Chương 1098: Day One Thousand And Ninety-Six

Dear Diary, I might have done something bad. Well, more 'naughty' than 'bad', and more 'prankster' naughty than 'adult fun times' naughty. So I'm not really feeling super guilty, but I am sorta amused at myself. Kinda funny that back in the day, so many of my friends thought of anything sexual as inherently 'negative'. I mean, I guess I did too, but that was definitely the neopuritan indoctrination talking, given the amount of self-service I indulged in, especially when the Black Dog came barking.

Speaking of, I'm beginning to think that when I know a crash is coming, and nothing bad prompts it, it winds up being a lot less horrible. Like, instead of 'I hate myself and everyone hates me and I'm not worth an equal amount of runny dogshit and I should just crawl off and die', it's more along the lines of 'I think I'd like to lie down and sleep forever. Or at least until tomorrow. Or until I wake up rested'.

Which isn't great especially when I've already had a full night's sleep and there's nothing that ought to be making me tired, but it's way, way better than the alternative. I think when I've done some amusing and happy shit in the days previous, it can even wind up being... I dunno, similar to the feeling you get after a hard day's work. Just that feeling of 'I have done good, now I can rest'.

Yeah, the whole 'you get to decide how to respond to your emotions' crowd isn't dealing with unmedicated chronic depression or anything similar, I guess, because 'controlling how you respond to your emotions' is something that's way easier to do when you have the energy to spend on it. Unlike when you're fatigued, exhausted for no good goddamned reason, because there isn't much of a reason for somebody with my Endurance to be fatigued other than, y'know, depression.

Okay, I think my Mind might need sleep or some shit like that, because even if I'm maybe offloading some storage and processing to nearby tentacles, maybe, the tiny bit of me that's me isn't much bigger than a Human, with a nominally Human sized brain, and that means I'm gonna need Human frequency rest or the brain starts going wonky. That's my current theory, at any rate. At any rate, Saffron's birthday, while it wasn't the same scale as previous years maybe, still wound up being a success.

Heh, listen to me, talking about 'not at the same scale as previous years' when we had packed crowds screaming for us in seven cities. Shit, basically Worshipping us. Fuck, maybe that's why I didn't crash today like I expected to. I mean, crash, yes, horrid self-hating crash no. We got home, fed Saffron another dinner of all of Marie's 'not ready for Saffron's birthday' dishes. Our Wife goes all out for our birthdays, especially now that she's got the rings and the Title and the Kitchen to do it in.

We had two different sweet and sour meats; one non-chicken fowl that I think was duck, and the other a gamey meat that wasn't quite bear or venison. Moose, maybe. I'd ask where she got kaiju deer meat, but I've seen Marie take on a Dire Bear. One of the smaller ones, but still, if she can do that, she can take down a moose. Also, I've just realized that despite joking about kaiju deer, I've now faced actual Kaiju, and I'm really not sure which I'd rather face.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Okay, that's not true. I'd rather face the kaiju deer, because not only is it actually physically weaker than the kaiju, there's far less chance for collateral, and I never got to eat any of the Kaiju. That would have been weird, honestly. I'd ask Leviathan what they taste like, but she's still kinda moronic, even if I think she is an Actual Demigod™ now.

No, I think I can still ask Jormungandr; while he took the remaining Kaiju home to the pole with him, I think he maybe ate one of the ones we'd killed. I really hope he didn't eat that nasty bubble one, because even after the stink burned off it was still almost as bad as Hole Spawn stench. Almost. I said almost. Nothing is as bad as Hole Spawn stench. Along with the sweet and sour land animals, we also had a couple honeyed water critters.

Some honey rock shrimp, some molasses braised salmon, even some kind of white fish with simple syrup. Honestly I think that one was just Marie testing 'sweet' and 'fish' together, but with our horde, nothing ever really went to waste, and it's not like Marie's learning experiments were bad or anything. Just 'I'd drop a Benjamin for a meal with this as the entree and not complain' good. The kind of thing you'd expect at an upscale steakhouse.

Despite some tension, probably from the whole 'waiting for the other shoe to drop', not to mention having to keep one of me calm to avoid jostling Aisling while the other did Saffron birthday things with my Kitten, nothing awful happened in the Bath or even once we got to bed. After the night previous, nobody felt any sudden urgent urges, so we all just kinda vibed until everybody but me was asleep. I couldn't sleep. No, I didn't count that as 'awful', just annoying. Unfortunately, I let the intrusive thought win.

Fortunately, the intrusive thoughts were, as noted, more mischievous than maleficent. I Co-Located out to M-Space atop my tallest tentacles, stretched out as far as they could reach in a direction that was neither up nor down nor any variety of sideways, and Scried. It took me almost all night to find what I wanted.

Okay, the basic idea was easy, but what I really wanted wasn't really a 'normal' thing, so I had to do a shit ton of Scrying until I found somebody with an image search open, then Scried using that image. In the morning, as I rousted the kids out for breakfast and thence to school, I pulled Marie aside.

"Hey Mittens?" She just looked at me. I think she can sense deviltry. I pulled out my prizes, which were a big assed pile that I wouldn't have been able to hold without tentacles. Not the weight, even though that was a bit given how many I'd stolen, but the sheer volume of thirty six sets of high thread count sheets was more than I'd really considered when I was duping them. Of course in my hands I held the thing that took me so long to find, the set for our big round bed.

I'm pretty sure she'd repurpose the top sheet, because in the pictures it looked like it was made by somebody who thought you'd sleep on a twenty foot wide round bed like you would a normal king size, with your head near one edge, and the top sheet covering everything from your neck down to the far end of the bed. Yeah, normally if we needed sheets or blankets, which we hadn't done very much, we just used little one person sized blankets. Not, like, small one person sized.

Maybe something that would work as a comforter on a twin bed. At any rate, the top sheet wasn't what I'd gotten the set for. Any of the sets really. I'd gotten them for the bottom sheets. The fitted ones.