Chapter 66

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[|| =!BONUS LEVEL!= ||]

Love is hard

Irisai, dragonborn and holder of many other less important or inaccurate titles, was ready to kill her future husband.

She had traveled long, far, and hard. When she used clairvoyance it had pointed her a long, long ways away it seemed. When she had seen the strange machines the people had used to travel the roads she had first attacked it with unrelenting force and threw it on it's side. It had roared and groaned. She assumed that it still lived and threw fireballs at it. It exploded.

The man inside survived, if barely, and she healed him. That was how she learned about cars. After stealing one for herself she had to admit that they were far superior to horses, though she was puzzled that they broke down quite quickly. Then she learned about fuel, which made perfect sense to her. Horses needed food. Petrol, diesel, and those other liquids were the different types of food cars could eat.

Strangely enough nobody thought magic was real where she was, which was odd, but she caught on quickly. If nobody thought magic was real then nobody could say that she had been invisible when she stole all their stuff. The silly superstitions of the peasants of the world were much more to her advantage than in Skyrim. She got some very strange looks in her dragonscale armor and was nearly put in a cell twice. Light, leather armour barring a helmet was apparently acceptable though. She saw some young maidens smoking in similar attire, though they weren't using pipes but rather small white sticks. Well, it was no concern of hers.

The only issue was her husband. He was only sometimes in the world. He appeared often enough that it was clearly his home, and he arrived back in it every night, but he was so, SO far away!

Thus far she had crossed half the world to get to him since half the world was how far away she was from him. Europe had been nice. They spoke common there, thankfully. Asia was much harder to get through. They all spoke different languages and used different currencies. Luckily, gold was a good way to catch anybody's eye. That and thievery. Thievery was a staple trade of any decent adventurer, though she took it above and beyond to the point that she could literally steal the clothes off a person's back, to the awe and confusion of the thieves' guild.

And after such a journey she found that she had to cross a small ocean to get to the nation of Japan, a small island nation much like Solstheim except that it wasn't drowning in ash, though it did have some great hot springs apparently. It was something to look forward to.

Yes, she would finally find her hubby. He would look at her in shock as she, the most beautiful woman in Tamriel, had collected Elder scrolls, dealt with Daedra, crossed oceans, tamed wild cars, and been assaulted by the strange magical staffs of the law several times (they were nothing against the typically useless wards she had learned).

For but a minute she would recite the grand loving words she had recited over and over in preparation to awe him by her fervor in her pursiut of one of the few men she had met that weren't stunned stupid by her beauty, smelled like a pig, were arrogant to the point of demanding her hand in marriage, or as weak as a newborn babe.

He would stride to embrace her, she would greet him happily, and they would kiss in a fiery romance that would have tales about it sung. Yes, she would be the treasured wife, dragonborn hero of the realm of Nirn and slayer of dragons and he the man whose mere servants (and adorable little sister) slew an army of dragons on their wedding day, making a rain of blood solely to honor her in the hopes of her hand.

The day it rained dragon blood was the most beautiful day of her life. She had never realized it but a dead dragon was the greatest gift somebody could give her. An ocean of blood and the souls of countless great dragons? Her husband had slayed an army and given her the spoils. It was a dowry, plain and simple.

But when she finally arrived in Japan after more than two months travel, dealing with obstacles great and small, learning new customs and honing old ones she hadn't practiced in a long time. When she finally arrived in Japan…

"… Sir? What's that way?" She pointed across the ocean calmly crashing against the shore, wetting the soles of her boots.

"Nani?" he grunted. He was an old fisherman out on the docks just casting his line out.

"Sorry, I don't speak Japanese. It's a long story. What lies across this ocean?"

"Fucking American," he swore. "There lies Hawaii. Island like Japan. Past that stupid American land. Now shoo. You scare fish away and my English shit." The crotchety old man turned back to the sea while Irisai looked across the waters, a slow bubbling rage building in her chest. An ominous laughter escaped her as she plotted how to punish her disobedient husband for RunNinG AWaY FrOM HeR LoVE!

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Maine. He was in Maine.

She was wondering if her husband had some sort of horrible flaw that he was ashamed to show her. First he was in one of the Asiatic countries, leading her all the way over there, and then he moved a little farther East… to Maine. What was even in Maine? Raccoons? Snow?

It was practically Canada. Ever since learning of the strange network made of clouds or a foreign energy called wifi she had learned quite a bit, one of those things being that Americans were rude, gun-toting capitalists and that Canadians were nice, mild-mannered folk that really didn't deserve their rich, unruly neighbors. So why go to Maine of all places? It was the rudeness of Americans combined with the weather of Canada dumped in the middle of nowhere… who lived in Maine?!

Whatever the reason for her husband's isolation she would forgive him… probably. A romantic engagement was fine. Divorce was always an option, of course, as was poisoning or a sharp knife, and if he had committed some sort of horrible crime against humanity she wouldn't really care. If he was a troll in disguise she probably would care, but if he could turn into the hunk of man she had burned into her memory most of the time she wouldn't mind so much. She was technically a dragon in the meatsuit of a half elf anyways.

Say, could her hubby give her a dragon body? That would be sweet! Okay, she was totally pissed at him but if he could let her turn into a dragon her love for him would become more than bottomless as it already was. All would be forgiven in a heartbeat. Done deal. She could have crossed the world in like… two weeks if she had Odahviing with her, but flying on her own? Well her husband was a great mage so he could probably do it. No, he could definitely do it and it would be awesome.

But first she had to get there.

Maine was, as expected, full of a whole lot of nothing. It didn't really even have mountains like Skyrim, though it had some tiny ones. It had a fair few rivers and some pretty lakes she drove by, but nothing really outstanding other than nature, and she had seen a lot of nature.

Doing some trickery with a map and clairvoyance when her hubby was home, she figured out that he was somewhere east of a place called Eagle Lake and south of the Deboulle mountain. Needless to say, there was nothing there. At all. Like, she asked a local and he told her perfectly plainly that there was seriously nothing there. It wasn't even a national park. It was just nothing, the epitome of Maine in her opinion.

More travelling ensued. She had to take some backroads and the GPS she stole back in California wasn't all that helpful. Even the spirit inside the little box didn't know much about the back-end of nowhere.

But THERE! She had found it!

Clairvoyance led her down a trail in the woods after going into the middle of nowhere. She had prepared herself with some camping supplies beforehand, already knowing her hubby was a bit of a hermit, and donned the blade of woe, one of her favorite blades, on her back to fend off bears. All of this was in her magical backpack of course. All of her stuff was in it so she didn't worry about having to hijack another car. She could do so freely without leaving any of her valuable stuff behind.

So she trekked, having to hike for a day and a half until she came to the top of a tall hill. And then she saw it.

It was perfect! Beautiful! It was a woodland manor! It's oaken walls were standing tall and proud in the forest around it, a clearing cut to keep nature's grasping hands at bay. It was a house fit for a Jarl, as great as Dragonsreach in her opinion. She knew exactly what her husband had been doing. He had made a house just for her in a land that he had thought would remind her of home, of the snowy north she called home. He was… *sniff* so thoughtful… no she wasn't crying.

After spending a minute wiping some water from her eyes she made her way to the manor. The door was unlocked, as though to welcome her home. She wandered the halls in awe for a minute before she ran into another woman with cat ears in a loose dark purple blouse eating from a plastic bag, her face dusted in some orange powder. She blinked dumbly for a minute at Irisai, the dragonborn dressed in the dragonscale armor she had first met her husband in, her cheeks stuffed with cheetos.

Elsyria looked at the woman and her eyes narrowed in on one thing. The fucking cat ears.

"He has another sister?"

"Whut?"

"Ah, introductions, my apologies. I'm Abyss' wife."

"Oh! Another one for the harem!"

"WHAT?!"

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The Serpent

Ophis napped. It wasn't complicated.

That wasn't to say that napping itself wasn't complicated; it really was. As she had learned in her few months of napping you needed the right temperature, the right level of ambient magic, the right lighting, and more.

Or you needed Abyss. That worked too, though he sometimes had to leave their bed early or move her head from his lap, thus disrupting her naps. Over her long life she had learned that disturbances to her life, like Great Red or that pale lady in Abyss' former dimension, were to be crushed and the peaceful silence to be cherished. If it annoyed her get rid of it. But she couldn't exactly punish her lover. He was worth a little noise. So in her infinite mercy she allowed him to disrupt her naps… sometimes.

The cat wasn't a problem, though she could be annoying. She simply wanted attention, though, which couldn't be faulted. She wanted the same, after all, though the cat knew that she got first dibs for time with her husband. The demon, the more recent sister of hers, was more troublesome but after rousing a little of her power she quieted down and focused on her husband and hobbies, all inconsequential to Ophis. Her husband was hers first, after all. She had dibs.

Oh, she was also pregnant. She had children before, sorta. Cast-offs of her power that gained sentience were children, right? She had never thought of them as hers and they had come and gone throughout the ages, occasionally toppling a kingdom or crippling a divine pantheon. This child, though, was intended and more importantly, the child was going to be Abyss'. That meant that Abyss would care for their child and care for her more. Kids would also tie him down, something Kuroka and she agreed that he needed.

That they would tie him to her was more important than his stability, though him being happy was pretty important too, at least the cat said so. But most important was that he was hers and she couldn't have him running away or something. Then she wouldn't get her silence back and she would have headaches again and Baka Red would hog the gap and throw noise everywhere while she tried to sleep.

She was actually starting to enjoy being awake now thanks to her mate. So he would stay with her so he could cook for her, keep the cat from irritating her, give her the finest pillows to nap on, and make her chest feel weird when he kissed her or said he loved her. She still hadn't figured out what the feeling was and she had felt a lot of feelings since the dawn of time.

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"Hey Ophis… wanna play mario kart?" The cat asked. She poked a controller into her face and the dragon god opened one sleepy eye. She considered just sleeping more but she was also kind of hungry.

"Go get me something to eat."

"Here!" She said cheerfully. Ophis was handed a popsicle, one of the orange creamy ones. She took a few bites from it and enjoyed that crunchy taste of the wood with the treat. She handed the rest of the popsicle, the part that was just a stick, to the cat and she tossed it away.

Well she was up now. She may as well entertain the cat. She took the controller and the cat excitedly hit the play button, starting the race. Ophis chose the character that looked like a tiny spiky turtle, momentarily wondering how the cat could have so much energy. Didn't cats like napping and being playful? Actually, some to think of it she did a lot of that. It was just at night and before she went to sleep.

"So what do you think of Esdeath?" The cat jabbered. Her cart got a shell and she almost threw it at Ophis before she reconsidered and tossed it at another cart. Smart.

"She knows her place and she's quiet." Ophis answered.

"Huh so you like her?"

"Abyss likes her."

"Yeah, I guess I'd be a bit sad if she left too. I just don't like the sadism."

"I don't care."

"I don't really either. We both know Abyss doesn't like hurting people, though. He thinks she's actually a really nice person inside but her childhood really screwed her up. It's kinda like his aunt Raven. A really shitty person but he can't help but see family in a good light."

"He tolerates it."

"Uh huh… and she is really, really fun in bed. Abyss doesn't hit hard enough sometimes."

"Be quiet." She finished her first lap. She was in fourth place, the cat in first. The cat was blissfully quiet for a few seconds before she started up again.

"He's going to attract other women, you know. Mates."

"Yes." It was only natural that he would have hanger-ons. He was great.

"How many do you think he'll have?"

"A lot." She had a lot of sycophants too. They just popped up when you had power.

"Duh. I think there'll be about seven or eight, though I'm lowballing it with six. We're up to three so far. I'm up for more. He should start developing time magic, though. If he wants more time so much why not just make it?" Ophis shrugged. "So anyways, you're okay with him getting other women?"

"He's mine." She threw a shell she picked up and took third place. The second lap finished.

"I know, I know, first and foremost he's yours. No argument here. But you don't care if he has a bunch of other kids, loves other women, bangs a TON of women? I'm pretty sure he'll have flings when he gets older. I really want to see him with a salt and pepper beard."

"Hmm," she hadn't thought about it. "Yes, a beard would be nice."

"And the other kids?"

"Other women are temporary. I will exist forever. He will too. If he ignores me I will take action."

"Flings?" She ignored the cat and took second place before being immediately set back to fifth by a banana peel. She felt vague annoyance at the game. "Yeah, don't care at all. Got it. Oh, and I asked Esdeath. She doesn't care if he sleeps with every woman on the planet. Actually, she might feel proud of him. She has this alpha mentality, like me! So we're going to get a bunch of kids for him and I'll probably encourage him to expand his harem. I sorta wish my sister wasn't taken by the Red Dragon Emperor, though. She's missing out."

Ophis ignored the cat's words and fell sideways onto her lap. It was soft under her head. She was asleep a moment later. When she woke up the cat had somehow slipped out. Not having the silence made her less important so she missed her leave. Still, the pillow under her head was an acceptable apology.

Oh, it was eight o'clock. Abyss was coming back to her now. Good, she wanted kisses and lovemaking. Lots of lovemaking.

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