Chapter 3: Bride of the Overlord

"H-How did it end up like this?" Mew tried to recount the events that led up to the present, "I got up. Got dressed. Got my strawberries. Spoke to a voice in my head...totally normal. Then, uh, another voice in my head. What am I, hosting a Skype call in here? Oh right, then I came to this city. Got insulted by a bag of chips. Met Auris. Apparently smooth-talked her into inviting me back to her place? Got comfy and cozy...A-And next thing I know she's mounted me like a stallion."

He is currently being pressured by the unstoppable combination of her bountiful breasts on his chest and her firm thighs against his legs. She had him practically wrapped up like an anaconda and refused to let go.

With his lips puckered up in a wobbly smile and his face so red his eyes were washed of color, Mew stared into Auris' fluttering eyes and thought, "Yep...j-just a normal day for me..."

He refused to close his eyes because his pants might be lost forever by the time he blinked. All his options of escape were cut off. She had exploited his weaknesses physically and mentally.

"O-Ok Mew think...You've got an older, super attractive babe pretty much all over you. What...what now?"

He turns his brain inside out for answers then widens his eyes as he realizes that, "Oh crap! Everything I know about love I learned from anime! They never show these parts!"

Mew's head kept spinning as he looked at Auris and wondered why she had stopped making any advances.

"I-Is she waiting for...me?" Maybe the hormones in his brain were screwing with him, but he swore that Auris nodded in response to his private thoughts.

Many men his age would kill to be in his position. Many of them would also probably think twice before jumping to action. Mew...was not one of those men.

"NO, listen here, Me, this is the opportunity of a lifetime! If you chicken out of it now you'll regret it forever! J-Just trust your instincts and it'll all work out...s-somehow..." But as Mew kept looking at Auris and waited for his body to act, he couldn't escape the feeling in the pit of his gut. A hard, inescapable admission of guilt.

"...What am I thinking? I can't do this. I'm not ready..."

Mew closed his eyes, took a very deep breath, and calmly started to say, "Listen Auris, I..."

He made the mistake of closing his eyes. When its prey shows fear, that's when the anaconda strikes. Auris' hands snagged onto Mew's wrists gently and applied pressure, opening his hands up. She then raises and lays them upon the boy's kryptonite - her breasts.

"What do you think?"

"S-S-Soft..." And real. Mew had never touched breasts in his life, except for suckling his mother's teat. But he knew these were real. Auris' knowing smile after disarmed the last bit of resistance Mew could muster.

"Of course. I'm...rather proud of them."

"...Screw it." With a loud whisper Mew prepared to dive right in. Auris had set a fine table and prepared him a lovely meal. At this point, it would be rude not to dig in.

"M-MOM?!" A shrill gasp of shock from an unknown third party snapped right out of it. Auris got right off him and knelt on the couch to look over it. A moment later Mew scrambled to peek over the couch.

There was a girl standing at the door with a scowl most foul on her faded pink lips. She wears tattered blue jean shorts, using the pockets to prop her fists up in disapproval. Her legs have rough looking skin, especially on the right knee where a little dirt resided.

She wears a loose green t-shirt that, try as it might, couldn't hide her breasts. They weren't as big as Auris', but still impressive by Mew's high standards. Her chest is just about the only girlish thing about her appearance though.

Her cheek bones look rough around the edges. There's a small scar on her nose suggesting she's a scrapper. Atop her head is a red sports cap with her brown haired ponytail slipping through the hole in the back. And finally she wore a velcro headband with an iron plate around her neck.

Mew stares at her and slowly blinks as the girl is busy drilling into Auris with a glare from her bright blue eyes. Auris puts on an innocent smile and honeys her tone of voice into something more bubbly, "Oh honey, I didn't hear you come in."

The girl's eyes narrow as she mutters, "D-Don't you 'didn't hear you come in' me! What the HELL do you think you're doing mom?!"

"M-Mom?" Mew shifts his head over to Auris, then back to the girl, then back to Auris, back to the girl, and so forth and so forth. The only thing mother and daughter shared were the size of their breasts. It was a pretty sexually-driven observation but, like, he didn't have much control over where his eyes went at this point.

The daughter is also a few inches shorter than him and again, Mew wasn't trying to be rude, but he couldn't help but notice that she's a little pudgy around the waist. These things kind of just stick out in his eyes.

"And you," The girl turns her glare on him and dials it up to 11 as she asks, "What do you have to say for yourself?"

Mew's just confused on what the hell is going on here. He was so busy staring that he shut out the entire heated conversation, of which the aftermath left the daughter with red cheeks. And the only thing he can do in response is stare at the girl's breasts. The girl glares at him some more, then winds up following the trail of his gaze to her own chest.

She sucks her lips in, turns an even darker shade of red, then crosses her arms before her chest to cover it up. When her eyes start trembling she closes them, grumbles "Goddamn it!" and then marches to the stairs.

"I-I'll be in my room. Call me down when you decide to be an adult, mom!"

Mew sits up and exclaims, "H-Hold on I can expla-"

"Whatever, pervert!" The girl dismisses him outright by the time she's disappeared upstairs.

Mew then lays back against the arm of the couch and staring blankly at the ceiling. Auris readjusts herself so her feet are back on the ground. She giggles softly and says, "That was more fun than I expected~"

Mew lazily lifts one hand up and asks, "So you're a mother...?"

Auris lays a finger upon her lips and gives Mew a playful wink, "Guilty as charged!"

"And you coming onto me was all an act?" Mew said, sounding utterly defeated.

"Maaaaaaaybeeee..." Was the most disastorous and vague answer Auris could have given.

"..." Mew springs up, throws his hands out to grab Auris' and shake it vigorously. With a big grin he hastily told her, "Well it was nice meeting you and all but I got to get back to a normal, non-adultry life kthnxbai!"

As Mew stumbles on his feet to leave Auris lays one arm atop the back of the couch and says, "Make no mistake. I did tease you for my amusement."

Mew had one hand through the door when Auris turned up the sincerity in her voice by a noticeable degree, "But I do need your help. There's no one else I can turn to but you, Elemental Overlord."

Mew stops in place. He holds his hand out then leans his head back a bit and sighs quietly. He finally squeezes his hand into a fist, turns around, and walks right back to the couch opposite Auris' and takes a seat.

"Alright..." He calls the cup of strawberry lemonade into his hand and says with an earnest smile, "I'm all ears."

Auris closes her eyes and says, "First let me give you a proper introduction."

She gently lays a hand atop her chest and opens her eyes with a genuine sense of maturity to her posture, "My name is Auris Aurora, the Sage of the Aurians, and the wife of the original Elemental Overlord."

Mew's eyes perked up a bit as he murmurs "W-Wife?" which leads to him remembering a certain, totally minor problem that he voices against his better judgement.

"H-How old did you say you were...?"

"Two-thousand and forty-five years old." Auris says with a straight face.

"T-Two thousand..." Mew double-takes then rubs the back of his head and chuckles, "You...don't look a day over twenty-five!"

"That IS roughly when I stopped aging, mmhmm..." She says with a tender, amused smile.

After the shock subsides Mew lays his hand back on his leg and slumps back into the couch's leathery frame. Once he sips his drink he ponders aloud, "This is the first I'm hearing about this. You know the whole...'Elemental Overlord had a wife' thing, not your age."

"Its not exactly common knowledge that the original Overlord was betrothed," Auris raises both her hands, fingers spread out, and turns them around to show both sides, "The lack of a wedding ring probably didn't help you piece that together either."

"You've definitely surprised me..." Mew's lips wobble as he squeezes his eyes shut and blushes, "I-In more ways than one."

Auris gets another laugh out of his reactions, most certainly, but when Mew gets back on track with the conversation she's silent and all ears.

"...Now that that's out of the way, how about you give the 4-1-1 on what's up with this place?" Mew's stern but lackadaisical means of asking got Auris answering right away.

"Take your pick. What do you want to know?"

Mew shrugs and remarks, "Might as well tell me what an Aurian is."

Auris looks at him and lays her hands atop her legs, "You know all about the elements right?"

"I'd be a crappy Elemental Overlord if I didn't," Mew then puts his glass down and starts raising a finger per element he lists, "Nature, Water, Wind, Electricity, Earth, Ice, Fire, Light and Dark. Those are the nine elements."

Auris then raises on her hand the last finger Mew did not and says, "But the truth of the matter is that there are ten elements. Aura, which represents the element of Life, is the tenth."

Mew looks at his hands, pops the last finger up, then curls his hands into fists. He gives a brief nod to Auris and says, "Aura, got it."

But then after giving it a second thought he swings a hand up and shouts, "No wait a minute!"

Auris looks barely surprised as Mew holds his hands up by his head and says "Nature, Water, Wind, Electricity, Earth, Ice, Fire, Light, Dark and Aura" at twice the speed he did before.

He then brandishes one finger out and says, "An Elemental Overlord can't be missing an element! I might as well be called the Fraud Overlord now!"

"Oh don't you worry your pretty little head over it," Auris said with a hand propped under her chin as she chuckles, "The original Overlord never learned how to control Darkness or Aura. In fact, that would make you more of a master of the elements than him."

Mew blinks then slowly leans his arms back against his chest, staring up at the ceiling with one eye wider than the other as he remarks, "So what you're saying is...I should be called the Super Elemental Overlord."

"Or the King of Hot Air." Auris briefly chides him with a smile.

Mew rubs the back of his head and chuckles. Meanwhile, Auris places her hands together and remarks with a serenade-like voice befitting a storyteller, "Long ago in the time of the original Elemental Overlord there was one tribe for each of the ten elements. Sancturia, the representative for Aura, was one of those ten tribes."

"And the other nine tribes were scattered across the Earth." Mew deduced

"No," Auris quickly put-down, "The ten tribes existed on a world separate from this one."

Mew kept his mouth shut cause he guessed that Auris knew what he was going to ask, which she deliberately took the time to acknowledge when she spoke up again.

"And yes, that does mean this entire city was moved from one planet to another. Through magic or science, you may ask? Either answer suffices really. Its not as though the humans at the time were advanced enough to notice."

"Well there's gotta be some kinda mumbo-jumbo going on here," Mew remarks as he twirls a finger around and around over his head, "Satellites buzz around over the planet daily, eventually someone would've had to notice an invisible city hanging out over the North Pole."

"And it is to the barrier designer's credit that we have avoided any contact for two-thousand years." Auris says with too much confidence for it to be a lie.

"But its not just humanity we're trying to remain hidden from. Our city holds plenty of secrets. Dangerous, powerful secrets that could upset the natural order of things if there were to be stolen."

Mew leans forward a bit and bridges his hands under his chin as he remarks, "And someone's after one of those secrets, which is why you called for my aid."

Auris' smile pushed up her cheeks as she properly praised the boy's deduction, "How astute."

She then lifts her head up a little to look Mew in the eyes, "But its not someone from the outside who is after it, but one of our own."

"A traitor eh?" Mew's lips subtly shifted into a scowl of intrigue.

"A traitor? That is one way to put it, but..." Mew noticed Auris held herself back from finishing her sentence, as she quickly shifted topics, "It may come as a surprise to you, but my title as 'Sage' exists in name only. I am not the sovereign power here."

"You're not?" Mew's reply came off as a surprise initially but when he stops to think about it the facts lined up, "Now that she mentions it, this house looks like all the rest on the outside. Wouldn't she be living in a palace if she was the big-shot around here?"

"Then who is?" He asked.

"His name...is Gravitus." She says. Her eyebrows begin to slant, and she cups her hands near her mouth as the pleasantness of their conversation now seemed like an afterthought.

"At least, that's what he calls himself nowadays. He used to go by the name Damascus, and was a servant of my late father's whom acted as the guardian of one of Sancturia's most regal treasures...The Neo Drive."

"Neo Drive?" Mew found the name empowering, and suitably dangerous sounding.

"After my father's passing and Sancturia's migration from our world to this one, Damascus saw his opportunity to strike and overthrew me as leader of the Aurians."

Auris' hands tighten up as they remain clenched together, with her voice becoming firmer as well, "Ever since he's ruled over Sancturia with an iron fist."

"...Everyone seems pretty mellow considering they're living under a tyrannical rule." Mew is quick to point out, being light on his usual joking mannerisms.

"Make no mistake the threat of his iron-clad rule remains omnipresent. But...I will leave it to you to decipher all that on your own." Auris says, leaving Mew more than a little unsatisfied with the answer.

He slumps his head a bit and budges his gaze forward as he asks, "Where does this Neo Drive factor into all this?"

Auris lean backs a little and explains, "Gravitus' thirst for power has not been quenched. Not satisfied with dominion over his people, he seeks to expand the purview of his reign across the entire universe."

"And he needs the Neo Drive to do so."

"Exactly," Auris says, her voice a smidge worried, "That has been his endgame for the last two-thousand years, and I fear he is close to achieving it."

Mew closes his eyes, leans up against the couch and lays his arms up on the back of it, then nods a little before responding, "A power-hungry tyrant, a maiden in distress, and the brave, strapping young hero who can help save the day..."

Mew sits upright with a big ol' grin and declares, "Sounds like a good setup to me! Don'tcha fret over it Auris. I'll be your knight in shining armor!"

"Hahaha," Auris dryly laughs, arousing embarrassment from Mew's face by the time she proclaims, "Do I look like I require a knight upon a fiery steed?"

"W-Well you DID call me in to help..."

"I asked for someone strong, someone brave, someone capable..." Auris snickered then creased her lips into a tiny smile, "When did I ever say you were helping me in particular?"

"H-Huh?" Mew spun his eyes a bit and stuck the tip of his tongue out as he loudly hummed, deep in thought. He then squints at Auris and wonders, "There's...something you're not telling me, isn't there?"

"Correct again," She says with a honeyed smile, before proceeding to lay her hands on her legs and says in a blunt, dismayed tone, "So you met my daughter already."

"Ms. Green and Grouchy?" Mew briefly thinks back to the girl's sour first impression of him and nervously chuckles, "Y-Yeah, guess we did..."

"The poor dear's at that confused, rebellious age...And she has a big beef with Gravitus in particular."

"...Uh-oh." Mew could easily sense where this conversation was heading.

"It won't be long now before she sees fit to take matters into her own hands and confront Gravitus on her own," Auris then puffs her chest out a bit and oversells it a bit on her dismay, "Strong as I may be, I am no match for that girl's adolescence infused stubbornness."

"Auris' daughter looks like a fighter..." Mew imagines in his head a giant shadowy interpretation of Gravitus looming over that bloody and battered girl, "But it sounds like she's not ready for a monster like Gravitus."

"I'll have kicked Gravitus' ass before it becomes an issue, but why do you sound so sure that she's gonna rebel soon?"

Auris leans forward a bit and smiles as she whispers, "Because I have already seen it happen in the future."

"I see..." Mew bobs his head a few times...Then it all comes crashing down on him like an avalanche.

He widens his eyes and stammers, "I-I'm sorry...you what?"

Auris keeps her voice to a subdued whisper as fans her fingers before her face and forces Mew to gaze into her bewitching eyes, "I am clairvoyant. You mean to tell me you never once thought about how odd it was that I knew your name from the get-go?"

"Hahah well you see, funny story..." No amount of bravado Mew could muster would hide that he was caught with his pants down. Maybe if he hadn't been busy thinking naughty thoughts this whole time he would've caught on. Between knowing his name, knowing when to contact him in the city, and especially knowing when her daughter would be home to achieve maximum levels of humiliation on his end...It was all staring him right in the face but his vision was obscured by breasts and thighs.

Instead of lingering on the negatives, Mew thought on the bright side of things, "Well hey, that's great! Now you can tell me how to beat Gravitus!"

"No." She playfully rescinds.

"No?" Mew says with only mild confusion.

Auris withdraws her hand from her face and holds it out towards Mew, "Think of each of my fingers as a decision you could make. One leads to joy, another leads to heartache, another leads to laughter, another leads to sorrow. The last one leads to the perfect outcome for you. Knowing where your decisions lead, which one would you choose?"

Mew stares at her hand for but a moment before deciding, "Obviously the perfect outcome."

"Of course," Auris nods then curls all but her pointer finger inward, "You travel down this perfect path, only to encounter another fork in the road."

She unfurls her pinky and says, "But now you have only two decisions ahead of you. Trust your instincts, or continue to rely on knowledge of the future to get your perfect outcome. So, where do you go from here?"

"..." Mew was less certain this time, as the woman's voice was laced with a manipulative pull towards the same answer as before.

"...The perfect outcome?" Curiosity made him decide this answer. But when Auris curled in her pinky this time, it never unfurled.

"Then you keep walking down a road of perfection. Nothing bad ever happens, everything goes just the way you want it to..." Then her last finger slowly starts to curl into her palm, "But...Could the mistakes you would've made been to your benefit? You stubbed your knee once, so now you know not to stub it again."

Once her fingers are curled into a fist she closes her eyes and says, "Rely on foreknowledge and there'll eventually come a time where that knowledge will betray you, and then you'll be ill-equipped to face the challenges ahead."

She gently opens her eyes with a knowing smile as she proposes to Mew, "And you of all people could never accept that, could you?"

Mew bites his teeth down behind the obscurity of his lips then shrugs his hands up by his shoulders and acts all cool about it, "Yeah I guess it'd be pretty boring to have the answers handed to you on a silver platter."

He then glides his hands right on behind his head and gives Auris a one-eyed wink, "Me personally? I like to take things one day at a time and go with the flow of the blows, y'know what I mean?"

Auris nods then lays her hand back on her lap and remarks, "If its any consolation, none of my answers would've been that helpful to begin with."

Mew then leans forward a bit and leaves his hands lagging by his waist, "Still you DID call me in now so the odds must've been looking grim right?"

"Without your intervention there was less than a 1% chance of stopping Gravitus." Auris started off with.

"And now that I'm here? What're the odds now?"

"...5%." Auris says with a perfectly dauntless face.

Mew shivers a bit then cracks a beefy grin and stutters "T-Twenty percent huh...?"

He squeezes his hands together into one big fist and then rowdily declares to Auris, "I like the sounds of those odds! This is getting exciting!"

"Then its all settled?" Auris ponders quietly.

"Yeah," Mew firmly nods his head, "Like I already said. I'll have Gravitus' ass kicked by the end of the week!"

"That's wonderful..." Auris' face lights up with a playful smile, "Because you know, he won't actually be back here for a whole week."

"Wait, seriously?" Mew tilted his head and looked disappointed.

"Consider this an opportunity to get used to Sancturia, its people, and our culture as well," Auris decrees, "I shall give you whatever advice or answers your require, but for the most part I'd prefer it if you figure things out on your own."

"Fine by me!" Mew says with no weight on his back, then nervously grins as he asks, "Just...tell me there's no more crappy Chinese knock-offs around here."

Auris smile could've meant "Yes" or "No" and it wouldn't have mattered from Mew's point of view. What she offered more concretely though was a nudge in the right direction.

"For now I'd suggest checking out the Pyramid of the Neo Drive. Its in the very center of town just northwest from here."

Mew nods, stands up and goes "Sounds like a plan to me!" before heading straight for the door.

"Later!" He waves back to Auris on his way out, unaware that the daughter's head was peeking down around the corner of the staircase.

"...Grrr..." The daughter growls as her fingernails dig into the wooden post on the railing and gently scratch the finish.

She pulls herself up from her uncomfortable laying position on the stairs and presses her back up against the wall. With a fist squeezed until its red against her chest she grumbles quietly to herself, "That pervert? The Elemental Overlord? Is this some kind of a joke?!"

She reflects upon his dumb face when she caught him in the act of perversion, but her recollection of events is a lot more...extravagant. Mew's grin has big donkey teeth and his eyes were staring off in different directions.

She clamps her teeth down into a bitter scowl then shakes her head hard from left to right. She then takes a couple steps down the stairs, pokes her head around the corner, and sees that her mother has gone off to the kitchen.

"Now's my chance...!" She whispers as she whisks herself off towards the door. She's out of there before Auris can see her. But little does she know her mother was smiling the whole time she left.

Back with Mew he's followed Auris' direction to the letter and made his way to the center of Sancturia. This time around he rears his head back and whistles "Woo-hoo!" with plenty of enthusiasm.

He was staring into the face of a twenty-story pyramid perfectly preserved from the mold of time. The crystalline gleam he expected from the temple was now all over the place here. Every two floors of the pyramid was lined to the brim with different colored jewels. First floor had rubies and sapphires, third floor had amethysts, fifth floor emeralds, and so forth and so forth. It was an honest god treat to behold after how familiar and unremarkable the rest of Sancturia's buildings were.

"So this is where the Neo Drive's housed eh?" Mew tucks his hands in his pockets and looked down to find a small square tunnel surrounded by teal bricks acting as the entrance. His curiosity was piqued and ready to go investigate.

Then he smirked and coyly remarked, "If you want to stalk someone, maybe don't stomp the ground like an elephant?"

Mew looks right over his shoulder as someone smashes their right foot into the ground with the sound of a hammer coming down. The daughter of Auris is behind him glaring with the same ferocity as before, but now her eyes were widened to the point that it was a miracle her eyeballs weren't rolling out of her socket.

She puffed her chest up by taking in a very deep breath, then bellowed an intimidating roar towards Mew, "You're not going anywhere you...you punk!"

Mew closes his eyes and sighs to himself "I reeeeally should've seen this coming" then turns around and gently wags his right hand out of his pocket to ask, "Look if this is about what you saw I'm telling you-"

"Shut up!" She shouted, her voice beginning to draw a crowd of onlookers around the front of the pyramid. She cocked her right pointer finger straight towards his face like a gun and declared, "You don't belong here! So I'm gonna send you packing in a bodybag!"

Mew takes his hand to the back of his head while its out and remarks to himself, "God I suck at first impressions, don't I?"

Next Time: Learning from Battle