Chapter 1771 – Mistakeolotl

“KNOW YOUR FUCKING PLACE!”

Rave’s scream made everyone in the room flinch. Rare was the anger of the first and foremost of the harem. Typically, the three things that invoked a negative reaction from the feline Lightbearer were her mother, an injured haremette, and other women trying to get ahead on the marriage. That last button had been pressed – hard.

“You think you can just waltz up there and announce that you’re going to marry MY guy to the fucking public?! In front of the entirety of the fucking Abyssal media and representatives of, like, half of the Divided Gates?!” Rave’s hands slammed down on the table with enough force to split the solid stone in two. Only growing more agitated, she launched both halves of the table at the walls with effortless swipes of her hands, then stepped into the open space. “Most brazenly, you do that in front of me?!”

“Uhm…” Nahua started, then let out a nervous, “Eeep!” when Rave suddenly slammed her left hand onto the wall behind the seated demigoddess. The ring on her finger glowed with prismatic light.

“Genuine question, do big cats hunt axolotls in the wild?” Rave asked, her rage turning from white hot to colder than the arctic ocean.

John felt the eyes of Nightingale, Lu Zhi and even Moira on him. Shaking his head in tiny, rapid motions, he made it very clear that he had no control over this situation whatsoever. Was he the man of the house? Definitely. Was he a dom? Certainly. Was he the ultimate decision maker of the household? He would say so. Was he stupid enough to intervene in this? Absolutely not.

“John, what do you think about this?” Rave asked. She was looking over her shoulder. Her pupils were nearly invisible slits.

‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,’ he thought and tried to find a set of words that was the most eloquent. He hadn’t even done anything wrong in this situation, but he still was more nervous about this than he had been about challenging Macuil. There was not even a fragment of control he had over this situation. “I think what she did was hasty and out of bounds.”

“Thank you, tiger,” Rave said.

John was infinitely relieved when she snapped back to Nahua.

“Who do you think you are, hmm?” the pink-haired leader of the harem growled like an angry lioness. “I mean, I get it. Depression – sucks. You finally manage to put yourself together a little bit and then you just have to use that energy for something, yeah?”

A pause.

“I asked a question, Nahua!” Rave shouted.

“Yes! All of that!” the demigoddess squeaked.

“So you juuuuust have to use it. Nice, we have that established… BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU CAN JUST PROPOSE ALL OF A SUDDEN, YOU…. Insults! Evil curses! AH!” The words left Rave loudly. As she took her hand off the wall, she inhaled deeply. Her tail, a bushy thing of pink hairs that stood on end, twitched occasionally. “Okay…” she pressed out the word and forced herself to be calm. “Okay…” Both hands raised, she made short-lived fists and threw them open. The gesture was repeated again and again. “Okay…. Listen. Are you listening?”

“Yes!” Nahua answered quickly this time.

“Good girl. Okay. Listen. You will fix this, because if you don’t fix this, I-“ The ringing of a phone interrupted the feline Lightbearer mid-sentence. Her eyelid twitched, but she had gotten just enough out of her system not to break the phone as she pulled it out of her pocket. “I am dealing with it, Lydia,” she growled into the phone.

John’s supernatural hearing managed to pick up the words. “I deeply apologize for calling.”

Without further comment, Rave ended the call. She stared at the display, as if to challenge someone else to call her. “I will,” she resumed her lecture, “ostracize you, completely, from this social circle. I ain’t putting up with this level of disrespect.”

“May I make the case that I did not know that marriage was of such importance to you?” Nahua asked meekly.

“Then you should have fucking asked,” Rave told her off. “But if it’s a cultural clash, then it’s simple what you will tell your people and the press: ‘wedding’ is a more flexible term in your customs and you were simply proposing to join the harem.”

Nahua looked like she wanted to ask what the big difference was. She thought better of it. “It will be done,” she promised. “By the blood of my father, I swear it.”

“Good… that’s good.” Rave slowly and audibly exhaled through her mouth. “Tiger. Maid uniform.”

“Do you think that’s-”

Rave glared at him. “Did I stutter?”

Crossing his arms, John stood his ground. “You’re going further than being angry justifies,” he answered.

Hands moving in weird ways, Rave continued to exorcise the pure annoyance from her system. “Yeah… sorry,” she surrendered the point, much to the relief of everyone else in the room. “I’mma step out for a sec, do a round around the house or something. Gale, you come with me. If I get approached by a journo, I will rip their head off.”

“We would rather avoid that,” John agreed and gestured for Nightingale to go along. That left the Gamer with Lu Zhi and Moira in the room. A rather odd arrangement. The Warden and the imperial tomboy had sort of just gotten swept up in it all. “Would you mind stepping out as well?” he asked both her and the Heavenly Jade Empress. For one it was a reminder of privacy, for the other it was a reminder that she should pretend not to be involved too deeply.

“Ehem, yes,” Lu Zhi said.

“Quite,” Moira also agreed. “I shall join my father in the coordinating efforts.”

“Much appreciated.” John watched the two of them leave, then turned to Nahua. “I’m glad you found your way forward, even if I wish you hadn’t sprung it on me like that.”

Nahua crossed her naked legs and dared a little smile. “Have we suddenly decided to be coy about what’s going on between us, hmm?” It was good to hear her speak like herself again. The confident episode was shaken quickly though. “Did I screw up that much?”

“In the modern west, marriage is a complicated thing. To most people, it’s the final step in a life shared by romance. We don’t do political entanglements a lot anymore… Well, the Abyss still does some of it. In the mundane it’s practically died out.” He grabbed one of the other chairs in the room and dragged it over, so he could sit across from the axolotl woman. “I take it you grasp the implications?”

“Can you spell it out for this silly gal, ‘cause I, like, don’t wanna be the total bimbo?”

“Jane and I got engaged three and a half months ago. We’re not married yet and nothing about any of this would have been possible without her. It was a big deal when I proposed to her and it was an equally big deal when I proposed to Lydia. There’s more than twenty other women in my harem that I haven’t proposed to yet for one reason or another. Marriage is for love in my culture. Granted, we’re deviating from said culture in a number of ways… but that only makes it a more important signifier of things.” He paused for emphasis. “In terms of joining my harem, you effectively announced to the world that you think you’re better than everyone.”

Nahua bit her lips at the explanation. “I will fix this,” she promised again. “I didn’t… I thought it was best.”

“It probably is the best for your people,” John agreed with a groan. “It ripped them out of your collective depression, so that’s good. You’ve all suffered and you deserved to… air out your souls one way or another.”

“That’s a stupid way to say that…?” Nahua muttered carefully and poked him with her big toe. He smirked at her to encourage the banter. “Can I still be one of yours?” she asked quietly.

“God, Nahua, I wanted you since I first laid eyes on you and the time we have spent together has not made that any better.” His eyes wandered to one of the two halves of the table that should have been between them. “I never could resist women that were dangerous.”

The Aztec demigoddess chuckled darkly. It was just a matter of her voice, so oddly capable of working both the sickly sweetness of overbearing innocence and raspy darkness of malevolence – without holding either of those stances truly. “Having seen all of your women now, I believe you have a more base category that you select by.”

“To paraphrase Abu Hasan al-Sari: my women have asses below a slender waist that oppress us both. It enthralls me when I witness them and tires them when they move to stand up.”

Nahua’s upper body curved to allow her to behold her own posterior. “It was rather tiresome to haul around when it swelled from the bottom of a girl to the ass of a woman.” One cheek was gently raised by her posture and she reached down to grasp it. Her fingers sank deep into it. “I am an arousing creature, aren’t I?”

The Gamer couldn’t help but laugh at the seriousness of the question. He knew that it was still a rather new revelation to her, at least in terms of active knowledge. As a previously asexual being, Nahua would have spent most of her life finding men and women of certain shapes aesthetically pleasing, but nothing more than that. That had obviously changed with John pressing the right button.

“Laugh at me and feast your eyes!” Nahua let go of her bubble butt and shifted her weight back to a proper balance. The process made her squishy thighs jiggle. They rested for only a moment before the demigoddess spread her legs and arms wide. “This is all I can offer you, ruler of the north,” she said, once again serious. “My body and the strength that I owe to you. Use me to birth your heirs and bring down your enemies.”

And what a body it was. Small, perky breasts with dark areolas that rose with a reddish tint from her tropically brown complexion. Every bit of her was permanently glistening, as if she had just stepped out of a shower. The narrowness of her hips and flatness of her softly defined midriff was followed by hips that were made for breeding. With thighs to match, she was one pair of big tits away from matching Chel. White, tribal markings were engraved into her very soul by her divine ancestry, forming a symmetrical pattern that seemed to shift a bit with every passing day.

“Before you say it…” The words had John focus again on her face. She was cute and gorgeous, innocent and dangerous, with green eyes that were ever underlined by a black shadow too thorough to be makeup. The white strands that crossed above her nose and that framed her face as a whole were mostly straight, messy waviness joining the texture as it all cascaded past her neck and stopped at her middle back. “…I chose ‘use’ very well.”

John felt obligated to say, “You shouldn’t give absolute loyalty so swiftly.”

“It’s been more than a month since we met, John, and we spent much of that time together. My judgement of character is terrible, but I’ll trust it one more time.”

There was a desperate undertone to her confession. John knew it. He had heard it from Eliana when she had found herself resurrected and in his care. That was the voice of a woman who had nowhere else to go and that knew, should she be rejected, she would never fully recover from it. John did not want to take advantage of someone vulnerable. Yet, what love could there be if one never exposed themself to hurt?

“I will do my best not to disappoint that trust,” he promised then leaned back. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves again. Much as I would love to ravish you right here and right now, there’s a proper pace to these things. I have to learn to be measured before I expand my harem to the edge of the solar system and you have to make up for what you did.” Nahua nodded solemnly. “Simultaneously, I do not want you to roll back all that you have said to your people. Do you think there is a workable middle ground here?”

“…I could don the uniform of your servants before my people and accept you as my Master…”

John noted the proper way she said that word. ‘She really would fit in with them, wouldn’t she?’ he asked himself. While she did say the word itself with veneration, the sentence as a whole was presented reluctantly. “It would send the wrong signal, wouldn’t it?”

“I wish to join my people with yours, not subordinate them to you,” Nahua agreed.

Whatever their private relationship would end up looking like was one thing. For better and for worse, Nahua had made her marriage declaration the very symbol of the Aztec’s place within Fusion. If that was publicly turned into her wearing a servant’s clothes and declaring her submission to him, that could very well be taken as the Aztecs becoming a slave class.

John had designs on cutting out the sacrificial parts of Aztec culture, but he did not want to rob them off their individuality or history. For the sake of integration, he was going to curtail their liberties for a time, but this was always meant to be a temporary measure. If all went well, the Aztecs would become a regular constituency within Fusion within a generation. Anything that went further than that, he did not wish to entertain.

In a vacuum, Nahua’s idea had been quite right. A marriage ceremony with a mixture of both people’s rites would have honoured the Aztecs while opening them up for the necessary change. Authority over the people, spiritual and legal, would have been transmitted with Nahua’s hand to John.

The clash between an ancient and a modern culture was quite stark.

“I really did not think this through,” Nahua mumbled, drifting back into the lifeless and depressed tone of the past weeks.

Grabbing both of her hands, he put them together, between his, and looked deep into her dark green eyes. “What is done is done and I don’t think this was regretful,” he told her. “Is there a rite for accepting someone into the Aztecs?”

“A number of them, depending on the station and circumstance,” Nahua answered quickly and grimaced. “All of them would leave you traditionally subordinate to the gods.”

“Then we will just rewrite the ritual,” the Gamer stated plainly.

The suggestion took Nahua aback for a second. Then it slowly dawned on her that she was the only person left that had that sort of authority. “What is your intention?” she asked.

“We change the rites to you swearing fealty to and becoming part of the Federation and accepting me as head of state. By doing it in your people’s way, they will be honoured while also heralding the needed change. It will not be what the people expect from the word marriage, but we can make it clear enough that you’ll be my woman and will continue to live with me.” John scratched the back of his head. “The easiest way would be to lie about all of this to save face, but, unless you want to upset Jane more-…“

“Which I definitely do not!” Nahua rapidly assured.

“…you’ll have to stand up there and admit to have spoken in haste. Assuming the ceremony is taken smoothly, the Aztecs will accept me as the primary authority figure through the investment you have in me and then through me the soldiers and Order members will be listened to.”

Rave chose that moment to come back into the room. “Alrighty, got it mostly out of my system now,” she announced and marched over. “Ya two worked out how ya gonna make this right?”

“For the most part,” Nahua answered, then suddenly perked up. “Actually, you should have a prominent position in all of this, first woman of John!”

Rave hummed, pleased. “Not my choice of title, but ya can go ahead and explain?”