A drumming sound was competing with the classical inspired video game soundtrack that ran in the background of the large room.

Thump-Thamb-Thump, floor, wall, ceiling, two similar noises encapsulated a slightly different one in their order. The wall had a different thickness than the other two surfaces and was fashioned from a different kind of stone, causing the vibrations to sound ever so slightly different. The golf ball landed in John’s hand and he tossed it again, like he had done for ten minutes now.

The small white sphere had been removed from its socket just a couple of metres away from the small desk on top of which the Gamer currently sat. A couple pieces of paperwork were scattered on it, together with a laptop whose only installed program was a media player. The desk was seldom used for work and the technical equipment in the room existed solely to either play music or illuminate the trophies sitting pretty on top of pillars and under glass cases.

John was gathering more and more objects of emotional value in the room. A couple remaining drops of what had been the Construct of Order, the Godkiller Construct Romulus had destroyed during the battle of Warsaw, were arranged in a pretty circle on a red pedestal. A written treaty on the harem’s rules negotiated in Amsterdam, a simple sheet of paper that held almost more humoristic than sentimental value. Same held true for the contract that had given him ownership of his yacht.

Shining in many colours was a piece of polished glass that he had crafted recently to remind himself of the Atlantic Fuse. There was a piece of rubble with a red cable surrounded by a thorny branch on it, taking the shape of a wreath. A piece of debris that he had put aside during the demolition of a former Thorne building. Another piece of concrete was the orderly shaped tip of the old Illusion Barrier Mass Anchor, decommissioned after it was damaged during the Hudson Brawl.

From between those points in time were the remainders of John’s old Gamer set of equipment. A few ashen pieces of cloth and the melted bits of what remained of the first Mandala Sphere joined the intact shoes. There were some of the photos, eternalized in glass, that his parents had gifted him for his eighteenth birthday. Many of them had been distributed between the harem, due to John feeling awkward about having them around, but a choice few he had decided to keep in this trophy room.

A single shard of Tietan, Sigmund’s shattered sword, was kept in this room as well. Most had been used to let Marathyu upgrade his equipment, but that singular piece of black Mithril he preserved for sentimental purposes. There was the peace pipe he had smoked from when making the deal with the Hidden Tradition. He still remembered that taste that had made the insides of his lungs scratch. An unpleasant memory along a joyous occasion in a dark time. On a wall hung a painted picture of John holding up the contract making the annexation of the Small Lake Pact and the Amacat guild official. It had been gifted to him by an artist. John had insisted to pay for it instead, not wanting to owe favours.

A vast array of dungeon loot was scattered across the room as well. A couple of the weapons were quite powerful, but they were only there to remind John of particularly difficult challenges he had beat. There was a piece of wrinkled gold foil that had held the piece of chocolate Thana had devoured before entering her current and, apparently, everlasting state of quiet depression. Vials of Elemental Essence were arranged in a decorative circle. Two business cards with lipstick on them spelled out Cindy’s and Worlina’s business phone numbers. The private ones were written on the back.

A discarded exoskeleton of Eliza’s transformation was propped up by a dummy. Four maps showed the evolution of the Guild Hall. There was a tiny silver bust of Velka when she had been just a hatchling. Next to it was a certain door handle Alice had brought him. Wendy had followed it up by giving him a pie recipe.

Copies of more contracts were framed and covered the walls. Trade deals, business agreements, tiny successes and achievements he was proud of. The first and incomplete versions of the tokens – an incomplete arrangement thanks to Velka stealing one of them during transportation. John let her keep it.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

Of all those trophies, the one John held at the moment somehow held the most value to John. It was a golf ball. Nothing special on the outside or the inside. It wasn’t particularly worn out, nor was it new. It was just a golf ball that had been used in John’s game against Abraham.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

Whenever the Gamer found himself unable to solve a problem satisfyingly, he somehow ended up in this room, with that golf ball in steady motions. Blindly, he tossed it in exactly the same way he had tossed it hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. It bounced off the floor, the wall, and then the ceiling, only to land perfectly in his hand again.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

There was something intensely calming about this well-studied motion. It had taken him a bit to master it. Throwing a ball so it bounced off three surfaces and ended up in its original position wasn’t easy. It was even harder after he had acquired the habit of letting the Possession of his contact lenses go while enacting this little ritual.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

The steady sound and the darkness helped him concentrate. His mind was silent. There was some traffic of other thoughts running through his soul, but his girls tried to keep things to a minimum. When he was in this room, it was understood that he wanted to think. It was his own Fortress of Solitude or, if he wanted to keep things more grounded, the garage of his house. It was his space more than his living room was.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

‘Think,’ the single word surfaced. It caused him to hold the golf ball in his hand, his every motion frozen. Suddenly, he realized his mind had been empty for ten minutes. The Gamer couldn’t think of the last time he had been thinking nothing for such a long time. ‘You are avoiding the issue,’ the voice, that was and, at the same time, was not him, whispered. John resumed throwing the golf ball.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

It was that voice that spoke thoughts on its own. Subconscious was a word for it, but John didn’t quite like it. The ‘larger him’ was what he liked to conceptualize it as. His active mind was a mediator between the whole of him and the world. What parts surfaced of all he was, that was, at the best of times, for him to choose. Sometimes, thoughts and answers still popped into his head that he himself didn’t actively think. Instinctual or non-deciding parts of his persona trying to contribute to his decision making.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

‘What do I do with the Gestalt?’ he asked his broader self the question his active thoughts hadn’t been able to solve.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

There were too many of them. As cruel as it was to say, it was bad for Fusion that so many of them had survived. Over a thousand of them were still alive. All of them were muddled bundles of different people’s memories, without clear personalities except a level of in-group preference that any kind of cult would have blushed at. Anyone following their way of life was good, everyone not doing so an unknown risk impossible to trust. For the most part, they were weak, but there were so many.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

Ignoring them was impossible. John needed the land they were based on, if he wished to unify all of America. He needed to sift through their archives, trying to find out more about the Death Zone. Perhaps the worst, if he ignored them, they would perhaps find a way to restart their program, giving another thousand bodies to the Lorylim or fuelling another catastrophe. They could have told outsiders about the Sands of Time and the phantom and that news could eventually reach Romulus. Small as a risk as it was, it was still a risk.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

Integrating them was impossible. Even if he assumed that there was no way to restore their ritual now that the Sands of Time were coalescing somewhere out of reach, they still had gone through it for twenty years. None of them were an individual anymore. They were all some kind of amalgam of what had been themselves and many, many others. John had tried to speak to many of them. When he pressed someone to name themselves, he only got hesitating answers. Not only because they struggled to recall who they had been, but also because they loathed John.

The Gamer had made a clear tactical error when expressing his distaste for their way of life too openly. Because they all tried to keep their experiences the same, they had ceaselessly exchanged all information each of them received, with no secrets and no detail left out. What had spread was the truth of what John had said about them and a rapidly consolidating view that, somehow, John was to blame for the disappearance of the Sands of Time.

It was an understandable mistake. John HAD ordered the Sands to be removed wherever he had found them and he refused to share his Remus theory with a thousand potential leaks. Regardless, it was false and made them even more hostile towards John. They wouldn’t obey his orders unless forced to and they certainly wouldn’t become part of what he tried to build.

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

If he couldn’t ignore them and he couldn’t integrate them, what was he to do?

‘Kill them,’ his subconscious presented the logical but horrible answer. ‘I can’t do that,’ the Gamer told himself. ‘Systematically slaughtering a thousand people for my convenience… what would I be then? What would separate me from the eugenicists? The number of people I cleansed, nothing else. If I cross that moral line, I have nowhere else to go but down.’

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

His active and subconscious minds both went silent, searching for answers.

‘I could exile them to somewhere outside America,’ John thought. ‘That way they would be out of my hair. They could still fall prey to the Lorylim, if they discover another way to share their minds. How much do I care about that? Should I try so much to save them when they are so dedicated to their own demise? How much do I care about another thousand bodies for the Lorylim?’ He growled to himself in the quiet room. ‘A lot. I will not give those things an ounce more influence on the world, if I can deny it to them.’

Thump-Thamb-Thump.

‘Remove them,’ his mind suggested and John stopped.

That was the answer.

If he couldn’t leave them where they were, couldn’t put them inside his organization, didn’t want to exile them and refused to kill them, then the only answer was to isolate them from everything. He had to put them somewhere unreachable. ‘A concentration camp?’ he asked himself. The term had horrible connotations, but it was what it would be: a place where he kept all of the Gestalt members. He didn’t plan to do anything horrible to them, but if they remained in this world, he had to keep them confined and overseen to prevent them from building any mind-linking machines again.

Only if he kept them in this world.

‘Can I channel them into a Kingdom?’ he asked himself. ‘No, no, I can’t. I don’t have reliable access to one, and even if I did, I would have to find an empty one… A regular barrier might do… if I set it up through the I.D. Gate, it would be as secure as it could be and removed from the rest of the world. It also wouldn’t be all that large…’

John looked at the pop-up. It wasn’t the first time a Quest would have taken things from him for completing it. However, it was the most severe one so far. It was also the only way to solve this while avoiding all catastrophes and leaving all parties aside. Historians would, likely, still look at the complete resettling of a guild’s survivors with mixed opinions, at least. Given all of the horrible choices John had at the moment, he was willing to take this path, however. It was the best that could be offered. Nobody else would even have the opportunity. The detriment to his person was something he would take. What were a couple of numbers in exchange for a thousand lives?

He left the room and informed the girls of what he had resolved to do. They listened quietly, following his reasoning and clearly as unhappy as he was that this was the best they could come up with. There was discussion. Then they went to enact the plan.

John negotiated with the apparent leader of the Gestalt. They were distrusting of him but he left them basically no other choice than to agree. Between him telling them they would either have to be eaten by the Lorylim or have their way of life eradicated by Fusion’s laws, they accepted his proposal for ‘resettlement’. A formal contract was signed, transferring all of the Gestalt’s lands to Fusion in exchange for a space where they would be forever left alone. While they technically only stood for the east, the west fell, officially, under their influence as well.

It took two days to move everyone to the newly set-up Illusion Barrier in the I.D. Gate. They moved them through the teleporters, trying to keep this thing out of the public eye as much as possible. It wasn’t outrage John feared, most people would know too little to form an opinion before the process was concluded, but meddling by other officials or the media. He didn’t want to be stuck answering questions before he was done with everything. Still, he let a couple trusted sources attend to eventually testify how the move progressed. Going through all of the troubles of moving them would be partially useless if everybody assumed he had killed them. His conscience would be clean, but his image wouldn’t be, and the Gamer needed both.

The Illusion Barrier he gave them started as a simple green plain. Gnome created small mountains for them, Undine filled in lakes, and together they created forests and fields. John organized some animals. Deer, wolves, rats, cats, butterflies, and whatever else came to mind, just to add more life outside of humans to the surroundings. With magic and force of will, they raised a village into existence for people to live in, organized all of the literature needed to build a magical and a non-magical civilization. In a hurry, they left the raw resources there as well.

By the thirtieth of October, they had done enough. Not by John’s standards, but by the Gestalt, who wanted nothing more but to be rid of the Gamer as quickly as possible and return to their insulated existence. Not knowing what else to do, John left them with the resources he had already organized and finished the Quest by kicking in the door that would have led to that Illusion Barrier. The frame was left empty and no repair alert came.

The Gestalt was gone and they all slept lightly, knowing they had done the least horrible thing they could.