Chương 929: Day Nine Hundred And Twenty-Seven

Dear Diary, Y'know, I remember back when I was in school, and by 'in school' I mean back in the day at Eastside, one of the teachers talked about why we had all the classes we did, why we learned what we did.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, but the answer was basically that nobody fuckin' knows what's going to be critical to any given person's life, what's going to be utterly irrelevant, and what's going to be something that won't actively hurt them not to know, but will make life so much fuckin' easier if they do.

Yeah, some stuff like 'basic communication', 'critical thinking', and 'problem solving skills' are pretty fuckin' useful unless you're, I dunno, a religious hermit living in a cave where people bring you food so you can contemplate the Holy Writ or the cosmos or some shit. Between a bloated curriculum and my own neurodivergent need to chase down new information to absorb, that meant I got a shit ton of information loaded into my brain before it got blown through the back of my skull.

I dunno how or why any given piece of it came across into here and now me, whether I remember everything I ever learned, or some subset of all that, but I do know that of all the things that I learned back in the day, philosophical debates on religion weren't ones that I thought would ever be practical life knowledge.

Yeah, I loved that shit, because as an atheist kid growing up surrounded by elders who'd drunk the Kool Aid fed to them by rich guys who wanted their brown workers to turn the other cheek, I thought it would help shut down the folks trying to force feed it to me. Yeah, for all my edginess, sometimes I think I missed the fact that it wasn't possible to argue with people like that. Out arguing someone who wants a nice quiet worker wasn't going to automagically promote me to some kind of protected status.

Most likely it would have gotten the shit kicked out of me, with some small chance of being shot by an authority figure instead of a mass shooter. Thing is, as fundamentally useless as that information was back home, despite how entertaining I found it, here and now I need to think about that shit. Like the old saw about 'if God is All Powerful, why do bad things happen?'

That argument goes on to say that if God is Good and Bad Things Happen, he is not All Powerful, and if God is All Powerful and Bad Things Happen, God is not Good. I've been thinking about it as I try to sort out how I can be who and what I am and not hurt the people around me, especially those I love, and I think there are some fundamental flaws with the argument, but of course I would.

I'm arguing the opposite end of the thing now; I'm not a teenage atheist tryna come up with a reason some fundie bigot should shut up and go away, I'm the one thinking brain in a timeless entity doomed to consume all creation. Doesn't mean I'm gonna shut up. Which is kinda fuckin' obvious at this point, or it should be. First of all, I get that I'm not actually all powerful. Okay, if I could figure out how to get past the whole 'only one human sized functional brain mass in all my billions of tons', I might be.

Or at least 'powerful enough to individually intervene in every situation that requires it'. Which might or might not be functionally equivalent. I guess 'able to Change anything within a particular volume of space time' might be limited omnipotence, but it still sounds pretty fuckin' omnipotent within those limits. There's also the whole 'omniscient' thing, which I absolutely am not. I can't be everywhere at once, so I can't see what's going on everywhere at once.

I realized with the Kaiju that I can pick up on big enough disturbances where there's not really any background noise, like out in the deep ocean where there aren't really nearly the population density of Kraken there are in coastal areas, or areas where there are Human Adjacent folks living on land. So I guess maybe if one of the Big Powerful Deities incarnated on the East Coast of Atlantis, I might pick up on it whether I was there or not.

I guess I could Scry on stuff as well, but again, I've got to know about something to Scry on it. If I just Scried on 'bad things happening', I'm pretty fuckin' sure I'd either get some random person having a bad day or I'd go insane from information overload, because 'bad things happening' is just fuckin' life. I mean, 'good things happening' is too. Like The Doctor said, one doesn't erase the other. But if good things are happening, I don't see any particular reason to intervene.

Then again, maybe scrying on 'good things happening' might be kinda like my Altar visits during Revels. Some way to connect to little ways shit is going right in the Alliance, shit that might delay or defer or even defuse my next inevitable spiral when the Black Dog attacks.

Honestly, I might even try Scrying on bad things happening, with the understanding that if it's just some random bullshit, I can justify intervening entirely on the fact that it is in fact random, and 'randomly helping one person a day' seems like something a Trickster Deity could get props for. All of this requires a lot more time spent on it, because I think that's a completely reasonable response to discovering that there is nobody home except me, that I am in fact the Woman Behind the Curtain.

But to get back to my original point, this is one of those topics that nobody in their right mind would have predicted being 'the single most important thing I learned about' when I was attending school at Eastside. So at any rate, the little one-episode adventure I ran the girls through only lasted until mid afternoon, and a surprising chunk of pre-lunchtime was spent going over their characters so we all agreed on how they worked.

I didn't remember ever playing in a tabletop game back in the day, but I'd played through a couple cRPGs, and 'not knowing how shit worked' ranked as a big problem there, so I figured as the one in charge it behooved me to make sure everybody knew how their own stuff worked.

After they managed to defeat the dude at the top floor of the tower their little group had been sent to investigate, which involved them fighting a alligator, which none of them could really envision until I told them to think of it as a wingless swamp dragon, they got their rewards, one of which included the whole 'levelling up' thing.

That's when things got even more hilarious as Ria, the one who had really understood the rules the easiest, decided she wanted a Deity more in line with, y'know, her actual real-life Deity, meaning me, which involved her cracking the rule books herself looking for appropriate Domains. I told her if she came up with something, we'd talk about it next time we played. which meant we had to schedule that, of course, which I guess means Tuesday is Game Day.

I guess that's part of what had me cogitating about Things Deific, which is why after a dinner of calzones, panzerottis, and pastelillos, including some veggie and egg ones Ria seemed to enjoy, I gently tugged Marie over to me as we floated in the Bath.

"Mittens?" She focused on me, and even if I no longer really felt the kind of fear having a seven foot predator focusing on me ought to have engendered, it still made some butterflies go all acrobatic in my midsection when she did.

"Do you know anything about," I trailed off. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"About What?" I shrugged.

"God stuff." That got me a weird, 'duh' look from her and the ladies, so I laughed a little and said, "not, like 'Worshipper Deity relations'. I think I've gotten a handle on that."

"Handled. She thinks she's handled us." Saffron sounded more than a little feisty. So I slipped surreptitious tentacles around my ladies, not to mention into her, and innocently asked, "haven't I?" She just smiled through her sighed out, "much better." So while I kinda set my tentacles and arms to snuggling people to me, not to mention surreptitious Sapphic Kitten pleasing, I focused on Marie again.

"Do you know anything about afterlives?" Then I realized how stupid that sounded.

"I mean making them." The intensified 'duh' look she'd gotten melted at that, and she nodded, then shook her head. What came out of her mouth wasn't nearly as confusing as her body language.

"Hades. Hel."

"Oh. Oh, shit, yeah, they're the ones who handle warehousing the Souls. You just handle delivering them." She smiled, nodded, then thoughtfully said, "Claimed?"

"You claim... No, Hel and Hades claimed their Afterlives?" She shrugged, then nodded.

"Okay, you're not sure, but you think they sort of claimed them, then did some home improvements?" She head bunted me and said, "So Perceptive." Of course the thought of her delivering people got me another really awful thought.

"Shit. With only one of me, I can't really do the Psychopomp thing for each and every Worshipper out there, can I?" Marie just kept her forehead pressed to mine, one claw pressing against the side of my head.

"Welcome, Vlickies." I smiled at her.

"Yeah, I get it. I appreciate that you're doing that for me now. But..." I sighed.

"Some of my people have wanted my Maw. Garde. Anise."

"I know." That tensed me up in the way that a Siberian Tiger who'd chosen bipedalism focusing on me hadn't.

"Have you?" Fortunately she got it without me spelling it out, which would have been uncomfortable.

"Not Yet." After letting out a relieved sigh, then hugging her again, I thought about it.

"If someone does, and it can't wait, and I'm not available? I trust you, Mittens." She acknowledged that with a kiss, then once our lips separated, asked, "Otherwise?" I nodded.

"Yeah. If somebody wants that, I really ought to be there. I think. Fuck, if that winds up being some kind of popular destination, I'd wind up doing nothing but watching people dissolve."

"I think," Saffron's interruption averted my panicked spiral, although it also irked me for no particular reason, which made me interrupt her verbiage and hopefully thought process.

"You do? Damn, I must not have been doing that right." She pulled herself down to me, kissed me sloppily, then let my tentacles pull her just far enough away to say, "so right. At any rate, shall we not borrow trouble? If that becomes a thing, we will simply have to arrange some ceremony wherein all the Souls who perished within a certain time frame pass into your Maw together." I must have looked some kinda way, because she followed that up with, "it would also impose some form of waiting period for that.

Which is not a terrible thing, really, given how quickly time can pass in M-Space."

"Or how slowly." She shrugged.

"You have control over that. Or you can take control over it. If they all wait twenty four hours subjective until your, ah, monthly Holy Feast, would that be so horrible?"

"Not sure I like that term. But..." I sighed.

"I guess it could be worse. I kind of even get why... Why Grandma wanted that." Saffron went still. Then whispered.

"Why?" I pulled her in, snuggled her gently to me.

"Because her Soul had so much weighing it, so many memories, from so many lives, that she thought she wouldn't be able to answer the call to another one even if she heard it. There was nothing left for her but slowly decaying. Losing herself." Saffron shuddered, and if tears leaked out of her eyes, she didn't wail or even sob.

"Thank you, Goof. Thank you, Tabitha. Thank you, Mimic, for allowing her to end how she wanted to, rather than face that slow dissolution." Then she looked at me.

"If I asked for that someday, would you grant it to me?"

"I... I dunno if I could. I want to say I would. I want to be fair, most of all to you. But..." She squeezed mine.

"So I suppose you'll just have to make that cottage by the sea so appealing I cannot think to do aught but remain there to serve at your pleasure." I smiled.

"Okay, Kitten. Preference noted. If I don't just make you a Demigoddess instead."

"How does this change my fate of remaining in that cottage to serve at your pleasure?" I chuckled at that.

"You sound like Siobhan now." Siobhan interrupted with a drowsy, "no, I'm to be in the Bedroom." Saffron just shook her head.

"Our Cottage will need a Bedroom, Darling. For you and I to console one another while our Goddess is out doing Divine things." I'm gonna blame the Bath for making things slippery enough Siobhan could yoink Saffron away from me to use her as a second woobie while she murmured, "sounds good." I'm not sure who to blame for what came out of my mouth when, after everybody was dried off and in bed, Murder Mittens picked me up and stepped us to the Bedroom.

Which was, "y'know, I think I want to do some sparring sometime soon?" She got real still, real thoughtful, then loomed over me and said, "Tomorrow, Vlickies." Then she employed some very unfair techniques to knock my silly ass out in the most pleasant way possible. Dreamt of my ladies all watching that in super slo-mo on the big screen, complimenting her and talking about replicating it without her unfairly long fingers and claws.

Well, trying to compliment her, anyhow, since every time she showed up she got yoinked to the bottom of my Maw. Somehow my other tentacles can yoink stuff under without being dissolved, but I dip one bit in and the dissolving starts. How is that fair? In the morning, after divvying myself up to play with each group of kids, not to mention sit with Siobhan and help Marie with kitchen and laundry duties, Marie stepped with me to that endless field of tentacle tips.

Before we really got started, she held up a hand and said, "Take Me." I frowned.

"But... Okay, yeah, I need to be able to go against somebody without holding back so much they can do unto others, while also not being a menace to the people I'm tryna protect, but," I paused, trying to think how to phrase it.

"Part of me is holding back because it's you." She tilted her head, thinking, but somehow I realized it was all for show. Then she turned to me and grinned.

"Last Night." Yeah, that didn't take me long.

"Yeah, you doing what you did last night is not a threat for any time you take me down." She just Grinned even bigger and said, "No, Me." I blinked as I realized what she meant. Then added.

"I'mma practice on you once I have you down." She put her claws to the sides of her face in a totally over the top 'oh, no' face.

"Every time." Which only made her go, "Oh! No!" before laughing her ass off at me. Which is how I scored the first takedown of the day, because duBois taught me to fight effectively, not fair. None of the others were nearly that easy. It wasn't until near the end of the day that I realized that even with my self-imposed limitation of 'no tentacles', she hadn't actually taken me down once.

"You're not going easy on me, are you?" I asked as I Shapeshifted just a little to get the right finger length after pinning her.

"Never, Vlickies." I do not know why I think it's cool that she can be that certain, that absolute rock solid surety, right in the middle like that. Or how quickly she can demolish my ability to concentrate then, too.

"Yeah. Um. We've got just enough time to maybe spend an hour or so elsewhere before dinner, right?" Also kinda amuses my terminally Juvenile ass that she can straight up lift me like a bowling ball. One finger, not three, but still, you'd think it would be off putting, but it's totally not, especially when she does it to toss me onto the Bed. Somebody hammering the front door of the Homestead loud enough to interrupt us all the way in the Bedroom, however, definitely put me off my Mitteny feed.

I stepped outside the front door to find a beat to shit Lemonkyenin standing there. Beat to shit enough that I didn't immediately go off on him for hammering the door of East House as hard as he'd hammered my Temple doors, at least. I even didn't go off on him when he grabbed me by the shoulders and shouted, "why have your minions done this thing to me?"