John found himself in a jacuzzi.

That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as a matter of fact it was a very good thing. He and Rave were sitting in the bubbling, hot water, looking out of a giant window. The view of the ocean was spectacular. The clouds from yesterday had concentrated into a thunderstorm that filled the morning sky with grey and the occasional crackling of lighting. Rain rushed down endlessly, but wasn’t thick enough to limit the visibility tremendously.

Similarly spectacular were the cheeseburgers Aclysia and Beatrice presented to him, prepared by Wendy herself in the nearby kitchen. Not only were they delicious to a level that overcame even Aclysia’s cooking, they also disobeyed the laws of homemade burgers by neither dripping nor falling apart in any fashion. This was despite them being so tall that John just barely managed to take bites out of his.

The room they were in was on the highest floor of a building that was just short of deserving the title skyscraper. It was oddly shaped, having round lower floors and then separating into four rectangular towers. The building was primarily white, with silver frames encasing the large windows that dominated the outwards facing sides of the towers.

Close to the top, in between the four towers, hung a sphere of the same silver colour. A simple Observe had revealed it to be the building’s central mana engine. From there, all of the running water, electricity and other operations were being fuelled and overseen. How people got inside there, the Gamer wasn’t quite sure. His money was on teleportation. It could have been that there were secret passageways. There was certainly enough surface contact with the towers to make room for a door.

This was the so-called Paradise, headquarters of the Florida guild and located on the south end of Miami Beach. It had been absolutely no wonder that they spotted him sniffing around this close to their base. Perhaps they had already noticed him when he had landed. Whatever it was, he was now there and quite literally eating cheeseburgers in Paradise.

As much as the flowing water, the climate-controlled surroundings, the embrace of his girlfriend and the delicious food presented by his beloved maids intertwined to make him a fundamentally happy man, it was hard to properly enjoy the moment. This was because he still hadn’t heard a single word about what they wanted to discuss (and Nia, consequently). The anticipation and impatience made it difficult to really enjoy what he had.

Almost as bad as that was the presence of the pariah, whose hair, John was now pretty sure, wasn’t actually black. Rather, it was a shade of brown so dark it may as well have been black. The difference was subtle, but present regardless. Even after the earlier events and while being naked (as they all were, for the Gamer’s lack of packing swimwear), the blank exuded a steady level of discomfort that made John’s hairs stand on end. He felt like he was sitting just one thick lead wall away from the Chernobyl reactor. Sure, he was safe for the moment, but the mere knowledge that this threatening thing was this close awakened a primal fear.

It didn’t help that she never said anything. She just stared and smiled. Not overtly, not in a threatening manner, not small-lipped or happily. She just smiled. The silver lines on her back crept over her sides and spread over her torso, to her arms and legs, finally to her chin, only to slowly withdraw.

“And ya sure ya don’t want us to know your name?” Rave asked, having a much easier time at getting used to the pariah’s presence. “It’s kinda odd to talk to ya and being unable to call ya anything.”

“My name remains out of your reach, for now,” the pariah said, stretching like a mixture between cat and otter, her perky breasts rising out of the water during the motion. Her thin body, as discomforting as her aura was, was nothing short of delicious. Between her raised arms, a lightning bolt cracked through the sky and illuminated the white room more intensely for a moment. “You may call me Vita for the moment.”

‘Latin for ‘life’. Odd choice, but that shouldn’t surprise me anymore,’ John thought and nodded, before looking around. While Rave continued to involve the pariah in a conversation, he looked over his shoulder.

The room was both surprisingly normal and very odd. It was filled with the people that had greeted him about an hour earlier, as well as a bunch of further individuals. The room was large enough to easily encompass all of them. The odd thing about it was that, save for the toilets, everything had been rolled together into the same four walls. Living room, bathing facilities, kitchen, hobby room, they were all put together. Even the balcony was accessible just by marching out of a gap between window and wall. This caused a bit of a puddle in that corner, given the amount of rain outside, but nobody minded and the white tiles weren’t worse off for it.

It seemed they had, without asking or informing him, decided to throw a welcoming party for the Gamer. A party in which he wasn’t the focus and just left to sit in the jacuzzi, catered delicious food and stared at by the blank. He honestly wasn’t sure if they were trying to honour or insult him.

Ultimately, he decided to just challenge the issue. “I’ll mingle with the other people for a bit,” he announced and started to rise out of the tub. That left his naked body exposed to the guests for the time it took him to get out and dry up, about half of which were male. Not that this bothered John much, being a Greek god in all aspects aside from dick size.

Vita did nothing to stop him, so John dragged his clothes from his inventory. A lack of shame didn’t mean he preferred to be naked around strangers. Questioningly, he looked at Rave.

“Imma stay in the tub a bit longer,” she said with a wink, “ya have fun, tiger.”

Scanning the room for someone to talk to, John pretty quickly found someone that piqued his interest and smiled. “I think I will,” he answered and walked away. As he began to walk, Aclysia put away the mostly eaten cheeseburger and followed him like a duck takes to water. Within moments, she attached to his side, rather than beside him, and John put an arm around her waist.

It took quite a bit to cross the large room and John noticed that nobody was actively tracking him. If there was a test veiled in this spontaneous party, it was hidden very well. Perhaps they were curious who he would approach first. In which case, John was about to confirm the stereotypes about his persona.

“Hello, may I have a moment of your time?” he asked, when arriving at the target of his interest.

She was a woman with greyish red skin. Her hourglass figure was entirely unclad, revealing sizable breasts, a hornet waist, wide hips and generally a body made to allure men. Small, decorative bat wings were folded behind her back and a thin, spade-tipped tail grew from above her thick ass. In addition to silky, black hair, she had a pair of smooth horns that curved back like that of a goat. Yellow eyes, slit like that of a snake, focused on him.

“More than just a mhhhm-oment,” she genuinely gasped, pussy juice visibly dripping from her cunt the moment he stepped near her. “Sssssssorry,” she hissed wantonly and fidgeted. As impossible as it seemed, the flow of love juices only seemed to increase. “My kind gets naturally horny around men of… sizable… powerrrr,” she began to slur.

“What your kind is is exactly the question that brings me to you,” John said and scratched the back of his head. “I would offer my hand in introduction, but-“

“NO BUTS!” the gorgeous woman screamed and inched a little bit closer, raising a trembling hand. Her tail excitedly curved through the air. “My name isssss… Nashara. Nashara Depthdire.”

‘About as demonic as I expected her name to be,’ John thought and took her hand, suppressing any hesitation he may have had. “John Newman.” He was surprised his introduction wasn’t immediately drowned out by an orgasmic scream. Although that was the only thing that didn’t go about as expected.

Nashara’s legs buckled and trembled, several strong waves of pussy juice dripping down between them. For a few moments, it seemed like she would be able to keep herself standing, then she collapsed to her knees with heavy breaths and barely suppressed moans. Her tail moved in jerking bursts, while she slumped forwards.

Perhaps rudely, John caught her by a horn before she could collide with his crotch. More contact only intensified the orgasm she was having and now she screamed properly. A liquid thicker than saliva was running past her wide-open lips.

As much as that made the Gamer wish to dispense with his pants and just plunge into her clearly available mouth, he would not engage with a (presumed) succubus until he knew what a succubus actually entailed in the Abyss. He didn’t want to feed her years of his life accidentally. Once she was sitting in a puddle of her own making, he slowly let go of her and let her recover.

Gulping, she eventually stuttered, “S-sorry… whew… okay….” Nashara looked up to him and offered her hand again. “Can you help me up?”

“Sure?” John asked, not quite sure what would happen next. This time, when their hands made contact, she only shivered, and once she stood, she stood remarkably firmly for someone that had just had a visibly intense orgasm.

“Been a while since someone’s touch alone made me cum like that,” Nashara hummed while crossing her arms and pushing up her sizable bosom. The dark red nipples were hard, even if she now seemed to have control over herself. “It doesn’t happen much to succubi at my level.”

“So, you ARE a succubus.” John didn’t even try to veil his ignorance on the subject. “It’s my first-time meeting one of your kind. I was getting conflicting information on whether or not demons were just a class of corrupted elementals and started to wonder if you were real at all.” Overtly sexual, he analysed her head to toe once more. “I’m glad to see there is something like a true demon. Mind making things a little clearer for me – about your kind and demons in general?”

Nashara smiled, revelling in the attention of a powerful man. “Not at all, just tell me where you want me to start and I’ll happily answer some questions.”

“Let’s start with something general then: what is a demon?” the Gamer asked. “Because, unless you tell me you are descendents of elementals somehow, I don’t see the relation between them and you.”

“I think the confusion you humans have is born from the fact that demonic Kingdoms are interconnected,” Nashara sighed. “And that your ‘corrupted’ elementals can enter them, while you and their ‘pure’ siblings cannot. You can think of the term ‘demon’ to mean something like ‘European’. We’re a number of races living in proximity. Many of us have developed similarly because of that. We’re not the same though.”

‘That makes enough sense.’ John scratched his chin. “Do you know why corrupted elementals can do that and normal ones can’t?”

“The areas such elementals live in in their elemental planes are closely connected to our Kingdoms,” the succubus sighed, shifting her weight from one leg to another in a very suggestive way. “It also seems they become somewhat similar to us in the process of corruption. How do I explain this… they don’t have the same origin, but they have the same vibe as us?”

“Like steel and concrete having a similar rate of heat expansion despite being entirely separate materials?” John suggested.

“Sure?” Nashara blinked. “Haven’t looked into building materials, sorry.”

“Maybe a bit of a forced metaphor,” the Gamer conceded while wondering if this meant that Salamander and Undine could visit those demonic kingdoms. This similarity in appearance and, apparently, underlying magical structure would also explain why these two fundamentally different factions both got summarized under the word ‘demon’. “Do the elementals need to be free to travel over?”

“That seems to be the case, yes,” the succubus answered. “At least I never met one that had a master.”

‘That puts the alternative vacation place for Undine out of reach then,’ John thought and suppressed a sigh. It was odd to think of them as demons anyway. Something he would gladly cease doing now that he knew there was a fundamental difference between corrupted elementals and natural demons. That only left the question of Ifrit open, but he couldn’t get a detailed answer on that here. Instead, he focused on the demon in front of him and wondered about something different. “How did you end up here then? Were you summoned by someone?”

“No, I found a normal way to arrive in this world, got stranded and eventually decided to just stay,” Nashara answered. “Once you get accustomed to the rules, it’s pretty nice here. I never imagined the central world to be so restrictive when it came to magic. Came as quite the shock. I could have died pretty quickly if I hadn’t been lucky enough to stumble over an Abyssal first. I think that happens to most of my kind. They come over during a new moon, fuck some man for a snack and get wiped out by Gaia.”

“One would think she would engage in some education campaign for succubi to prevent things like that,” John mumbled. “Does that mean none of you get summoned, by the way? Now that I see you,” he gestured at her breasts, “I don’t understand how your kind is not something most people try to have around them. Do you suck out people’s lifeforce or what is the issue?”

“I mean, yeah, we do, but not in any lethal way.” Nashara emphasized the later part with a raised finger. “Think of us as symbiotic life forms. You give us a bit of your energy and the chance to have offspring – if we feel like raising one – and we give you as many orgasms as your body can handle. We don’t want to kill our partners, that’d run pretty counter to our reproduction strategy. I think we don’t get all that popular with humans because we are whores.”

She used that word to describe herself like John would have used nerd. There wasn’t a single iota of shame in her voice. It was just a statement that was true. “Mind elaborating on that a little bit?” the Gamer requested.

“Well,” she looked down to the puddle she had left, “as you can see, our bodies react pretty intensely to powerful men. Whether or not they are virile and create strong children, that’s just about all we care about in our partners. Long-term relationships aren’t part of our program.” Nashara shrugged again. “I guess we lack whatever makes you humans fall in love with each other. We just fuck to get food, pleasure or pregnant. The only way to keep a succubus ‘loyal’ is to make it so you’re the only one with physical access to her. If you tried that shit with me, I would bite your dick off after two weeks.”

She smiled as if she had said nothing unusual whatsoever and revealed her rather sharp teeth. They were definitely capable of the task and John wondered if she was talking from experience. “…Good to know,” he shortly said, “…and there are no exceptions to that?”

“Not in pure-blooded succubi, no. That is to say, not in succubi that have exclusively demon heritage.” Nashara played with her hair and purred. “See, if you were to knock me up, my child would come out either as a succubus or incubus, former much more likely than the latter. That child would have the appearance and general attributes of my kind, but a few of yours, like this ‘loyalty’ stuff, might get carried over into the next generation.” She shrugged again. “It seems like you humans value it when your partners are exclusive or at least mostly exclusive to you, so you stick to your elementals and your golems for magical partners. Other demons seem to have similar complications.”

‘Yeah, I think I’ll stick to this lane,’ John agreed in his thoughts and squeezed Aclysia’s butt. The Artificial Spirit was absolutely horrified by what she was hearing at the moment.

‘And I thought she was such a good contender for your attention when she orgasmed from your touch alone!’ the weaponized maid shared with him. ‘Instead she presents herself as a freely usable cumdump, this is disgraceful!’

‘It explains why people wouldn’t bother to go down this route at least,’ the Gamer answered, although he wasn’t quite satisfied with that answer alone. “Is it difficult to summon a demon?”

“Kind of? I’m the potential target of such a summoning, so I don’t know a whole lot about it. The usual main problem is that my kind and the warlocks don’t agree on what the terms of our stay should be.”

‘Good old demon contract problems,’ the Gamer shook his head slightly. While this conversation had cleared up quite a bit, it had also taken a lot of the mysticism out of the subject. All he could see demons as now were unreliable contract workers. The only reasons to bother with them seemed to be greed and arrogance. He still wanted to sleep with a succubus at least once, but any desire of maybe contracting or otherwise having one in his harem had basically vanished. “I wonder why there is next to no available information on this anywhere.”

“You can ask the virgin downstairs,” Nashara hissed; this time her voice was openly hostile. “Smashing and burning all of it wherever they find it. I can understand slaying all of the aggressive demons, but declaring war on the entire craft is just ridiculous.”