Chương 1056: Day One Thousand And Fifty-Four

Dear Diary, I don't know quite how to parse something what got illustrated to me today. So many ways I could interpret what was shoved in my face. So many feels vying for my attention, all of them trying to be the One True Feel. Like, the simple fact that got dropped on me is that despite my High Clergy being able to grant themselves anything that might be called a 'power of Tabitha Diaz' or 'power of Mimic' as a Boon, they are still not me.

I really do forget that, because so much of what I do isn't core to my physical or mental being. It's Skills and Shapes and Spells that I know how to do, either because I learned them the hard way in the Practice Yard, Mimicked them from somebody I was fighting, or got them the easy way by getting them as a Boon from Dad. For what it's worth, I think there's actually some amount of Skill gain going on even with Boons and Mimicked Skills.

I've gotten better at Translocating and Co-Locating both, which even if they're really the same Skill or Shape or Spell or whatever, each one has got some interesting weird features that require getting used to. I'm to the point now that I don't even really feel it when I Co-Locate near myself.

I mean, if I pay attention, I can still tell there's feedback, and I'm pretty sure if I did another Battle of the Walls situation where there were two thousand of me in one spot I might wind up with the kind of migraine that makes Sparagmos seem like an option. Also I think I can hop around carrying a lot more than I used to, although I'm not sure if that's being more Skilled, my Strength being higher, or some kind of combination of both. At any rate, none of those are my basic Attributes.

My ladies might be able to grab some portion of my Strong Arm Skill to boost their Strength, but they don't have the kind of leverage the tentacle tip of a continental mass has. Yeah, sometimes I have granularity problems, but I don't think mobile things I can't lift exist. Shit, I lifted Florida. That's not generally listed as 'mobile', even if a lot of the homes there were back in the day. But I'm also one tiny part of something that has more ability to absorb damage than most small municipalities.

I'm not sure what would happen if the part of me that I think of as 'me' took enough hurt to vaporize me, but... Honestly, I've got more than a strong suspicion that some other part of me would just start Blending itself into the me that I think of as me. It would explain why I can take lethal hits while Co-Located without more than, y'know, agonizing pain at the worst. Don't get me wrong, agonizing pain is agonizing, possibly even incapacitating, but it's not, y'know, lethal.

Even when talking about the category of beings known as Deities, I'm way less Mortal than most. That's another of the feels. The first one would be how my ladies aren't really replacements for me. Yeah, they can fill in for me like Karen did for the past week, and they're definitely able to solve a lot of problems without my direct intervention, but at the end of the day they're not me. Which is a mixed blessing, really. Despite all the improvements I've had, I still have only one Mind.

Only one 'me' spread out across however many bodies, and that can be a problem when there's more than one 'only I can fix it' problem occurring at the same time. Yeah, it's nice to be wanted, but being needed is... Holy fuck I'd rather be wanted than needed, even if being needed is safer. I also think I just realized the possibly subconscious reason the Deities of the Pact have acted the way they've done for so long. Their motivation, even if they've never said it aloud.

They feel safer being needed than wanted, and they're too terrified to take the risk of not being wanted, so they've gone with being needed. At any rate, the 'other' feel is that I'm not... Not Human. I guess I'm still Human Adjacent, sort of, for a broad enough definition of Human Adjacent. Fuck, I think if Sister wanted, she could Shapeshift or Mimic a Human and walk around looking Human, so I'm at least as Human Adjacent as the Kraken.

I'm trying real hard right now to forget how often I've classified my Kraken as 'people, but not really Human Adjacent'. So yeah. Needed, not wanted, despite how I'd like to be wanted rather than needed. Not Mortal, not even as Mortal as the other Deities here and now, which might explain why I tend to classify them as 'Mortal'. Not Human, and barely Human Adjacent. The final thing that's pulling at me is one that I don't want to admit, one that I'm still looking for the logical loophole to get out of.

I'm better than them. No, no, not 'better'. That's the thing I'm trying to avoid, the thing that feels awful even to think in the privacy of my own Diary. I'm not 'better'. I'm more than them. In that classification of 'need versus want', I want my ladies. My people rely on them. But there are a lot of them, and their innate skill sets overlap a lot. If any of my ladies died and couldn't be brought back, or didn't want to or whatever, somebody else could step up.

If something like that happened to me, I'm not sure anyone could. I know Saffron would try. Loki might too. Hopefully Hades and Hel would follow his lead. Marie's a Deity, but she's purely a Demigoddess, not really able to affect things at a regional level, let alone a global one. Conrad is pretty powerful now, but I'm not sure he'd do more than avenge me. Domnu... Shit, I'm not sure if she's learning to be a better person, or if she's just afraid of my coring tentacles.

I'd like to think the former, but I can't forget the fact that up until I implanted those in her, she was trying to kill me. Okay, there was a brief 'run away so she could come back and kill me later' moment, but mostly trying to kill me. I really don't want to think about how the top choice for my replacement is my three year old daughter.

On the one hand, she can in theory literally copy everything I can do since I am, in fact, a predator, not to mention how she can use all the abilities of every predator that ever was or wasn't, which really ought to terrify anybody who's ever seen any fiction from back in the day. Shit, I'm pretty sure she could fly if she somehow learned of the existence of Sharknado. Which I no longer want to think about. But my point here is that I'm more than them. Heh. Mor.

But my point, which I keep evading, is how I don't want to start thinking of myself as 'better' in any kind of moral sense. Bigger, stronger, faster, tougher, sure. So much so that I'm hard to replace, but just because I've got the bully pulpit doesn't mean I've got a sermon worth preaching. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. At any rate, yesterday around sunset Madeline called for aid, and here and now's version of Sauron answered. Fuck, no, I think I might be Morgoth.

Anyway, I thought back, coming! and immediately started to step to her. Weirdest thing, while my connection to my ladies is apparently really fuckin' hard to sever short of one of us doing so, apparently one of them Blending hard enough will maybe redirect me, because when I reached out to Translocate to her, not only did I feel her Blending for all she was worth, not to mention something else tryna interfere with that, she also managed to redirect me to another of her, because she was Co-Located herself.

I landed slightly off balance on the slope beside the Altar in Norfolk. Madeline knelt in front of the Altar, elbows resting on the padded surface, hands clasped before her in a position of prayerful supplication.

"I'm here!" I knelt next to her, putting an arm around her so she'd know I'd arrived, that I'd come to her in her hour of need. The moment I touched her, the tension holding her rigid drained out of her. Power poured from me to her, pulled from me by her desperate need. I'd done that trick so many times, pulling Mana into myself, then handing it off to another Co-Located me, because all of me are still me. She Shaped... Translocated... Collapsed back into one of her. Tried to, at any rate.

"Catch me, Goddess," she whispered, and before I could see through her eyes to find out why she'd called me, pain ripped through both of us. I do not know what it says about me that I recognized that particular agony. Translocation while pinned in place by Cold Iron. Technically not possible, but if you pour enough Mana into any Shape being impeded by Cold Iron, it heats up. Denatures. Becomes just plain regular iron. Of course, it also fuckin' melts. Or nearly so, at any rate.

It gets hot enough fast enough that it causes a steam explosion, or something so fuckin' similar and painful that I'm calling it a steam explosion and will only take notes from anyone who has also experienced that particular sensation. Which now included Madeline. She convulsed, throwing herself out of my arms as she went stiff as a board, then dropped, limp, atop my Altar, where she lay staring sightlessly at the night sky.

"Fuck." Madeline's down! Saffron's reply came back oddly, infuriatingly cold. Ask her about the Sneaking. How? Her Soul will not wander, love. She waits for you wherever she fell. Yeah, I may have panicked looking at a dead Priestess. A dead friend, with no enemy there for me to vent my rage upon. Saffron's calm comment shook me out of that, and I grabbed Madeline's body and stepped to M-Space. Where she sat on my Altar, shivering, arms wrapped around her knees.

When she saw me arrive, the tension dropped out of her again, like my very presence comforted her.

"Goddess." I laid her corpse behind her, then sat down next to her, pulling her into my arms.

"I'm here. It's gonna be all right."

"Because you're here?"

"Damn straight, Mads." She snorted, chuckled, sobbed, then buried her face in my chest, weeping.

"Goddess. Oh, Goddess. Oh, Goddess, how do you deal with that?" I shook my head, not really getting what she meant. Okay, I had a guess.

"Yeah, Translocating with Cold Iron in you is a stone bitch." She pulled away, staring at me, mouth dropping open, shock at my apparent lack of clues breaking her out of her sobbing.

"I meant dying. Although you're not wrong in any particular." I hugged her, chuckling ruefully.

"Yeah. Dying sucks too, but there's dying and there's dying. On a one to ten scale, where one is dying so fast it's painless and ten is getting slowly smeared across a slate rooftop by a size fuck me boot on my chest, dying from Cold Iron Translocation meltdown has to be an eight, minimum." Still sniffling a little even as she snorted out a laugh at my whole rating scale, she managed to force out, "what about multiple Cold Iron weapons?"

"Oh, shit. Somebody stabbed you with one of those fuckin' things?" She paused, thinking.

"Three, I think."

"You don't know how many times you were stabbed?" She shook her head.

"Not sure if they were all Cold Iron."

"Oh, yeah. That's a nine, easy. Maybe even a ten." Then I thought about what I'd just said and sobered suddenly.

"Who did that to you." Goddess? The Sneaking? By the way Madeline looked almost nauseous from trying not to answer me without thinking, I realized why.

"Saffron had you doing some clandestine shit?" She nodded.

"Is the Sneaking okay?" She shrugged, shaking her head, but said, "when last I left her she was fine." Sneaking was fine last Mads saw her. Opsec? Indeed. Thank you, Goddess. You need a report from Mads? Is she in any condition to do so? I focused on Madeline, who'd gone silent as I communicated with Saffron.

"So. You don't have any Cold Iron on this you, do you?" She shook her head.

"Of course not, Goddess." After a pause she added, "I do have my old Cold Iron shirt from when I fought for Calverton, but," she shrugged.

"It's rarely worth the trouble. I keep it more out of sentiment than anything." I nodded.

"Fair. Okay." I thought about my High Priestess. The second one who'd been mine. Not Mimic mine, but Tabitha mine. Who'd become one because she didn't feel worthy of life itself, but didn't want to off herself.

"So."

"So?" I nodded toward her corpse.

"You've got a choice to make." When she tilted her head and looked at me curiously, I explained.

"You died. Died doing shit to help the Alliance, I'm guessing." She opened her mouth, but I shook my head.

"Saffron will tell me what I need to know when I need to know it. For now, though, you died, and not in any kind of way that would leave me pissed at you." I paused a moment.

"Shit, probably doing something that counts as Heroic. So, y'know, you have the option, if you want, of Hel, or Hades, or I will absolutely kick the shit out of whoever I have to in order to get you a spot in the Elysian Fields." After a quick pause, I added, "I'll even make you something custom, although I'm really not sure how to do that shit. Or you could stay on the Altar and rest up for as long as you need to decide." She sighed, a weird thing for someone who didn't need to breathe, then sagged into my arms.

"So... I am not to be Revived?" I shrugged.

"That depends entirely on you. Do you want to live?"

"Of course I want... To..."

"Even knowing that whatever eventually kills you, unless it's old age in bed, it's probably gonna hurt as much or more than that?" Before she could say anything else I added, "okay, seen a couple people die of old age related shit that hurt like fuck, so even that's not a guarantee." Wonder in her eyes being chased by humor, she repeated herself.

"I want to live." Then, shaking her head as if she couldn't believe she meant it, she said it again.

"I want to live! Not just don't want to die, because I've now been there and done that, but I want to live!" I smiled at her, nodded, and took her Body's hand my left, wrapping her Soul in my tentacles. Before I said the word, she smirked at me, writhing just a little against my noodly appendages.

"Unless you'd rather have me as an evening snack?" I laughed.

"There's always time for that later, if that's what you want." I waited until she opened her mouth, then said, "Revive." Her Soul traveled through my tentacles, through me, and into her Body. She sat up, gasping, typical Red Bull and cocaine enema behavior that accompanied my Revives. She kinda tackled me a little bit right then and there, right on my Altar.

"You need to report to the Imperator?"

"Of course. I do want to live, after all. But right now?"

"Yeah?"

"I want to live!"