“You ALSO take a lot after your mother… or grandmother, technically?” John said, once they were back. “At least attitude wise.”

“Yeah, not that I am complaining,” Salamander agreed and hovered off the floor. “Oy, Mat, how did you survive without me?”

“Same way I did with you, just slightly more bored,” the First of Wrath returned, and the two greeted each other in much the same way as they had said goodbye – with a fistbump and some friendly wrestling.

There wasn’t more to add to that front, although John actually had a question that now surfaced. “Since I have two of you to ask now, did you find out whether you just have the ‘elemental standard names’?” he asked and gestured at himself. “You know, like I’m called John, which is a super average name for an American?”

“Disappointing answer is yes,” Salamander said, landing outside the circle. “Like every tenth elemental I met was called Salamander, guess it was the same for you, Gnome?”

“Not quite that bad but… there were a lot,” the earth spirit confirmed.

“Ah, well, at least that solves the mystery,” John shrugged. He felt neutral about this, all he wanted was to satisfy his curiosity and that had now happened. Now he wondered how this worked with the summoning procedure though. Was there some invisible magical scancode to all of them? Was his Gnome Gnome#1337? “I guess it fits since you also seem to fall pretty middling along your respective origins, personality wise. Not that I am complaining about you being an adorable, sexy and entertaining lot.”

“If it’s relaxed and likes burning things, no need to deviate from a winning formula.” Salamander grinned and looked around. “Anyway, you should bring the airhead back already, I miss her ramblings. I know, crazy talk.”

“Totally is, ja,” Rave nodded at the side, “but we’re still all thinking it. Super weird.”

“Maybe it’s because she is exuding pure cheer all the time?” John theorized as he sat down at the circle again. “That’s got to be addicting in some capacity?” He touched the circle and started the ritual.

His body dispersed into gusts of wind. ‘Interesting that it's the opposite elements that have similar phasing procedures,’ he thought. ‘Water and fire both filled the room, air and earth picked me apart.’

It was those very same thoughts that caused his consciousness to consolidate into an astral projection in the plane of air. Rather than sand, it was clouds that he rose out of this time. Solid clouds, at least in the sense that he could push himself out. They had the consistency of a very soft mattress and the colour of cotton candy.

John took a look around. Sparkling crystals hung in the air, some smaller than him, others the size of islands. Rivers curved through the sky, as did jets of flames and lightning. It was a chaotic display, with a myriad of other details surfacing depending on where he looked. Something like a hurricane of flower petals waltzed over the horizon. A grey, completely still area peeked out behind all the chaos. Looking at it seemed to draw the air from John’s lungs, so he moved on to look at the stream of golden plasma that curved through the sky. It formed an ouroboros. Given that there was an actual maw on that thing, John guessed it to be some sort of elemental. Observe, sadly, refused to work.

Of all the realms he had visited, this one he found to be the most visually stunning. Not that he got to enjoy it for much longer. He dropped the mental signal and immediately was thrown back into reality.

“Am back!” Sylph declared, hovering in the air in front of him. “Really great to see you! Really, really, really great! Did miss you!” A quick kiss on John’s forehead later, the tiny elemental zapped over to Salamander. “And you!” The kiss was repeated, as was the zapping to her next target, Rave, in this case. “And you! And you! And you!” Each iteration came with a dart and a kiss. She had gotten through everyone before John stood up.

“How was home?” he asked the, now almost traditional, question.

“Cloudy, too little gummy bears, lots of chatting, Mom is a sexy beast. Like, super sexy. She can be so tall if she wants to, but usually is, like, the size of me when I am big, so she is small by your standards. All air elementals seem to be kinda small by your standards. I also met my sisters Sylph, Sylphi, Sylphia, Sylph, Sylphren, Sylphenda and my brother Sullyvan. I don’t like Sullyvan, he talks a lot of annoying stuff that makes no sense.”

“When that comes from you, vacuum brain, I imagine a nerdy guy that talks about math all the fucking time,” Salamander said.

Before answering, Sylph decided to take a seat in the fire spirit’s cleavage. “Warm and comfy,” she sighed, sinking between the twin hills. “No, Sullyvan talks actual nonsense. Like, I now get what I must sound like to you sometimes, ‘cause he goes like, and I try to quote but I am kinda dumb, so: ‘Went tripping yesterday, saw bananas, like bananas, not quite the yellow of the egg but, you know, big bulging muscles don’t come from hanging around with spiders all the time.’ And I listened to all of that and sipped on some Discordwine, no idea why they call it that, and was only thinking, ‘waaaaah?’. Makes no sense, that dude.”

John scratched his head, fending off the erection as Sylph did as he had wanted to with Plasia and vanished down to the neck between Salamander’s boobs. The fire spirit even did her the favour of squishing them together, to make the whole endeavour easier. “Happy I didn’t get someone of that variety. I like being able to understand what you say most of the time.”

A single hand darted out of the cleavage. “I solemnly swear I will improve my understandableness in the future! That was a horror, a genuine horror to listen to, what does it even mean that the ground is out flurps and the glasses whisper with marbles? WHAT DOES IT MEAN!” She pressed her head against Salamander’s left boob. “World is cold, titty is warm and soft. I made my choice, I’ll stay here! Forever! Most air elementals have, like, tiny boobs. I got big boobs for an air elemental. That’s so weird, I am like middling in this harem and I am the concubine! Not that being the concubine means I need to have bigger boobs…”

“You don’t get to stay there forever,” Salamander drily announced.

“But you’re so warm and big!” Sylph complained and kneaded the fire spirit’s boobs like a kitten did its mother’s belly. “And you feel so big and protective from this perspective! You would make a great mom, Sally! Super great mom!”

Salamander blushed a bit, which was a rare and almost invisible display. The only reason John even noticed the slight increase in redness was because it came along with a very clear mental signal. “We don’t get to be mothers, Sylph, we’re elementals, so no need to say that.”

“Nah, we totally get to be, we’re John’s elementals. He got Perks suggested that said he can breed Acylsia, so he can breed us as well. Breed. That’s a fun word. Breeeeeeeeeed. I wonder if I would make a good mom. Oh! Audible gasp!” Sylph turned to John. “Mom wanted me to tell you that she likes you and that you are handsome and that you are doing a good job! Also that she would have loved to meet you but she is, like, super busy with a Lorylim infection at the edge of the realm or something. Regular stuff.”

“Right…” John couldn’t quite wrap his head around the idea that Lorylim infections were a regular occurrence. From what he knew, however, the elemental planes suffered from those a lot more regularly than the real world. The plane of air, being the one that mingled the most with the other elements, supposedly also had the weakest borders.

“I’m also supposed to tell you that her name is Tempesta and that you should keep it in mind and to those close that have your heart or something like that,” Sylph babbled on.

‘Well, that was a bit anticlimactic,’ John thought and, by the name of the Achievement, was also reminded that the third book of the Kingkiller Chronicles still wasn’t out. Which irked him. He really, really wanted to read that book. ‘Anyway, now I got 10 kilos of both the strongest fire and wind metal… wonder what I can do with that…’ He had two ideas, both of which had to wait for the moment.

For now, he had one more elemental to summon and his life to resume the normality of before. He touched the circle and stretched his mind to the realm of light. The feeling he got in the process was more akin to wind and earth, his body dissolving, only to reform elsewhere. It missed the bit where he needed to stir his consciousness in order to acquire a body though. He suddenly just was.

This was the only realm he had seen before. A vast space, filled with light elementals of all sizes, filling the vacuum with their brilliant, multi-coloured light. From tiny dots to entire planets, they made it feel like he was standing within the night sky. Which was the only strange bit. Last time he had floated. Now there was a floor.

It was covered in golden plates and radiated softly. Oddly curved mountains rose in the distance, one looking almost exactly like the other. Between them was a blazing ocean covered in darker fields, like the surface of a sun. It didn’t have the same heat, though, or at least John didn’t experience it. Otherwise, he would have simply been incinerated before he could have perceived anything.

As his eyes moved on, he noticed more strange repetitions in the landscape. The trenches were the same in girth, the gold plates had a rhythm to them and the floor was a lot longer than it was wide. Then he began to realize that he wasn’t standing on a floor at all. By the time his eyes had spotted the tail waving in the distance, itself the size of a mountain range, he knew what was happening.

He had, by pure chance, materialized on Stirwin’s back. The infinity elemental was currently soaking in a sun. John turned around and looked in the other direction. If his light spirit knew he was there, he didn’t show it, remaining still. For a moment, the Gamer considered walking up to Stirwin’s head, his ear more specifically, and have a chat, but that walk seemed like it would take days.

‘Yeah, he is never going to fit into any Illusion Barrier ever,’ John thought, rubbing his chin. It was incredibly hard to get a sense of scale, but John felt like Stirwin was big enough to dwarf even Nathalia. The same Nathalia who already had to shrink down to fit into most places, preferring to move about as a humanoid most of the time. ‘Kind of sad, would be awesome to see, but there are just physical limitations sometimes.’

He gathered his mana and sent out the summoning pulse. The ground under him vibrated, as the gargantuan creature started to move. John somewhat hoped that the Father of Light would show up as well, but no such luck. Stirwin rose, and moments after, they both arrived in reality.

“Well, hope you had a good time,” John said to the tiny crocodile hatchling that sat in the middle of the intricate summoning circle. Sapped of the power his realm had fed him, the infinity elemental had immediately shrunk down to the usual size. Although that also put his brain down to the size of a peanut, Stirwin squealed affirmatively. “Must have been nice to be home without being sealed.”

Tiny scales rubbed against John’s hand as he picked up the hatchling. He was soft and pleasantly warm. Scratching him under the chin, John coerced a number of further squeals, while he moved towards the door. His mind was set alight with numerous communications, tiny emotions and memories were exchanged, clarifications sought and all of it happened inside of John’s soul.

He had been without most of them for a few days, and just like he had to get used to their presence, they had to network with each other again. A week wasn’t enough time to lose the grip on what they had before, it was questionable if it could be unlearned at all, but some adjustments had to be done regardless. Especially since John’s head was so crowded; between Artificial Spirits and elementals, there were a total of nine people interconnected through his soul, ten if he included himself.

John embraced all of that happily. It felt right like this. He didn’t have to listen to all or even the majority of it. Their presence alone was what he cherished. After all this time having shared his mind with so many other people, having had over half of them removed felt like living in an empty house. The awkwardly empty seats they had left at the breakfast table had only emphasized this.

Now things were as they were supposed to be and John could concentrate on what lay ahead. Which, in this case, was more paperwork and tomorrow. Indeed, tomorrow was a special day. It would be the last day of August, a month that had passed by with frivolous indulgence and great leaps forward. More importantly, tomorrow was the last birthday of the many they had celebrated this month.