The Gamer Chapter 1068 – Christmas Family Finale – Family Dinner (Patreon)

“Family, meet lovers, lovers, you know my family,” Rave shortly introduced her parents, after bringing them in from the door. With few words, Nariko and Reagan sat down on the last empty couch in the large room. Both tried their best to look casual and presentable and both messed it up by wearing bright green Christmas socks. Despite that jolly oddity, a low tension lay in the air.

Rave’s relationship with her parents was, as always, turbulent. It was in a reasonable state at the moment, otherwise there would have been no way she would have invited her parents, but it was still far from perfect. Her relationship with her dad had soured considerably since John had met his girlfriend, for reasons of his own fault as far as the Gamer was concerned. Keeping the reason for his divorce quiet and demanding that she break up with John were definitely two moves that would impair the relationship of a father with his daughter. As for Nariko, neglect and a thoroughly arrogant attitude did all the damage needed to strain relationships.

Courtesy of some (admittedly undesired) help from John, putting the Hollmey family in the same room during Rave’s last birthday, things had been stabilizing lately. They had been stabilizing around a mutual understanding that they should have friendly but limited contact, but they had been stabilizing nonetheless.

What didn’t help the tension was that this was the first time the Newman’s interacted with Reagan since he had informed John’s parents of his harem. They had taken it a lot better and Reagan had not taken well to that in return.

“So, you accepted how your daughter wants to love?” Brenda jumped right into that topic.

“Accepted is the correct word,” Nariko responded immediately. The older Asian woman poured herself some coffee. Aclysia had brewed an entire pot after Benjamin’s request. If he didn’t drink it, Scarlett most certainly would have.

“Struggling against what Jane wants is like a pencil with erasers on both ends,” Reagan responded, taking a deliberate pause to draw out the punchline. “There is no point.”

John wasn’t sure if he was ready to laugh or cry, while his father decisively chuckled. “If you stick to puns, we will get along splendidly,” Benjamin said.

“Oh, the only puns I am guilty of are about courthouses,” Reagan said.

Next to John, his daughter snorted. “You’re terrible, dad!”

“How come you laugh at his puns but when I name our ship the Boating Seaquence, that’s terrible?”

“’Cause ya ain’t funny tiger.”

“Then how did I manage to seduce you?”

“Ya didn’t, I’m just in this for the money.”

“I used to be way poorer than you.”

“And I can see the future.”

Nariko placed down her cup after taking a sip. “If you had that ability, we’d have a more harmonious relationship.”

“Why’s that? Because you would have found me useful enough to stay around?”

The Abyss Auction employee hesitated in her answer and for once John couldn’t blame her. Even he wasn’t sure whether Rave had meant that as a joke or not. If he had to guess, she didn’t quite know either.

“No, it’s… haaaaaa…” Nariko was evidently struggling between giving the honest answer, the harsh answer, and the consolatory answer. In the end, she primarily opted for the last. “There’s no answer I could give to that which would satisfy you. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s…” Rave swallowed, likely realizing that she was starting things off just like her mother. “Urgh, ja, okay, I shouldn’t even have said that, let’s just forget it happened.”

“Oh my god, progress!” Momo declared, clapping her hands and gaining a warning glare from mother and daughter. “I’ll be the villain of your reunion, as long as you don’t start bickering.”

“No guarantees,” Rave stated and leaned back.

“Anyway,” Nariko turned to John’s parents, “Reagan and I have accepted the way of their relationship… out of necessity. I would lie if I said I was particularly thrilled about it. If the only option is to live with it or be cut out of my daughter’s life, I will go with the former.”

“Even if we express it poorly sometimes, we do care,” Reagan added, holding his wife’s hand.

With things cleared up, Brenda was in a much more forgiving mood. “Ah, but who never expresses themselves poorly?”

“Would never happen to me,” John asserted, leaning backwards with a joking smile on his face. “In unrelated news, wasn’t Liz supposed to tag along?”

“She made short-term plans with her boyfriend instead,” Nariko kept it short. “Who, I must admit, although loyal to only her, is a much less pleasant person than you are.”

“He’s a layabout,” Reagan specified, upon the questioning gaze. “A bit too happy to drink and smoke and a little too reluctant to work. They’re young though, so it’s not going to be that bad.”

“Bad habits cultivated while young blossom into bad habits engrained when older,” Nariko pushed back against her husband’s assertion immediately.

“I used to party a lot and I turned out fine.” Rave kept to a definitely casual tone this time, preventing things from turning into a confrontation.

Nariko, however, couldn’t help but scoff. “Jane, you squandered your potential in just about every walk of life for the better part of six years. That you turned things around was almost entirely dependent on you finding the right people to surround yourself with.”

“Thanks!” Rave chirped happily.

Her mother’s eyebrows rose in confusion. “I wasn’t complimenting you.”

“Nah, but ya throwing shade at me kinda just bounces off me, so I’ll just take the good thing ya said about the harem I helped build – thank ya very much.”

“I… haaaaaaaa…” Nariko exhaled long and slowly through her mouth, exorcising building tension. “At the very least, you are successful now. That both of you turned out rebellious no matter how much I tried certainly spells out a level of incompetence on my part.”

The joke about Nariko being self-reflecting practically wrote itself, which was why John was so pleased when Rave didn’t make it. Instead, his girlfriend stood up and walked over to her family’s couch to sit down next to her mother. “Not like ya never make good points at all,” she conceded that much.

Things progressed pretty smoothly from there. They remained around the low table for about three hours. Rather than keep things in one large conversation, they splintered into individual groups most of the time. John’s parents were eager to get to know each member of the harem better. From their perspective, any of these women was a potential mother for the grandkids, which they made clear on several occasions.

As far as John could discern, his parents were happy with basically all of his girls. That was no wonder, given how brilliant and charismatic they all were. There were implicit favourites. Brenda hung around Eliana, Sylph, and Nathalia a lot, for different reasons. That the maternal woman looked after the most damaged of the harem followed naturally. Similarly, Sylph’s simple cheeriness seemed to please John’s mother quite a bit. With Nathalia, the two seemed to bond over (perceived) similarity in age and nymphomania. In reality, the dragoness outstripped Brenda in both categories by an absurd margin, but that didn’t prevent them from bonding over the things they shared.

Benjamin spent most of the time speaking to Scarlett. That had essentially been a foregone conclusion. Once it became clear that Scarlett was not just a businesswoman but a fellow engineer (of some description), the two started discussing technical procedures and the train was out of the station.

They still both tried to talk to everyone equally. They didn’t succeed, but the effort made was enough for the harem to feel recognized.

Nia, the only member of the harem that couldn’t be interacted with, eventually left the room to follow a pre-agreed procedure where some of the girls or John would excuse themselves for some reason (a phone call, a smoke, or whatever else came to mind), and spend some time talking to her. Because of the sheer number of people they could cycle through, this didn’t catch his parent’s attention.

As the day progressed, Benjamin and Brenda grew less weary of Copernicus. By the time the wine bottles could be opened reasonably, they were acclimated enough that they fed the disguised light spirit. Once they had climbed that hurdle, they asked to see the crocodile as well. They took to Stirwin a lot quicker, for reasons of mild inebriation, previously overcome shock, and the infinity elemental being a lot better behaved.

John made it a point of principle to mention repeatedly that both animals were from tamers that knew exactly what they were doing and could not be compared to animals in the wild or even zoos. The last he wanted was for his mother, still in her natural ingredients health-fad, to slide further down the hippy insanity rabbit hole.

After the animals were fed, they moved on to dinner. Eating a third roast in as many days was still delicious, but Aclysia made sure to mention that their nutritional balance was getting out of whack. That was Metra’s excuse for not partaking in the food as well, while Aclysia, Beatrice and Momo did take part in eating. They would have to eject the meal later on, biological matter inside an Artificial Spirit went through the process of rotting and that was far from pleasant for them or anyone around them. It was a sacrifice they needed to make to keep the façade up and facilitate the day.

Sometimes the talks threatened to escalate. The worst it got was not when Nariko and Rave had one of their less agreeable exchanges, but when Lydia, Siena, Eliana and Nariko got into a discussion. Lydia’s stern discipline, Nariko’s demanding attitude, Siena’s contrarianism and Eliana’s distaste for anything authority related quickly turned the heat of the discussion up. It ended through intervention by Undine, who knew how to handle her two closest friends perfectly well, obviously got along with Lydia very well, and made enough sense for Nariko.

After dinner, the Hollmey family left. Rave accompanied them to the airport, while the Newmans and the harem stayed behind. Benjamin and Brenda would only leave the next day and stayed the night at the place. It wasn’t completely without incidents. They got a lot drunker than he had bargained for, which was not a problem of his own behaviour, but one of the continuously lowering inhibitions of his sexually open parents.

As always, John felt incredibly awkward when hearing about the escapades of his swinging parents. His harem wanted to hear a lot about things, and so he quietly suffered through it or went out to play with Stirwin in sacred winter silence. Thankfully, things never escalated to the level that his parents made any advances on his girls. That would have put John in a situation without pleasant outcomes, even if it was clear where his priorities were. As much as he loved his parents, he loved his harem that much more and he had to draw clear borders somewhere.

That little hell of swinger tales only lasted about forty-five minutes, though, after which they all went to bed. If there was one good thing about the needlessly white house, John found it to be that they managed to cram an adequately sized bed into one of the rooms.

Also, the walls were thick enough that neither party heard what the other was doing in the privacy of their rooms.

________________________________________________________________________________

“It’s been really nice seeing you again, sweety,” Brenda said, after John drove them to the airport. The genuine New York experience was a lot less endearing with a hangover, as it turned out. “You need to decorate your house more though. It feels… new and sterile.”

“We’re probably just going to buy a new one.” John shrugged. He didn’t just say that because it was easier to hide how little they lived in their front-houses if they had little time to live in them – he genuinely didn’t like that house.

“You shouldn’t waste a good set of four walls just because you’re rich,” his father chastised.

Rave laughed. “Oh, he knows. He recently gave us an earful about how we couldn’t throw out a table just because the surface was singed because of Socrates or something like that.”

“Aristotle,” John immediately corrected.

“What’s the difference? One Greek guy next to the other.” Rave’s cheeky response was obviously aimed just at winding him up a bit.

John bit and, answering with more outrage than he actually felt, said, “The difference is two generations of teaching and a narrowing down on virtue ethics over the original framing of western philosophy.”

“Whatever ya say, tiger.”

His parents chuckled. Brenda reached around her husband’s waist. “You two get along very nicely.”

“As impossible as she makes it sometimes,” John agreed with a content smile.

“Isn’t that how all relationships feel?” Benjamin hummed before looking at a nearby clock. “Anyway, we got to go. I wouldn’t want to keep you from your work.”

“Yeah, sadly I have a lot of that,” John sighed and hugged both of his parents one more time. “I’ll come visit you again when I’m down in DC for something.”

“Just give us a call before.” Brenda smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

Then they separated, John and Rave getting back into the car and his parents disappearing into the crowd of people taking the plane back home. “Always nice to meet them.” His girlfriend smiled.

“I just feel bad that we had no gifts for them,” John confessed. It was hard to find good things to give to his parents. They found it similarly hard, which was why he hadn’t received anything. In the end, sharing their company was the only thing he really wanted anyway.

“There’s always next year.” Rave smiled.