The Gamer Chapter 1298 – Fusion Festival 5 – Dress Code (Patreon)

In John’s mind, a three-dimensional map of the Guild Hall and its many festival attractions opened. He glanced to his left, at Lee in her typical combination of jeans and black shirt. It had the Fusion logo on it, which was extremely fitting for today. Glancing to his right, he looked at Claire, in her maid outfit.

Lee was a gamer of the ‘my ideal vacation day is not speaking and not seeing the sun for sixteen hours straight’-variety. As a vampire, Claire had almost the same aversion to direct exposure to natural light. With those two, the proper date path was one with lots of shade, in preferably cool areas, and potentially indoors.

While the Gamer cobbled together a highly adjustable route, using his scheming brain for something that was a little more fun, another idea surfaced. Cute as Claire’s maid outfit was, a different outfit would have been more in line with the dating mood. Those were her work clothes after all. Part of that work was getting his dick wet, so he loved that outfit, yet this was a rare opportunity for her to wear something different.

“I’m yours to doll up however you want,” Claire chirpily responded to his thoughts out loud.

“Hey, no having mental convos.” Lee crossed her arms, which meant John had an excuse to hold her a bit tighter to keep her against his side.

“Sorry,” the vampire maid apologized immediately. “It’s just so much easier and it’s so great staying in contact with his mind. Ahhh, it’s so beautiful. Master’s insides. I could just get lost in them. Stay forever inside him. Become one with him. Forever and ever andeve-“

Lee snapped her fingers twice in front of Claire’s face. “No dropping into crazy dere mode right now.”

“Ehem, I will try my best. That always comes over me so suddenly… like a hunger pang…. Right, you never had one of those, keep forgetting that…” Claire looked for another metaphor.

“I can imagine it,” Lee assured.

“Not to insult your intelligence. Not to doubt your word. Not to question imagination, but I really don’t think you can imagine what it’s like not having eaten anything for ten days before you actually did it,” Claire responded. “It’s a very unique kind of pain, even among the various tortures I had to deal with under… him…” Her face darkened for a moment, then it immediately cleared up again. “That’s all over now though,” she said, with a carefree smile.

“Glad you’re doing well,” Lee responded with a smile on her own. Claire wore her heart on her sleeve and had been historically unable to keep herself from crying when she actually felt like it. The consequence was that, no matter how sudden her mood shifts looked sometimes, one could be certain that was what she was actually feeling. “Anyway, what was the dolling up about?”

“I was just thinking whether Claire should be wearing something else for the date.”

“How about a partner look? I got spare shirts.” Lee pulled at her chest area. “She can eat one, I don’t mind.”

That was one idea going through John’s head and it sounded fantastic. “Alright then, guess we’re going to your apartment.”

“Oh… can you… just wait here and I go fetch it really quick…?” Lee sighed when both of her dates were plainly displaying mischievous intent on their faces. “I just made you way too interested by sounding like I didn’t want you there, didn’t I?”

“Master, she knows us so well, I’m impressed,” Claire commented.

“I just know why I fell in love with you, Claire. You’re just as much of a teasing soul as I am.”

“Ehe… Master said he loves me,” the vampire maid sung those few words. The three of them turned around and marched to Lee’s apartment. It was in the opposite direction from the teleportation hub.

Lee’s apartment was a bit of a mess. There was no trash around, although John was sure there would have been if the cleaning slimes didn’t have access to it all. Similarly, there was no dust around because Aclysia went through here every so often. Despite those two factors, the room was a remarkable mess of scattered underwear, sex toys casually left on almost every surface (primarily of the John-sized dildo variety), and a large pile of documents on a couch table. As a matter of fact, there were documents, candles, and all manners of stuff just scattered around the entire, fairly large room. The young Fateweaver’s apartment was unique in that it was made up of a single room, with only a bathroom attached.

In all of this chaos, there was a notable, L-shaped trench that went from the entrance to the computer desk and from the desk to the bed, specifically on the side the closet was.

“Man, archetypes really are something,” John remarked, looking around. It reminded him immensely of how he had used to live. He had been a bit filthier, even, with all of the used tissues he had left lying around. Then again, he did spot one of his self-cleaning wipes on Lee’s table, and he was certain that was not just used to take care of spills from energy drinks. “You’re barely in here, how does it get so dirty?”

“Can we not?” Lee asked and, blushing heavily, kicked a bunch of her used panties into a corner.

“You know, Aclysia may just do the basic de-dusting, but if you let Beatrice run through this place…”

“She’d never let me forget it.”

“…that is fair,” John rescinded the advice. Instead, he picked up one of the panties and stretched them between his index fingers. It was a terribly expensive piece of lace. Only the lover of the head of a nation could leave that kind of underwear sitting next to a still dirty pizza cutter. “What do you even wear underwear for? Gaming sessions?”

“I have friends that I’m comfortable being in underwear around but not comfortable enough to be naked though.” Lee giggled. “They’re going to lose their shit when they see me on the broadcast. Some of them still can’t believe I’m offline so much because I got together with you.”

“Like 99% of them are guys, right?” John asked, making an educated guess on the gender breakdown of people that rigorously played online games together. “Because I guarantee you at least half of them want to be with you instead of me.”

“For real?” Lee asked, an eyebrow raised. “I mean, maybe, I don’t really think about it.”

“We’re simple and confused on what to say. Also, cute gamer girls are always in high demand. Anyway, you’re mine, so their hopes of getting you are zero.” He gave her a wink and flung her worn panties into the laundry basket.

Claire dumped an entire armful of panties and shirts into the basket as well. “Not housewife material though,” she commented, in the kind of jokingly chiding manner that was both serious and not. The vampire maid was about to throw another t-shirt in there when she stopped to give it a sniff. Eyelids fluttering, she let out a long, perverted sigh. “…Master…”

John snapped his fingers and said, “Claire, no horny.”

“Awwww,” the vampire maid let out a saddened sound when the hypnotic suggestion surgically removed the lustful part of her obsession and put it in jail. “It’s the proper thing to feel towards you though!”

“Maybe, but we’re on a date and I don’t want to stop every ten metres because you need some more physical attention, you naughty little thing,” John took his shirt from Claire and tossed it over the backrest of the gaming chair. Then he followed the trench all the way to Lee’s closet.

It was immediately clear that she was not in charge of her own laundry, considering how neatly everything was stacked. “Aclysia is just the best,” Claire commented.

“I mean… yeah…” Lee’s deflated mumble was barely even audible.

“I honestly have no idea if I could run a household these days,” John confessed. The last time he had lived on his own had been when he was stuck in that house in Germany for a couple of months. That wasn’t quite on his own either, Momo had been there. What mattered was that Aclysia wasn’t there. Whenever she was around, his chores were taken care of. “People like us aren’t usually orderly. Would it be that we could get the same level of enthusiasm for structure we have in Factorio for our rooms.”

“Factorio is sooooo goooooood.”

“Are we visiting factories?” Claire asked.

“No,” John told her with a chuckle. He grabbed one of the shirts and unfolded it. Luckily, it was exactly the kind they were searching for. After receiving both it and a pair of jeans, Claire started munching.

Elegant as Claire usually was, when she ate she behaved like an absolute savage. Her mouth opened wide, her canines visibly grew sharper, and she tore chunks out of the fabric like a wolf out of freshly killed game. More often than not, her teeth clacked audibly. At a rapid pace, she devoured both articles of clothing, adding them to the stockpile of materials inside her.

The maid uniform receded and was soon replaced by the shirt and jeans combo she had eaten – with the notable difference that these actually fit her. There were a solid ten centimetres between Lee and Claire, so that was a necessary step. Artificial Spirits needed to eat the clothes to copy the design, but the dimensions were changed to fit them relatively. They needed additional fabric to make up for the difference though.

Another thing that made what Claire now ‘wore’ different from actual clothes was that they needed to stay connected to her body. She hid it where the clothes sat tightly, that the fabric was melded with her skin.

“Hmmm,” John hummed and inspected his vampiric lover. Obviously, she was adorable, that was a baseline affair and the clothes did a nice job highlighting that. It was the plainness of these clothes that truly stood out. Like all maids, Claire only ever switched out of her outfit to visit the mundane side, which she never did on her own.

An element of her current appearance was missing. John could not quite put his finger on it. A status that only lasted a couple of seconds before his brilliant mind had run through every possible explanation he could think of and picked the most likely one.

“How about you switch to your human disguise?” John suggested. From his mouth, in Claire’s ears, it may as well have been law. The vampire maid nodded. Her skin assumed slightly more colour, going from paper white to a more commonly found pale. More drastic were the changes to her eyes and hair, changing from red to green and from white to red, respectively. When she smiled at him, past these little transformations, her canines were human levels of pointy. “That’s a date-ready, casual look,” he complimented his crimson-haired vampire.

“Thank you… I guess it’s John for the next hour then?” Claire asked with a wink.

“Absolutely.” The Gamer put an arm around her and they marched back the way they came, leaving slightly less chaos behind.

With the girls in a partner look, he felt more ready for the outside world than ever. They did have a bit to walk before they left the Palace though, massive as it was. Even if the dimensional folding destroyed the common-sense suggestion of how long the corridors should be compared to the size of the rooms attached to it, they were still long.

“Picked up any hobbies yet?” Lee asked, as they walked along.

“Woodcarving,” John answered immediately. His left ear got playfully tugged at, as punishment.

“Dude, not the entire world revolves around you.”

“As a worshipper of John, I find that offensive.” Claire giggled and winked at him. For a moment, his heartbeat stopped. “If the world doesn’t revolve around John, it should. Maybe finding a way to do that should be my hobby. Not sure if little old me could achieve that, but I can try.”

“…That’s a question I wanted to ask too, how old are you anyway?”

“Your world has a weird fixation on age,” Claire remarked.

“Our world,” John corrected her. “I’m not letting you go back, even if I found a way. You’re mine now.”

Claire rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, like a happy cat. “All I could want to do back in the Iron Domain would be to spit on Arkeidos’ grave anyway.”

“So, no idea?” Lee asked.

“I had no idea, but you can just check the John’s group interface,” Claire reminded her. “To spare you the trouble of tapping around in the air, it says I’m 43.”

“Oh, you are old… you don’t really behave like it.”

“I never behave like anyone expects me to – except John, of course.”

“Well, even if I have accurate expectations, you do require a firm hand to get you where I want,” the Gamer dared to complain a little.

“I must immediately change everything about me… Don’t look so worried, I’m joking, joking.” Claire waved off with a broad smile, her natural charisma combining with the raised Stat of the same name to let her find exactly the right words. “I’m aware now that I am as down bad for John as a meteorite falling from the sky and that that’s not exactly normal. Not to say that I’m better than anyone, because I’m definitely not, but I do pity you all for that.”

“Pity us? You’re the one who loses self-control whenever John kisses you a bit too much,” Lee teased.

“Yeah, and that’s great! The whole world goes red and pink and I feel excited all over and then… ahhh…” Had it not been for the still-active hypnotic suggestion, she doubtlessly would have changed the way she walked now. “It’s an indescribable bliss to be this deep in love.”

“…That does sound pretty nice, in a way,” Lee admitted. “You need some hobbies outside of John though.”

“Do I?” Claire tilted her head, making that a genuine question. “I think Aclysia is doing pretty well. She is the best! I love her so much! She takes care of Master and his harem, she’s super in control, despite being as rightfully obsessed as I am.”

“Aclysia is indeed the best,” John agreed. “Jane is best girl though, and Beatrice is bae.”

“Jane fascinates me.” Claire turned her eyes away in thought. It seemed she was rather fond of chatting about her fellow haremettes. “Of all your other women, I think I like her the most, even if I love Aclysia the most. Beatrice is…”

“Difficult?” Lee suggested. “Obtuse? A pain in your side? Always right? Pedantic? Lovably useful when you need her? Obsessed with the most useless things? Dependable?”

“Yes,” Claire made it short. “Oh, I shouldn’t talk about anyone else, I still have such bad manners. Not sure if I should talk about what I think about you though, that might be rude too.”

“I’m not made out of sugar, dude, hit me up.”

“Your habit of addressing everyone with dude is weird.”

“I am claiming dude as a non-gendered term because I can’t be asked to say girl instead.”

“You probably have a verbal tic.”

John snorted. “Well, who would ever have a verbal tic?”

“Well, who would indeed?” Lee’s sarcastic remark was a quarter of the reason why he loved her. “Anyway, we were talking about me?”

“You are a lazy, adorable couch warmer that really needs to clean up her room and get her priorities straight,” Claire stated suddenly. “In a word, you are a procrastinator. You’re charming and you’re competent, if you just did it.”

“Yeah… yeah…” Lee sighed. “My teachers always called me minimalist and I was kinda proud of that label… I’m trying to fix that, but old habits and all of that, you know?”

“Uhm…” Claire reached out to John’s mind to draw out the idiom she was talking about. “Ah, they die hard… do they? I guess that depends on the habit. I used to have this rock I loved to sleep under, until another tribe came through. That habit died quite easily.”

Lee stared at the happily humming vampire. “…I deeply admire that you can keep smiling after that life of yours. I really do.”

“Why wouldn’t I smile, I have all a woman could ever ask for – successful vengeance and love.” Claire’s grin turned sinister. “I like this saying in this world: the greatest revenge is a life well lived.”

“You will live the best life,” John promised her.