Chương 553: Day Five Hundred And Fifty-One

Dear Diary, Sunday night and last night notwithstanding, this past week has been remarkably good. Met some neighbors and, other than a bit of a knee jerk jump scare that would have been way more dangerous back where I'm from, made some new friends. Did a bunch of running outdoors, which I found surprisingly enjoyable.

Got in a kind of argument with Siobhan, which I'm still sort of guilty about, because even though I thought I was doing the right thing, I'm sure there are plenty of decent folks who supported some really shitty stuff for just that reason, and did it for the same reason I did; I didn't think. I mean, it felt like a serious no brainer moment. Heal Injury does what it says on the tin, so I used that shit on everything where something wasn't a 'disease'.

Shit, I used that stuff after I used Cure Disease, to erase the long term injury type symptoms of the disease, like ribs broken from too much coughing. Like Frank's Red Hot, I put that shit on everything. Which, according to my lovely Ice Pop, is fine for emergencies like battlefields or plagues, but isn't exactly the right move when it comes to peacetime applications. So now I realize I may have left a path of people with permanent disabilities behind me.

Which, to be fair, are less onerous than the ones they could have had.

'My arm aches in the cold' is way better than 'I wish I still had my arm'. But I gotta know the limitations of my tools, because there are times to use a saw and times to use a scalpel. So like I said yesterday, I called Siobhan in to do the Healing on the Cadets. It turned out all of them needed a Heal Injury, because they all had lots of minor shit wrong that needed fixing.

But after I Stabilized all of them just to keep them from bleeding out, I watched carefully through her eyes as she used what looked like variations on Heal Injury, Cure Disease, Stabilize, and some other shit I didn't really know how to describe, but understood on an intuitive level. She aligned and fused bones so they'd heal properly. She used a variation on Cure Disease and my Filtration Ward trick to debride deep wounds. She sealed up those deep wounds from the inside out, so there weren't weird inclusions.

She basically did all the shit that I should have known how to do by now, what with having passed 'Advanced Healing', but I was too much of a slacker to learn. At the end of it, I pulled her in for a hug and kiss.

"You, my lovely little Ice Pop, are a better person than I'll ever be." She blushed and leaned into the kiss, into me.

"Kinder, possibly. More patient, probably. Gentler, definitely. But those aren't always Virtues in a woman of action, my Hero." I shrugged.

"Still need to reward you for being so consistently awesome."

"You keep saying that." I rolled my eyes.

"Blame the Headmaster. He keeps roping me into stuff."

"See you at home tomorrow night?" I sighed.

"They'll do better with a little rest, right?" She nodded.

"Friday some time after noon, then."

"See? You're kinder than you know, my Hero." Then she was gone, stepped back to the Homestead. Marie wandered over to me, O'Brien and Chloros following her. She'd been showing the Cadets about butchering, and the two of them had shown the most interest.

"Drain." I looked at the big bastard of a bear and sighed.

"Really, Mittens? You sure?"

"Freezing."

"Fuck." She chuckled.

"Later."

"Gonna be next week if this shit keeps up like this." I got an idea and asked her, "head up or head down?"

"Down." I sighed, then Blended one of my big tentacles and, waving my hands like some kind of bad B movie telekinetic, used those tentacles to grab it by the ankles and lift it into the air until the dump truck sized bastard hung upside down, the claws of its forepaws scraping the snow. Marie stepped over and made a few deep slashes in its neck and forelegs. She also managed to dodge the first gushes of blood out of the thing. The Cadets who'd been watching her mostly moved around to watch.

Brown, on the other hand, came over to me.

"How... Pardon, Champion, how are you doing that? I can't even see the Mana." I snorted.

"I'm Loki's High Priestess, remember?"

"Tricksters can hide their Mana?" I felt a little bad as I started to answer, then stopped myself and thought for a second. Brown definitely saw that, but waited.

"Never assume. Never take things for granted. Yeah, you can see Mana. Normally. But there are gonna be people who can hide it from you. Shit, you might wind up with some variation of whatever's wrong with me."

"Wrong with you?" I shrugged.

"I can't see Mana unless I'm high on Fae Grain. Okay, I can kinda see things like Ley Lines. But not much short of that." They opened and closed their mouth a few times before finally settling on.

"Are... are you really a Demigoddess?" I sighed, slumped a little bit, and said, "I've got a High Priestess and a Temple and everything, don't I?" They frowned.

"But... you're not... wait, are you a Trickster Goddess?"

"Yes, all Trickster Goddesses will answer that question honestly, if they're idiots, like their reputations clearly show them to be. Right?" Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Brown blushed, thought for a second, and finally said, "so, I ought to question my assumptions when I see something I don't understand?"

"If you have time? Do it even when you think you do understand. Especially if you're dealing with opposing forces. Or think you might be."

"Thanks for the advice, Champion." I shrugged again as Marie walked back to me.

"It's what I'm here for, right? Mentoring you and shit like that?"

"I think I'm older than you." I had nothing to say to that except to just give them a look until Marie walked up and said, "Same."

"Yeah, you're older than all of us put together. How long do I have to keep doing this?"

"Hour."

"Shit. You sticking around until then?" She nodded, then snuggled around me while I stood there pretending to hold the bear up with my outstretched hand, actually holding it up with one Blended tentacle. At the end of the hour, she had me turn it belly down and proceeded to literally gut the thing. As she did that, Ryan and Mackenzie started a fire and set up a few simple spits over it. As Marie pulled the larger organs out, the Cadets put them on the fire to cook.

As they did, I called out, "hey, can you snag a solid chunk of that for Sister Siobhan? She likes liver." Marie grinned and used a claw to slice off a normal cow-liver-sized hunk of liver, Translocating it back to the Homestead before returning to continue breaking down the bear. I'd realized when Marie started in on the bear that we'd need be up most of the night. Piece by piece she broke it apart, leaping back to the Homestead every so often.

Each of the Cadets requested and got a piece of bear skin big enough to make a bear skin cloak. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 'fur is murder', but this fucker had tried to murder the fuck out of us first, and I'm sure it would have eaten us if we'd come out the losers. She sent me a mental picture of little bear skin fur coats for the kids, and I nodded, mentally noting that any other kids at the Homestead ought to get ones too. Yeah, I'd gotten them warm coats, but fur coats were cool.

Generations of pimps can't be wrong, right? After we'd stayed up all night breaking down the bear, with the Cadets eventually taking over each of the tasks when Marie'd shown them how, we faced sunrise absolutely beat to shit, with a huge puddle of blood and mud and offal where we'd torn the thing up.

"Normally, you'd want to break shit down further from where you're gonna sleep, or move camp if you've got to break shit down where it fell, but I am too fuckin' tired to move. Cave's ours by right of conquest. See if you can figure out a way to camouflage it a little with some brush or something, then three watches of eight hours each. We run back to the Homestead Friday." So we slept all day Thursday, and through the night until Friday morning.

I'd intended to sleep, I really had, but something about sudden Dire Bear kept me just the tiniest bit too on edge to get properly drowsy. So one of me lay there pretending to sleep while another of me Blended and settled down atop the cave. I'd worried about the offal attracting predators, but other than some scavengers like foxes or coyotes or some other 'smaller than wolves' quadrupeds, nothing really showed. Probably too fuckin' cold for the scent to travel.

The one exception came maybe two hours before dawn, when a small figure crept up to me. My first thought was Brown, but then I realized that the figure was clearly a she, and also clearly dressed in buckskins.

"Hey. Wondered when and if any locals would show up." I realized right then that whoever she was, she wasn't shivering, despite the deeply subzero temperatures. She also had a certain there-ness to her.

"I didn't know any of you spoke our language." I raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah, it's a knack." I held my hands out, palms outward, before reaching to her with one of them to shake.

"I'm Tabitha. What should I call you?" She looked at my hand for a while before taking it, saying, "Call me Rabbit." She wriggled her nose, totally cute, then said, "some of my people call me Jack, but that's gotten the attention of the... unique one from the South."

"You mean Jack from Jackville?" She rolled her eyes.

"Just the one. Who I was trying not to draw the attention of. Because he is clearly insane. As are those who would summon him." I grinned.

"Aw, some of us are just stupid." She smirked, then snerked, then broke out into quiet laughter.

"Seriously, though. If he gives you trouble? Tell me. I'll come straighten him out."

"You're very confident for one so young seeming." I shrugged, then started counting on my fingers.

"Artemis. Odin. Apollo. Sengann. Domnu. Balor. Morrigan. That's seven who've come up against me so far, four who died, and three who regret their decision to reject my offer of sitting down and talking like potential friends." I realized right then that my guest had gone absolutely still. Quiet noises still emanated from the cave, and I still saw bits and pieces of the world in normal color, so I knew time hadn't stopped, but it had gotten more than a little bit darker.

"Fuck, Mom, did you need something?"

"You called me, Daughter."

"Not every mention of your name is me calling you." She sniffed.

"Look, Ma, you're scaring my new friend. Can you fuck off and, I dunno, go play with Johnson?"

"I was doing just that when you summoned me."

"Okay, now I'm officially unsummoning you. Fuck off." A moment later light returned to normal, and Rabbit was gone. Sensing she might not actually be entirely out of earshot, I said, "Like I said, you or any of yours have trouble with any of the newcomers, let me know. I'll come collect my people, maybe teach them some manners."

"You'd claim them as yours?" I sighed.

"I'm embarrassed by some of them. Most of them. But somebody's got to take responsibility."

"Why you?"

"Because I can." It got real quiet.

"Hey, those three we met the other day. Closer specifically. They yours?"

"Of any of them, he's the closest, I guess. I'll remember what you said."

"You do that. And, y'know, stop by any time, we've got some extra beds at the Homestead, and we can always make room at the table." A few moments later, I almost imagined a rustle in the bushes, and she was gone. When the sun rose, I collapsed back to myself, got the Cadets up, and ran them straight south. Fun, funny thing, the West Tower is tall enough that I could see it from the treetops at least four ridges away from home.

Yet another handy feature, probably just as intentional on Saffron's part as everything else. As we approached the big bone fences, I asked, "any of you have anyplace to be early tomorrow?" At the general answers in the negative, I said, "I'm a little beat at the moment. I could Translocate you all home, or you could head back the long way, or you could stay the night and I'll take you back with me when I head in to teach my class."

They all opted to stay the night, and we hopped the fence and got greeted by a selection of homestead women which included a very attentive Chloe, not to mention my three ladies and all seven kids. As Marie and the women took the Cadets in hand to get them rooms, dinner, and baths, Saffron and Siobhan slid under my arms.

"I am exhausted. I could sleep for a week, but I've got to be up in the morning. So, dear lovely ladies mine, I'm hereby requesting that you take turns pile driving me into unconsciousness." Saffron and Siobhan looked at me, looked at each other, and shook their heads, chuckling ruefully.

"Sorry, love. I'm afraid you'll have to go another night without. Or at least, you can't go to sleep yet."

"Huh? Why the fuck not?"

"Because, as you required and requested us to do, my Goddess, lovely Siobhan and I have finished the modifications to Assess Health."

"Yes!" Piped up Siobhan.

"Now we just need your help to... how did you phrase it, Saffron? Oh! Right! Roll it out Globally!"