John and Rave were just walking along with one of the groups getting shown around. The initial mass had been separated into batches of ten, which were each now being shown around by one of the maids. For this day, there wasn’t anything else to do, so they decided to follow one of the tours, just to look at everything they had built in completion once.

If that made the maid heading this particular tour, a girl with smooth, black hair, pale skin, red lips, and of a short stature that bordered on stout but remained sexy, worry about their presence, she hid it with remarkable cool. “Alright, follow me,” she announced and they set out from the arena.

“Need my arm?” Rave asked, genuinely worried for a moment as John took a very slow step. Once again, he was making a bit of a fool of himself for trying the double contact lens approach. With a thankful nod, he took her offer. Luckily, the tour itself also didn’t move particularly fast, so John could keep it measured.

Nevertheless, his crawling pace was noticed by everyone. Just as he wanted. They didn’t pay too much attention though, as the guiding maid began telling everyone some trivia about their first destination. From the arena, they had walked north, into the gardens, following the outer path, with the wall to their left and the many individual patches that made up the actual gardens to their right.

“Let’s talk about the wall first. John Newman, who I don’t need to introduce further, used some odd spell to combine two of his elementals to do it. He literally calls it Combination. Anyway, the wall was made by forming magma and then keeping it in shape as it was cooled to stone. A lot more durable than the old wall. Might look the part, but the wall wasn’t made in one go. New segments were just seamlessly melted onto already existing one. Took like two days to go around the entire island.”

The Gamer didn’t really like the nonchalant way she talked, but no one else seemed to mind. People here were just way more casual about everything. He bowed down to Rave, “Have to say, I really like your tan,” he whispered.

Although Rave had never been properly pale, she had always been on the lighter side. Now she had a bit of brown to her. Well, caramel, to be more accurate with her ancestry. John himself had gotten more of a brown tone.

“Ya tanned almost as fast as I did,” Rave pointed out in a similarly quiet tone. “Which is the usual bullshit. I am light mage, I can get as tan as I want. Your Gamer powers should give ya like a sun allergy, if anything, not get ya to catch up after like an hour of sunbathing.”

“If you include the time we spent fucking, it was more like two and a half hours,” John pointed out. “Also, you don’t like me with a bit of chocolate flavour?”

“Doesn’t really fit your nerd image, does it?” Rave jokingly responded, then gave him a quick peck on the lips. “Nah, it’s sexy. I need ya to get about two levels browner though.”

“Why that?” John actually had no clue.

“Cause then ya could grab a palm leaf, oil up, and fan me wind while I lie on a soft pedestal,” his girlfriend returned giving him a lewd smile. “Ya know, that’d be hot.”

“Oh, if we’re playing that game,” the Gamer responded with a giggle, “I want you to become as tan as you can get, then have a threesome with you and Metra.”

Rave let out a little moan, imaging that. “We could do both of these things at once… guess we’re sunbathing again later.” She bit her lower lips and looked her boyfriend up and down. “Seriously, ya became sexy with time, like holy everything.”

“And you keep being sexy and in love with me, which is all I could ever ask for,” John returned and this time leaned down to kiss her. It was almost a disaster, as he lost his balance in the motion, one eye focusing on a tree while he stayed in control of the other. However, Rave caught him while answering the kiss.

In the background the maid continued the tour. “The gardens have a pretty easy structure. Close to the mansion, it’s mostly lawns and flowers, a relatively open space for people to lounge around. The further away you get, the more trees and hedges you get, places to sit hidden between the plants and all that. Master said he wanted to have it Game of Thrones style.”

“You’re such a nerd,” Rave giggled when she was reminded of that.

“It has a place in history,” John grumbled, “gardens usually had some hidden corners were people could talk a bit more privately. These things are essential for schemers like me… also there is a lot of shade.” He sighed quietly. “Just sad that we didn’t have time to install the fountains yet.”

They reached the westernmost point of the island, stretching like a thorn out of the elongated landmass. A series of barrel shaped, hollow stones decorated the inside of the black wall at that point. The lids were slanted, revealing a finger-wide gap pointing towards the inside of the island. From that gap and numerous holes flew a number of bees. The colony wasn’t particularly large yet, so no vast swarms made their circles and they all came from only one of the barrels.

“This is where the local bee-fairy court lives,” the guiding maid explained. “Master offered rent-free living, so they moved in pretty much immediately. We get to gather some honey once a month though, so I guess they’re doing something. Well, they also pollinate the flowers, crops and other plants on the island, so I guess that’s important.”

Indeed, John had been quite lucky to find out about these so quickly. That he had earned himself a colony so quickly had nothing to do with luck, however. Apparently, they were quite a populous species and summer was their ‘spreading’ time. Basically, a bunch of older hives had children they finally wanted to kick out and John had offered free housing without even asking for an experienced fairy court.

The result was that he got a shy, inexperienced queen moving onto his island. Someone Sylph liked to visit often. They got along quite well, which was good for everyone. It gave Salamander a few hours a day where she didn’t have to stomach Sylph’s antics and the bee-fairies integrated nicely.

Like some other insects, these creatures were apparently able to practice incest without any genetic flaws surfacing, cloning themselves as a new generation. Well, cloning in so far that no evolution outside of widespread mutation would occur. The offspring weren’t going to look the exact same or have the same personality traits.

Subsequent generations of the one colony he had gotten to move in would spread into the other barrels. Well, John also had two other courts saying they wanted to move in and he had no reason to deny them. His guess was that there was going to be some monarchical Europe style diplomacy going on rather soon. Doubly good for them that they were immune to incest damage.

John had no plans to be greatly involved with that. As long as they didn’t go have wars in his garden over the most fertile flower fields or something, he really didn’t care what they did. Maybe he would join a court session once in a while just to watch the diplomatic microcosm. ‘That would probably be interesting… wonder if they’re going to form, like, specialized clans over time or something,’ he thought.

As the maid had stated, once they moved around the corner and strutted along the northern stretch of the wall, the garden areas, separated by walkways of condensed dirt (another thing that John would want to improve in the future), shifted from tall hedges and trees to low hedges and flowers, to just flowers and lawn the closer they got to the mansion at the northern tip.

“John said this thing is built in Victorian style architecture. Absolutely no idea if that’s true, but it really does beat the old shack. Personally, I would rip out all the doors, because opening them all the time is super annoying, but Master says something about privacy or some shit. Everyone can still hear him banging though.”

‘Seems like she has a zero-fucks-given policy…’ John, who was still very much present, thought while his girlfriend giggled. “What are you laughing for?” he asked her loud enough for everyone to hear. “It’s me slapping your ass and your moans that they hear half the time!”

“Ja and their faces are hilarious,” the Lightbearer retorted. “By the way, peeps, whatcha’re smelling is Aclysia’s cooking.” There was indeed the nice smell of food in the air. Sweet and heavy on the meat note, it drove out even the smell of the flowers.

“Yes, as I said earlier,” John added, “you can go and eat your fill whenever. I suggest we finish the tour first though.” The leading maid turned away from the open kitchen window with a sigh, it was pretty clear she wanted to get a serving of whatever was going on inside. However, disobeying John and not giving a damn that he was here to hear her were two different beasts. As such, they continued down the central path.

“What about the tower?” one of the tourists asked, when they had just begun moving. He was, of course, talking about the medieval looking thing, integrated into the mansion’s architecture. “Why did you keep that?”

The maid looked to John for that, since she actually didn’t know. “Because it predates the Small Lake Pact and I am a sucker for old architecture,” John responded with a grin. “Apparently it was built by French Abyssals that settled in this area, eventually driven out or integrating into whatever was here before you people started your way of life.”

“How do you know those were French?” the same person asked.

“They inscribed the inside of the tower walls with some sort of diary. Can’t really read French and much of it has been covered in graffiti and stuff… which is a shame because it’s up to 400 years old,” he gave the short maid a glare, who had the decency to shrink under his gaze. She had either been directly or indirectly involved with the relatively recent besmirching. “I’m going to learn French and decipher it all soon enough.”

They then moved to the beach; there wasn’t much to say about that. It was a beach. People were pretty surprised it was there, considering it hadn’t been a week ago, but having a soil elemental and a fire spirit around made the creation of sand a pretty easy effort. John humble-bragged about that much, earning him a soft bite from Stirwin at some point.

They continued down the central pathway that ran from the northern to the southern tip. About a third down the island, they arrived at the second remaining building. “The mana factory has been newly outfitted with non-forceful seating. People instead give mana in shifts in order to keep the housing conveniences running.”

That was most of the truth. The dirty secret was that John had actually kept two of the old, downright torturous installations in a now walled-off corner of the building. He didn’t plan to use them but the fact of the matter was that continuously siphoning an Abyssal’s mana away while keeping their hands locked was the only way to keep them restrained in the long term. In other words, he kept those as an emergency prison unit.

After showing everything but that inside of the mana factory, they went further down, although there were few interesting things in the southern half of the island. The numerous houses of the people that stayed on Savage Island were an immense upgrade from the previous shacks, no questions asked, but they were also just houses.

The same could be said for the fields and greenhouses that followed and the stretch of forest in the southwest. Impressive, new, pretty vast for the size of the island, clean, most of all, but not all that interesting.

The tour found its end on the top of the second watchtower. It was a heavily modernized version of the one in the north, with heavily reinforced windows that could be used by people with long-range attacks to snipe at assailants on the water. The roof was empty, but had a large socket for some sort of magical cannon to be installed at a later date. For now, the red tinged stone monument was good only as a viewing platform.

Most of the people in the tour weren’t romantically minded, so they had no interest in basking in the view. John, however, was triply so. For one, he had come to like looking at places from high positions. With all the aerial viewing he had been doing since he got Possession and his flying elementals, it was almost natural for him. Well, that and the Gamer liked to make minimaps of the terrain and run some mental assaults on the location. The second reason was that he was looking at the fruits of his own labour, so that stroked his ego. Thirdly, Rave was with him, and with her around, he would happily stand anywhere as long as it involved having an arm around her hips.

“It looks pretty nice, doesn’t it?” John asked. The sun made the lush green grass everywhere expand like an emerald carpet. Trees stood silently in the windless landscape. A perfectly straight path ran all the way up to the mansion. The six obelisks around the arena cut into the colourful view of the garden. All surrounded by the wall, like a distorted picture frame.

“It’s a lot humbler than Liberty Island,” Rave said and nestled against his side. “I like who I am with more than the view though.”

“Hm,” he hummed as if he had to think about whether or not he agreed, earning himself a pinch in the side. A lightly pained giggle escaped him and he softly ran his hand up and down Rave’s waist, feeling her naked skin under his hand. The motion was as perfectly smooth as the surface it travelled. “Okay, okay, I agree,” he answered when she pinched him a second time.

“That’s what I thought, tiger,” Rave pouted in a non-serious fashion. Then, likely having a spontaneous idea, she looked over her shoulder. The tourists had already moved on, as everyone wanted to check out the food that had been offered earlier. “Wanna do a something? Like, right here?”

“I do like my somethings,” John responded, and Rave pushed him just a bit away from the balustrade, before squatting down in front of him.