Chương 1051: Day One Thousand And Forty-Nine

Dear Diary, It's kinda weird. I think I may have spent way too much time with the physical elite here and now. That's not any kind of complaint, mind you. Nor am I using 'elite' in some kind of, y'know, elitist way. Yeah, that's some dumbass shit right there, but what did you really expect from me? At any rate, I mean I spend a lot of my time working with people who have used Mana to enhance themselves in some fashion.

Seriously, it's the only fuckin' thing that makes sense, the thought that even folks who don't really do Shaping are still able to get their physicality to the point where they can survive in pup tents in the snow, or march for days on end without a break, or any of the wacky shit I've seen folks who aren't really top tier do.

Folks who work physical jobs, mind you, those who back in the day would have been the kind of dude everybody got real polite with at the bar when they got drunk, both because if they were showing the drunk they'd had enough to kill small children and pets, and also because they might get annoyed and even the kindest, gentlest giant can still flip your fuckin' Mini Cooper over if you're enough of a dick. The benefits of Saffron being one of those top tier athletes has not been lost on me either.

I commented way early on how boosted Endurance sets the refractory period down to zero, or at least nearly so. Epic makeouts are epic, and being able to just keep going until you need to go to work or sleep is one of those benefits that twelve year old Tomoko inner child me is still giggling about even years after realizing it. The same goes for Marie, only more so.

Apparently while Tallulah hasn't exactly pushed herself to achieve the kind of beyond peak physical condition Saffron has, she's still been around and active for thousands of years, and from what I can tell Mana makes it harder to lose gains. Handy that. So yeah, there's one person conspicuous by her absence in that whole 'superior physical specimen' list there. Siobhan is clearly smarter than average, what with being able to Shape a Global Spell.

Seriously, I know just enough Math now that I've been teaching it to realize exactly how insane keeping the details of that kind of Shape in their head is. At the level they're doing it that kind of Shaping requires knowing both the Mathematics behind the Geometry as well as, y'know, the Shape itself. It's that orbital mechanics thing, sorta.

I mean, it's the whole 'if you're gonna shoot a rocket at the moon, you gotta get the Math right, because one degree off has your astronauts sailing off to never never land or pancaking into a mare' thing. Which isn't exactly orbital mechanics, even if it kind of is. Okay, look, I'm talking about accuracy and precision, not to mention significant digits and shit. Granularity.

Fuck, I know all these words and know what they mean, and I know what I'm talking about, and I think I'm describing it pretty well, but I am both appalled at how much I'm relying on metaphors, which tend to be shaky, surprised at how solid my metaphors seem to be, and wondering if there's now, y'know, a Saturn V Rocket somewhere down in M-Space in Jackville. Fuck it. If there is, he's welcome to it. Maybe if he and Adrienne have a kid they can send her to the moon to get a pet rabbit.

At any rate, Siobhan is way brainier than her quiet nun persona might suggest. She's way, way smarter than her 'treat me like a particularly lifelike sex doll, please' post-deflowering persona would suggest, and she got her Archmage Title well after that. Honestly, I think that might be one of the weirder things here and now, how shit seems to snowball. Like, from what I can tell, the Archmage Title makes folks who do Shaping smarter.

Literally boosts their Reason and Memory; possibly their Personality as well, which would be why they've got the reputation of being able to stand up to Gods. It is indeed. As you learned at one point, the original descriptor of that Attribute was 'Force of Personality', and it's roughly equivalent to physical Strength. Wait, wouldn't that be Reason? As I said, roughly equivalent, but Reason is frankly closer to Agility. Huh. Okay, I can see that. Memory is Endurance?

Something like, although as noted, it's a rough equivalence. Frankly mental Endurance is probably best thought of as split between Memory and Personality. Yeah, I guess there isn't really a one-to-one equivalence. Thanks, Dad. You're the best. I know. At any rate, not long after sunset Siobhan's whole demeanor shifted. Like, not in any kind of possessed angry way, but prior to that she'd been her normal quiet self, interspersed with bouts of agony as contractions took her.

But as I heard the kids trooping into their bedrooms down the hall, she slowly went slack, like she'd sort of stopped trying. She wasn't whimpering or panting with recovery, she just lay there staring at the ceiling. I was about to Assess her, but then another wave of contractions hit, and she curled up, grabbing at my hand and screaming. Then, a few minutes later, she flopped back and stared again. The Assess burned out of my cheek without conscious volition.

It still showed her as 'in labor', but it also listed her as 'Exhausted'.

"Shit, is she gonna be okay?" Canta shook his head, but he said, "so long as you keep feeding her Mana the way you have been, she will survive, but this... This may take a toll on her Mind."

"Fuck." I sighed.

"You're sure about, y'know...?" He nodded.

"Beyond my normal hesitation, she has yet to fully recover from the injury that Spartan caused." Normally Canta spoke with the kind of even tones I'd come to expect from Siobhan herself, but the way he hissed 'Spartan' sounded like Siobhan talking about Trease when she thought nobody could hear.

"I worry that it might cause her some permanent injury to her core should we make an incision."

"Fuck," I repeated.

"Okay." I slipped more Mana into her via a slow rolled Stabilize to the back of her neck. As I did, I leaned in and whispered, "you gonna be okay, Darling?" The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. I was not copacetic about her not replying. She just lay there staring at the ceiling. Then she whimpered a little, and another contraction hit.

I realized right then that she'd been in labor for nearly forty-eight hours, and if there might be an end in sight at some point, what with her dilating what Canta called 'normally', she'd been awake for nearly seventy-two, and her last night of sleep had been at Lindsey's camp. Not the most restful night's sleep. At one point some time more than halfway through the night, after a particularly intense set of contractions, she blinked and said, "Tabitha? Saffron? Marie?" We all clustered around her.

"We're here, Ice Pop."

"Not..." She trailed off. After a few minutes, she said, "not..." again. A few minutes more and she groaned out, "NOT cool!" before another wave of contractions hit her. When they passed, she flopped back and stared at the ceiling again, catatonic or dissociating or whatever again. A while after sunrise, with Marie sitting next to Siobhan holding her hand while I fetched water, Canta pulled me aside and murmured, "I have news."

"I'd ask good or bad, but you'd have said if it was good." He shook his head.

"No, actually. My news is mixed. Siobhan's birth canal is fully dilated now. The child is moving further into it with each contraction." I frowned.

"Okay, which means the bad news is really bad. Hit me." He took a deep breath, and I realized he was worried I'd take the news out on him. I reached around him with arms and tentacles, hugging him gently.

"Look, dude, you did not do this to her. Didn't get her pregnant, didn't stab her so we can't do the C-Section thing, didn't make it take over a year of puking to get to this point. I'm not mad at you."

"You've been up as long as she has. Longer. I... Had concerns about that." I snorted.

"Once she's recovered I'll tell you all about welding Jackville back together. That shit took, I dunno, like a fuckin' week relative, and I wasn't just standing still the whole time. Seriously, I'm in need of a bath and maybe a drink and hopefully some mutually decompressing alone time with the ladies including our new mom to be, but I'm not gonna go off."

"Even if the Spartan were here now?"

"I might forget how bad he was gonna taste and yeet that asshole into my Maw, but I'm focused on Siobhan right now." He looked me in the eyes for a bit, reminding me of Grandma Aetos the night Saffron and I were married. After a bit, he nodded, then murmured, "the baby is both breach and tangled in the umbilical cord." I panicked, but forced myself to freeze rather than doing something stupid.

"Is Siobean okay?" He rocked his to the side.

"At the moment, yes, but should she move much further into the canal she might not be."

"Fuck. What do we do?" He took a deep breath.

"This is a situation I might, possibly, try to cut the child free, but as I noted, that is not an option. With that said, I would try to reach in and correct the child's orientation while untangling her, but..." He slumped, looking down at his hands.

"I fear even fully dilated she is too small, and my hands..." He snorted.

"I am seen as 'unmanly' by some for my gracile hands, yet here when I might wish they were even more so, I realize that they are still too large."

"Mine aren't." Saffron was just there, looking up at Canta.

"What do I..." I touched her shoulder.

"No, Kitten." She shot me a look, and I shook my head.

"Your hands are little, yeah, but..." I cocooned her in hair fine, semi-corporeal tentacles.

"I think I've got an edge here." She slumped into the embrace of my tentacles, and tears leaked from her eyes.

"Save them, Goof?" I pulled her into a hug. Kissed her forehead.

"Okay. Need you to maybe keep me grounded and keep her still. Okay?" Saffron nodded, and I turned to Canta.

"Kid's supposed to be head first into the internal end of the vajayjay right?" He mouthed the word 'vajayjay', nose crinkling up, but nodded.

"Cord's supposed to be dangling behind her between her legs?" He took another deep breath.

"That will do nicely if you can."

"Okay then. Help Marie and Saffron hold her still." He nodded, and the two of them stepped back over to Siobhan, who groaned her way through another contraction. I got myself into the catcher position, at which point I kinda saw what looked like two little butt cheeks at the far end of Siobhan's baby ejection port. I realized right then what I had to do, what with my Darling being, like most people, entirely opaque.

I leaned my hands on the bed between her legs, just in case Siobean came out at speed, then closed my eyes. I focused on my tentacles. Not the big ones, thankfully, but I still remembered that weird dysphoric dissociation that happened when I went looking for the Kaiju. I slipped dozens of tentacles ranging in size from hair fine to pencil thick into Siobhan's birth canal, feeling my way. Okay, I wasn't feeling my way. I realized right then, I could kind of see.

I was forcibly reminded once again where my wireframe vision came from, how I see without light when I step outside of time. I'm not 'seeing', or doing anything so crude as detecting moving particles. I just... Know where things are around me, whether it's walls, furniture, people, or body parts. When I'm not doing it with my eyes, it's even panoramic. Three hundred and sixty-five degrees. Which is not what my Mind is set up to receive, which left me going even slower.

Like, once I got in contact with everything I could see if I opened my eyes, glacially slowly. When I took hold of Siobean and the bit of Siobhan she intended to go through and pushed the little one back inside just enough to reposition her, Darling gasped, then groaned.

"This might hurt a little. I'm sorry." I didn't think she'd hear me, but she had just enough coherence at that moment to hiss back, "do it. Save her." I'm gonna save both of you, Siobhan Darling. At that point she kind of thought back something weird that sounded like 'Goddess', 'Mistress', and 'Tabitha' all at once. Like she wasn't thinking a word, just thinking... me. Her mental image of me, but as a single amalgam word.

When I recovered from that, I slipped another tentacle along her spine, then shaped a constant slow Stabilizing current of Mana into the spot where her spine met her skull. Then I got back to work. I spread her further open, and tried to ignore it when she groaned, then screamed during the next contraction when I refused to let anything contract. I even spread everything inside apart just the tiniest bit to give me room to untangle Siobean's cord.

Slowly, carefully, working with senses that confused me so badly I might as well be blind, I unwrapped Siobean's cord from around her. It wasn't just around her neck; she'd practically mummified herself with it, wrapping it around herself over and over, like she'd been spinning in circles like some kinda slow motion break dancer. We were not naming Siobean Ray-Gun, either. I lost track of time.

Time wasn't important, just that steady flow of Mana keeping Siobhan stable, another even tinier one I slipped up into Siobean as I worked, and slowly, gently turning her around so the top of her head pointed at the escape hatch. It did not help that the moment I slipped her butt far enough out of said escape hatch, gooey fluid sluiced out, giving everything roughly the same coefficient of friction as a slick surfaced stress ball coated in a quarter inch of Astro-glide. It took forever. I didn't care.

I think at some point Siobhan screamed herself hoarse during the contractions. I know that during one, she started twisting like she wanted to move herself, and I cocooned her in tentacles and refused to let her move. Finally, after some length of time I could only judge based on my ability to do basic math and the fact that the sun had just touched the horizon, Siobean's cord dangled back between her legs, and her head pressed against the inside of Siobhan's birth canal.

"Darling?" Siobhan? She made some kind of rasping groan, but since she hadn't made any noise previous, I figured she was listening.

"On this next contraction, I'm gonna push you just a little more open. It's gonna maybe hurt like a bitch, but I need you to push as hard as you can when it happens. Okay?" She grunted again. Canta asked, "is it done?" I opened my eyes, because at this point I needed to be ready to catch.

"As ready as I can make her. It's time for Siobean to join us all out here in the world outside Siobhan."