Chương 1083: Day One Thousand And Eighty-One

Dear Diary, Not sure entirely how I feel about Saffron and Tallulah's plan to recruit the English Pirates as privateers.

Like, on the one hand, my inner moppet is having a war with herself between the part that caught the deluge of 'pirates bad' propaganda, the part that might not have seen the propaganda for what it was, but dug in her heels at anyone telling her what to do, and the part that is still vaguely hoping for Johnny Depp to stagger sideways into her bodacious ass while I'm painting myself across the front of Orlando Bloom.

On the other hand, some part of me, very likely the bit that has a Domain starting with V that is not susceptible to my Kitten Shapeshifting to force some Domain Expansion. Yes, I'm referring to Vengeance and Vagina there, respectively. At any rate, part of me wants to do unholy things to anybody who'd dare attack one of our ships, while another part of me just wants to, I dunno, dangle them over my Maw and read them the riot act. Give them a genuine come-to-Goddess moment.

But most of me is surprisingly okay with the idea of the 'friendship' ending. I always thought those were kinda lame in Mortal Kombat, but having done some shit that the Mortal Kombat censors would say 'uh, that's... That's a little much, don't you think?' I no longer have any real desire to do unto people like that. I mean, okay, I haven't had anybody... No, wait.

Seriously, those fuckin' Spartans pissed me off, and the closest I did to 'only not a war crime because Geneva doesn't exist here and now' was using a surgical spell to disassemble them. Yeah, I think that might technically qualify back on the world of Eastside, but in terms of killing someone fast, I think they died about as fast and painlessly as anybody does in combat. Wait. No.

I forgot about their Cold Iron; most of them had Cold Iron in their helms, which means they had 'near molten iron' burns on their scalp. That must have been excruciating. Fuck it, they killed kids tryna celebrate the New Year. Fuck those guys in particular. But my point was I didn't get creative with interesting ways to violate their still living yet soon to be corpses. I think right now I could do something like that without feeling that massive letdown I got hit with then.

I think I may be healing, and not just healing in the sense of recovering from the damage I did to myself, but maybe kinda sorta healing from the trauma I came here with, the shit that might have been why I did that damage to myself in the first place. So after laying out in the sun most of the day for three straight days all of us, even 'the beacons are lit' Siobhan, had picked up a little bit of color. Hers was mostly pink, but still, pink is a color.

Okay, Tallulah didn't so much tan as wind up with her freckles darkening, which showed off those pearlescent lines between them even more. Marie... Marie doesn't tan, she just lies in the sun like any other big cat. But everybody was pretty rested by the time dinner rolled around. Marie had put a roast on in the morning, and by dinner time it was absolutely perfect.

Fall apart meat, soft, almost fluffy root vegetables, caramelized onions, confit garlic, just everything you could possibly want in a simple roast dinner. Spent a lazy evening, first washing off the heat with cool showers, which were a feature I only just discovered today, then soaking away any possible remaining cares of the day in the Bath. The slow, quiet time spent in the Bedroom once the kids were asleep just felt right after that slow, gentle kind of day.

Dreamt of my ladies chatting quietly while they floated around. Woke in the morning to Isnomi staring into my brain from point blank range. Brought back memories of Saffron and I in our cell. Weird, having nostalgia without grief. Like, I remember those mornings, and I loved them, but I'm not mourning the loss. They've turned into a fond memory of the precocious little girl we had now, the head of our Horde Hoard, even if she was practically the size of Isadora's bicep.

"Good morning, Menace."

"Time to fwy!" I blinked, 'cause it had been a while since she had that on the brain. Still, we'd done it before here at the Homestead, and if the weather over the past couple days was sunny, hot, and dry, that wasn't bad flying weather. I turned to see Saffron watching me, a quiet smile on her face.

"What do you think, Kitten?" She shrugged.

"We can sit on the roof and watch them as they launch from there. There are a few things I wanted to discuss with you, but nothing we can't do while we're watching over them." I turned back to Isnomi.

"There you go. Let's get some breakfast in everybody, then we'll all head up to the roof. Okay?"

"Ohtay!" We decided to go with a simple oatmeal today. Okay, technically Marie told me it was 'porridge', because it wasn't all oats, but I'm sure I saw some oats in there, and it came out tasting very oatmeal. Okay, once we added honey and berries and butter and a pinch of salt, it tasted like good oatmeal, but still oatmeal. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

At that point we discovered that our Menace had not fallen far from the tree, planning wise. Instead of heading to the roof, she detoured to Conrad's Workshop, where he had four more gliders, not to mention having stored all of the previous ones. Also, just because my boy is awesome like that, or because Isnomi asked him to, he'd made a couple chairs for us.

Kinda weird, they let us lounge while also having enough height to look out over the Courtyard and the fields beyond; basically everywhere the kids might wind up gliding to. Marie's was more of an elevated cat bed, but fuck it, she a big cat, she need a big cat bed. We all trooped out, set up the chairs, went over the rules and how-to of gliders with Boy, Girl, Anise, and Felicia, who were the only new ones who wanted to try flying.

Anise and Felicia both took a few years off our lives by nose diving right into the ground, but apparently they take after Marie and I; I don't know what their Endurance is, but when I Assessed them, other than 'minor bruising' and 'emotional distress', they walked away just fine. Literally nothing harmed but their pride.

Especially when Boy, Davey, and Daya all three did the most basic of run, jump, and glide to the ground, but still avoided face planting, while Girl absolutely took to the skies right behind the more adventurous of our brood. After that I went over the basics of glider flight again, this time with Menace standing next to me repeating everything while Anise and Felicia half pouted.

They absolutely pouted when Menace quizzed them, they failed abysmally, and she said they could go up when they told her the right answers, which they could do when she came back down.

"Menace..."

"Yeth, Mama?"

"Anise and Felicia are your sisters, not your daughters. That is not your call to make." Before she could say anything in response to that, I turned to Anise and Felicia.

"That said, Isnomi is completely right. If you can't pay attention to the lesson well enough to repeat it back, and you didn't pay enough attention to even glide to the Courtyard like your sibs, it's not safe for you or your sisters if you're in the air." They slumped when I mentioned safety, then chorused, "yes, Mama," before turning to trudge off.

"If you're really polite about it, Davey, Daya, and Boy might help you learn the flight rules," I called. They paused, looked at one another, then dashed off for the Bore. Once we got ourselves situated on the chairs, I asked, "what did you want to talk about, Kitten?" She smiled.

"Scheduling and flags."

"Flags?" She shook her head.

"That's second. I took the liberty of setting up a schedule for you this Season, just awaiting your approval." I tilted my head, thinking, then said, "okay, what's on it?"

"I recall hearing you think you wanted to work on a new Shape at one point, so I signed you up for Advanced Mana Shaping on Moondays, your Camden Yards Physical Training Class from last Season needs a Combat Training instructor, so you're scheduled to teach them on Wotansdays, and finally, if you're willing, you'll be teaching Physical Training for your class of Cadets up in Newark on Freydays." I nodded.

"Yeah. Yeah, that all sounds good. Wait, you heard me thinking about that?" She just grinned.

"Your thoughts are loud sometimes." When my face got a little warm, totally the sun, she grinned harder and said, "oh, I especially like when those thoughts get loud. Because often you do as well those days." I sucked my teeth and thought about that Penance night where I'd managed to put mirrored ahegao faces on Kitten and Darling.

"Yeah, some of those days I'm not the loud one."

"That makes it even better!" When I recovered from that, I said, "What was that about flags?" She nodded.

"Something we noticed during our few fleet engagements is that telling Navy ships from auxiliaries and friendlies is a little difficult, not to mention telling the Tentacles apart from a distance for anyone not intimately familiar with them or their commanders."

"Okay. So... Flags?" She nodded.

"Flags. With each City being nominally it's own subordinate state, the agreement is to have one simplified flag for each City, which will be flown on ships based from that City, and one for the Alliance as a whole, which will be flown by all Alliance shipping." I nodded.

"Okay, makes sense. I take it you've got samples?" She shook her head.

"Not for all of them, not yet."

"Who's missing?"

"The Alliance flag is still forming up; I've got some ideas, but it's still a work in progress. At least one other hasn't been finalized yet."

"Okay, so..." Suddenly my mind's eye filled with a bright blue flag with thick white edges on the top and bottom; almost like it had three stripes, really, two white and one blue. Camden Yards. The next flag looked similar, only with an orange stripe in place of the blue one. New Amsterdam. Another stripe flag, this one with a bright gold stripe. Norfolk.

"Aren't these a little simple?" Saffron nodded.

"That's deliberate; as I noted, they're simplified to allow for easy identification at sea."

"Okay. Next?" This time instead of a stripe, the white flag had a pair of chevrons sticking in from one end; one of them black, the other brown. Calverton.

"Aren't their colors blue and yellow?"

"Those are the colors of House Calvert, yes, but Marylin decided that it was time and past time that the City be known for the work of its laborers, not the wealth of its ruling House. So the brown stripe for their shipbuilding, the black for their Cold Iron smithies."

"Okay. Kinda cool." At that point Tallulah chimed in.

"I think I shall do likewise in Rich Man's Port." When we turned to look at her, she explained, "to differentiate, we'll not use brown, but rather the blue of sky for our sailors, since despite the number of former Thralls and Trolls, sailors from Rich Man's Port now make up the bulk of the crew of the Black Dragon." Then she smirked.

"And... Pink, for Rich Man's Port's other notable feature." I just stared at her for a second before saying, "are you seriously putting your City's brothels on the flag?" With the worst fake innocent look I've ever seen, she put one hand to her chest and said, "of course not, none would take us seriously if we did that. No, that is for our fields of grain Underhill, which bloom pale pink in the autumn."

"Fae grain."

"Exactly." I could laugh or... No, y'know what, I wasn't gonna cry any tears at all. If some asshole wanted to make something of the brothels of Rich Man's Port getting a spot on the flag, they could lodge a complaint of the northbound end of a southbound Leviathan.