Chương 1022: Day One Thousand And Twenty

Dear Diary, Y'know, at first it weirded me out. The whole 'Revel' thing. In more than just one way, really. Like obviously there's the whole 'right out there in the open', but then I realized that first of all it wasn't really 'out in the open'.

Not only is it indoors, in a place which is functionally my private space at this point, what with there being no other 'love' Goddesses in Phileo of which I'm aware, but also any time my Worshippers needed any kind of privacy I Blended the fuck out of us so they could have it. There's also the lingering puritan thing where I thought my ladies would feel some kinda way, but frankly I think the only one who comes anywhere near 'jealous' is Saffron, and frankly it's not 'jealousy', it's 'greed'.

Which would kinda explain how once she made the emotional connection between a physical connection with me and belonging to her, she went absolutely all in on that shit. I worried about that shit for a bit. I know I joke about her being my tiny Tyrant, but the fact is by nature she has every personality trait that could lead her to being an absolute tyrant of the worst kind. I'd like to think that I've influenced her to be more maternal. That's not to say a mother can't be tyrannical. Far from it.

But nobody's immune to the pressures of their position, and if she sees every fuckin' person in the Alliance as her kid or partner or, y'know, family, that might offset the entire 'Imperator' thing. By family I mean what every decent person I know thinks of as 'family', by the way. Not the folks you're genetically related to, although hopefully they qualify, but the folks who accept you for who you are, the ones who have your back no matter how... No matter how 'you' you wind up getting.

The ones who maybe encourage you to be the best you instead of the worst you, but they're encouraging you to be you, not to be some kind of self-mutilated version of you that meets their approval. Y'know, I think even somebody like Conrad can benefit from that. Yeah, now and then I've had to be more the Matriarch than the Mommy, let him know that I know he's tryna manipulate me to be my worst self, let him know that the more he tries to be his best self the more I'll let him maybe indulge my less awful bad parts.

Shit, if anything he's indulged my bedroom habits most of all, and from everything my ladies tell me, nothing about that is inherently 'bad'. Dark, but as Saffron said, darkness need not be evil. But that gets me back to the other big reason I got weirded out, the whole 'everybody in the Alliance' thing, which, let's face it, it really isn't. It's the people who are working the hardest to bring a better world into being, as envisioned by me and engineered by my Kitten.

The ones who maybe, in another lifetime, I might have hooked up with, stayed with for some length of time even in a mono-normative society, because they're the kind of people I want to be more like, the kind of people who help those around them. Okay, I would if I'd gotten over my entire red flag addiction. Seriously, that dude was hot as fuck, but he was fuckin' made out of red flags.

But the thing is, while there are weeks when my Revels have been very much Dionysian, with everything that implies, at this point there have been just as many where I've spent the bulk of the time just talking with my Worshippers one on one. Listening to what they need, which a lot of the time is just someone in a position of power to listen to them. To treat them as worthy of attention. To see them. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I remember seeing that movie about the shapeshifter chick not long before dickless shot me in the head. That line at the end, 'I see you', that's some powerful shit right there. I get that. I get that so much, because even though I know now that my mom loved me, I also have realized that she didn't see me. Didn't realize that maybe I could have done with a little less cash and a few more memories after she died.

So at any rate I spent yesterday teaching Math to the kiddos at the Temple of Love, not to mention working with Marie on some more pasta. We've gotten a sort of standard mix with our pasta now, a solid marinara sauce, a nice pesto, and a really good garlic butter sauce. For pasta we'd made some gnocchi, the kind made out of potatoes. Marie knew another recipe, and she made me a few. Incredible, the way everything she did was, but mostly we did the potato gnocchi because she wanted to perfect her potato gnocchi.

We also had bear meatballs, because even with a huge portion of the Alliance pitching in, we still hadn't finished eating that fuckin' Kaiju bear in lake Erie. Once we got everything on the big table and the kids were all eating, I dispensed hugs and kisses to the kids and ladies. Where to tonight, ladies? The Temple of Love, Goddess. I stepped there, and Karen greeted me with a hug and those cheek kisses. Ooh, fancy! She chuckled, then waved a hand to the Altar, where Cherry sat, hands around his belly.

Giselle sat next to him, Tabson tucked into one arm, her other hand on Cherry's shoulder. Yeah, no still terrible. I felt bad about that, but it's not like I could do anything about it. Okay, once the kid was old enough to decide he didn't like it, Tallulah and I could fix it, but I wasn't gonna do that before the kid had a chance to decide. His name, after all. I settled in next to Cherry, slipped an arm around him, holding Giselle's arm in place.

"Hey, Cherry, what's up?"

"I'm afraid I might need to stop seeing clients." I hugged him.

"What's wrong?" He sighed.

"I've not been feeling well. Threw up breakfast the last three days running."

"Oof. Morning sickness sucks. Three days?" He nodded.

"Welp. Not much I can do for you." I looked at Karen.

"Did you guys Assess him?" She nodded. Cherry made a little noise, and I turned back to him.

"I... I trust my fellow Clergy, but..." I hugged him.

"Hey, no worries. Hold still." I Assessed him. Siobhan? I felt her looking through my eyes, flipping through the Granular Assessment data. I truly hope he recovers more normally, but his little one is progressing normally.

"Okay, looks like she's coming along just fine, Cherry." He smirked at me.

"He." I laughed, and hugged him.

"Okay, okay, point taken." We talked a while after that. I sang to him, and we talked about the changes his body had gone through. Apparently he'd always been flexible, but his joints had started getting looser. By the middle of the night he was sacked out, and Karen and Giselle carried him off, only to have Wendell take his place.

"Hey, Wendell? Guess what I've been doing?" As he settled onto the Altar next to me, he paused his inevitable info dump of the latest Squadball League information to ask, "what have you been doing, Goddess?" I smiled and watched his eyes light up as I said, "teaching this year's batch of Cadets how to play Squadball." Yeah, I definitely think I like the times like this just as much as the Altar antics.