Chương 736: Day Seven Hundred And Thirty-Four

Dear Diary,"Egalitarianism, Equality, Equity, Try not to fuck it all up." - Tabitha Diaz, Doctrine of Tabitha, Book of Egalitarianism The final Verse of the Book of Egalitarianism is quite simple. Tabitha reminds us of the foundations of Egalitarianism; Equality and Equity. Equality of value for all people as our goal, Equity as the path to reach that goal. Then, in her own blunt yet charming way, she gives us a call to action, to remain mindful lest we fail this simple task.

- Priestess Most High Above All Others, Archmage Imperator Saffron Aetos-Diaz, Commentary on the Doctrine of Tabitha Yeah, I'd run out of ideas, and couldn't think of another set of seven syllable lines. On the one hand, I feel kinda bad about that, what with Egalitarianism being seven syllables, sorta. But on the other hand my Kitten, High Priestess, and favorite awesome rack haver managed to knock this whole Book out of the park in terms of turning my mad scribblings into actual life advice.

Weird how much of her interpretation seems to be all about being mindful and paying close attention to things. It's almost like paying attention and thinking carefully about shit are the ways to make the world a better place. Which is weird, because those are definitely not my strong suits.

I mean, I agree with her, I think that if more folks lurked more rather than tryna be the center of attention, and sat down and thought about shit rather than emoting as hard as they can when their posterior is in pain, the world might be a nicer place. So yeah, it might have taken the smartest woman I know ramming her hand up Past Me's metaphoric ass and interpreting her words like a puppet to make it happen, but that's my goal as a Goddess.

I think I really decided that while Ria's Blessing had me all amnesiac, which meant I was pretty much just back in the day me, only without all the trauma I've accumulated here and now. Which means the fact that I'm in complete agreement means that either she really is living on as part of me, or that we're in agreement about this, which is almost as good. Now that I think about it more, she didn't really act like I did back in the day, either. I'm talking about emotionally.

I kept, I dunno, jumping at shadows for my first couple seasons here. Like the racism thing. Yes, there is racism here and now, and yes, I've been targeted by it a time or two, but in some ways it's way less entrenched. Or maybe I just never really got driven into the ground by it like I did back in the day. So I kept reacting like the street kid who knew, deep in her bones, that getting caught by a cop meant, at best, some maybe physical, maybe emotional bullying, at worst, a closed casket.

I never actually hit the maybe worse middle ground of hoping the dude wanted to see me swallow or mess up my face than maybe get me pregnant, but my cousin wound up with a kid that way. But I think I've started to heal from some of that. In part because I talked through a lot of that with my family. In part because I've seen Saffron and the Alliance making huge strides fixing the problems here and now, making Phileo live up to its ideals, pushing everyone else to adopt at least the core of those ideals.

In part it's because one of the worst openly racist families I knew here and now have turned their shit around. Like, I'm sure Lenny is still not totally copacetic with Bag and Dan being on an equal footing, but Larry has done a complete one eighty, and the only time he does dumb shit is purely out of ignorance, not any kind of malice. Lachlan... shit, Lachlan always was that kind of racist who had no rancor for anybody, he just felt like he was better than all of them because he was Dan.

Which, given the plethora of genetic gifts the man has, not to mention getting all the best food, training, and gear all his life, he really has wound up better in the 'able to protect people' sense. He just had to have somebody knock loose the 'because he's Dan' part and remind him about the whole 'you got to train full time while the other kids were working eight to twelve a day to afford food and shelter'. So yeah, I think Blessed Me wound up getting the absolute best emotional start point.

Got to learn and grow from more or less zero, and when given all that power, decided not only to use it while she had it to write a book about how to be a better person, to spend the rest of her time building a house, playing with our kids, and.... I still remember that note. She knew in her heart of hearts that I would be the better mom, the better guardian, the better Goddess. So at the end of the day, she was ready to step aside to make the world better. By letting me take over.

Shit, that's some heavy shit to live up to. I'm not sure I can. I'm not sure I could by myself. But I'm not. By myself, that is. I've got Saffron turning my inner Tomoko's jokes into actual words to live by. I've got Marie showing me how to keep my kids supplied with clean clothes and good food. I've got Siobhan showing me what it means to be a better person; patient, kind, sweet tempered. If I hadn't seen her reaction to Trease back in the day, I'd worry that she was just dishwater, but I did see that.

She's not soft because she can't be hard. She's soft because she chooses to default to kind, chooses to believe people are better than maybe they really are. Weird, fucked up thing is that I wasn't lying when I talked to her about that. Because sometimes, Siobhan looking at me, talking to me, treating me like I'm a better person than I know myself to be made me want to be that better person. Inspired me.

If Saffron, Marie, Tallulah, and I wind up being a positive influence on the world, I'm definitely gonna give a heaping helping of the credit to Siobhan, for inspiring me to be a Hero rather than a Villain. For making me want to be a Hero. No, for seeing me as a Hero before I even knew I wanted to be one. Just makes me wish I could do more for her right now than hold her hair back. I mean, I've started to. Yesterday I read to her. Poetry.

She said she liked it, but I'm not sure if she really did, but was just kinda blah because of the ongoing misery, or she was just tryna be nice. I'm gonna read to her again today. Speaking of yesterday, after Saffron's outburst, she thanked the Cadets and Helen for their help, sent them back to class, and stepped the two of us back to our suite, where she put her head down on her desk and wept for a bit. I knelt next to her, stroking her hair and muttering quiet soothing shit at her, like you do.

"I can't do this."

"What do you mean, Kitten?"

"I've spent all of my Adult life to date, not to mention about half of my Young Adult time, working on this one project, and now when I'm so close I realize I've missed something that stupid and basic." I made shushing noises, then whispered, "Priestess?" If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Yes, Goddess?"

"After this goes Global, which is gonna be some time in the next week, I think, I'm gonna give you Penance that's gonna rewrite that bullshit out of your brain for good." She turned and stared at me.

"What?" I smiled.

"Seriously, Saffron. You started this less than two years ago. After my birthday on the year I arrived, right?" She nodded.

"You went into it with the idea that you just had to tweak Franklin's work," she growled, and I put my fingers over her lips, slipping a thick tentacle in as a bit when she tried to bite me.

"You went into it thinking you just had to do some repair work. Then you found out you had to rewrite the whole damn thing. Right?" I slipped the tentacle out of her mouth, and she muttered, "Yes."

"Okay. That was, what, right in the middle of the Season we annexed Norfolk, right?" She nodded again.

"Which means you've really only been working on this for like a year, right?" She grumbled, but then growled out, "if you want to look at it like that, I suppose so."

"Well, I do. Since I'm the Goddess around here, I say you've taken a year to get this far." She shot me a look, and I smirked at her.

"And you've done it." Her annoyance turned to confusion.

"No, but, I..."

"Look, Kitten, you're not making any shit up behind the scenes, are you?"

"NO!" I waved her down.

"It's okay, I didn't think you were. I just needed you to hear you say it. Now, those numbers, especially as you get to higher tiers, are gonna be less and less granular, right?" She pouted at me and said, "at least you didn't say 'more and more fudged'."

"Yeah, no, they're not fudged. Approximated, or really rounded, but not fudged. So the fact that Hildegarde could push an extra fifty pounds didn't fuckin' matter, because the next number up was still four hundred and fifty pounds away. Fifty pounds was a rounding error." She rolled her eyes at me.

"I suppose."

"Okay then. So you did it." Her jaw dropped.

"Did you see how much I was off by for Helen and myself?"

"Did you see that you absolutely fuckin' nailed it for everyone else? Seriously, Kitten, you showed me this back when I complained about the weights being too light in the Practice Yard. You just forgot about it for perfectly understandable reasons when you were coding your Inspect." I tipped her chin back a little, pressed a kiss into her forehead.

"Yeah, you forgot something for cases outside the norm. You've probably forgotten other shit, stuff you'll have to add more stuff in to account for. But..." I waited until she said, "But what?"

"Chicken butt." I giggled a little, then said, "no, seriously, you've done it. You're generating accurate numbers based on everything you knew to take account for, and at a guess, you'll be able to adjust for the whole size issue in, like, a day at most."

"Probably three." I tilted my head.

"One to properly plan out the solution, one to 'code' it, one to add that into the rest of the Shape."

"Yeah. See? You did it. You, my adorkable little nerd, have done what Franklin could not."

"I'm still not happy that I forgot about how size can affect Strength." I shrugged.

"No big. Even your enormous brain can't hold everything, everywhere, all of the time."

"So my brain is enormous?"

"Yep. Itty bitty body, ginormous brain. Such a nerd." She frowned at me.

"Oh, c'mon. You know I'm into nerds. As often as my nerdy wife will let me, really." Her frown got deeper.

"Besides, that's what makes you fun sized. Oh, shit." Her face got thunderous.

"Yeah, you want me to remind you of the benefits of being fun sized with an impromptu pit stop?"

"On your day of reckoning, I am going to shrink you down to 'fun size', make myself as big as Marie, and manhandle you mercilessly."

"Don't you mean womanhandle?" Her lips twisted up in a cute little moue.

"No. How else will whatever mewling puddle remains of you wind up with child?" Yeah, I could only swallow and try to get my brain working again for a minute after that. Eventually I croaked out, "Bedroom?" Her Grin was awful and terrible and I couldn't resist it when she said, "knowing how mad I am at you right now, knowing that I will absolutely take that out on your poor indestructible body, you ask for that now?" I nodded. Licked my lips.

"Yeah." We skipped dinner. I mean, I still brought it out, because the mes that had been doing Maid duty didn't get their worlds rocked in ways that needed some cool down time in the Bath and a good night's sleep or six to recover from. I didn't stay to eat, though. Just made sure everybody had food, that Marie had Siobhan and Tallulah had the kids, then collapsed back to myself, because my rampaging Kitten hadn't finished venting her wrath yet.

As we lay there in the bath, my head resting on her belly, my body weightless and alternating between post coital bliss and post workout soreness, I murmured, "tell me Ledger Day is gonna be like that."

"Oh, no." I must have made disappointed Tabitha noises.

"It will be so much worse. I have plans. Updated regularly whenever I think of some novel punishment or reward for my beautiful, loving, infuriating Goddess." I hummed contentedly. As the kids came splashing in, something finally clicked. Marie grinned at me, some Maenad sense realizing my bits were tingling.

"Wait, did you say you were gonna leave me with child?" Saffron, head resting on the side of the Bath, eyes closed, hummed an affirmative.

"So you've figured it out?" She shrugged.

"Is that what you're waiting for? Figuring it out?"

"And for a time we are secure enough."

"Uh..." She just raised an eyebrow.

"Do you have, like, a checklist or some shit? I have no idea why, but the idea of making babies with you has got me motivated to get shit done." She hummed, then said, "will you promise me not to go off half cocked and ruin the plans I've been carefully crafting to check off every item on the list?" I thought about that for like a half second before saying, "okay, but if I see one of those boxes ready to be checked and you don't call me off, it's getting checked." She sighed.

"I suppose that's the best I'm going to get. We need secure borders. Boltophsberg and the Atlantic must both be ours. Which means we need to pacify the west coast of Europa. We need not conquer or occupy any of it, but each and every major City in that region must agree to or be forced into some form of treaty. Non-aggression, cease fire, whatever it takes to ensure they will not support the Spartans."

"Are your goalposts shifting?"

"Only as I realize they were insufficient before. Your family must be secure." I opened my mouth, then realized who she was talking about.

"I've got a plan for that."

"I'm aware. I will support you in any way I can. But they must be secure, lest they be used as hostages." I nodded.

"At that point? I would feel safe enough to move the two of us to almost purely support and administrative roles."

"What if somebody in the Med decides to get aggressive? Or one of the west Europan Cities changes its mind?" She shrugged.

"In the former case, the Black Dragon will meet them at the straits and discuss matters with them. In the latter, I'm certain if you offered to watch their City, Jack and Adrienne could be convinced to take a trip to Europa to discuss things with whoever thinks us being pregnant is a good time to upset us."

"There she is." At confused Kitten noises, I explained, "There's my Imperator, my Archmage, my Priestess High Above All Others. My Kitten. My Love. My Wife. My Saffron."

"I'm a bit too satiated to return to the Bedroom at the moment, love." I shrugged.

"Not saying it for that. Not gonna say no if you change your mind, but not saying it for that." She pulled me up far enough to put her arms around my head, and whispered, "I know that, love. Which is exactly why the four of us in this Bath will, at some point, take turns showing you exactly how much we appreciate that about you." Turns out she really was satiated at the moment. She fell asleep right there in the Bath, and we all formed a floating island extending outward from her.

Funny, she kept making comments all day today. Not, like really over the top ones, but quiet, mild ones about 'as soon as she's had time to recover from last night', like she was the one that needed cool down time. Then again, given what we did in the Academy Suite bed after Maid me sashayed away post pit stop, she wasn't really incorrect.