat seemed to have come closer with Lily still behind her back. "I'm proud of you my son, you might be the first dryad's familiar in history who got an order and a punishment at that."

Was that sarcasm?

No.

It was genuine as far as Mandy could tell.

Leum was completely red. But eh-- eh-- was he kind of happy among the shame? Did he have that kind of fetish?

Mandy really wanted to get away from this punishment game-- She started to turn red. Or was this a punishment game designed for her? Because she spent all those rune stones....

Ugh. This was the worst. She hid her face on August's chest. She wished she had that skill of blending into surroundings to disappear.

"Well then, can any of you tell me about the future you came from?"

And so Leum's, no, Mandy's punishment game continued till late night. Turned out Lily was a great cook. They had wild game barbecue outdoors. And when it came to the future--

It was mostly told by three of them - the girl named Seraph, the cute oriental 'sibling' of August named Lai and the dog-child - Neo. Their story started with a war that supposedly took place five years from now on - a huge nuclear conflict that ended up destroying two-thirds of the planet and left side-effects on the atmosphere as well. Solar flares became so influential that electricity became obsolete.

There were places where some form of internet and electrical appliances still existed, but they were expensive. In most of the world, technology deteriorated and culture went with it.

But, even in this disconnected and war-ravaged world - humans survived. For a while, things were okay, about fifty years that is, after that life started dying out. Scientists ended up discovering the existence of aether and shortly after found the sleeping August.

After they dissected August and created cumimis and set up some cumimis as a filter/pseudo-god for filtering aether, some life started coming back, but along with it came the appearance of grays (souls that couldn't reach the transmigration cycle on their own and got violent) and cumimis were set up to fight and clear them. The organization that dealt with that took on the name 'Church'.

Then around ten years in, Titans started appearing and destroyed human settlements.

Some cumimis grew strong enough to kill Titans, but that was a losing game - strong cumimis also sometimes turned into Titans. Strong grays also sometimes turned into titans.

Seraph told that regardless of who turned into a titan - they all went after world destruction and thus needed to be wiped out. She had been a leader of a church faction that did exactly that.

At that point, there was a disagreement. Lai said there were about three titans who had different motives and only went after church settlements, he also told about countless hidden communities, countries and other places, some of which even had titans as their rulers.

That deeply frustrated Seraph. But Neo agreed with Lai. Turned out Neo had served as the last pseudo-god and thus apparently took in and recycled all souls in that world. Thus he did know about all the communities and the like.

Lai, turned out, had an ability where, if he died, he snapped back 24 hours, he had taken on a secret agenda to save the world and had tried more than five thousand times. The final short 10 years of time he could repeatedly re-live ended up being too short to go against the organization led by Seraph, who had kept going for a hundred and fifty years. That matched up with Seraph's age.

The world ended when either the filter/pseudo god died or the Mandy titan died. Turned out that the last place to disappear had been August's apartment. The isolation barrier and the forest in it had kept going for the two hundred years till the world died.

Curious detail - the filter was housed/and August had been dissected in a bunker under the town of Gustavsberg.

Ha hah. Good going, Leum.

The ones asking all the questions and sorting out details were - Tiamat, Albus, and Marcus.

Only after the story was fully told and fleshed out those three started discussing what might have happened.

The first thing they were 100% sure about was that most, if not all, seeing side people had evacuated to other dimensions.

The second thing they were 100% sure about was that dryads had all disappeared. A war of that kind of magnitude could have wiped them out or re-set their domains, and if August had stayed behind, with a well-protected domain, then he would automatically inherit all the authority and thus be KOd.

One dryad just isn't enough to both maintain the barrier and generate aether, so both would be done imperfectly. Rather than life dying out, the three agreed that humans just tried to breed above August's capacity. Had humans kept their own numbers low, actually low enough, then August would eventually recover and might even groom new dryads.

And there was the motive for titans. At first, they slept to keep aether consumption down, waiting for August to recover. But when August was dissected they tried to bring human count down to avoid extinction, plus, most would be reasonably pissed at these scientists/aka church/ who ruined the world's chances.

If August stayed, then Mandy would stay as well. If she did, either by learning like hell or eating rune stones, reach a Titan's status, then her strength would make her qualified to become an administrator in case something happened to August.

Mandy couldn't help but make a wry smile at this. She had been going in that direction from the beginning. Leum and Veri fell on them after she had already stepped on that path.

Something did happen and August was dissected and 'replicated' in a flawed shape. Quantity of cumimis didn't match the quality of a genuine god. But - they did mess with the system - and all cumimis (not just the filter) kept some authority. Remaining authority went to Mandy and any new titans that popped up.

But, the way living worlds were set up required them to have at least one full administrator. If one is not in place then the world would be disconnected from the transmigration circle and souls would no longer properly circulate. The said pseudo god/filter together with strongest Titan ended up forming this unit, although imperfectly, so some souls just couldn't move on regardless. The said berserk filter tried to subconsciously merge, but she was too imperfect to do so.

How it came about or why things happened - who knows - but, the final result was a world that would have died anyhow. It had no hope to recover. That hope had been lost the moment humans dissected August.

"How can you figure this out when you had no clue about your own dimension's affairs?" Tiamat asked Marcus.

"Let's say something similar happened to Hades," Marcus said, shrugging off the jab. "The history was different, but we also once killed our gods. To draw a parallel, our people are 'cumimis', we survived because we killed the original beings who kept messing up the air. But it sounds like cumimis weren't made well enough to do the same, developing the same flaw as original inhabitants at 13 before they could even make descendants."

"Well, they made cumimis to be slaves rather than superior beings," Albus said.

Marcus smiled. "I think only Aheals have the drive to serve their craft or creations not the other way around. But that is also the reason why father picked you guys as allies."

The only thing that ruined this deep and meaningful discussion was the fact that they were all sitting on logs and completely ignoring that August kept sitting on-- Leum.

"Don't your knees hurt?" Mandy asked, starting to feel like... this might be enough of a punishment, no? Even she, by this point, fully understood that she would have become a titan anyhow.

"Not at all," Leum replied with a bright smile.

August got up and put Mandy down. Towards Leum he said: "Next time you pull a Terrean move I'll send you to mine the Antarctic for a decade."

Leum stood up casting a frightened look at August, but even that didn't last. Veri rolled a log over and the four of them sat down on that. Leum cast a purification spell to clean up his hands and knees.

"Right," Tiamat said. "What did you want me to do?"

Veri spoke up this time. "I have a rune stone for legendary grade sealing, can you eat the soul fragments out of it."

"That might work for a mythical grade, but legendaries are impossible," Tiamat said.

Veri sighed. "Mythical wouldn't be enough."

"True. How about you have Leum craft and artifact out of it?"

Mandy had no idea what they were talking about, but she figured it was about fixing the issue of her potentially growing tentacles. At this point, most of the travelers also trailed into their own conversations.

Kiri was sitting close, so Mandy asked. "Hey, how did I look in the future?"

"Completely black, eyes all over your body and you had tentac--," Kiri's explanation ran short with August flicking his forehead and causing him to fall off the log he was sitting on.

Neo and Alan who were both sitting next to Kiri shook their heads. They seemed to understand that August didn't want Mandy to hear it.

SHIT. Mandy looked down in despair. Okay. It was inevitable, but-- now she understood why August got THAT pissed at Leum.

Tiamat and Veri continued a conversation that kept making no sense, Leum had joined in it as well and the only thing Mandy figured was that it was a complicated process and Leum seemed to need some rare and expensive stuff from Tiamat. But, on the bright side, it looked like they had a solution.

Then they started bargaining for the price naming all kinds of items with unfamiliar names.

Marcus came over to sit on their log. The conversation was starting to fraction so sitting closer would make more sense if he wanted to talk about something.

"Why do you think your future self in that setting stayed in Urea?" Marcus asked.

"Who knows," August replied.

"Can he even leave?" Mandy asked. She had been under the impression that it might be impossible - like, some force that keeps their-- gods/administrators/something in place.

"Yeah," Marcus said. "You don't need to be on the location to administrate, I mean, my brother wouldn't be trying to find and kill me otherwise."

Hmmm... Mandy looked at August. Why wouldn't he leave then? Why wouldn't dryads leave then?

"Fine, since you aren't set on leaving, would you like a technology to make all nuclear weapons unusable?"

August squinted.

"I mean, I know that right now they prevent wars rather than causing them, but a little something to neutralize them moments before they go off. Unless they teach complete rubbish at Ureal schools my current impression is that one missile could set off a chain reaction, but one stopped missile would give time for other countries to deal with the problem in other ways. Ureals don't seem to enjoy the idea of making less space for themselves to live in."

"Don't you need to be an emperor to promise such things?" August asked.

"Not at all. This technology is such a basic they teach it at, let's say, equivalent to Ureal middle school in Hades. I can write it on a piece of paper. Urea has both the materials and technology level to set it up," Marcus said.

Wou. Truly a science fiction world prince. Mandy was impressed. What would he want in exchange, though?

"I don't know a thing about politics, do you suppose it would be of any use in my hands?" August asked.

"Unless elven knowledge is rubbish, you have a connection to Tiamat, Grisham and your familiar is Riveria, through them it should be possible to get access to any other influential seeing side individual, and while unruly in many ways you are beloved by dragon of fate," Marcus cracked up a bit, but straightened out his expression for the next line, "I don't think there are any hands that are better for it than yours."

"Fine, what do you want in exchange?" August asked.

"I can do it as a favor for a friend, you are letting me stay in your house, after all," Marcus said.

August paused, peering at Marcus. "Do as you wish then."

"I need paper and pen or a power outlet," Marcus said.

That's a practical issue. Well, true, Mandy had not seen either of those in this house.

"Power outlet wouldn't help, I'm positive all your, or Timothy's techs are dead," August said as he got his notebook/bible out and didn't draw the symbol over it-- oh, it was it an actual notebook? Turned out it had a pen stuck into the back too.

"Is it a dryad zone property?" Marcus asked as he opened the notebook and flipped past a few pages. "I've noticed that there's no metal in this house."

"You could say that," August said, then looked towards the lake as a soundless sloop crossed the boundary between no-fog and fog.

His expression said 'oh shit' and just moments after two youths leaped off the mast and landed on the shore. They were slim, tall, with elven ears, but their hair was brown and ginger, they didn't look as ethereally elven as Leum, but like people who could run, jump and do stuff.

Tiamat looked towards them. "Oh, it's that time already," she said. "Your house was stolen."

Their eyes moved over to August and sparkled over. They spoke something in fae, but the only meaning Mandy got was that they were happy to meet him in multiple different ways.

And August replied something along the lines of it being a good house, asked if they wanted a barbeque and conveyed a feeling of whispers while looking at the kids.

They said a few more happy things in fae, then switched to human speech.

"So I suppose we speak to you in human if we see you," one of them said.

"Yes," August replied.

"Then I'm Ernst" and "I'm Haig," they introduced themselves with smiles.

"We'll let all the visiting tribes know," they said.

Lily passed Tiamat over to August, he didn't even look as he took Tiamat's hand. Then Lily went to make more barbeque.

August looked relieved. "Thank you."

Some kids got up to help with the barbeque and August shortly introduced those closest, the elves seemed to be impressed with everything and then they went around and got to know the kids while eating, blending in as well as if they had been here yesterday already. The kids soon surrounded the two and tried to suck out every bit of information, bringing the two juice and more meat.

For a while, Mandy wondered if elves were actually nocturnal, but then the sky started lightening up and Mandy realized that it hadn't been very late evening, but very early morning.

August also looked at dawn with a sigh, then he complained to himself. "I don't want to compound."

"I'll be awesome and call purple for you," Tiamat said, puffing out her chest.

"It's great to have you around," August said. Sometimes he could be cheap.

Purple? Mandy heard the name Ian had mentioned. Wasn't he or it the thing who offered teleportation services for witches in danger. Tiamat drew a shiny circle in mid-air and soon a big purple blob appeared, 'Premium customer detected, synchronizing' it let out a mechanic voice, then turned into a purple haired and purple eyed fashionista boy.

"You made a new function?" Tiamat asked.

"Yes, yesterday," Purple said.

Tiamat started saying "August wants..."

"To shorten my sleep-time," he said. "So much writing to do, so little time."

Purple smiled. "I have just the right thing." He took out a pair of sunglasses from mid-air, passing them over. "Writers in Ahea use these. Use the Ureal Writer app, pick Ureal language, and type on any surface or even mid-air without minding the speed and," he took out a tiny usb from mid-air. "You can export it only as .txt when it comes to ureal extensions, but I'm sure that's a minor issue. And Bergens happily offered me a box of 10 times speed-up potions with an active time of one hour, a new product. So 8 hours of sleep in 48 minutes and pack in as many as ten days into one."

Holy-- was that the merchanting god? A genie? It was a genie, right? Sweeping along and solving all the problems. No, a prince in shining armor and white horse?

"Name your price," August said with an entranced look.

Was August in love? Holy-- If this was her competition Mandy did not feel like she had any chance of winning.

"Three of those aether essences, if you can give five I can deliver you another box tomorrow, just name the location."

"Mandy, can you slide your hands under my shirt?" August asked with that Entranced look still.

Wow!!! August! To seduce your lover while being in love with another-- Not that Mandy hated it, but...

"I need a free hand," he said.

Ah, okay. So that's how it was. And then Mandy could watch in wonder as August plucked out strands of his hair like they were flower petals with no pain present, having them turn into huge beautiful waterlilies of a magical glow formed from black and white.

"Here is a good place," he said after passing fifth over, "Lily will pick them up."

Right then Lily walked over to take Tiamat from August, so she heard and nodded. Purple meanwhile passed August the potions. Their transaction was thus complete.

"Right," August said and looked over at Marcus.

Marcus looked up, noticing the gaze. He looked to have just finished writing and adding some final notes.

"That's my friend Marcus Revo Turoleo," August said. "He was interested in trading with Urea if he ends up becoming the next emperor of Hades."

Both purple and Marcus looked amazed.

"Marcus, this is my favorite merchant, Purple," he said with a smile.

Purple regained his ability to speak first. "Pleased to meet you. I might just have something you might be interested in--"

Marcus passed the notebook over to August and August made his exit, pulling Mandy along. The apartment was empty and since August had gained so many hours of writing Mandy stole one for herself.

He said she had become more beautiful but wasn't that true for himself?

As he now made so many expressions at so many people.

With all these connections he made he wasn't becoming less for her, but rather, there was more of him.