Chương 1028: Day One Thousand And Twenty-Six

Dear Diary, I know I've mentioned this before, but one of the worst parts about chronic mental illness and self improvement is how it's a perpetual process, with almost no visible results. Seriously, I get it, there are results, I know there are results, with fuckin' Status and shit I can, if I remember and choose to employ it, see numerical evidence of those results.

But unlike some of the less pleasant domestic tasks I've undertaken, like washing bedding and undergarments, I do not have a pile of clean bedding and undergarments when I'm done a therapy session. Or when I do some kind of self-reflection like I do on the regular here in my Diary. That can make it feel like I'm never making any progress. Never getting better. Like I'm a constant, unmitigated disappointment to the wonderful women I've surrounded myself with. Listen to me, talking about 'mental illness'.

I mean, yeah, that's what chronic depression is. It's a chronic illness, and it's a mental thing. Fuck if I know if that technically qualifies as 'mental illness' or not, but some days I really think it fuckin' ought to. Thing is, it can strike whenever it fuckin' feels like it, and there's jack all I can do about it. Okay, that's not exactly precisely true. I've noticed a few triggers, I think. I've realized that the more triggers I set off, the worse the eventual crash is gonna be.

I know that the longer I go between bouts of depression, the worse the eventual depression is. I think that's what accidentally happened back at Yule. Everybody, and I'm including me in this, did a bunch of shit to make me feel better, to 'fortify' me for the big reveal in my Status, which nobody really knew was coming. Okay, I know Dad and Saffron knew what my Domain was, and they were right to worry about how it would affect me, even if maybe with the best of intentions they chose the worst way to prep me.

Like, I think if they'd told me, I wouldn't have believed them, or I'd have felt some kinda way, but when I saw the proof it wouldn't have been nearly so much of a shock. The fact that it came after the bigger shock of there being no Big Black to influence me, that I was responsible for all the fucked up impulses I've had over my time here, that just coated it in hot sauce for extra damage.

Fuck, if I ever see Paul Rudd in a red suit near a Crossbow, I'm gonna be hard pressed not to yeet his ass into the sun and claim self-defense. At any rate, chronic depression is chronic, and chronic pain can make that chronic depression worse, and both of them can combine to make the Sisyphean task of pursuing mental health feel even harder, even less rewarding.

I never really got into the habit of checking my Status the way some of the Cadets in Physical Training seem to, the way they make a big deal out of each and every point of improvement. Once Saffron asked me not to do it, I think I got into the habit of not checking it, which is like a step further from checking that shit on the regular.

Honestly, given where my Attributes are at, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to see much improvement in my Skills short of getting rid of whatever debuff being a 'Young' Adult lays on them. I think I may have plateaued on a lot of that shit. That's the reason not to use Strong Arm while doing Strength training, by the way.

Apparently if somebody tries to train both at the same time, they plateau both of them simultaneously at roughly half what they'd each individually plateau at, leaving that person with one quarter the effective Strength. Given how much combat here and now frequently boils down to 'bigger stronger fighter wins', that's a serious problem.

Yeah, I know, Larry and I have kinda moved things toward speed and creative tactical thinking, but Lachlan is still a fuckin' beast, and Murder Mittens executed a half dozen High Priests of Ares using nothing but her murder mittens and boundless rage.

So yeah, my chronic health issues, physical and mental alike, make it hard to keep pushing when I don't see progress, and I think I've wound up making progress without actually clocking it, leaving me plateaued and thinking that I'll never improve when I am, in fact, better than almost anyone I'll ever meet at anything I've focused on training. Seriously, out at the edges of my tentacles' reach, I had trouble overpowering kaiju. Not 'couldn't do it', but 'had to exert myself'.

I've fallen from low orbit and came back from that shit. I've had Primordial Gods and Dragons try to overpower me and find out that they could not, in fact, do that. Leave it to my Murder Mittens to show me, without a shadow of a doubt, that I have in fact learned. Grown. Changed, in maybe the best way I can think of. I definitely shall do that, Daughter. My Daughter-In-Law is old and wise and loves you very much; I will place my trust in her. Thanks Dad. You're the best.

I think your Wife may in fact hold that title now, and I do not regret that in the slightest. So yeah, yesterday Marie laid out a metric fuckton of ingredients, then stepped back and did the Morpheus 'show me'. Fuck, I hadn't even bragged about knowing kitchen fu. So I wound up having her fetch butter and flour before I started anything else. While she did that I cleaned up the root vegetables and set them to roasting in the oven.

By the time she got back, I had the onions chopped up, and I set her to chopping the garlic and leeks while I caramelized the onions. I've learned a few tricks to make them caramelize faster, or shit like dark vinegars that kinda fake the process, but nothing beats just sauteing them long and slow. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

I added in the garlic and leeks as they started to get that nice brown color; meanwhile I had Marie go fetch cream and tomatoes. Felt a little silly when I asked her to make them into paste for me, because that shit's time consuming, at which point I realized she'd made and stored some tomato paste when she pulled it out and handed it to me. So I sent her to get some mead from Devorah. Normal mead, not the jars of seduction from Yule.

Once I had the aromatics all sauteed, then stirred up with tomato paste and mead, because I prefer the taste of honey to grapes, I set that off to simmer, had Marie start making pastry dough with the flour and some of the butter, and pulled the root vegetables out and put the meat in to slow roast a while. Okay, I didn't do that to the fish, because I'm not an idiot. I did have everything in covered crocks to keep it from drying out.

While Marie got her pastry dough on and the meat roasted, I turned the potatoes, yams, and carrots into thick, creamy mashed potatoes, mashed yams, and mashed carrots. Marie showed me a trick to that, where you squeeze a little of the liquid out of the carrots before you do the mashing, so they don't come out watery.

I put that liquid in a pot and simmered it down while I worked on the potatoes and yams; I wanted to keep the mashed carrots from being watery, but I didn't want to lose any of that carrot flavor, so I cooked it down, then added it back in while mashing them. Well, turning them into 'mashed carrots'. The process has less to do with mashing and more with a kind of constant whipping, almost like making whipped cream.

Kinda wish I could get Alton Brown to talk about that, because I know I'm using something like whipping cream, so I'm wondering if the end product has anything to do with whipped cream. Anyhow, put the rolled out pastry dough into a bunch of little ceramic pie dish things. Yeah, my kitchen vocabulary sucks, because Marie is not exactly loquacious. But I put the pastry dough into those, weighted it down with beans, and swapped those into the ovens when I pulled the roasted meat out.

Tossed the fish in as well, because it didn't need as much time to get where I wanted it. Broke the meat up into bite sized shreds and chunks, pulled out any questionable bouncy bits while I did so, and mixed it in with the sauteed vegetables, added the corn in along with some soup stock I raided from Marie's stores, and some cream to thicken it up a little. While that simmered I got all the mashed root vegetables into piping bags.

Pulled the pie crusts, did the thick soup stew filling thing with the fish, then filled each of the pie crusts with the meat and veg filing. Before anything could get cool, not that anything could with us having cooked in the kitchen most of the day by that point, I piped alternating stripes of mashed potato, yam, and carrot on top of the filling. Got Marie to melt some more butter while I did that, and painted that shit onto the top of the mashed root veggies.

I did different patterns for the different meats; swirls, stripes, concentric circles, I managed to keep them all distinct and separate. Because I knew my girls, and I'd made three dozen pies just a little bigger than what I'd think of as 'single serving', because my girls were active and growing and while they didn't eat like me at the Academy, they certainly ate the way I did when I was 'food insecure' back in the day.

Okay, they didn't bite each other's hands, and they shared, but the overall volume of food compared was similar. One last trip into the oven, at which point I kinda slumped back against the counter. Marie looked over at me.

"Pies?"

"Yeah. Do you think I messed stuff up?" She did that cat ooze thing over to me, wrapped herself around me, and said, "Smells Divine." I'd been tasting and sniffing stuff all day long, but it had been, y'know, just making sure the spices and herbs and shit were what I wanted, what needed to be added. I hadn't taken in the smell of the kitchen as a whole. I took a deep breath though my nose, and my mouth watered while my stomach rumbled.

"What... Did you make something?" She flicked me on the back of the skull with a claw.

"You Did." Kinda funny, I'd never realized before, but somehow things we made in Marie's Kitchen always finished cooking right at dinner time. I scooped everything out of the ovens and, scooping Murder Mittens up as well, carried all of the bubbling, crusty pies out to set them on the big dining table.

"Careful, girls. They're hot." Isnomi hopped up to look, then got a kind of weird look on her face.

"Whud awe dey?" I shrugged.

"I know Marie's made meat pastries before."

"Dath nod Mawee's mead pathdee." I sighed.

"Yeah, I know." I looked over the pies, thinking.

"The ones with swirls are fish, the ones with stripes are bear, the ones with potato circles on the outside are chicken, the yam circles on the outside are pork, and the outside carrot circles are beef." I had a thought, Co-Located to the linen closet, and came back with two dozen small towels.

"Here you go, kids. Be careful, they're hot." Maze chuckled, using a towel to pick up one of the swirled pies.

"You mentioned." Saffron and Tallulah returned from their day working right about then, and Saffron said, "those smell heavenly."

"Got a meat preference?"

"Yes, I would like one with meat." I chuckled, waited for all the kids to get their pies, then pulled one for each of my ladies. I grabbed a beef one for me, bear for Siobhan, fish for Tallulah, pork for Saffron, and chicken for Marie. Then I settled down and tapped at the crust with my spoon.

"Well, the texture seems right at least." It had that pastry-like crispy crunch that butter fried potatoes could get, which is what I'd been trying for. At least one thing went right. I realized right then that I was spiraling, although I wasn't crashing at least. Right about then the kids started making nom noises, and Saffron got a mouthful of her pie.

"Omigod, this is heavenly, Marie. You've outdone yourself. Quite possibly one of the finest things you've made since we moved in here." My marvelous Maenad just smiled at me, shook her head and said, "Tabitha Cooked." I didn't even think about what I was doing as I kinda hunched under the smiles directed toward me. I punched my spoon through the crust, filled it with a bit of bottom crust, a bit of top, and a generous helping of the filling.

I'm really glad that 'burning my mouth' is no longer really an option for normal Mortal foodstuffs, because it definitely was 'scald my mouth' hot. Then the flavors hit. As we all floated in the Bath in various stages of food coma later, I realized I'd snarfed the whole fuckin' pie without pausing to drink any water or talk or even breathe, I don't think. I languidly looked over at Marie.

"Did... Did you trick me into making that?" She shook her head.

"All You." I just sat there while my ladies made appreciative noises I'd only heard before in the Bedroom. My mouth worked, but no sound came out. I'd made that. I'd done that. I really needed to look at the details on my Skills, I think. Right as I realized that, Marie snuggled in beneath me in the Bath, the fur around her lips tickling my ear as she whispered, "My Vlickies." Then, right after that, "Kitchen Witch."