John stood before the summoning circle with crossed arms and mentally wrestled with a decision. Looking to his left, finding his girlfriend gazing at him with questioning eyes, he explained, “I’m not sure if I want to just do the traditional summoning or if I want to peek into the other elemental planes.” He rubbed his sternum absent-mindedly as the memory of the pressure the Mother of Water had put him under resurfaced. “Not sure if I want to meet my other mothers-in-law.”

“Kinda sure the other four won’t be that bad,” Rave suggested. “That aside, not like they can permanently harm you.”

“It’s still going to be wholly unpleasant if they decide to do things to me,” the Gamer hummed to himself, his head swaying from left to right and back again. The circle repeated as he thought. “Well, I know the Father of Light kind of liked me and I don’t think I have done anything to change that. Gnome and Sylph have both evolved without problems so far. Really, only Salamander’s… well, I don’t even know if she would still qualify as her mother. I would go with yes, Mother of Fire sounds pretty universal, even if there is a step in between there.”

“Grandma of Fire just doesn’t have the same ring to it,” his girlfriend said. “Anyway, doesn’t seem like ya have to fear anything.” She tip-toed over and slung her arms around his neck. “When did my tiger ever back down from something he was afraid of anyway?”

“A couple of times, because I happen to think that fear can be a pretty good warning sign for things that you should stay the hell away from,” he answered honestly. Next to him, his girlfriend let out something between a grumble and a complaining meow. “What, you hoped I would push out my chest and give you the cliché hero answer?”

“What if I did?”

“Then I would tactfully remind you that we both prefer me alive and that you’re going to marry a complicated, well-intentioned politician of a nerd, not some straightforward, brave hero of a jock.” He gave her a bemused glance. “You knew what you were getting into here when you decided to spend time with the lanky, smart guy.”

“I knew I was in for some fun, not a dedicated relationship that would have me help conquer the USA in the middle of it,” Rave defended herself. “That aside, since when did ya get the authority to tell me I’ll marry you?”

“I had that since you stole my heart.” He winked. “You were so distracted keeping that thing safe, I had the time to take something back in return.”

“That’s actually kinda creative for corny talk.”

“I have to keep you entertained somehow.”

“I’m entertained by brave nerds with big brains and big ambitions.” Rave slapped his ass, something that made John stand a bit taller from the suddenness of the action. She also kept groping his firm behind for a little bit afterwards. Not all that unusual, in this household. Leaning up to his ear, she whispered, “Lemme rephrase the earlier question: when did my tiger ever back down from anything because he was afraid of something?”

“Your tiger never did that,” John answered firmly. “The John Newman that didn’t know you did. I know that fear is an emotion that should inform decisions, not cause them.”

Rave kissed him on the cheek. “That’s my boyfriend.” She sounded oddly proud when she purred those words and he loved how her tone resonated inside him. After a second slap on his ass, she stepped backwards and spoke loudly again, “Now get on it, I wanna cuddle Gnome, chat with Salamander during workout and – I know this sounds crazy – I miss Sylph babbling.”

“THANK FUCK!” Eliza suddenly shouted. “I thought I was the only one who was damaged enough to think that!”

“Just as long as she doesn’t make a mess in my kitchen,” Aclysia joked, halfway at least.

John kneeled down at the circle and reached for the outer circle. His fingertips made contact with the black chalk. His mana flowed in as he activated the first Skill. The way he thought of it, the only proper way to do this was to go down the order of acquisition, which meant he would start with Gnome and work his way through to Stirwin.

It only took a few moments for the circle to react and pull him into the other realm. The transition he experienced was much different. Rather than the room filling with water and fading, it was him that fell apart. His skin, flesh and bones broke apart into grains of sand and chunks of stone. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, especially once he closed his eyes to ignore the admittedly unnerving visual experience. It was like his muscles relaxed beyond their physical ability. For a moment, he was nothing, just another segment of the sediment. A state of mind that he could have, with meditation, prolonged.

However, the Gamer was a person with a busy mind. Too quickly, his thoughts consolidated into the purpose he had and the thirty other things he had to do in the next few days. The earthen plane reacted to this firm mind by giving it a proper avatar. John burst out of the sand, wearing the clothes he wore in reality, and looked around.

He was sitting, lower body still submerged in sand, in a very small desert surrounded by a dense forest. ‘Those two biomes do look very odd next to each other,’ John thought as he got up. The change from yellow grains to brown earth and green grass was so sudden, the Gamer felt like he was looking at an incredibly high-resolution version of Minecraft.

Other things about the landscape pointed to the same conclusion. Floating rocks, oddly shaped mountains and hills, and a seemingly random assortment of plant life were among the foremost things. What went against the idea, however, were the earth elementals walking around, tiny pebbles, living beanstalks and strange mud creatures among the most present, and the sky. It was still blue, but not because air bent sunrays, but because a gargantuan ceiling made of crystal had assumed the colour. The same crystals seemed to be the origin of light in this place.

John sent out the same mental signal he had when resummoning Undine and waited for something to happen.

“U-uhm, so,” an equally royal and shy voice reached his ears from somewhere, and he looked around to find its source. “Thanks for taking good care of one of my children… t-they all deserve it and… yeah, that! Bye!” There was another delay and then the panicked voice said, “Gnome, just go home already, this is embarrassing!”

In a sudden but firm move, John was pulled from this realm and back into his body. He opened his eyes to see Gnome standing in the circle in front of him. “You really take after your mother, don’t you?” the Gamer asked, very certain that he had just been addressed by one of the strongest creatures in the wider existence and that that very same creature had been too shy to show her face.

“I-I guess?” Gnome answered and then puffed up her cheeks in a mildly annoyed fashion.

“What’s the matter, cuddle rock?” Rave asked and walked up close.

“I didn’t want to stutter first thing coming back…” the earth spirit answered and then let out a loud, “Umu!” when Rave threw herself at her. “I missed cuddles with squishy warm things,” she said while hugging the harem leader back.

John, meanwhile, shouted in a choked off fashion, as his girlfriend’s thoughtless indulgence in her hug-addiction damaged his summoning circle more than a little. He then sighed and, since the damage was already done, added himself to that hug. “How was home?” he asked.

“Fun,” Gnome answered with a big smile. “Nothing to eat, but Mother knew who I was and cared to hear about you and so we had a lot to talk about! She is really wise and powerful!” John expected a ‘but’ there and it came a few moments later. “…However…” Not quite the word he guessed, but close enough, “...she is a bit of a recluse and very, very… uhm… closeted about sexual behaviour?”

“Ya REALLY take after your mother, don’t ya?” Rave repeated John’s earlier statement. “Glad ya got over your pervy denial streak though.”

“I’m not a pervert!” Gnome raised her voice and got a bunch of doubtful glances. “I just… like u-unusual things, okay!”

“Stop being as fucking dense as a rock, you rock,” Eliza threw her hands into the air. “Being a pervert is basically a requirement to be with that love-falafel over there.” She pointed at John. The most adequate reaction he had to that was to shrug and wave.

“Uwuwu…” Gnome didn’t have any further counters either. Instead, they cuddled some more and then she and Rave stepped off to the side. After about five minutes of redrawing damaged lines, John then went on with the summonings.

Next up was Salamander. She was the one who had the highest likelihood of garnering him some animosity. There had been no reports of fire spirits reacting as negatively towards corrupted among their kind as their watery cousins did, however. Even more than that, fire elementals were, even ahead of shadow, the ones that had the highest amount of demons in their ranks.

What exactly a demon was still eluded John. It seemed to be more of an esoteric title given to things that were vaguely ‘evil’ and had an affinity for contracts than an actual classification. The thing was just that John hadn’t heard of demons as their own thing yet. There were no warlocks that he knew of and no ‘hell’ plane, just as there was no ‘heaven’ plane to his knowledge. All demons and angels he had encountered so far had been in Instant Dungeons, the one that sometimes appeared in churches being the sole exception.

Whether that made them extremely rare or non-existent, John didn’t know. He would definitely prefer to live in a world that had succubi. Then again, he could have done without devils and things that preferred to feast on human organs. A difficult trade-off.

The point was that there was ample reason to hope that Salamander’s scars weren’t seen as something that necessitated purging. ‘Only one way to find out,’ he thought and initiated the ritual. A storm of fire rolled over the walls, consumed John’s field of view and, extremely quickly, pulled back to leave him standing in an ashen field.

Whereas the plane of water had been creepy and the plane of earth surprisingly friendly, the plane of fire was simply desolate. Large volcanoes endlessly erupted in the distance, making the sky a black amalgamation of ashen clouds that rained their particles down to the craggy, grey landscape. Towers of obsidian and glass rose as sharp spikes from the knee-deep cover. Occasionally, an opening in the floor would send a geyser of fire upwards, creating intense gales of heat. Thanks to this being an astral projection, John didn’t think anything of the warmth.

One would expect a realm dedicated to fire to be bright, but John found this place to be even darker than the water plane. Sure, there were flames just about everywhere, but those contended with the ash rain, and few were so bright that they could illuminate everything under a black sky. The horizon was a glowing line, orange at most stretches, with some areas that were blue, white or green, indicating at least a few different kinds of biomes.

John must have landed in one of the deserted neighbourhoods of the realm as he saw no elementals around. ‘They might be hiding underground,’ he theorized, when another geyser flickered up close to him. A bunch of tiny Salamanders huddling together and pooling their powers to create an occasional explosion sounded like a very fire elemental thing to do.

He didn’t take the time to investigate, dropping the mental call and immediately seeing the orange of the distant horizon flare into an intense crimson. It was too quick and too well-timed a change to be coincidental. More importantly, the light peeled out of the line of the horizon and rolled towards him like a rapidly expanding bushfire.

John didn’t feel particularly great about that, but he decided to stand his ground and wait. Protectively, he raised a hand to his eyes. An unnecessary precaution against the wall of ash and dust that preceded the closing-in firestorm. Blinded for over a minute, the Gamer felt something gargantuan and very hot settle in front of him.

A large hand swiped the storm away like John would have done with a waft of cigarette smoke. Towering before him and shrinking rapidly to a size more comprehensible sat a woman. Her skin was of a glowing orange, like lava or heated iron, and radiated extreme heat John felt despite his lack of physical presence.

Her body was surprisingly plain. Attractive, yes, with an hourglass figure and breasts that would have been large if she had shrunk to a human’s size and basically small hills on her enormous frame. The Gamer couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to be surrounded, with his full body, by those red-nipple crowned things.

Grinning exactly like she knew what he was thinking, the Mother of Fire looked down at him. She had a face with a pronounced jawline, sharper than John preferred but not in a masculine way. Her smile was devilish and large, red lips revealing exclusively pointy, black teeth. Her eyes were like Nathalia’s, layers of orange that heated up until they arrived at a golden-white core. Her ears were long and pointy. Eyebrows and hair were a steady flicker of multi-coloured fire. Red and orange were the most pronounced, closely followed by black and only minorly completed by all of the other colours that flames were found in. None of it was ever steady, aside from the wild shape her hair took, cascading down her back and shoulders.

‘Not on fire yet, so that’s a good sign,’ the Gamer thought, looking up to the Mother of Fire as she leisurely leaned forwards. One of her legs angled, she rested an arm on her knee to better look down at him. John also got a good look of her crotch that way. Unlike her breasts, he did not have any real curiosity towards how it would feel to be surrounded entirely by a large vagina. He liked to remain outside of the bodies of giants.

In the middle of her stomach, where the navel would usually be, John spotted the prismatic gem that he had also seen on the forehead of the Mother of Water. Magoi had since confirmed that this was the usual look for a Hearthstone.

“You seem to be the one,” the Mother of Fire stated, her shark-like, black grin making her inspection of him a fair bit unnerving. She raised her head and looked over her shoulder. “Yo, Salamander is-“ Whatever she found must have annoyed her as she clicked her tongue. “Slowpoke,” she declared and gestured in a way that John couldn’t see a lot of, thanks to the rest of her body blocking the view.

He could, however, feel the entire realm shifting at her command and Salamander suddenly appeared next to John on the floor. Somehow, she still managed to stick the landing and stood up next to John. “Yo,” she greeted in much the same fashion as her elemental progenitor. “How do you like my home, John?”

“A bit too much fire for my gentle, human soul,” he returned with a joke. Seeing that she was neither harmed nor worried put his mind at ease. Salamander smiled and a chuckle from the Mother of Fire made the earth shake.

“Steady nerves, I like it,” the Mother of Fire said and introduced herself, “I am Plasia, First of the Fires and mother of the same. I offer my name to you, John Newman, as a sign of respect. Understand that you are to keep it in your mind and your loved ones just as I keep your name to my realm.”

Respectfully, he bowed his head. “You won’t find me in breach of contract, Plasia, I have honoured mine. Including the times it wasn’t in my best interest.”

“And you wrote contracts so you can exploit them with your best interest, I have heard it all.” the Mother of Fire made a tossing gesture and yawned. Not out of disrespect, John read from her still amused expression, but for a lack of care for etiquette. “Let me be clear, any enemy of the deep-dark-deep-down-bitch is somebody I fundamentally like.”

News must have spread fast among elementals for John’s treatment at the hand of the Mother of Water having already reached her. Either that or the news of Undine’s corruption were so old that everything afterwards was just presumed as true. “I don’t really aim to have her animosity,” the Gamer answered truthfully.

“You would be an idiot if you did,” Plasia cackled. “Who would ever want an elemental mother as their enemy? The Faith-leech in his concrete imperium, maybe, given how much he has to gain from slaying one of us.”

“Romulus doesn’t strike me as someone out for unnecessary conflict.”

“I will let my son be the judge of that and continue dwelling where I belong,” Plasia stated and shrugged. “Not that I have a lot of choice in the matter. You obey the contract of names we put in place and we obey the laws of space that Gaia put in place. Everyone obeys something – except her, arguably.” Another dismissing wave of her hand. “Whatever it is, I don’t worry. I wished to see you for myself and show that not all of us are reactionary puritans like my younger sister.”

“I’m thankful for that,” the Gamer said earnestly. Every bit of assurance was a load off his paranoid soul. More than that, her being here and saying her name had gotten him quite the hefty Achievement reward. “If I can ever be of service, I’ll gladly give it my consideration.”

“Oh, you will be of entertainment, if nothing else,” Plasia said, only to disperse into a storm of crimson embers and roll away as a firestorm, just like she had arrived.