Dear Diary,

"Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears."

- Marcus Aurelius

Yeah, after an three months spent working on myself trying to get my shit together, or at least all in the same zip code, I've finally got the modern introvert's answer to that kind of problems: self-help books!

The modern introvert's answer to being fucked up in the head sucks. Just sayin'.

So today started out at dusk, when we bundled the Menace into bed, then Marie and I got the here and now equivalent of YouTube of Culture. Okay, totally the 'Hub, and both of us enjoyed that shit to the fullest. I think Saffron enjoyed it to the fullerest, but I'm really not sure. Maybe that's why she's so eager for me and Sister Siobhan to do our date thing. Nah, couldn't be that, not my innocent little Kitten.

Yeah, I think I broke my own suspension of disbelief with that one.

After a nice evening of Saffron reading and Saffron watching, we all collapsed back to our bedroom selves and slept late. Mimic Dreams included Marie and the sous chefs with Infinite Shrimpworks, plus psychedelic psychotropic tadpoles carpeting the floor of the Bay. Well, all of it east of the Black Dragon, and big chunks of it west of there. Weird thing; the tadpoles are doing a whole 'glowing' thing, right, but the ones east and west of the Black Dragon look different. Like, they're all too small to see, but the patterns the ones to the east make are kinda sedate, like a slow pulsating eastward flow, only they're not actually moving, although I've got no idea why. The ones to the west, on the other hand, are in constant motion, a kind of deliberately chaotic maelstrom of color.

Dreams. Weird as fuck, no sense making.

Woke up in bed with Menace snuggled between us. Apparently the wards on the room include a certain degree of climate control, which meant despite a heat wave hitting we didn't roast ourselves snuggling up. Maybe a little uncomfortably warm for actual sleeping, but not so hot we couldn't have done some dry runs of sibling creation had Menace not been right there. I woke to a beautiful dawn shining in through the window, and nudged Saffron and Isnomi so they woke before the sun fully rose above the horizon.

"So pwiddy!" cooed Menace, who'd bounced over to an end table to get a better look to the east; our window technically faced southeast, and while that was fine for me, our spawn seemed to want to stare directly into the sun.

It took me a second for my brain to kick in and say, "be careful, Isnomi. You don't want to damage your eyes."

She turned to me, blinked like four sets of fuckin' eyelids, at least two of them translucent enough to see her actual eyes, then blew a raspberry at me before turning back to watch the sun. "I fine. Mama pwiddy."

"Aww... thanks, Menace, I..." What she'd just said hit me like a brick. "Do you see me when you look there?" I asked quietly, terrified of the answer.

"Yus!" she crowed. "So pwiddy!"

That really fucked with me for some reason. No idea why. I mean, seriously, I've told the Sun what to do... twice now? The second time it wasn't even that big of a thing, just 'sunrise should be right around now, so get your ass up in the sky toot sweet'. But her looking at the Sun and seeing me just... I dunno, it weirded me out.

So that made me decide to get up, which reminded me that I really wanted Doc Z to get his 'show the class Tabitha's latest self-destruction' moment over and done with so I could get shit fixed. "Hey, Marie? Could you carry me to class today?"

"No."

That brought me up short, but before I could say anything, Saffron cut in with, "classes don't start until tomorrow, Goof. You've gotten abbreviated breaks before now. Lots of perfectly good reasons, but right now there's nothing messing with the schedule, so we had a full week off."

I just stared at her. "A full week, huh?"

"Well, yes. Three days before the Solstice, three days after."

I scrabbled for my cane. "Oh, that's good. I'd hate to think I had to work this week. I had three days off before Solstice and three days off after."

She snorted. "You sort of have taken it easy these past three days. Which, don't get me wrong, you absolutely deserve. I was going to recommend you take more time off, keep yourself as a highly mobile reserve down in Calverton to deal with any nastier Undead, especially the ones in spaces too small for Jotnar to access."

I might have growled out something like, "I've been putting off healing for three days. Now you're telling me I've got to waddle around with a broken pelvis for seven more?"

"Of course not! I didn't realize that's why you were holding off, love! I'm... I'm so sorry! I got distracted, first by the Black Dragon, then by that philosophy of science book, then by... uh..."

Mixed emotions about that, what with the endorphins flowing, but my general crotch region saying 'you need to lie the fuck down now'. I looked at Marie and said, "can you watch Menace?" At her nod I grabbed Saffron, Translocated to the Love Shack, flopped onto the bed and moaned out, "okay, Kitten. Mom powers activate. Kiss it and make it better."

She giggled a little, but said, "I'll gladly do so, but I suspect after three days of healing we really ought to have a professional look at it."

I grinned up at her. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Oh, that's mean."

"Hey, she's the one who decided I'm made of Sister-nip." I reached out and poked Saffron with a toe, then Co-Located the pair of us to the Infirmary, slapping a uniform on Saffron before collapsing into one of the beds.

"Who?" said Sister Siobhan, turning from her desk as she stood. "Oh, Saffron, what are you... Tabitha!" A moment after seeing that I'd collapsed into a bed, she got a look at my state of complete non-clothing, and every bit of her skin went bright pink, shading into red. "Is... What... Are..."

While Sister Siobhan gabbled at me, the Saffron back in the Love Shack looked at me and said, "why are there two of us now?"

"Because you're still kissing it better while she works?"

Saffron laughed, low and throaty, and said, "I don't know, I think I might bite."

"Normally I would be all about playing rough if that's what you're in the mood for, but... ouch. Just ouch. Please play nice?"

She pouted at me. "Okay, fine. Just until you're healed though."

Down in the Infirmary, Sister Siobhan managed to reboot her brain a second time. The low groan I made as my pelvis decided to protest how violently I'd landed on the bed might have helped with that. "Tabitha, what's wrong?" I just kinda pointed at my general crotch region. She twitched, looked at Saffron, then back at me and said, "is this the worlds oddest, possibly weirdest date then?"

I couldn't help it, I started laughing, but every guffaw pulled stuff attached to my pelvis and lower spine, which now that I'd deigned to pay attention to them, were not in the best of shapes. "No. No, if I decide our date will be... What's that word you like, Kitten? Skyclad? Yeah. If I decide our date is gonna be Skyclad, there's gonna be one less clothed person in the room. Meaning you, just to be clear. But right now I'm not really in shape for any post-successful-date shenanigans anyhow. I... might have shattered my pelvis."

"Oh!"

"Part of my spine too."

"Oh, dear!"

I let out a sigh as Saffron started giggling. "Four times."

Sister Siobhan said nothing after that, although she had that tight lipped look people got when they absolutely would not give in to the urge to laugh. She walked over and did that little diagnostic prayer I remembered from my first day in the here and now, and lay her hands just over my crotch. Sadly, my body vetoed my plan to scandalize her with pelvic thrusting. Fortunately, Sister Siobhan is Sister Siobhan. Apparently my non-moving crotch parts decided to react to her proximity and attention, and there's no way she couldn't notice, what with doing her mystical tricorder thing on exactly those parts.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Well. You're not going to like this."

"Sister, that's either a sign that you need some real confidence boosting regarding your lady pleasing abilities, or you're kinda terrifying me. Just spit it out."

She blushed, but nodded. "Much like your earlier wound, this one has begun healing already. Unfortunately, it's not a surface wound, and no work was done to set any of it, or heal it at all, really, so..."

I groaned out, "oh, this is going to suck."

Saffron blinked away, then returned with Marie. She also collapsed both of us to the Infirmary, which left me with a raging frustrated lady boner on top of everything else, because she'd been assiduously kissing it better when she and I both realized what needed to happen. "Marie, I'm afraid we need you to shatter Tabitha's pelvis and lower spine."

"Wait!" Everyone froze as Sister Siobhan hollered.

Saffron stepped over to her, laid a hand on her upper arm, and said, "is there another way?"

"Well, no, but..."

At the word 'no', Marie went to work. She carefully pulled me down onto the hard stone floor, pulling the pillow along and laying it behind my head. Then she straddled my chest, giving me a nice view of her ass blocked only by her tail whapping me in the face, and another of her Co-Located down to hold my knees. "Ready?"

"Never gonna be. Just do it."

When the Black Dragon's sixteen inch guns shattered my lower bits, it had been a single massive impact followed by a slow rotating slide until I fell off and landed on my head on the teak. This was not a single impact. Over and over she slammed her fists into my crotch, my hips, my gut, that last so hard that I think I felt her knuckles hitting my spine. After the second impact, I grabbed at her hips, digging my fingers in until another Marie knelt with one knee to either side of my head and gently but inexorably pulled my hands back, interweaving her fingers through mine. I ground my teeth, and she reached down, squeezed my jaw until my mouth opened, then slid her tail in between my teeth.

I have no idea how long it took. It couldn't have been all that long, but it sure as fuck felt like it. Before she finished, I'd bitten through her tail at least three times. No idea how she managed to grow it back, but she didn't lash out or yowl or growl at me or anything. She didn't even change the slow, steady, brutal rhythm she'd started with, and if she hit harder, that could totally have been trying to turn my pelvis into something granulated enough Saffron and Sister Siobhan could fix it right.

Finally Marie stopped, looked to Sister Siobhan, and said, "Ready."

That's when I became aware of a gentle sobbing that had come from Siobhan's direction since right around when Marie pulled my hands back. "How do you do it?"

"Huh? Aren't you the Healing expert?"

"No, not that." She said as she knelt down on the floor next to my hips and started her diagnostic prayer again. "How do you go through all this pain and... and still keep going?"

I shrugged, then immediately regretted it. "It's just part of the job, isn't it?"

"Oh, Dear Sweet Canta, you really think that? I've never seen a Hero survive what you have and keep going." She turned to Saffron. "I don't have anywhere near the Mana to Heal this."

Saffron nodded, as if she'd expected that. "Could you do it if you did have the Mana?"

Sister Siobhan took a deep breath, let it out, then said, "I'm not sure. I can definitely get it to a point where it's set properly, where it will heal correctly over time. After that, every bit more I can do will make her heal faster, decrease her convalescence." She nodded once, decisively. "If you can get me the Mana, I will do my best."

Saffron smiled. "That's all I can ask." She wove her hands through what I almost recognized as Doc Roberts' Mana Network Shape, including herself, Sister Siobhan, Marie, and me all in the Network.

"Oh, we can't pull Mana from her to do this, can we? She'll need that energy to heal."

"I'll be fine, Sister. You do what you gotta do, trust Marie to keep me still and Saffron to pull exactly what you need and no more."

"So be it. Canta, grant me your sight, your Skill, and your Strength." Then she started Shaping, and I swear to God somebody decided to DP me with a Altoid's mint dildo and a Thai pepper the size of one of Marie's fingers.

How evocative.

Love you, Boss, but shut the fuck up.

Marie dropped two of her tails into my mouth, and if I didn't bite down hard enough to bite them off, I sure as shit appreciated the way they muffled my whimpering. Turned 'oh god, oh god, oh god, why?' into 'ng ng ng' followed by a squeal that might not have been me expressing displeasure. I mean, it totally was, but Sister Siobhan didn't need to know that. She'd find out eventually anyway, right?

Okay, the part of me that wants to be all faithful and true to Saffron is obviously fighting a losing battle here. Doesn't help that Saffron and Marie are both on team 'Tabitha gone corrupt Sister Siobhan until Tabitha can't call her Sister with a straight face any more'.

So maybe half an hour of essence of painful Healing later, Sister Siobhan failed to prevent herself from faceplanting right into my abs. "Srry," she mumbled into my belly. Then her face went from red and sweaty to red and hot as she realized that no matter which way she turned her head she'd be looking at something intimate in one way or another. "Hlp, pls."

"Marie? Pick her up and put her on the bed before she suffocates, please?" My Murder Mittens showed that she could, indeed, span Sister Siobhan's waist with one hand, and lifted her off of me, leaned over, and lay her on the bed I'd been dumped out of. At that point I realized the entire room reeked of Pumpkin Pie Spices, and I couldn't help what came out of my mouth next. Okay, I could have, but I really didn't want to. "That's for after our date, not now."

"Tabitha!" the Sister squealed, rolling over to look at me, eyes wide. "You! I! Eeeeeee!"

I couldn't really tell if she was scandalized, looking forward to her cinnamon suffocation gleefully, or just experiencing complete Tabitha induced brain shutdown, but I absolutely lacked any desire to not make it worse. "Hey, you asked the wrong question."

She paused, something approaching guarded coherence lighting her eyes. "I did? What wrong question?"

"How I do what I do. I don't even think about that shit, I just do it."

"Oh. Um. What should I have asked?"

"Why."

"Because I... Oh. Right. Sorry." She tittered a little, and the dark part inside me and I were in complete agreement that this was absolutely how we wanted to break this particular cutie. She was absolutely a diamond in the rough, and we would shatter off her bits until we exposed the sparkling gem within. Something in my gaze must have shown through, because she squeaked and asked, "why do you do it?"

Ignoring the stupid ache in my crotch-bones, I rolled on my side to look up at her, deliberately grinding my thighs against the inside of Marie's as I did for a little bit of extra psychic damage. "The rewards are fuckin' awesome."

She blushed and, voice breathy, said, "oh. Well. I guess..."

"Yeah. You wanna be a reward? You're pretty awesome." Her mouth dropped open, and I said, "wait, wasn't there another word in there? Oh, we'll have to do that later."

Saffron and all three Maries in the room snickered as Sister Siobhan wheezed, her blush showing through the thinner parts of her habit and robes where they pressed against her. "Tabitha!"

"Yes, Sister?"

She gabbled for a solid thirty seconds, completely unable to come up with anything coherent. Finally Saffron took pity on her. Because I sure as fuck wasn't gonna. "Tabitha, I seem to recall you saying something about wanting to be able to properly focus on your first date with Siobhan?"

"First?" squeaked Sister Siobhan.

Meanwhile I shrugged and said, "yeah, and?"

"Can you... focus properly with your hips the way they are?"

"Fuck."

"Precisely. So, are you done tormenting the poor Sister?"

I smiled up at Sister Siobhan. "I'd say I didn't mean anything by it, but we both know I absolutely do. Unless you wanna cancel? Which I would totally get, by the way. I'm a handful. Two, maybe even three."

"Four," chimed in Saffron.

"Six." countered Marie.

"I... I'm not sure I'm quite up to... to being a proper reward for you, my Hero." I had to hand it to her, she got all that out without fainting despite her face being the color of a fire engine.

"Do you want to be?" I asked.

She worked her mouth, but nothing came out besides squeaks. Finally she snapped her mouth shut and just nodded.

"Good enough for me. Got a preference on warning or no yet?"

One quick head twitch side to side.

Saffron blew a lungful of air out of her nose and said, "thank you for your help, Sister. We'll take care of getting our Goof back into full fighting trim. Or dating trim. We'll be going, unless?" Siobhan perked up, and Marie's hand slipped over my mouth before I could start up again with my bullshit. "Was there anything you wanted before we go? While our irrepressible, invincible Heroine is, in fact, repressed enough for you to have your way with her at the moment?"

"Sffrn!" I tried to holler, but Marie kept my mouth covered.

Meanwhile Sister Siobhan's eyes got really big, then she scrambled down off the bed to kneel next to me. With Marie holding my hands interlaced with hers, not to mention her thighs clamped around mine, all I could do was waggle my eyebrows suggestively as Sister Siobhan bent down and kissed my cheek. Then squeaked and ran away. Saffron laughed, then Translocated us all back up to our bedroom. Marie collapsed into the one of her prepping Menace for a day in her glider, and Saffron carefully straddled me right under my breasts. "She is such a pure, sweet soul. Utterly incapable of resisting your inevitable assault on her virtue."

"Yeah," I sighed.

"You're going to corrupt her, aren't you?"

"Oh, fuck yes."

She cocked her head. "What? No guilty denial?"

I frowned a little. "Nah. Just guilty acceptance. Okay, guilty reveling in the fact that I am gonna corrupt her so hard there might be epic poetry about that shit. She might start going by 'Siobhan formerly known as Sister'. She might start wearing black. Or maybe red with gold trim. Or, ooh! Ooh! Skyclad Sister Siobhan!"

"I can't wait to see that."

I shook my head. "So fuckin' weird."

Saffron tapped her teeth. "But you still feel guilty?"

"Yeah."

"I'll have to do something about that then."

I looked up at her, eyes narrowing, then shook my head in resignation. "Do I even want to know?"

She just Grinned at me. "Oh, you probably do, but," she said, then sang, "I'm not going to tell you."

"Ow."

"Did you want me to stop, or should I keep doing that until you don't feel guilty any more?"

"Dammit. I have work today."

She, of course, did not move. Instead she sang, "so go get all your work done."

I rolled my eyes, flipped her off, and Co-Located to the Black Dragon. I spent most of the day there finalizing our plan for the assault on Calverton's docks. Since I expected to be completely out of service until Wednesday, our plan was to set up some trebuchets on the deck of the Black Dragon, fling rocks at any Undead we could see from here, and let the Trolls and Jotnar sortie and tease out as many Undead as we could into the killing zone we'd made of the mile or so to the west of our Cold Iron fortress in the Bay. On Wednesday, after two days and a bit of harassment, we'd go in hard. If Undead could be surprised, that ought to do it.

Of course I did all that with my utterly incorrigible wife humming little seven syllable singsong lyrics in my ears. Or nibbling on them. I heard pages turning in the other room, I'm pretty sure she was reading more Science of Discworld, but I could not be arsed to get up and check.

When I collapsed back into myself, though, I scooped her up and stumbled into the other room to confirm. She looked up at me over the paperback while her other self nibbled at my neck. "Done for the day, love?"

"I am. You're not." When her eyebrow went up, I fell backwards into the Love Shack bed.

"Before we were so rudely interrupted, I think you were kissing it better?"