Dear Diary,

"Equity gives a fair shot,

To everyone who tries,

To employ their Agency."

Doctrine of Tabitha, Book of Egalitarianism

Yeah, I dunno. I get the whole free verse meter focused thing, and I guess I can hum along with what I wrote, but I kinda feel like I'm just spouting drivel sometimes. Like, not lying, or making fun of anything, but just cramming ideas into a particular poetic format, trying to keep them to sound bites. Which is a thing in and of itself, I guess. Back home most religious folks didn't seem to pay a whole lot of attention to their own holy books. Like, they'd know some quotes, yeah, but half the time they either got them wrong, totally misapplied them, or showed a weird preference for odd precedence.

Like the 'not lying with men like you lie with women' one, which originally translated to 'boys', not 'men'. Nothing to do with Gay people, everything to do with Pedophiles. But at some point I guess the Church decided they needed a rule against being Gay more than they needed a rule about not touching altar boys. Same thing with the 'suffer not a witch to live'. Original text referred to people who poisoned common wells, which is just fuckin' common sense, especially when you live in a fuckin' desert, or even just someplace kinda arid. But I guess King Jimmy needed to pay some bills, and old women without husbands or families are usually easy pickings for a dude with a weapon and a badge. And I'm not a fuckin' Bible scholar or anything, just a dumb chick who studied some mythology, but even I remember the whole 'do unto others as you'd have them do unto you', and how JC himself said that one liner summed up 'all the law and the prophets'. Like, dude, why are you so hung up on Leviticus when JC's saying 'look, dumbass, I made it simple, one rule. One. Fuckin'. Rule'.

Okay, yeah, I don't think he ever called anybody a dumbass. But I sure as fuck am gonna. I swear, if Future Me keeps dropping the writing of this shit in my lap, I'm gonna work 'thou shalt not be a dumbass' in there somewhere. Fuck, no, I can't, because I'm something of a dumbass myself, and I really don't think that's changed, what with my loving wife's favorite pet name for me being 'Goof'. 'Thou shalt not be an asshole'? Nah, I'm an asshole sometimes too. Maybe 'thou shalt not be an asshat'. Like, yeah, I know I suffer from that condition myself on occasion, ain't nobody doesn't. But if you find your viewpoint entirely eclipsed by colon, it's time to start that whole extraction process.

Speaking of an extraction process, that's basically what Loki wound up having to do eventually. I've got no fuckin' clue how long I sat there clinging to Mom... to Sigyn. Fuck it. She looks like my mom at least to me. In my head I know that she's not technically in possession of the hoo hah I slid out of originally, but she looks like Mom, sounds like Mom, feels like Mom, acts like... like my Mommy. I think she gets a little warm fuzzy thrill every time I called her Mom, too. So I was in no fuckin' hurry to leave her lap. But eventually Loki cleared his throat, and Mom said, "we can absolutely stay like this as long a you like, mija, but your father cannot help with the harm done to your Soul while we're sitting here."

I sniffled a little bit to clear my nose and said, "will it hurt?"

I think Loki started to say something, but Mom said, "not that I can tell. Perhaps some discomfort, like a thorough massage. But other than that?"

"You're generally sore for some portion of the following day. To the point of preferring to lie motionless until your Soul finishes healing itself properly. But after that natural healing is finished, you should be as pain free as you were prior to... Conrad's device." He sounded really pissed about that, but not, like, thoughtlessly angry, and not entirely at... Conrad.

"So, like, you knead me like dough, I lie there for a day rising, and I'm good to go?"

He chuckled. "Always food with you. That's about the size of it though."

I nodded, but didn't let go of Mom. "Can I stay like this after?"

Loki looked over at Marie, who'd stayed with us the whole time. "Unless your ladies need you, I don't see why not?"

"Nightfall." Marie intoned.

Loki nodded. "So, do you want me to be as slow and careful as I can, to avoid discomfort, or as quick as I can safely be, to allow you more time like this?"

I sniffled, but some hell spawned impulse grabbed my tongue and I said, "do me quick and dirty, Daddy!"

"Tabitha!" Mom stood up, slapped me on the ass in a kind of desultory one spank punishment, then lifted me to lie on the table in front of Loki. Immediately after which she stole my blouse, which just so happened to be the only article of clothing I'd remembered to put on this morning.

Dad wasn't weird or pervy about it, though, he just rolled me prone and went to work on my back. I don't know how long he worked on me like that, but he started on my shoulders, moved up to my neck and then scalp, then worked his way all the way down to my heels, spending a while on the soles of my feet. Somehow he managed that without tickling, then worked his way back up to my lower back. He finished that up with what felt like the press of one massive thumb right into my lower back, which crackled and left me blissful.

Then he flipped me over and did the same thing on my front. Weird as fuck; I'd had dudes 'massage' my tits before. Always code for copping a feel. Fondling, if they were any good at it. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good fondling, but it would have been weird if Dad did it. But he managed to actually massage them without, y'know, making it more than vaguely titillating. I think it may have been how he used the backs of his hands, his forearms, and even at one point his fists. But he worked his way from my belly up to the crown of my head, taking time to work on my chin, my jaw, my cheeks and nose, then working my temples and scalp before working his way from my crown down to the soles of my feet again.

Kinda weird, as he went south of my Mason-Dixon line, he paused a moment at my hips, nodded Marie over to him, and whispered something to her. She nodded, and he move on down to my thighs. Fuck it, by that point I think if he and Marie had said she was gonna behead me and would be back for my body later? I'd have just nodded and said 'sure'. Part of that was the absolute trust I felt in Marie, but another big part was the absolute relaxation that had washed over me by that point.

After he worked his way back to my belly, Mom bent over me, Marie lifted my shoulders enough for Mom to slide her arms under me, and then Marie shifted my arms over Mom's shoulders. Working together they lifted me up as Mom stood, then settled back down in Loki's lap. So weird, my Mom being married to an actual Norse god and shit. Never really pictured my mom as a size queen or anything. A moment after she settled with me draped over her front like a blanket, I heard Marie make an inquisitive noise. Mom laughed and said, "come here, 'Mittens'."

Marie growled a little, but a moment later draped herself over me, laying her head on my scarred shoulder, her arms lying over mine, her hands twisting around oddly to interlace her fingers through mine.

We sat there like that for a while. For moments. For minutes. For hours. Forever.

Then Marie sighed. "Nightfall."

Mom asked, "you have need of her?"

Marie almost sounded shy when she whispered, "want?"

Mom chuckled, then said, "go on, just be careful with her."

"Duh." Before Mom or Loki could reply, Marie shifted backward, and the two of us rolled into a bed.

Okay, I think it was a bed. The lights were so low I could barely make anything out. Ceiling. Maybe some shelves... bookshelves maybe, up near the head of the bed. I couldn't hear any kitchen sounds, but the place smelled like a bakery. Like, the word would be 'reeked', except it smelled really, really good. Spices with just a hint of savor to them somewhere. "Where are we?"

"Lights. Three." Some neat little lamps near the ceiling slid open, and I realized that the ceiling above me was a mosaic of mirrors. In the biggest ones I saw another mirror in the center of the head of the bed, surrounded by bookshelves loaded with paperbacks. I could just make out another mirrored wall past my feet with some kind of low reclining couch up against it. I also noticed a complete lack of something else.

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"Where's my blouse? Uh... where's your uniform? What if somebody walks in?" I wasn't really concerned, per se, because 'concern' felt like way too much effort at the moment, but the place had the feel of a public space, like a library or something.

"How?"

That's when I noticed that there were no doors in the room. "Holy shit, you can teleport?" The moment I said it, I felt really stupid. I guess some part of me thought I'd just lost the memory of going from place to place. Then she dropped another bombshell on me.

"We."

"We can teleport? Like, I can teleport?" She nodded, and I lay there just thinking about that for a minute, looking at the scars running across my body, looking at Marie's perfect pale skin, her straight platinum hair, her long white nails tracing their way across my belly. "Uh. Marie? What did Loki whisper to you about?"

"This." She then proceeded to massage all the places Loki hadn't. I'd say 'while I watched in the mirror', but while her fingers massaged down south, her tongue did the same to my mouth. I got glimpses of the room, because she slowly, gently, moved her mouth around mine, but never more than glimpses. Sadge, because I found myself absolutely intrigued by her long, pale limbs against the tan of my skin. Of course, the weirdest part had to be the fact that while holy shit yes this was absolutely sexual, it was also absolutely a fuckin' massage. Like, literally on both counts. Okay, that's not quite true. The 'sexual' part about it wasn't fucking. Not even close. I'm intimately familiar, pun intended, with the general cycle of sex. Little bit of interest, some physical reaction, more interest, reaction gets pointed, much like my nips, some fondling and groping, stuff gets varying forms of damp, direct stimulation ramps everything up in a whole cyclic increase of intensity, then BAM! Orgasm! Followed by a swan dive crash from the heights of ecstasy to the deep waters of post-coital bliss.

This shit, and just to be clear this awesome yet fucked up shit Marie did to me, somehow bypassed all that cyclic ramp up, all that increasing tension, and just kind of annexed post-coital bliss to the general bliss I'd been feeling when we arrived.

Speaking of arrivals, not long after I'd decided that my ultimate fate was to lie here for eternity in a state of nirvana maintained by my very own albino power forward, Siobhan and Saffron arrived, wearing white robes and a stunning black dress respectively. Saffron chuckled and said, "started without us, I see?"

Marie pulled away from my face with the Platonic Ideal of a shit eating grin on her face. "Therapy."

Siobhan, suddenly naked and nearly as pale as Marie, clambered onto the bed, crawling up to lie on the far side of me from Marie. "Oh, if this is therapy, as her Healer of record, I must insist you allow me to assist." I noticed she didn't quite touch me though; just snuggled in close, then lowered her hand to hover, palm down, just above my belly.

"Tabitha? Shall we?"

"Wha... Wha're you wai'in' for?" I just could not come up with the fucks to make my mouth move properly. Maybe this was bliss overload, maybe I was drugged or something, but fuck it, if my tombstone read 'merked by sexy ladies doing sexy things just how she wanted', I would auto-resurrect just long enough to sign that bitch just so nobody would argue with it.

"Permission?" I realized just then that Marie's hand had stopped moving. All three of them waited, patiently, while I managed to spin up enough clock cycles to make my mouth go.

"Yes."

"Yes, we have permission? To do what, exactly?" Saffron smiled at me. I saw it in the mirrors, and an entirely different kind of warm fuzzy feeling washed over my utter sense of bliss.

"Yes," I breathed, the ghost of laughter coloring my voice.

Saffron's smile slipped into a dark, sultry grin, and she crawled onto the bed straight toward me, everything but garter, stockings and boots gone. "So... I... we can do anything I... we want to you?"

I almost lost the thread of the conversation watching her ass as she crawled. Humor misted through the bliss when Marie rolled her eyes and said, "Greedy."

"Absolutely. Tabitha?"

"Yes?"

"May we?"

Three guesses what I said next, and the first two don't count. "Yes."

"Lights. Zero." The lights slid down as all three of them slid into motion. I closed my eyes. If I couldn't trust these three, I was fucked in a bad way anyhow.

It was absolutely not a bad way. If normal sex is, I dunno, a bliss power washer, and some of the wacky shit I'd done in the past few days were tidal bores and tsunamis? This was slowly, gently sinking into the fuckin' Marianas Trench of bliss. A whole fuckin' Pacific Ocean of bliss. I'm not even sure that it counted as 'sex', really. In the end, I had only one word that fit.

Blissful.

I woke to an entirely different kind of bliss. I still wasn't really feeling the need to move, and an aborted attempt to raise my head a little let me know that my body was not in the mood for anything more adventurous than 'breathing' and maybe 'moving my eyeballs'. Blinking was okay, but not too often.

Didn't matter. Didn't need my ears to hear the absolute roomful of quiet snores around me. Little kid sized bodies snuggled up to my sides, Siobhan and Saffron sized heads resting on my biceps with my arms draped along their backs. Somebody heavy as shit curled up on my legs. All of us naked, but it had that feel of a hot August night sleepover, where nobody had any kind of naughty intent, just no desire to fuck with clothes in any fashion while we slept.

Don't know how long I lay there, but eventually one of the kids next to me stirred. A little while later, a cry of, "MAMA!" split the air, and a toddler glomped my face, eyeballs almost touching mine as she squealed with glee.

A few moments later Siobhan sat up on my other side, looking around and blinking as Marie reached one long arm up and palmed the toddler trying to see into my brain, lifting her, turning her around, and affectionately muttering, "Scamp."

"BAFF TIME WIF MAMA!" crowed the little kid.

"No." declared Marie.

"YETH!" countered the toddler.

"Isnomi?" muttered a lanky girl in a pony onesie, who'd sat up between Siobhan and I.

"Yeth, Mayth?"

"If you don't stop shouting, I am going to drown you."

Isnomi somehow managed to snicker and blow a raspberry at the same time. Marie booped her nose with one finger and said, "Scamp." This time the tone held a bit more warning, and Isnomi sagged.

"Tabitha is recovering, children. I expect by this evening she'll be ready to help with bedtime, but for now you'll need to be gentle with her."

With that, the pony girl leaned over and hugged me gently. "It's good to have you back, papa." Before I could react to that, she scrambled up and headed off, at a guess to the bathroom. Over the next few moments, as Saffron finally sat up and stretched, another four kids took turns giving me hugs, everything from a fierce snuggle by the second tallest one to a kind of cursory squeeze the blonde girl after her. Finally Marie released Isnomi, who scampered over and glomped my face again, staring into my eyes from almost eyeball-touching distance and saying, "you retht, Mama. Ah gat dis."

She scampered off, and Saffron leaned over to collect a quick kiss. "Mmm... you smell heavenly. Marie, could you lift her onto the bed? Love, do you mind playing backrest for Maze while she reads to everyone today?"

I tried to shrug, but my shrug refused to shrug, and my mouth had fucked off for the day, so I just kinda sent, sure, why not, vibes.

"Excellent."

Wait, you can hear me like this?

"Of course. The three of us," she nodded to Siobhan and Marie, "are your High Priestesses. The disruptions to your Soul made it hard for any of us but Marie to understand you, but now that it's back where it's supposed to be, you need but think to us, and we will hear you."

Damn. That would have been handy to know last night.

"Did you need to tell us something last night, love?"

Yeah, that you three have permission to do whatever the fuck you want to me, any time, any place, forever.

Siobhan kissed me, smiling the whole time, then stood up and headed in the direction I assumed lead to the bathroom while Saffron gave me another kiss. "You trust us that much already?"

Look, you guys have done nothing but pump me so full of endorphins I can barely move for feeling so at peace with the world. If you guys wanna merk me right now or some shit? All I could ask is that you make it quick and painless. Hell yes I trust you.

"What if we want to keep you in this state forever, until the end of time."

I couldn't help it, my chest ached a little as a chuckle escaped me. Don't threaten me with a good time.

She ran a hand along my jawline as she sighed and said, "oh, I've done that a time or two. One of those threats still hangs over you. But for now?" She paused a half beat, then quietly sang, "I've got to manage bath time."

HOLY SHIT! Holy shit did you just do that?

Indeed, love, Saffron's voice filtered into my brain without passing through my ears. I believe you called it an 'endorphin button' that I 'Pavloved into you'.

You conditioned me?

With your permission, yes. You also called it 'built in antidepressants' at one point.

I lay there thinking about that as a whole host of kids and adults lined up for the bathroom while Marie lifted me gently and laid me down sideways near on a big four poster bed, close enough to the end that Maze could dangle her legs off and lean on me as a backrest.

Which, after bath time, she absolutely did, while reading The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents to an enthralled crowd of kids, women, and Nordic WNBA players who absolutely had to be related to Marie.

Saffron? I thought, wondering if she could hear me at work, wondering if I'd disturb her.

Yes, love?

Who taught her how to do this?

After a moment where it felt like somebody maybe shared my eyeballs and ears for a second, Saffron thought back, you did, love.

I really I hope I didn't spoil the reading for anybody. I really couldn't tell, because the tears just wouldn't stop flowing. But the smile wouldn't come off my face either. Maybe I'd been an utter fuck up my entire life, but if somehow, I inspired this kid to do this?

Maybe I'd done something right after all.