Chương 932: Day Nine Hundred And Thirty

Dear Diary, Something I've definitely had to work on, and in this case I've done it mostly subconsciously, I think, is a sense of scale. Subconsciously. That word takes on a whole new meaning when the vast majority of my body mass seems to be a semi-responsive lump. It's weird, I guess, because while the Assess Health comes back as 'Persistent Vegetative State', there's clearly at least enough functional neural tissue extant for me to issue orders and have my tentacles respond appropriately.

So between the whole thing with cephalopods having distributed intelligence and me not having an actual cephalo to go with the pods, it feels almost like, I dunno, an Operating System problem. Yeah, I know a little, very little, about computers. More than most of the kids I went to school with, and mostly because I wanted to get past the nanny software on the school library's computers.

Okay, complete honesty, I wanted to see exactly how much really fucked up porn I could download onto those computers, because I figured out pretty early on how to connect my phone to one of them, which let me use the school's data rather than mine. I know that prompts the question of why I needed fucked up porn on my phone, to which I can only reply 'standardized test prep classes are boring as shit when I had the skills to pass those tests four years ago'.

Also, really fucked up porn made me want to laugh and maybe ask for a pass to the bathroom to watch something less fucked up. I mean, I could polish the pearl to the fucked up shit, but if I was in the bathroom already I saw no need to. Meanwhile looking at regular non fucked up shit in class led to uncomfortable questions and unpleasant visits to the school psychologist.

Seriously, while I'm in the kind of Divine shape now that 'still feeling aftershocks, but ready to go again' is a thing, old Eastside potato me had a refractory period, and sitting there looking at that woman in her short skirts and legs that went on for days left me struggling with questions about my orientation which I wasn't in any kind of shape to explore. Also, she had minimal professional ethics, so there was no chance of either of us winding up kneeling in front of or under the desk. Total buzzkill.

At any rate, the process of getting video from the school library's desktop computer from the dawn of time onto my ostensibly 'smart' phone using a wire forced me to provide personal spank bank material for one of the computer nerds, who taught me about the existence of different Operating Systems, which included the vague knowledge that not every operating system could make every piece of hardware go. Except Doom. The old school pixelated one.

But as far as I or the nerd fapping to my potato tits knew, Doom wouldn't upload, download, cross-load, or most importantly play fucked up porn, so I had to understand the basics of 'this Operating System won't make that Hardware go'. To return from the other end of my long, winding digression's digestive tract, with my pods moving despite the lack of a cephalo, but being mostly unable to do anything on their own, it feels like my inability to do Deity Shit might be an Operating System problem.

Which does not fill me with joy, what with me being the Operating System in question in this particular analogy. Or is it a metaphor? I know it's not a simile, because I haven't said 'like' once. Okay, I have, but not as part of the analogy. Fuck off, it's cold and I'm tired. Also, that return from digression was actually another digression. There's always a bigger digression. Wait, does that make a digression a kind of fish? I always thought it was an ungulate, one of the horned ones. Or maybe those are dilemmas.

At any rate, I started off talking about scale. Seriously, it's a problem for me. Yes, I have to concentrate or be really emotionally invested to make any meaningful amount of my tentacles respond with anything like their full power, but I can do so, and when I do there's not much that can do so much as inconvenience me. Seriously, I could say 'I bench pressed Florida', except I'm pretty sure I had most of Georgia and Alabama on the bar as well. I'm pretty sure I could beat Atlas at arm wrestling.

What I'm saying is that Strength is not my limiter. As might be made clear by that whole 'significantly higher Tier than my Strength' rating when I throw Status at myself, Endurance isn't either. Honestly, while Agility comes in a distant third, I've gotten pretty damn good at applying precision pressure precisely, per pretty partners post pounding. I think being adopted into the Norse pantheon however briefly addicted me to alliteration. At any rate, my problem is scale.

Yeah, I can smash any opponent, but collateral damage is gonna wreck shit I care about. Saffron was right, I could probably flatten Sparta. Worst case, I drop Rods from God on the City until it's a nice cinder cone. But even though I may only care about the wives and kids and slaves in the City in that vague 'they're human beings' kind of way, I do care about them, and won't accept them as 'collateral'. Okay, I just realized, I care way more about the kids there than that. Possibly for Domain related reasons.

I'm not sure. But I do. Stolen story; please report. At any rate, I can Endure anything some asshole can throw at me, but they might not tire out fast enough for me to stop them before they break something or someone I care about. It's all a question of scale. It's like getting things out from between my teeth, kinda. If it's stuck in there too hard to push out, and it's too durable to just smush and shatter, I can't get it out without some kind of tool, or a lot of pain and agony.

So yesterday after the Revel, I made sure Cherry and Giselle were both safe and sound at 'home', which oddly enough since he's a Priest and she's now his official nursemaid on top of being a Temple volunteer, means they were living in one of the apartments at the Temple itself. Okay, I say 'apartment', but it was basically a slightly bigger, slightly nicer cell than the one Saffron and I originally shared at the Academy. They had two beds, a cradle, and an armoire.

Guess they're not into academics and don't need a desk. But now that I think about it, I changed Isnomi on our desk a lot. Karen? Yes, Goddess? Make sure they've got a changing table for the kid when it rolls around? That got me the amused chuckle it deserved. Don't worry, Goddess. We take very good care of Cherry. That reminded me of something. Whatever happened to Maurice? Who? Maurice Breedlove, Cherry's old manager? Oh! Mo! She sighed.

It's been a while since I've spoken with him; he'd been talking about moving to Muscogee. What? Really? Why? Something about being a entertainment management professional, and hearing they needed one down there. Huh. Cool. Let me know if you hear from him? Absolutely, Goddess. So once I saw them both home safe, with Giselle tucking Cherry into bed, then getting tucked in herself by yours truly, I stepped back home, where I spent the day lazing around with the fam.

I wondered about it briefly, but Saffron quietly said, "haven't looked outside lately, have you?" I hopped up to my office, couldn't open the door because it'd frozen closed, hopped up on top of my office only to wind up in a snowdrift deeper than I was tall. Not pleasant, even with the Jotnar anti-cold Boon. When I managed to blast some of that away, I stared up into an absolute deluge of fat, fluffy snowflakes drifting down from above. More snow?

It started midway through the night, during your Revel, thought Siobhan. The girls told me. How exactly did our girls know when it started? I got a sudden moment of sheepishness from Siobhan, then, I'm sorry, Mistress. I didn't think to ask. No worries. You've got an excuse. Being pregnant has definitely distracted you. I confronted the girls about it in the Bath tonight.

"Just to be clear, I'm not angry, but how did you know the snow started in the middle of the night?" Every eye in the horde turned to Isnomi, who swallowed and said, "Mama?"

"Yes, Menace?"

"Why you always say you're not angry?" I kinda froze up at that. It took me a bit, and when I realized why I winced a little.

"Because when I was a kid sometimes my friends' parents got angry, and did bad things to their kids, and I don't ever want you girls being frightened to tell things." She bounded forward through the water, arms going around my waist, and she said, "we're not afraid of you, Mama." A few moments later I had the whole horde clinging to me, some declaring how I was Mama, and Mama would never hurt them, some just clinging to me. I gathered them up, hugged them all, then pulled Isnomi up so I could look her in the eyes.

"Thank you, Menace. That really means a lot to me." She smiled and reached out to glomp my head, but I held her and said, "now, why were you awake in the middle of the night?" She froze, then kinda deflated with a sigh.

"I woked up when you brought Sissa Shawan back. I went up to look at my Temple, but the snow was falling." I took a deep breath, then let it out.

"Okay. Just... Okay, everybody knows you're big and bad and scary, but please let one of us know if you're going to do something like that? Especially in the middle of the night?"

"Bud... Ith my howy gwownd?" I nodded.

"Which is why I'd probably say it's okay. Maybe go with you, or find something to do in my office if you wanted some privacy or something. But you're still my daughter. I still... I care about you, Isnomi." I scanned the whole horde.

"I care about all of you. If something had happened, and we didn't know where you were? We'd feel horrible if we couldn't come find you. And even if some of you are getting pretty big," an understatement in Isadora's case. She was already my height. How the fuck was someone who wasn't even one already my height?

"You're still our daughters, and you're still not really full grown. So please, from now on let one of the adults know before you wander off. Take someone with you if you can, too."

"My Pweethtetheth?" I winced.

"Yeah, taking them along would probably be good for setting up your temple. But still, if you're going out after dark, or going out of the House, let someone know where you're going, okay?" She looked a little mulish, but then paused, thoughtful. She swallowed and asked, "is this a safety thing?" I nodded.

"Yeah, Menace, it is." She just sighed.

"Okay, Mama." I hugged her, hugged the rest.

"Thanks, girls." Dreamt of the ladies slowly dissolving while snow covered them. The snow tasted of mint and sugar. I know I'm 'fated to consume the world' or some shit like that, but it would help me slow down if everything didn't taste so good. Today I spent most of the day digging a tunnel from my office door, which I eventually managed to unfreeze long enough to open, to the base of the kaiju dragon skull. Through snow.

Because apparently here and now in the mountains having at least a dozen feet of snow piled up and not melting is just a thing that happens. Can't say I minded the trio assisting me, though; Isnomi and her two younger 'Clergy', who had loads of fun packing the snow into solid walls and a roof for our tunnel. Had to steal them all some hazmat gear, though. The interior of that skull stank something fierce.