John looked proudly at his work. Eliza was covered in a proper shibari rope construction, the erotic bondage style originating in Japan. The rope used was designed for human usage, recently oiled, and covered her body in a decently complicated pattern. It was the base onto which he had attached a number of other restrictions, keeping Eliza confined.

The original plan, to tie her to the bed, had been discontinued after they realized that the bed was simply too big. Sensibly, only the simple kind of bondage, linking limbs together, could be enacted on a mattress that had to carry an entire harem every night. Usually this was enough for their day to day debaucheries, with more specific cravings finding their outlet in the Sex Dungeon. Today, that wasn’t so simple.

Instead of the bed, Eliza was now confined to a construction that was a mixture of adjustable metal frame and lounger. It wasn’t quite as comfortable as the bed, but it got close. Also, it had a water-resistant surface and allowed John to change the way Eliza was confined over the course of the day, among a number of other advantages. If Scarlett had a few hours later in the day, there was enough room to add her as well.

It had been a bit of a pain to set it up in the living room, even with the inventory and all that, but John was more than happy having gone through the effort. The result was, after all, Eliza, with her limbs sprawled out (a sensible start to the day), wearing nothing but the shibari, a choker, a butt plug, and a leg strap that held the receiver that connected via cable to the egg-shaped vibrator in her pussy. Two more were secured on her nipples with skin-friendly tape. Personally, John enjoyed the sight of naked breasts too much to cover nipples up during usual play, but today was an exception. He would leave her there, squirming, for quite a stretch of time.

“All sitting tight and comfy?” John asked.

“Yeaaaahhhhh,” Eliza let out a drawn-out moan. The vibrators were still off, she was just enjoying her situation.

“Can you reach the emergency button?” he asked. Said button was her phone, sitting in a case that could be secured anywhere on the frame. If she kept in contact with it for five seconds, it would send a notification to John’s phone, letting him know that she needed something. Whether that meant that she was uncomfortable, wanted to eat something, was overwhelmed by pleasure or needed a potty break didn’t really matter. No BDSM was proper without a way for the submissive to opt out.

“Yes, I can reach the useless fucking button,” Eliza cussed back, stretching her hand out to demonstrate.

An obnoxious sound echoed from John’s phone and didn’t stop until John brought his phone close to Eliza’s. “You call it useless, but we both know you might need it.”

“Fuck no I won’t.”

John was of half a mind to prove her wrong right then and there. They both knew he had the power to. He put a hand on the Lover’s Will mark above her womb, dark blue lines that intertwined into an erotic mark, a heart at its centre, and then trailed up.

“As you say,” he then conceded and smiled at the disappointed groan that followed. The masochistic sub wanted to be broken, just a little bit, but the Gamer wouldn’t fulfil her wishes so easily. Certainly not when it was so early in the day. There had to be build-ups and pay-offs. That aside, it was half an hour past their early morning orgies. Just because they were the only ones in the house didn’t mean he had to immediately use her.

John put on the finishing touches. The blindfold went on first, then the mufflers and finally the gag. It was difficult to find the correct ones for this task. Senses far above the average human meant that Eliza had to be covered with equipment that were more intense in their isolating capacity. For the gag, they had to replace the usual ring gag with a proper ball one. Leaving her mouth exposed to the air all day just didn’t sound pleasant.

Once the sensory deprivation was in place, John looked at the remote-control app on his phone and put the vibrators at a third of their power. Eliza started to squirm immediately, moaning as she shifted in her confines. ‘Well… just a little bit wouldn’t hurt,’ John thought and moved around to the bottom end of the construction.

He pulled out the vibrator, climbed into the metal frame, got on top of her, and fucked her helplessly exposed body until he came inside her once. Then he pulled out, put the vibrator back in, used her mouth for a preliminary cleaning, put the gag back in, and then left her to the devices. Wondering when, throughout the day, he should whip out the heavier tools, he wandered to the bathroom. Once his dick was clean, he went to the gaming room.

‘This is going to be my entire day,’ John thought, happily. ‘Torturing Eliza and gaming… maybe this whole nation building thing was a mistake.’

_______________________________________________________________________________

It was nice to have peace of mind and just click buttons on the screen. Because of the ongoing patch, John didn’t even have to feel guilty about wasting time like this. Who, in their right mind, would go out and do something while it was only at 50% effectiveness? Better to just wait until things were in order again.

‘I suppose there is an argument to be made for urgency, but I don’t have that right now,’ the Gamer thought to himself and watched the money trickle in. He was taking a break from playing Slay the Spire by letting a clicker game run while he watched a video on the left of the four monitors. The integrated massage function of the chair rubbed his back. It was a far cry from Aclysia’s skilled hands, but it was still relaxing.

John jumped in his chair when his lull was suddenly interrupted by the ringing of his phone. It wasn’t the obnoxious sound of Eliza requesting attention, but the simple signal that someone was calling him. The Gamer picked up and looked at the display. An unknown number was calling him.

‘If this is Richard presenting me with some drama, I will flip out,’ he thought. This was, after all, his private phone. The work phone sat next to it on the table, but had been delightfully quiet all day. Accepting the call, John put the phone to his ear. “Hello, John Newman here?”

“Ehm… hi, John?” The Gamer furrowed his eyebrows. He didn’t immediately recognize the bashful voice that reached him. All he knew was that it was incredibly cute. “It’s Lee.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “Wow, you do not sound the same through a phone.” ‘And with a shy tone like that,’ he added mentally. ‘Seems like she isn’t that comfortable calling people? Or is calling me specifically?’

“Don’t I…?” Lee cleared her throat on the other end of the line. “Hope I am not keeping you from anything?”

“Can’t say you are, no,” John told her and paused the video. “Just watching my heroes’ level up. Clicker Heroes, if that tells you something.”

“Wow, I didn’t know you were a fucking casual.”

Suddenly, she sounded exactly like John remembered. “Oy, I resent that. I am still playing on a PC.”

“A casual from the glorious master race is still a casual,” Lee insisted. “You can play Minecraft on a GTX 1080, doesn’t make you any less of a normie.”

“To be fair, it’s still going to lag, somehow,” the Gamer countered and did his best not to wonder if Lee was as naked at the moment as he was. Talking with her was as dangerous as ever. “Anyway, what can I do for you?”

“I, uh, I was wondering if you could tell me what’s up with Nia?” Lee shifted back into her mild timidness. “We were going to work out, but she opted out last minute. Not her style… I think?”

“No, that doesn’t sound like Nia,” John agreed and grabbed the work phone. While he kept talking, he checked new messages. “I mean, she has a tendency to suddenly appear at, as she would say, ‘the right moment’, but she wouldn’t usually break on agreements. Did she say she found a cute turtle or something?”

“No, she just said she couldn’t make it,” Lee answered.

“Hmmm,” John hummed and finally found the explanation in his recent notifications. “Well…”

“You really say that a lot.”

“Well, that’s your opinion,” the Gamer responded immediately. “Anyway, so I have good news and bad news. Good news, Nia skipped out for a totally sensible reason. Bad news, I can’t talk to you about it. State secret.” Apparently, there had been a new lead on the whereabouts of the Sands of Time. Nothing to be too excited about, people found temporary concentrations semi-regularly, but still something Nia had to investigate.

“Are you saying I’m not trustworthy?” Lee said in a joking tone.

“I’m saying you’re not part of the military,” John responded seriously, not wanting to give her the impression this was something that could be discussed. “You can ask about this if you take Magoi’s or Magnus’ place. Until then, you won’t get an answer on this topic.”

There were several seconds of silence, during which John wondered if he had been perhaps a bit too harsh in his tone. When Lee did speak up again, she didn’t sound hurt in any fashion. “It is how it is then,” she let out a long sigh. “Man, now I have nothing to do the whole day…”

“I recommend using the gaming PC I gave you,” John told her, leaning back in his massaging chair. “Or you could dedicate yourself more to your Fateweaving studies.”

He heard the half-mocking sound of air getting blown out of Lee’s nose. “Yeaaahhh, riiiight,” she said in a deep, dry tone. “You are a… decently smart guy, yeah?”

“At the very least, yeah.”

“Did you ever do more schoolwork than you had to?”

“Well, no,” he admitted immediately. “My schoolwork was a little less exciting than setting up parallel dimensions though.”

“Sounds exciting at first, isn’t really when you are the best in class without trying and 90% of lectures are about theories,” Lee told him. “So, I’ll start up some LoL or something, I dunno. What about you?”

“I was thinking about sitting around and playing Minecraft,” he told her.

“Don’t you have a country to govern?”

“I’m on vacation,” he told her.

“That so… so you have nothing else to do all day, like me?” Lee asked.

It clicked immediately with John what he was expected to suggest next. The younger him would have missed the semi-obvious signals here. Current him knew not only how to read people, he also remembered the obvious flirts Lee had thrown his way in their last meeting.

Those flirts were also the reason why he was hesitating. If he suggested they spend the next few hours gaming together, they would doubtlessly get to know each other better. That was, in and of itself, dangerous. Still, John found himself tilting towards making the offer. Sure, they weren’t supposed to get into any kind of romantic or erotic entanglement, but not getting to know each other at all would have been a bit too extreme. Surely, Magoi wouldn’t be offended if John and his daughter became friends? What damage could one gaming session do?

“Since we both have nothing else to do, want to play some stuff together?”

“Sure, I’m game,” Lee responded in a tone that was a bit too sweet and excited. “Facecam?”

“Yeah, facecam sounds good,” he answered, semi-distracted. In John’s mind, an image of her being his prey popped up. He was chasing her through the forest. He caught her. Then he did all of the things to her that he always wanted to do to attractive women. ‘I may have made a terrible mistake,’ he told himself and looked down on himself and his erection. Just as he said, “I’ll need to get…” Lee spoke up as well.

“If you could just give me like…”

Both of them stopped. They chuckled into the awkward silence. “After you,” John was the first to speak up again.

“Was just going to say, if you could give me like 30 minutes. I need to get something to eat first.”

“Sure, I need to get some stuff done as well,” the Gamer returned. “I have to look after Eliza.”

“Is she sick?” Lee wondered.

“Bound and getting used,” John told her. It did occur to him that it was a bit weird that he was so openly telling Lee that he was about to go and fuck another woman. He didn’t care though. The Gamer was always truthful when it came to the harem conduct. “She was stressing out, so I decided it was time for her to spend a day in bondage. ‘Course that also means I am fucking her every now and again.”

“…That’s hot…” he heard Lee mutter under her breath. “Uhm, anyway! I’ll call you again in thirty minutes, I guess?”

“Sure,” John said, a little befuddled, amused and aroused by what he had just heard. ‘Seriously, she finds it hot to hear about me keeping Eliza confined and using her as a cumdump? Why must she be Magoi’s daughter of all people?!’

Cursing fate, John went over to the living room and spent the next twenty minutes filling Eliza up with fresh cum. Lee didn’t really enter his mind during that process. He wasn’t the type to think of other women while being inside one. Eliza deserved nothing short of his complete attention.

Once he was done with her, he rinsed off quickly and grabbed some clothes. If he was going to go on camera, he didn’t think it would be appropriate to be nude. When he came back to the gaming room, wearing a casual black shirt and comfy pants, he sat down and waited about three minutes for the call. Lee was exactly on time.

She wanted to use Discord at first, but John instructed her to use the Fusion communication application that Scarlett had written instead. It was already installed on her computer, Lee had just assumed it to be some kind of pre-installed anti-virus software, and it took a few minutes to get everything to work. Not because Lee was too stupid to find the wrong buttons to press, but because they had to fiddle with the usual computer problems of microphone and camera not being immediately recognized.

When they did get it running, John was greeted by the view of Lee in her gaming chair.

The young Fateweaver wore a black hoodie. Open, the front zipper let John see the grey top she was wearing underneath. It wasn’t overtly sexual, but its lean design stuck to her waist and petite breasts, underlining what little John could see of her feminine form. His eyes wandered up to her face.

He was slightly miffed by what he saw.

Was she attractive? Absolutely. She came after her mother, in the looks department. The shape of her face was worthy of a model, from the swing of her jaw to the elegant bridge of her nose. Her hair, a brown so dark it almost categorized as black, was long, well-combed and barely styled. Only her bangs seemed to have gotten some dedicated attention during her last saloon visit. Her eyes were of a similarly dark brown. Her skin was pale, but not unhealthily so. She had the body and the looks of a gamer girl that took care of herself.

However, she had somewhat compromised that by painting her naturally pink lips red and highlighting her eyes with mascara.

“You usually wear make-up?” John asked, unable to hide a hint of disappointment in his voice.

“Can’t say I do. Why? Does it look bad?” Lee leaned towards the screen, probably inspecting herself in the camera. “I think I did a good job.”

“I wouldn’t say it looks bad, no… can’t say I like it though,” John took a pause to order his words. “I don’t like it when women wear make-up. It’s an act of manipulation.”

Lee looked taken aback for a second. If she had put it on for him, his reaction to that would naturally bother her. Whether or not it did, the young Fateweaver didn’t make it obvious. Instead, she pushed back on his assertion in a sassy tone. “Manipulation? Really? And only when women do it?”

“Okay, yeah, it’s also manipulative when men do it,” the Gamer conceded that point immediately. “When it comes to the point of principle, at least. I’m just not personally bothered by that because, one, men don’t tend to wear make-up and, two, I’m not attracted to them so it doesn’t affect me.”

“Manipulation still feels pretty brutal for just some lipstick,” Lee grumbled, moving the arm of her mic-stand around.

“It is a visual lie,” John returned. “Not that I can’t sympathize with the want to present one.” He took out one of his contact lenses for one moment, to show the milky, blind eye that was hidden underneath. “Covering up scars is a good reason to want to wear make-up, but you are still telling the world the lie that your body is flawless. In doing so, you make people treat you differently than they would could they see what you really look like. That is a form of manipulation,” John put the contact lens back into place. “Similarly, artificially making yourself more attractive than you actually are is a form of manipulation. Whether that’s painting your face, wearing a push-up bra or… I don’t know, wearing an undershirt that makes it look like you have abs? There’s probably something like that. Anyway, you do these things to be noticed in a way you naturally wouldn’t be.”

“I mean, I guess?” Lee conceded the notion. “Feels like a pretty vast generalization though.”

“It totally is,” John didn’t care to pretend otherwise, “it’s still generally true though. Of course there are different levels of egregiousness. I would say pretending that you have abs, for example, is up there. You are faking something that you could naturally achieve. Covering up the natural look of your face is middling. I don’t like it, at all, but it’s not like I can fault people for wanting to be more beautiful than they were born. Covering up scars is pretty low. You are artificially covering something that remained from some kind of incident and that’s not truly natural to your looks. You, Lee, don't need to do any of that. Definitely not.”

“Pretty convenient order for you,” Lee pointed out with half of a growing smirk on her lips and a raised eyebrow.

“I suppose so,” John laughed and raised his hand. “I spend way too much time thinking about this. It’s not as if wearing make-up is worthy of any kind of punishment. At worst, it’s a very minor moral failing. Purely personally, I’d prefer it if people just looked like they looked. In a perfect world, people who are ugly or scarred would be able to get some kind of fix for their problems, rather than cover it up. In reality, I can just say that I personally dislike it when they try to paint things over.”

“You also seem a bit obsessed with working with true information, though,” Lee said.

“Huh,” John thought about that angle, “I took this more about my hatred of being manipulated extending to pedantic base levels, but that’s probably part of it as well, yeah.”

“Look how well I know you already,” the young Fateweaver said in a dry tone and took off the simple, black headphones she was wearing. “Alright then, mister schemer, let me just wipe this off quickly and we can start.”

“You look better without it anyway,” the Gamer said, although he doubted she could still hear him. ‘And she just indirectly admitted she put it on just for me,’ the happy thought rose and he had to try very hard to not grin because of it.