Chương 1034: Day One Thousand And Thirty-Two

Dear Diary, Went Scrying for birthday presents for Ria and Lindsey, and while I was doing so I spotted something that wound up kinda blowing my mind. In case it's not readily apparent, I tend to wind up Scrying on a lot of people searching the internet for shit I'm looking for.

If you've never wound up getting sucked into a Wikisurf or delved into the bottomless labyrinth that is TV Tropes, that shit is impossible to get away from when it's my hand on the mouse, which makes it especially bad when it's not even my fuckin' finger doing the clicking. So I wind up seeing a lot of random bullshit before finding what I want, especially if 'what I want' isn't some show on a streaming service.

Honestly, the few times I've done that I've learned to Scry for somebody hoping to Netflix and Chill because they always leave that shit running in the background instead of fast forwarding or pausing or doing any one of the million other things that are a pain in the ass if you don't have control of the feed.

At any rate, I caught a glimpse of an old Tumblr post that talked about how people have a tendency to want really awful punishments for their enemies, but are cool with their friends getting slaps on the wrist. At the same time, when they want a 'better world for everyone', they tend to leave the folks they don't like out of that equation. The post went on to point out that doing shit like that is fundamentally unfair and unjust, since everybody is on somebody's shit list.

Like, I'm sure Bob Ross, Keanu Reeves, Fred Rogers, Dolly Parton, and even fuckin' Elmo are on somebody's shit list. Okay, Elmo I can understand, but the others are just overall awesome, but there are folks who don't like them for no good goddamned reason whatsoever. Which means if only the people who everybody likes get a good life, then nobody does. The flip side is also true. Everybody is somebody's fetish.

Ain't nobody in the world, even the most heinous villains, who doesn't have at least one person who gets warm fuzzies in head, heart, and hinterlands when they think of them. Which means that if Serious Consequences are only for people nobody likes, ain't nobody gonna suffer those consequences. Now, I get that there have to be consequences.

I get that I am often the person who has to dish out those consequences, and sometimes those consequences need to be pretty fuckin' severe, because the people doing the bullshit that deserve consequences are in fact millennia old and haven't had a single person hold them accountable in all that time. But I can't just shit on the people I don't like and call it a day, because something makes me seriously suspect that's just another path to shit pyramid, only with different people at the top.

Given the nature of shit pyramid, I think eventually those same assholes, or other assholes indistinguishable from them, will wind up on top. Yeah, deep, heavy thoughts when I'm just looking for some nice camping gear or gadgets, and maybe something artsy or martial without being martial artsy for Ria. Hand fighting really doesn't seem to be her thing. But here's the thing, I am the biggest and strongest. I have a Duty of Care to spend what time I can thinking about shit like that.

Maybe to grab the worst of the worst and put them in time out for a while until they decide to stop being awful, or at least learn to be awful in socially acceptable ways. Which, now that I say it out loud, just sounds like a recipe for the kind of disaster I grew up in, but again, that's why I talk this shit out. So yesterday after teaching Math all day and getting some info on what Lindsey wanted for her party I came home to Marie having set up a whole assed buffet of salad.

Like one of those 'salad bar' things in the better class of diner from back in the day. Well, fancier class of diner, since most of them were old as fuck before I ever got to see one, and it wasn't the kind of age that made things seem classier, just shabbier. At any rate, the kits looked like they felt some kinda way until they realized that along with all different kinds of leaves and chopped veggies, there were also bowls of chicken, tuna, and egg salad.

Their former feels got spread amongst all the girls when they realized the Mom Collective was insistent on each of them getting some veggies along with their protein, or protein along with their veggies. We're not draconian about it, but we do try to get them to eat sorta balanced diets. It helps that Isadora is copacetic with following whatever rules we put in place, and Isnomi will be an absolute little dictator when it comes to rules designed to ensure health, welfare, or safety.

Between the Moms watching openly and the social pressure from their sisters, even Alex, Anise, and Felicia managed to get something looking like an actual salad. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. Okay, Ria and Lindsey both leaned heavy into the egg and tuna respectively for protein, and Anise looked put out when Felicia figured out the trick of glopping lots of creamy dressing over her veggies.

Not enough to not copy her, but Anise always looks put out when she 'has' to copy Felicia instead of the other way around. Weird, but even after the whole naked pizza debacle where everybody wound up covered in food, I think finger foods wind up being overall less messy for our girls. Maybe we've spoiled them a little with so many things they can just pick up and eat, especially the kits, because they're not the greatest when it comes to utensil use.

Then again, while we have a more or less complete 'spoon, knife, fork, chopstick' utensil set for anyone who wants to use it, we mostly have the spoons out, because in a pinch fingers can substitute for everything except a spoon. Okay, you can scoop up soup with your hands, but even our little savages aren't likely to do that. They're way more likely just to pick up the bowl and drink it. At any rate, showers took longer than normal, and I noodled around a bit helping the kits get themselves fully cleaned off.

Kinda weird thing about that, while a couple of the kits with thicker fur have the uncanny valley thing going on like Marie, with most of them it's way less pronounced. Of course, even with her she winds up staying in that mode way less, because while her fur and hair does kinda stiffen up into weird, unsettling patterns when it dries, crunching it out and running a comb or brush through it clears that right up.

Amazing how basic self-care can alter how others see us, and how we see ourselves can affect whether we take the time for that or not. Once the kids were in bed the rest of us bounced to the Bedroom. I brought a whole assed set of brushes and combs, and the four of us quadruple teamed our Marvelous Maenad Maid Murder Mittens Marie. With combs and brushes, until she melted into a purring gooey mess.

Not sure how, but she managed to keep Siobhan from going all wretched and retching by dint of making biscuits on her belly. Not ungently, and I'm pretty sure I saw the Siobean pushing back out the few times her paws left Siobhan's belly. Dreamt of our Marie getting the zoomies in my Maw. Just darting around, knocking everybody else under. Fuckin' hilarious. Dinner and a show.

After working the Phileo Cadets hard on Monday, then showing them how much they'd progressed by pointing out they were ready to do it again at the end of the day, I figured I needed to do something like that for the Cadets from the Yards. Of course, they've had that 'keep going no matter what' grit from the day they started, so I needed something different.

With that in mind, I maybe kinda sorta pilfered the Phileo weight set and set it out in the Camden Practice Yard, just all piled up like a little metal mountain. The one from the Yards looked remarkably similar, just maybe newer yet somehow cheaper looking, like whoever'd made it wasn't a thousand year old smith who'd made replacements dozens of times over the past couple hundred years. We did a lot of basic shit, but I focused on their lifting, because that's what they'd had the most problem with at the beginning.

Every time some Cadet finished a set, I'd surreptitiously drop a duplicate weight in a separate pile. By the end of the day, all of them had noticed that the new pile was like a dozen times the size of the old one. Around midafternoon, a Cadet raised her hand. One of the Obols, not Bonnie's sister.

"What's up, Cadet?"

"What's with the weight pile, Ma'am?" I smiled, then gathered them up into formation, looking at both piles.

"You all hear Cadet Obol's question?" They all shouted in the affirmative.

"You see the pile on the left?" Another round off 'yes, ma'am'.

"That's how much you guys lifted the first day I showed up. I pushed you guys to collapse, mostly, and that's all you did." I paused enough to let them soak that in.

"You guys feel like you're done for the day yet?"

"Ma'am, Yes Ma'am!" shouted the Obol who'd asked the question. Everybody in the Yard turned to stare at her incredulously. She smiled and shrugged.

"What? Not like she wasn't gonna run us ragged until sunset anyhow, and I figured maybe she'd send us in early." I didn't think anybody but me picked up her muttered, "maybe me at least," but I still laughed.

"Okay, Cadets. She's not wrong. Get your asses out there, let's see if you can't make this pile even bigger before dinner!" Yeah, there were groans and some good natured sniping. I even let them go as they tapped out during the last round of reps. All except Cadet Smartass Obol. She got dinner last. Not because of her initial comment, but because of the last one. Tryna slack is as old as the military and the hood combined, and ain't nothing I can do to eradicate that.

On the other hand, tryna slack while your buddies get the work done is just not in it.