Chương 855: Day Eight Hundred And Fifty-Three

Dear Diary, I'm torn. Part of me wants to just kick back and enjoy the relative peace and quiet until we spot Poseidon's next wave of kaiju. Yeah, I've got some prep work to do for when we find horse boy himself... Nah, not calling him that. Way too close to horse girl, and even if she's my little pony girl now, That's still way too much association for me. Even if I don't kill his ass and eat him whole, I'm still gonna steal fuckin' horses from him, just because Maze.

At any rate, part of me wants to chill, but part of me thinks I need to be super hyper focused on finding him, on prepping for the next wave, on making sure our inevitable confrontation plays out the way I'm looking to have it do. Seriously, every battle where I've put the slightest attention to the actual fight itself has gone shockingly my way. Okay, it shouldn't be shocking, really.

My big problem is not 'big enough hammer', it's 'getting the asshole to stand in the middle of the big concentric circles, so I hit them and only them with the biggest of hammers'. Fuck, I'm not even talking about Mjolnir here, even though I could be. Fucker's just sitting there gathering dust next to a desk at this point anyhow. So part of me wants to chill, part of me thinks I need to get my ass to work, and another part of me is just tense with anticipation.

I'm not even fuckin' sure what I'm anticipating at this point. Seriously, I ought to at least be able to say 'afraid' or 'eager' or something, but it's not. It's just tension, and it's eating at me, doing bad things to my patience. Part of me wants to blame the uglier parts of that on Her Dark Fatassness, because I can't think of anything where I'd be even slightly 'eager' for fuckin' kaiju to show up.

Mostly, though, I'm just glad that I've recognized I'm tense before I wound up snapping at my kids, or venting that shit on my ladies, or even just being less than diplomatic with folks outside that central circle. Okay, yeah, yesterday was one long pressure release courtesy of my Kitten showing off exactly how many ways she could ring my bell over the course of our eight hours of daylight. Inhuman Endurance from both my Kitten and I for the ultimate win. Not quite ultimate.

When Saffron reminds me that she listens in on the regular, I'm simultaneously heart warmed and terrified. Eep. That would be Ledger Day. I'm in danger. You love it. I do. I really do. I know that objectively, whatever she's got planned is gonna be downright terrifying if I look at it the wrong way. Or, fuck, even if I look at it the right way. But at the same time, I'm sure I'm going to absolutely love it. Well, 'love' might not be quite the right word.

'Enjoy' is probably closer, although when it comes to my ladies those two things bleed into one another pretty easily. So dinner wound up being things I could be sloppy with and still not fuck up entirely. Fried rice, which I know we do all the time, but I think my kids are like me in that it takes a long fuckin' while for them to get tired of anything. Just to double down on that, Marie made spicy eggs for me.

Well, she made enough for everybody, but before she told me what she'd done she slipped up behind me and slid one big paw across my eyes.

"Open Wide." What else was I gonna do? I opened my mouth, and she deposited a big spoonful of just shy of scalding spicy eggs into my mouth. The best kind, with sliced fried veggies to kick the texture and flavor up a notch. Without opening my eyes I spun around and pulled her down, but her lips remained stubbornly closed until I swallowed. I'm not sure if it's considered a chaser if I'm swallowing her tongue after food, but we absolutely lost a few minutes to her tickling my tonsils with big old tigress tongue.

So fried rice, spicy eggs, and something new I decided to try from back in the day, egg drop soup. I'm absolutely not sure if it's genuine Chinese, or some kind of Asian, or just Americanized, and frankly we were working on my imperfect memory of flavor and texture, but between salt, spices, chicken broth, scallions, and eggs, it came out pretty good. Ria seemed a little put out at the lack of eggy cheese paninis, but more of an 'oh, darn, I had a craving' than anything really awful.

Lindsey seemed oddly bemused, like she wasn't really into egg, but the sheer variety of ways we presented the eggs, combined with the plethora of veggies in them, got her to try all of them and eat a reasonable amount. Alex frowned until I told her eggs were a good source of protein. She and all the other girls wound up needing to nom some of the ubiquitous bread, because with a clan this size baking some bread is practically a requirement, no matter what else we bring home.

Funniest thing had to be the kits and soup. We had what I thought of as the full set of cutlery at the Homestead, apparently because Saffron had heard me bemoaning the lack of forks at some point when we had salad, but most of the women, ladies, and kids used spoons most of the time, and our spoons were frankly just plain nicer than the forks. Like, the forks were forks. Nothing really special.

Saffron and Marie had worked with the women who made our spoons, though, and we had something I thought of as a really nice hybrid of an Asian soup spoon and a western table spoon. Good bowl depth, good size, nice angle between the handle and the bowl, everything about it was custom engineered by Kitten and Mittens to deliver food to mouth with maximum zest and efficiency. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

But the kits, who had no real problem with meat mush, or fried rice, or even stew, did not seem to grok soup. I realized right then that with the stew they'd mostly just scooped up the chunks then drunk the little bits of remaining gravy like stuff at the bottom of the bowl, but the egg drop soup was runnier, basically just a slightly thickened chicken broth.

Instead of taking normal sized spoonsful of soup, they tried to get a pile of stuff the way they did with rice and stew and even how they'd done with the spicy eggs. The results were as messy as they were predictable. Soup everywhere on each and every kit. Which is when we all, even Marie and I, discovered that our kits definitely have their mom's feline instincts, as they licked each other clean.

Okay, mostly Isadora, because the big soup tureen wound up empty before all the other kits had finished their soup, and she wanted more, so she went to town cleaning the others with her tongue.

"Oi! Isadora!" She looked over at me.

"Mama?" When she saw the look on my face, she shrank the tiniest bit and asked, "Wrong?" I smiled to take the sting out of my words, but explained, "I'm fine with you cleaning them off, but you just bumped Calliope and made her spill an entire spoonful of soup on Erato." She smiled back.

"I clean!"

"Oi! Careful. Gently. Cleaning is fine, making more mess to clean is not." After that she waited until any given one of her sisters had emptied their spoon before licking them, and she also wound up a little more careful about where her butt and tail were. At this point she had to be at least twice Anise and Hailee's size, and a head taller than all the other kits, so it was definitely something she had to be aware of.

Nothing wrong with being big, but always something to be said for being aware of where your elbows are. Still kinda weirded out by how the kits are only like four months old, maybe five by local months, which are shorter, but they're already ranging from small toddler to almost kindergarten size in Isadora's case. I guess they're healthy, or one of the ladies would say something.

I've hit them with Assess now and then, and they come up Healthy, so unless something comes up to hint that there's something wrong, I'm just gonna thank biology and the Menace that they auto-potty trained so fast. Okay, not exactly 'auto-trained', what with their sisters basically helping them to do it, but still, less dirty diapers means less kids giving me shit.

Okay, kinda funny, I realized just then that if I found out that if Saffron putting a bun in my oven was an absolute guarantee of double Siobhan's pukey time plus years upon years of dirty diapers, I'd still be screaming 'breed me' at the top of my lungs when my Kitten decides it's time. No. You won't. But you will hear those words at some appropriate point now that I know how titillating you find them. Are you listening especially closely to me today or something? Mostly or something.

Trying to set up a highlight reel of our antics yesterday for us all to watch tonight. I'm so gonna dunk you. Oh, no. Not that. Whatever shall... I... She broke down into giggles right then. So of course after we all had a long, hot shower and an even longer, hotter soak, and we all piled into bed, I dreamt of my ladies watching said highlight reel. By their expressions, maybe even getting the full sensory suite at times.

I absolutely dunked Saffron every time she showed up, from the time I fell asleep to the moment I woke up. Today I spent the day teaching, guarding, cleaning, cooking, and searching. Along with all that, I also decided to keep one of me meditating in M-Space up atop the West Tower. Specifically, I was trying to feel for things with my tentacles. It was at the same time surprisingly easy to do, yet difficult to get any meaningful information from.

I think the biggest part of it was the sheer amount of information I got from each and every tentacle. Focusing on one of them wasn't too bad, but even a handful of them just overwhelmed me, and not in any kind of good or useful way. The closest way I could describe it to maybe Saffron was when I had something stuck between my teeth, and I could feel it with my tongue, but not find it with my fingernails or see it in a mirror. Except each and every one of my tentacles had that level of feedback.

As I mentioned, I could sort of handle the input from one of them if I concentrated, but there were literally thousands of the fuckers waving around, and that was just the big ones. As I sat there meditating I realized that some of the little ones started at ground level and stretched all the way to the sky, while others branched off of the big ones at some point. Really, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it that I could tell.

Just a giant fuck you to anything like terrestrial biology, what with me having one mouth, no eyes, and thousands of big tentacles, not to mention thousands upon thousands of little ones. Reminded me a little of something, probably from that big Mythology brick, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what the fuck it was. Of course, it did not help that all of my tentacles exist in M-Space, and I have to shove them through to the Mortal Realm to feel anything there.

I definitely found a few spots where there were villages or towers or some other kind of buildings. By the end of the day, I'd even spotted all the assorted towers Saffron had the Alliance military building up the coast. Weird thing, but it seems like when I remotely extend my tentacles like that, they form starting atop any buildings. I know I've reached into buildings with them before, but no joy trying to do that remotely with my tentacles. I don't think.

I moved slowly and gently, just in case I bumped into somebody. Because as noted, I do not have eyes on my tentacles. I also realized that my tentacles out in the Atlantic start at the bottom of the ocean. I also now know how the silt at the bottom of the ocean feels. For those of you with fully functional lady parts, it's remarkably like that nasty goo that lets you know that you need to get some pads and Midol.