Chương 805: Day Eight Hundred And Three

Dear Diary, As I may have mentioned once or twice before, I am an idiot. I've spent most of the past Season going over my Doctrine and reviewing Saffron's Commentary. I guess I initially started it with the idea of finally giving the Doctrine that once over it desperately needed. Editing shit that's clumsy, maybe even adding or replacing a few Verses. The Commentary I thought I'd read through with an eye toward making sure Saffron didn't take something I said the wrong way.

By that I mostly mean getting upset at something I said, but mostly making sure that I didn't word something stupidly and start, I dunno... There's an old joke about a Priest that goes to Heaven after a long life spent in the Clergy since he was barely old enough to take his Vows. Saint Peter welcomes him in and asks him if there's anything he wants to do, since Heaven is supposed to be a reward and he gave his whole assed life to God.

So he asks to see the original scriptures, since all he ever got to see were copies of copies of copies, and so much of the strife on Earth had to do with stupid assed shit where two people interpreted a smudge on a page two different ways. So of course Saint Peter shows my dude to the originals, and he sits down and starts reading. Saint Peter goes back to his post and gets back to work.

A while later, a heart rending scream of anguish comes out of the scriptorium, and Peter rushes over to find the guy on hands and knees, weeping. When Saint Peter asks, 'what's wrong', the guy, still weeping, cries out, 'the word was celebrate'. Yeah, I didn't really think that my uber word nerd Kitten would make any stupid mistakes.

On the other hand I totally thought I'd wind up finding at least one spot like that, where how I phrased something led to some conclusion that would make my life that much more difficult for my followers. I mean, difficult in ways it doesn't have to be to make life better for everybody. Taking what you want without consequences is easy, so it just follows that doing otherwise is harder than that, but that's just the way shit is.

You want me to make happy noises when you tell me all about it at the end, the story you tell me better not be about how you were 'smart' and exploited people instead of, y'know, not doing that. At this point, it might not seem like I'm that much of an idiot, since doing a read through and editing isn't dumb, even if you know somebody smarter than you has already read through it. Shit, I'm sure that some of the people reading my Doctrine are smarter than me and will notice shit I don't.

I'm sure that I noticed some minor bullshit in Saffron's Commentary that made me think 'hold up...' here and there, and I'm in no way as smart as Saffron. But here's the thing I thought about as I carefully slipped my leather clad, illuminated copy of the Doctrine back into the equally fancy copy of the Commentary. I am not holding a manuscript. I am not holding a bunch of scrawled pages held together with string and tape and happy thoughts. I'm holding a fuckin' tome. A high quality, fancy edition of a book.

A collector's edition. The existence of a 'collector's edition' implies the existence of, y'know, a mass production edition. Little fuckin' late to be doing line edits, know what I mean? Late in the afternoon yesterday, I Co-Located to my Temples, Blend in full effect, just to look around. I've spent a fair amount of time in my Temples by now, obviously, but the vast bulk of that time has been on the Altar, utterly focused on the Worshipper in front of me. On top of me. Under me. With me, you know what I mean.

At any rate, the second biggest slice of that time pie has been teaching math. Which still makes my mental wheels do a speed wobble whenever I think about it. I get it, I'm not teaching at the University level or anything, but I am teaching a few kids who might have been High School age back in the day.

I get that I'm an Academy graduate, more or less, and the Academies teach such a broad range of stuff, with the opportunity to do serious depth work in whatever area a Cadet wants, that Academy graduates probably do teach at the Universities now and then. But seriously, it's me. Me as a gym coach, sure. Me as a combat instructor, obviously. Me as a math teacher still does not compute. My point, and I did have one, was that I really didn't have a good idea of what the place looked like from a Worshipper eye view.

So when I Co-Located, I arrived at the front door of the Temple of Love and walked in. For the rest I'm a little ashamed to say I'd never actually walked in through the front door, so I had to do a little exploring to find it. In every case, I had to hand it to Conrad, plus whoever had done the architecture of the other Temples, if it was somebody else. The entryways, even the one in Norfolk that was mostly open air, felt cozy.

Inviting, while still being open enough to let a dozen people walk in side by side if they wanted to. All of them had some kind of 'coat check', I guess, although that varied from a simple wall with hooks with numbers on them in Norfolk to four separate 'coat check counters', two per side, in the entry hall of the Temple of Love.

The outer pair were pretty standard, with attendants busily taking coats and cloaks and in one case somebody's entire outfit, folding them neatly and handing over little chits with bracelet length lanyards. As I watched, the attendant on one side pressed the chit into an older dude's hand and said, "wrist or ankle, please don't 'forget' again, Mr. Ryan." Yeah, I couldn't let that go.

Followed him into the main hall, which opened to the bar on the left and the restaurant on the right, both utterly eclipsed by the beautiful architecture centered on the altar in the center. When his hand started slipping around behind him, I caught him gently with a tentacle, slipped in behind him close enough to lick his ear, and de-Blended just far enough to let him hear me breathe, "she asked nicely, Ryan." Never saw a dude react so strongly before.

Like, all but one body part went just a little bit limp, and his hand clamped down around the lanyard before he scrabbled to get it around his wrist. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. Screw it, Karen had lookout, and if someone required my personal intervention, she'd tell me, but I couldn't resist lending a hand. Tentacle. Whatever. Not everywhere had the bar and restaurant setup.

Norfolk had what looked like an outdoor buffet and picnic area, for instance. But every Temple had some kind of food service. I didn't really feel hungry at the moment, and I definitely didn't want to show up to my Revel pre-gamed, so after snagging a bar pretzel to nibble on, I stepped back to check out the two odd 'coat checks'. Which turned out to be not quite that. They had lockers, cubbies really, with numbers not unlike Norfolk, but most of what lurked back in those areas were showers.

Almost all of them in use, as folks sluiced off the sweat and dirt of a workday before the Revel proper started. I wandered around the perimeter of the Temple, taking in the private rooms, including the ones used as classrooms during the day. I realized I'd never really spent any time looking around the non-math classrooms. When I did, I found the first of what I was looking for. The room with a bunch of little kid reading primers only had one copy each of the Doctrine and Commentary, but it had them.

What I thought of as the 'advanced' reading classroom had not only a full set of Pratchett novels in a shelf along one wall, it had half a dozen copies of my Holy Texts as well. I really did not know what to think of that. On the one hand, this was a Temple. On the other hand, it felt a little like, I dunno, indoctrination. I almost called for Saffron, but realized she was right in the middle of arguing some political point with V himself. Not, like, angry arguing either, but that intellectual back and forth thing.

She did not need her elbow jostled. Karen? Yes, Goddess? it took me a bit to formulate my question in a way that wasn't accusatory. Are the kids taught how to read using the Doctrine and Commentary? Her answer came back a little tentative. Yes? Sort of? She sounded almost apologetic. I'm not mad, Karen. Maybe worried about something, but not mad. Not at you. Explain, please? When I said I wasn't mad, the feeling of tension lessened, and when I said 'please' it dropped away entirely.

Your poetry is sometimes a bit advanced for the little ones, as are some of the concepts in the Commentary, so we must use primers to bring them to a level where they can understand it. Once they can, of course it's our preferred reading material for them. Yeah. Um. Maybe back off on that? Just a little? I sensed confusion, thought a moment, then explained, Agency, Karen. I want them all to have it. Even the kids. Don't keep it away from them or anything, that's just stupid, but... Have some other options, maybe?

Again, the moment I said 'Agency', her confusion vanished. Yes, Goddess. There may be some difficulty with that? Why? There aren't many books written for children that age. She paused. There's a bit of, I'm not sure, a gap between primers and Pratchett? I smiled. I'll see what I can do. After that I meandered back up to the sanctuary, where the crowd had already half filled the seats.

I took the opportunity to check out a few of the empty seats; they were wood over stone, with lots of bolsters, some attached to kneelers, others hooked to the seats by loops of furry fabric, plenty just lying around. Also, slipped into the backs of the seats in front of them, simple wood and fabric bound copies of the Doctrine and Commentary. So right before the sun set, I cleared my throat in Boltophsberg, and in the sudden silence said, "hey guys, I've got somewhere I need to be for the night."

Then turned to Baba and said, "keep track of how many times I need to correct boy wonder over there?" I collapsed back to myself with the sound of Baba's cackling in my ears. I dropped my Blend all the way down as I walked up the steps to my Altar. If Karen was a little surprised to see that, she didn't get bent out of shape or anything. Just looked at me and said, "Goddess?" I definitely caught her eagerness. I wasn't sure for what, but it felt more like a want than an immediate need.

So I took her by the hand, sat down on the edge of my Altar, and said, "hey, Karen? Have the volunteers in the cloak rooms had a turn?" Her sudden surprised and guilty look amused the fuck into me. Not out of me, not hardly. I pulled her to me, hugged her, and said, "let's clear that up, shall we?" She laughed with relief, then said, "just a moment." She returned a few seconds later, towing the two folks along.

A man and a woman, the man looking youngish, like in his twenties maybe, the woman reminding me a little of Devorah with that full, mature look about her.

"Hey there, you two. I wanted to thank you for all the work you've done over the past months. It's always been you two in the cloak rooms, right?"

"Yes?" the young guy ventured.

"We're not really... Ah..." I held out my hands, and each of them tentatively took them. I looked deep inside her, then him, and pulled them gently to me.

"Hey guys. It's not all about fluid exchange up here, y'know." So, not so subtly Shapechanging to make myself big enough, I pulled them both into my lap. We talked. Talked about what it was like for them. Talked about how sometimes they felt subtly excluded in a Temple with so much dedicated to the physical aspects of intimacy and passion. The guy, Wendell, had definitely wound up feeling some kinda way about not wanting to get it on making him less 'manly'.

The woman, Dorothea, I felt kinda worse for, because she'd had kids, which meant she'd done the deed with no desire to do so. Multiple times. Still, it seemed like she enjoyed the motherhood parts, and her kids were some of the older ones attending the school. There was laughter. There were tears. Eventually, like halfway through the night, Wendell nodded off. Dorothea smiled softly at that, then leaned into me and said, "sing me a lullaby?" So I sang to her.

Sang her the songs I used to sing to and with Isnomi back in our Academy cell. She smiled, then slipped off to sleep. I laid her down on the Altar, then smiled at Karen, nodded at the pair, and said, "get them somewhere quiet?" She nodded, then jumped like I'd goosed her when I said, "hurry back, Highest Priestess." When she got back to me, I pulled her into my embrace, and looked deep inside her.

"Really?" She nodded, shyly, and I pulled her into my arms and sang to her. Talked with her. Quietly reassured her that all that she'd done for me, for my Temple, for my family, for my people, made me happy, made me proud of her, but none of that, whether success or failure, was why I accepted her. I accepted her because she was her. My dedicated, devoted Highest Priestess. A girl who'd been ostracized from her own high society, grown into a woman who chose to embrace everyone equally.

That dark place inside her gradually went still, not echoing empty like Celeste's had, but silent, quiet, and subdued. Satisfied, even if not satiated. Kinda fun letting her sleep on the Altar all day while I taught all the kids math. Only had to punch Perun in the taint twice today. Maybe he's learning.