‘It’s really annoying that the lenses have to have the same enchantments to count as a set,’ John thought as he equipped them. ‘It’s super annoying that I can’t just use the Inventory for this, well, I can, it’s just its own annoyance.’ Although it was possible to use the character menu to put contact lenses into his Head Slot (and back out), doing so would leave them without Possession, as the spell broke upon being stored in the inventory. Only notable exception being whatever his current Extension was. Even that connection was separated until he pulled the item back out.

During the normal put-in process he could cast Possession normally, which was why he favoured it over equipping the lenses first and then sticking a finger into his eye, either blind or with a third person view. John looked around the small store as he synced up his vision again.

It wasn’t a lot to talk about, an average street shop, white walls with glasses lying on or hanging from specially made sockets, more resting on podiums in the middle of the room. Simply put, he was at an Abyssal optician. From all the information gathering he had done, this was the best place to buy enchanted contact lenses in all of America. One wouldn’t have guessed that from the size of the shop, but it was a rather niche product, all things considered.

John had to, at the very least, admit that they were pretty comfortable. He couldn’t feel them being there whatsoever, which was an improvement from the very slight resistance he had felt before. They also had a number of extra enchantments that were helpful. Meticulous kept them clean, making removing them something he didn’t need to do everyday, Find Point made them glow so they could be easily found should he take them out and misplace them, True Sight 3 would just aid him along the way and Normality Layer gave his eyes a standard brown appearance, painted over the milky reality.

“Pretty good and quick work,” the Gamer complimented once he was certain he could look around again without problems. “You developed that yourself? This technique that prints enchanted contact lenses, I mean?” It was a rhetorical question, since Observe had already told him as much. Like usual in such a situation, John kept that to himself, since it would possibly spook them out otherwise.

Jeffrey, probably not the first Jeffrey John had met, cleared his throat in a slightly nervous manner. “Yes, I have created it, Mister President.”

“Just call me John or however else you would address a normal customer,” he tried to put the guy at ease. Didn’t do that much, the store owner still had his shoulders raised and stiff. ‘Doesn’t seem like its my presence itself that is causing his discomfort,’ John analysed, trying to find the root of the problem. ‘Ah, that would probably be it,’ he suddenly realized what the problem was. “Could you, given time and better materials, create a better printer with stronger enchantments?”

“Of course, but it’s a very complicated process, so it would take time to get used to the new materials,” Jeffrey continued, eyeing him up suspiciously. “Right now, I’m the only one who can create that machine.”

“Don’t worry, I have no intention to hire someone to change that,” John assured with a charismatic smile and the nervousness slowly dissipated from the man’s shoulders. The middle-aged guy had probably invested half his life into that work, so having the plans stolen by the neighbouring country would have ruined whatever future fortunes he could have made with it. “Your machine is pretty interesting. Works pretty fast, prints enchanted objects… it couldn’t be expanded to things other than contact lenses, could it?”

As far as John knew, every item out there still had to be enchanted by hand, using extra materials to achieve bonus effects. If there was a way to mechanize that process and use pre-enchanted cartridges or something like that, then Fusion being the first power to take advantage of it would be quite important. Sadly, the answer was a denial. “It doesn’t really print the lenses with enchantments, it just makes it really easy for me to do the work despite the small size of the object,” Jeffrey was willing to give that much away. “If I am not around for it, it would just create contact lenses with the minimal magical attributes that survive the shaping process.”

“I see.” John couldn’t help but be disappointed. For a moment there, he thought they stood in front of a magical industrial revolution. Still, something that made the process easier was already valuable. As were mass-producible contact lenses with a True Sight attribute. “Could I interest you in a deal?”

“That depends entirely on the deal, Mister President,” Jeffrey now sounded nervous again.

“Again, you can call me something less formal. Anyway, I have two deals, to be entirely precise,” John reached out to the cash register; the second he touched it the amount he owed for the pair of lenses was automatically withdrawn from his inventory. “One, I would like better ones than the ones you just made. The best you can conceivably make. I will fund your research, give you the materials, whatever is in my power, you will get. All I want is regular updates on the successes, you can keep the way you make better lenses to yourself, if you so desire. More easily, for the second deal, I would like you to continuously produce lenses of different standard sizes for me, of whatever quality you can produce in a steady stream of good quality, nothing outstanding.”

The intent for the first was rather clear. If John was stuck with wearing contact lenses, he was going to get the most powerful pair he could get his hands on. For the second deal, John wanted to have his entire army equipped with those. Couldn’t be wrong to make the soldiers more resilient against illusions while also helping whatever sight impairment they had.

“…I will have to talk about this with my family,” Jeffrey hesitatingly stated. “I hope that is alright with you, Mister President?”

John gave up trying to convince the guy to use whatever other title there was. “Sure, you can contact my office with these numbers,” he pulled a business card out of his wallet. Before he handed it over, however, he also took a pen out of his inventory and wrote a number with a moderate amount of zeros to it on the card. “Tell them that’s my baseline financing for your shop. I will also pay for a move to New York, should you want to come to the Hudson Barrier.”

Jeffrey looked at the number with wide open eyes, taking John’s extended hand with a slow, dreamlike movement. Their handshake was firm, but only because the Gamer made it so.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” he said before leaving the shop.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Aside from that, the tour through the city was completely eventless. Structure wise, it was a Type 2 city, a bunch of barriers of varying sizes, some very close together, but no city-spanning mega Protected Space. Not for a lack of interest, apparently, but because they hadn’t been able to get their hands on a Fateweaver capable enough to produce an Illusion Barrier Mass Anchorage. Before the fall of the Fateweaver organization, the prices had been too high, and afterwards, those Fateweavers had quickly found their homes in other, more powerful organizations.

If Magoi was to be believed, things were currently stabilizing in his profession. The new locations and affiliations of the formerly monopolized membership was written down and those who were willing to do work for third parties entered into a register. It was a lot more competitive than the former system, but not quite as smooth around the edges.

Good news, but not all that related to John’s current day. Having visited a lot of those barriers over the day, he could confidently say that the people around here were happy. Which was nice to hear in general, but didn’t make takeovers particularly easy. If there was supposed to be any kind of longevity to Fusion, it had to leave the areas it conquered better off than before, something a lot easier when they were absolutely depraved hellholes. With a non-hostile takeover, that wouldn’t be quite as bad, but it would still be best if John could present them a number of improvements to their lives.

There was one thing, however, that he found amongst most of these wealthy, largely happy citizens. A certain level of annoyance that there was no proper political system, only a set of oligarchs at the top. No call for revolution or anything, thanks to those oligarchs making pretty sensible decisions, just a general ‘wouldn’t it be nice if…?’ feeling.

As it so happened, Fusion demanded from all member guilds that they followed some sort of republican model. Meaning that this was the one thing John knew for sure he could give that they wanted. Question was just if that was enough. Time would tell.

They returned to the hotel. John had lunch, then went through the calls Beatrice had taken. Most of them were resolved with the message the passive maid had pre-written, soft-worded denials or agreements, nothing that John had to think about for anything longer than a second. There were a couple different things that, due to badly conveyed information or a slightly more complicated happenstance, had him make phone calls. Most annoying of those was a revelation that his massive project of building an Abyssal mega-warship had to be restarted from scratch.

Apparently, it had come to light that they had welded things to the base already that turned out to be faulty and the only way to get those back out was to dissemble that part of the base, which also meant they had to take everything above it out. There were also some dimensional errors that had come to light, although those might have been fixable.

While that did annoy John, it was nothing that actually made him angry. In the first place, that ship’s completion was not the primary goal of building it, as backwards as it sounded. Sure, he would have loved to have something he could use as a mobile fortress in wartime, especially once Fusion took a place in the top ten guilds of the world, but for right now it was more important that he had people working. He was going to want a large force of experienced shipbuilders, and this project was giving everyone, from the simple dock workers to the engineers, a bunch of experience. The secondary benefit was that a whole lot of people had employment thanks to the project, making them happy and well-fed.

So, a delay of this project by a few months was ultimately not that important. Hopefully, anyway, for all John knew a war would be declared on him on the day of the originally scheduled finish date. Better to have a delayed mediocre product than a rushed faulty one though.

The person making the report was obviously relieved that John wasn’t ripping their head off for that. Overall, not the biggest piece of news, just an unwanted one. Afterwards he made one more call towards the largest local TV station, who had offered to platform him the next day, an offer John gladly took after having a talk about what that would actually entail. Beatrice scheduled that for tomorrow, and that part of his day was also done.

He took a bit of time to read the report by Zensie that Beatrice had mentioned. It turned out to be a rather one-sided recollection of how John had goaded him into siding with the Lake Alliance. Overall, it was slander, with the former number two of the Small Lake Pact continuously framing himself as innocent and loyal, had it not been for the disrespectful ways in which John had behaved. The Gamer decided that this was best ignored, waiting for the whole thing to blow over.

Another bit of a break followed; this time filled with nothing but his favourite activities. Proper downtime, which he was split between wanting to last for as long as possible and finally passing as the next thing on the list was calling Lydia. Hearing the queen’s voice was always nice.

“I am most pleased by your recent achievements, John.” Especially when this was what he was rewarded with once he had told her what she had missed the last few days. “How curious, it feels like an eternity since you last didn’t make me sick with worry.”

“How often do you want me to apologize for that?” John whined, closing that Achievement, still feeling properly guilty.

“I will have you ask for forgiveness on repeat until we next kiss,” Lydia stated, her iron tone and way to formulize things not quite matching the content of that sentence. “Regardless, I approve of this takeover plan more than I do your last one. A minimum of people suffer under economic annexations, if executed well.”

“I don’t intend to pull a United Fruit Company on them, so it shouldn’t ruin anyone’s life.”

“And nothing less is expected of you, my love,” Lydia responded, giving John a warm shudder as he imagined her beautiful red lips forming those last two words. “This contact lens thing piques my interest as well, are you willing to share more information on that topic?”

“Yes… but also no,” John told her. “Technically you’re the leader of another guild, so I shouldn’t have told you in the first place.”

“Indeed, that was not the intelligent course of action from a leader’s point of view.”

“Too bad I see myself as your lover first.”

“No, you do not,” the metal mage stated, and the piano in the background changed to a lightly melancholic tune. “If you defined yourself as such, you would be by my side at the present. I would also think less of you, however, if you lived just for me. Two attributes that we certainly share.”

“Hmm, yes, I do agree with that,” the Gamer hummed. “Anyway, I can’t tell you a lot more even if I wanted to, I let him keep all the important secrets and only bought his services.”

“Maybe one day I will have to order his products from you then,” Lydia theorized. “Enough of this, however, let us talk about topics of pleasantry, not business.”

And so, they did, for almost an hour they exchanged philosophical and economics questions, little jokes and eventually a few lewd instructions. Then Lydia had to hang up and continue her day. Start it, rather, time zones were a thing.

Last item on the list of the day was that talk to Chemilia, which was largely eventless. Some back and forth regarding the ship situation, any unexpected developments in the economy, advancement in her control of her robotic limb, the training of the army, any enemy troop movements, such things. The only thing notable was that the border was still quiet. Which, on the one hand, was fantastic, but on the other meant that John had no excuse to send the former Small Lake Pact people in there.

He would not be the first one to run sabotage actions. That was like being the first party in a war that started shooting civilian ships that potentially smuggled ammunition. It would look incredibly bad on the world stage. Well, if it wasn’t needed, John was also happy to just let this war continue to be eventless. Starting next week, he would initiate the white peace negotiations and then things would hopefully just resolve without any real bloodshed.

That was the Friday, pleasant, but largely eventless.