Chương 983: Day Nine Hundred And Eighty-One

Dear Diary, Fuck. I shouldn't have run my fuckin' mouth. Specifically, I'm talking about how being busy tends to keep my tension from ratcheting up while I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yeah, apparently once everything settles into a routine, the 'keeping busy' falls off and the 'waiting tension' starts cranking itself up again. I think I understand why it didn't in Calverton, while I'm thinking of it. I wasn't waiting for the other shoe to drop there. I was the one with the shoe, waiting to drop it.

I didn't have to keep myself in a constant state of... Fuck. Hypervigilance. I didn't have to actively engage that part of me most associated with the worst part of my PTSD. Waiting for something to happen with Saffron deployed at Newark's walls? Vigil. Watching for Calverton to make its move, or for the Rogues to finally show up? Vigilance. Shit, even standing watch during the Calverton campaign wasn't really that kind of a vigil.

I wasn't watching for some big enemy assault, I was just waiting to get called in by our guys when they found something they couldn't handle. There was no sense of ominous doom waiting to do doom shit. Even once I realized the Master Lich was there, I didn't have a sense like she was playing some kind of game with me, where she acted and I had to react. I set the pace, I acted and she reacted. I didn't really feel like I had to constantly stay on alert, because when the shoe dropped I had to be ready to catch it.

I guess I kinda felt this way when the kaiju kept attacking. Sort of. Nah, really, I think I totally was, but there was never a long gap where I was waiting for them to attack where I wasn't doing something to either blunt the attack or maybe cut them off at the knees. By the time I figured out what had happened in Tartarus, where the kaiju had come from, and I had a plan to deal with them, that sense of impending doom was just gone. Shit, I knew what the enemy's plan was then.

I'd seen how the kaiju happened, I'd heard from Tartarus the vague outline of what had been done and what would be done, and the attacks had a kind of tempo to them. I might not have known exactly when or where any given kaiju would attack, or what kind of power set it might have, but I knew what they were doing. Coming right at us, at our coastline, at our population centers if we let them get past us like that one sneaky fucker, and just smashing whatever they found.

Again, with the exception of the sneaky fucker, they weren't exactly subtle or imaginative. But I have no fuckin' clue what the Spartan plan is. Part of me regrets not keeping one around for interrogation. A little bit. Not a lot, though, because I don't think any of our people are really interrogation specialists. Not, like, Black Widow tier, at least. Yeah, we've got plenty of people who are some degree of good at torture, but in the first place that shit doesn't work.

People being tortured don't give up truth, they say whatever they think will make the torture stop. I said 'in the first place', even though honestly that's all that matters, but there's also the fact that torturing somebody for information runs into that whole ethical dilemma shit. The only time torture doesn't hurt the torturer is if they're some kind of sociopath. I'm not talking some kind of clinical definition with that, by the way.

I'm talking about the whole 'sees other people as not-people' part of the popular image of a sociopath. Because humans are social animals. Unless we've been broken, we care about other people. A big part of training soldiers isn't even about how to shoot, or swing a sword, or any of that. It's teaching them to pull the trigger when pointing a deadly weapon at another human being.

Yeah, I get that a lot of people who are not sociopaths will hurt other people, but a huge amount of that is hurting people who hurt them first. Shit, even with the soldier thing, they'll hesitate unless their battle buddies are in danger, or have been hurt. At that point either they care about their buddy, so they'll hurt another human to protect them, or their buddy is hurt and all of a sudden they do care about the enemy. They fuckin' hate them and want them to die, which is still caring.

Honestly, a lot of that shit winds up hurting the person doing violence to another, but in a lot of those cases we're taught to take it as the price of doing business. But I'm trying to do better. Be better. Make a better world for my kids to live in. So, no torture if I can avoid it.

I suspect that's another thing Kitten does Penance for, because if I can figure this shit out, I'm sure she did so about ten minutes after I made her Imperator, and if she's tortured somebody, it's to break somebody else or some shit like that which might, maybe, in just the right hands, work. I'd still like her to not do that shit, I'm still against it, but I'm also against killing motherfuckers unless it's absolutely necessary, and doing it quick and clean when it's needed, and I absolutely do that shit.

I also won't tell her 'don't kill people', because that would absolutely tie her hands with exactly the people where she needs hands free, because some motherfuckers don't understand anything short of existential consequences. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Fuck. I was just gonna list out potential 'existential consequences', because back in the day there were more than just 'death', but one of the big ones is 'life in prison'.

I haven't seen a fuckin' prison since I arrived here. Not that I remember. How the fuck have I not noticed that? The closest things are Tartarus and Niflhel, and those are more 'Bad Places' than prisons. On the one hand, no prisons means no prison labor industry.

On the other hand, no prisons means 'death' and maybe 'enslavement' are the only existential consequences, and as a Goddess of Redemption I maybe don't want to overuse the first, and the second just skeeves the fuck out of me for obvious reasons of Being Born Brown back in the day.

So yeah, with the Spartans out there slipping around our uninhabited areas, with me not having the slightest fuckin' clue what their targets are, since the ones to the north probably were aiming at the Homestead, but the ones to the south would have to go through the roughest part of the mountains to link up with them, or forge through the relatively settled parts of Lancaster to get to the Homestead, so that just doesn't feel like their targets.

Gah, my brain is going haywire with the renewed stress, the renewed vigilance, and I'm putting together the unpleasant kind of word salad to describe it. So last night I went home, had dinner with the family, which consisted of individual pot pies. I snuck a peek at the new kids; very liver. Much iron. Which they need, if the stuff they're taking to purge the Cold Iron is gonna leave them anemic.

I fed Siobhan, because having her sit on my lap with one hand on her belly, feeling her little girl kick at me while I fed her momma, that totally drained away the tension at a rate I could feel. While I did that and the rest of the family either chatted, ate quietly, or paired off to help one another with food in appropriate ways, I also had one of me hop up to the Bath and clean it out. Wound up with another batch of Cold Iron powder.

Part of me really wanted to just run Mana through it until it denatured, but the more mature adult part of me realized that this shit was spendy, and there were legitimate uses for it, like dealing with Undead or maybe chaining up Rogue Heroes. I tried very hard not to think about what might have happened if I'd gotten the 'Full Rogue Hero' protocol during my Court Martial. Best case I'd have had rashes on my arms and legs. Worst case I'd wind up having to explain why I reacted like a Fae or Deity to Cold Iron.

Got the kids in the Bath, and this time the new kids went in without any fuss. Not like there'd been 'fuss' before, just resistance, but this time they just walked right in. They even kinda shifted around to the edge of the 'kid area', close to where the moms lay quietly, Isadora and Hailee along with us. I definitely wound up with a proud mom moment as Isadora shifted herself over to float next to them.

Not touching, not yet, and maybe far enough that any Cold Iron still leaking out of them wouldn't hurt her, but definitely close enough to show sibling solidarity. Shit, I'd wound up with two more kids. Eh, fuck it, not like we didn't intend to expand the roster anyhow. Once we got the kids to bed, Saffron pulled the ladies up to the Bedroom, where she pulled out the Saddle and settled Tallulah and I on that double attachment. Turnabout's fair play, I guess.

I got the Siobhan 'don't, until she breaks you' role, and Tallulah got the 'break her' one. On the one hand, sex is not exactly Tallulah's hobby. On the other hand, the woman is a couple thousand years old and neither sex repulsed or a prude. Took her longer than I think Marie or Saffron would have, but that's not a complaint. Tension: reduced. Of course in the morning the tension started rising the moment I hit the Scrying Room.

Which is apparently buried under Alliance HQ, and the only people who know it's there are Saffron, the Scryers, and a very trusted set of Teamsters who carry shit through Scrying Portals to the Tentacles. Amusing thing, we can't resupply the Black Dragon that way, because she is in fact just as Scry proof as I once supposed.

Okay, they might be able to set something up on the deck, like the helipad, but in the first place the steel under the teak is still laced with Cold Iron, and in the second place that would be right out in the open where everybody could see it. But yeah. The Jotnar from Norfolk had been kinda moseying along toward the staging area when the Troll trained Jotnar overtook them. Then took over the group and had them double timing the rest of the way there.

When a Jotnar double times, there might be some minor and not so minor impact statements going on, but they put on a fair turn of speed. The Trolls made it more than halfway down the Delmarva peninsula; I honestly don't think the Spartans are hiding there, especially since the Trolls have hit the northernmost Jarldoms, but I'm not gonna jostle Furtim's elbow.

'Clear the local area and work from there' makes sense, even if the local area isn't high likelihood. Fuck, I don't even know if it's high likelihood or not. For all I know, they're bunkered up and are just letting me stew in my own cortisol. Yeah, fuckers absolutely would do that, too. Okay, they're big enough assholes to do that. I'm not sure if they've got the patience to do that. Fuck.

If these fuckers actually make this a contest of patience between me and them, with me building up tension the whole time, I'm gonna figure out which one is in charge. Because while I definitely want to do better, be better, and if I have to execute these fuckers I'm gonna do it as quick and clean as possible for that reason as much as anything else? I am gonna empty that fucker into my Maw like a fuckin' squeeze pop.