Chương 1111: Day One Thousand One Hundred And Nine

Dear Diary, It's kind of weird. At one point in my life I thought of myself as a nihilist. Like, nothing mattered, so I might as well get high every day and play with my vibe instead of going to school. I've also thought of myself as an idealist sometimes. I mean, as kids I think we all are, at least until something shatters our belief in a just and meaningful world. Like, scratch a nihilist and a fallen idealist bleeds and shit.

Thing is, for a while, like maybe after I got over my amnesia, I've been thinking of myself as an idealist again. Maybe I am. Maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm a pragmatist. I'd like to think of myself as one of them, but every person I've met who described themselves like that was a selfish asshole who only thought about what was good for them, not what was good for everybody.

Okay, honestly I think Saffron and Tallulah are both pragmatists, but I don't think they'd describe themselves that way spontaneously, which is the key differentiator there. Thing is, even if I'm seeing myself as... I guess not an 'idealist', but a person with ideals, a person with values and ethics and shit like that, I realize that there's nuance to shit. Like, scaring somebody into taking a deal that's bad for them is douchebag behavior, no question.

Thing is, scaring them so I don't have to separate them from their precious, precious bodily fluids via Mana Blade, blunt force trauma, or squeezing them in a tentacle like I'm juicing an orange is arguably nicer than, y'know, juicing them. Especially if I stop deliberately intimidating them once they choose the path of sanity and decide to talk things over. Like, I can and will feed that whole fuckin' fleet of pirates to Leviathan and call it a day if they really, really want to make an issue out of things.

I'll hold back and let the Navy do it if Saffron wants it that way, because with a Cohort of the Troll Legion aboard Black Dragon, there's no way a bunch of sailboats can do more than maybe jostle her screws if she decides to just run them all over. Or land on them. Or use them as target practice. But none of those are my preferred option. I'm not sure I'm in love with the idea of recruiting the English Pirates as privateers, not least of which because I'm not sure they'll stay bought.

I'm definitely not in lust with the idea. But I'm not entirely against it, either. Like some kinda food that smells mid and looks even midder, but Darling, Murder Mittens, or one of the kiddos is scarfing with evident gusto, I'm gonna put it in my mouth and see how it tastes. No, I am not putting the pirates in my mouth. Or my Maw. Okay, maybe Anne or Red on the former, because she seems nice and if I gag him he's not unattractive, so if that's part of the deal I guess I'll take one for the team.

Can't nobody say I won't do my part to make the Alliance work. Also, the reason I didn't include Tallulah or Saffron on that list is the latter's taste in sweets and the former's stoicism. If she's gobbling something, it's either really, really good or it's Fae Grain levels of intoxicating, which... Y'know, I might not in that case. Weird.

I think I'm still on some kind of maintenance level of Fae Grain, maybe, in stuff Murder Mittens puts on my plate, but not so much that I can see Mana Shapes without concentrating on it or using that Shape Doc whipped up for me. I wonder if he'd want to make that Global, maybe. I'll have to ask him next time I see him. On Monday, unless the Pirates turn out to be bigger obstructionist dicks than... Y'know what?

Everybody whose kept me waiting wound up being pretty solid people once I waited, so I'm not even gonna go there. So after watching the fuckin' Weyland Smith of legend deliver hats to my kits, then spending the day watching Anise and Felicia do daredevil stuff with their gliders, not to mention doing some free climbing up the remaining unaltered hillsides of the Homestead, I took the Pirates and Saffron back to the Black Dragon. I let Orla know we'd be doing the negotiations there, because...

Okay, mostly because I missed my ship. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. Oh, just because I forgot to mention it yesterday, Conrad made Hailee one of those old school nurse's caps. I spent part of the day explaining what it meant to her, and she seemed pretty stoked about it once she understood. Borysthenis got a set of laurels like her sisters, only hers looked like they were cut from ruby, sapphire, and topaz. Okay, knowing Conrad they probably were.

Isadora got a sleeping headband; just a simple soft headband with integral earflaps and a sleeping blindfold. She put it on and sacked out on the roof of East House for the rest of the day. Felicia did not in fact get a helmet like Anise. Instead, somehow remembering something even I'd forgotten, he got her a top hat. Weirdest thing, apparently it's a magic top hat, although the only magic thing I've seen it do has to be related to that auto-sizing enchantment.

Only except auto-sizing to fit her, it's got some kind of mood-ring enchantment, where the 'more mature' she's being, the more it looks like an actual sized for her top hat. When she's being her typical one year old teenager self, it's totally the miniature top hat I envisioned. So fuckin' cute. At any rate, When we got the captains to the Black Dragon shortly after dark, I offered to let them sleep aboard, but they decided they wanted to return to their crews. Just for the night, at least I hoped so.

I stepped each of them to their own ships, because none of them were afraid of heights, and all they had to do was point out which ship was theirs from the top of the mast, at which point Translocating there with them was easy as. At which point I wound up alone on the mast with Saffron, who turned to me.

"Did you want to return home for the evening?" I might have glanced down at my cabin. Then back at her.

"Uh..."

"Or did you want to spend the night aboard?"

"The kids will be okay without us, right?" She smiled at me.

"Yes, love. One advantage of having, as you put it, the Mom Collective. Not to mention having raised most of our children to the point where they can both self amuse, self regulate, and be self sufficient without any of us for at least a day or two."

"So... You wanna?" Which is how we wound up eating in the officer's mess with Admiral Swanson, then slept in the bed that I hadn't really spent any time in since I'd been amnesiac. Weirdest thing, it didn't smell musty or anything. Hell, it even had a vague, lingering smell of somebody putting it to use for non-sleeping purposes. Dreamt of my ladies doing mock Naval battles in the Maw. When I woke, while I waited for Saffron to wake up, I thought, Mittens? Vlickies?

Have you been keeping my quarters aboard the Black Dragon cleaned up and aired out? Of course. I hesitated for the barest of moments, then asked, are you the reason they smell of, y'know, sex? Duh. Who? I really wasn't worried about it, but I figured I ought to know. I did not expect her to think, Lonely. Aww. Mittens. Did you want to join us last night? I got the sense of a shrug, then a quiet, Tonight? Sure, Mittens. Definitely gave me something to look forward to during the meetings today.

I'd forgotten exactly how torturous the Boltophsberg meetings were. Worse, we were basically introducing the folks in Boltophsberg to the idea of Constitutional Law, where the laws are all written down, like a written contract between everybody living in the City. The pirates? Each of their fuckin' ships had what amounted to it's own little contract that all of the pirates aboard signed.

'Articles of Agreement', they called them. So I got to spend all fuckin' day listening to Saffron and Swanson review all six sets of Articles of Agreement with the three captains, making sure that not only she understood them the same way the pirate captains themselves did, but that all three of them agreed to the same meaning. Which they did not. Not at the start, and not by the end of the fuckin' day, even. Although they wound up a lot closer than they had been. Progress, I guess.

I didn't even have to scare them once, nor punch anybody in the taint. So fuckin' boring.