Chương 982: Day Nine Hundred And Eighty

Dear Diary, It's weird. I've always thought that being overloaded was what set off my loss of control, but I might have been blaming the wrong culprit. Yeah, I know, the culprit is my lack of self control. Well, self regulation is the fancy term, because 'control' implies a level of influence over my own attitudes and emotional states that just doesn't exist.

'Regulation' is the word the school psychologist used back in the day, and when I asked why she used that, she pointed out that trying to pilot myself like some kind of robot wouldn't work, because I'm not a robot. I'm a person, with emotions and thoughts and ADHD and chronic depression and all kinds of societal pressures that cause me to have emotional surges. I can't control that shit. But I can regulate it.

I can put in little buffers like child safety locks on the medicine cabinet and the place under the kitchen sink where I keep the cleaning chemicals. I can vent on masses of pixels instead of people. I can't control the river of my emotions like a robot, but I can sort of steer the boat of my actions around that river a bit. Yeah, I didn't implement very much of that shit, but the visits to her office still helped.

Pearl polishing bank full up, depressive crash and violent outbursts both put on hold for epic self-service session. But I wasn't bi or pan or anything. Everybody does the deed in the dark thinking of women in short skirts, right? Anyway, back to my realization here and now, I've kept winding back to the idea that I'm overwhelmed, then something upsets me, I snap, and atrocities ensue. Dominoes. But that's not really the case. I wasn't 'overwhelmed' before the Moon Temple.

I sure as shit wasn't 'overwhelmed' before the Battle of the Walls. If anything, I was at loose ends with nothing to do but stare at the forest from atop Camden Yards' north wall. Meanwhile, before the Liberation of Calverton I'd been juggling Karen's Trials, Siobhan's Seduction, and oh also a major military campaign and the planning of the culmination of said campaign. I was fuckin' swamped with all kinds of shit to do every day.

I fucked some of it up here and there, and delegated everything else to competent people with Actual Skills™, but I was absolutely swamped, and even with the Army tryna advance before I called for them and Saffron taking bits of shrapnel through the day and even the fuckin' Master Lich showing up and threatening kids, I never lost my fuckin' mind. Never did an atrocity out of potent rage. Because here and now my rage is anything but impotent, as the Morrigan can attest to.

Yeah, I killed the shit out of the Spartans last week when we caught up to them. They'd savaged every undefended person they ran across, left a bunch of deadly traps and even more maiming ones, which in the winter here and now are just a slower, agonizing death sentence, in their wake, and deliberately evaded any place we might be able to find and stop them. They did war crimes, that pissed me off, we caught them, we killed them. Mostly me.

But I didn't make bloody sculpture out of them while keeping them alive to scream about it. I didn't self-service by shoving heads into assholes until I had a daisy chain big enough for Olga to use as a choker. I killed them, as quickly and cleanly as any battlefield deaths. Honestly, my only regret is letting them die in battle. That seems like the kind of thing they'd love. Brag about, even.

Fuck, I've heard they're some kind of anti-theists, which I could almost get behind given the fucked up nature of Deities here and now, if they weren't dead set on being worse than the Deities they refuse to worship. Now I'm wondering what happens to their Souls, where they go, all that kind of good bullshit, because I don't know whether I want them to be erased by my Maw or I want Murder Mittens to drop them in Niflhel so I won't have to taste them.

At any rate, The past twenty-four have in some ways been just as tense as waiting for the other shoe to drop at Newark, but I'm still not ratcheting up. I mean, I am, but it's more of an 'I'm not going to give them time to think' than 'I'm going to get off on pulling them apart like bugs'. Got home last night and, once I made sure that everybody was singular and inside the East House Dining Room, fully collapsed into myself and yoinked Tallulah and Marie into my lap.

Both of them seemed both amused and bemused, especially when I nodded at my plate and said, "my hands are full." Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. They took great delight in waving food in front of my mouth, then feeding it to each other. Meanwhile the kids, even the new pair, watched us with the kind of rolled eyes and surreptitious surveillance that I had come to expect from our girls.

Marie had managed to scrape up enough fish, rice, eggs, and veg to make a variety of sushi and tempura, which lured Sarah down to have dinner with us. Not sure whether she normally made stuff for herself, had Marie deliver stuff to her room, or just subsisted on Worship and D's Glory, but she brought him along as well. Little tyke was growing at least as fast as my kits, maybe faster.

He also made an absolute oinker of himself on sushi, which I couldn't really blame him for, even if I had some serious envy with every piece of sushi on my plate going into Tallulah or Marie. I kept them with me in the Bath, watching over the kids without being obvious about it, as the two new kids joined them in the bath and watched the assorted tub games. They didn't join in, but they didn't have that 'I am not a person, I am an object, please don't notice me' thing going on like they had previously either.

Baby steps. Also, didn't sleep much last night. Mostly because I took great delight in yoinking Tallulah and Marie up to the Bedroom, waving tentacles in front of both of them, then using them to put parts inside each other. Okay, mostly fingers, but faces and tongues were involved too. I think maybe Tallulah wasn't fully eager until Marie decided to show off her handwork. Convincing argument, that.

Best part was at the end, where Tallulah rolled her head over to look at where I lounged on the divan, enjoying myself, and said, "thank you, Mistress. I might not have indulged so freely had you not... convinced me." I snorted, held her chin with a tentacle, finished, and then chuckled.

"I haven't been holding you to her for like an hour." Her mouth dropped open, at which point Marie said, "She Hasn't." So nice to hear Tallulah laugh. Like a real, honest, unfaked laugh, and not at some kind of snide wit or anything horrible. Just laughing at the pure joy of having found joy in another person, however momentary. We all slept well after that. Dreamt of the ladies doing their war room thing again.

In the morning, Co-Located to a fare-thee-well, juggling half a dozen different things, but focused on watching the Trolls and the Jotnar and the Jarls, while my other Scrying Mirrors tracked half a dozen scouting parties. The Jotnar had arrived in Calverton, and Marylin and Orla directed them to a staging base Saffron had set up midway between Calverton, Phileo, Rich Man's Port, and Lancaster.

The Jarls were still getting their shit in gear, but that meant they were actually loading supplies rather than intending to 'live off the land', because apparently any surviving Jarls realized they, too, would look fetching wrapped around Olga's neck as a human centipede ouroboros. The Trolls... Okay, I did not expect Furtim to basically hit the Troll town across the bay from Calverton like a fuckin' scaly Joan of Arc, but holy shit did she ever.

Showed up with her cohort, marched right up to the very much no longer a tent command tent in the middle of town, then just started giving orders. People fuckin' obeyed, too. The few Human-Adjacent folks who'd taken up residence helped pack supplies, then more or less 'manned the walls' along with the elderly Jotnar living in town. The younger Jotnar took off in hot pursuit of the ones who'd headed to Calverton, although they seemed a lot more disciplined.

The Trolls, once they got their supplies and weapons in order, split into two groups, each of which spread into a thin cordon pretty much all the way across the fuckin' Delmarva peninsula, at which point one group started marching north. They kept up a kind of hissing chant the whole time, a weird kind of thing that was a little hard to predict. I only caught the edges of it through the scry, but it sounded a little like a Jody call.

Thing is, I totally got it; each of them could hear the ones to either side of them, and that meant even when they were out of sight they knew their flankers were still up and moving. They didn't 'look for tracks'.

They were close enough that unless the Spartans were fuckin' masters of camouflage, one of them would stumble across them, at which point five hundred pissed off Trolls would converge, and given the kind of abuse I'd seen the scaly bois shrug off, I didn't think the Spartans could put one down in the time it took for them to gather.

At any rate, it took them about four hours to hit the narrowest point of the peninsula, at which point half of them settled in to watch, still singing, and the other half formed up and lit out southward. Two hours later, the reinforced southern line started a sweep southward. Total brute force approach. Then again, much like me, my Trolls have strong brute tendencies. Sometimes you play against type, other times you go with your strengths.

They hadn't gone more than a few dozen miles south by nightfall, but that meant by nightfall there was a clear area of the peninsula, and they bedded down right there as the sun set, ready to keep sweeping in the morning. Gotta say, while they're not the most imaginative folks in my forces, they are both disciplined and thorough. Really hope Furtim liked her Boon.