Dear Diary,

Screw it, if I can use his cool lines, I'm gonna use his other lines when appropriate too; I've got a bad feeling about this.

Y'know, that makes me wonder about Divination and Prophecies. Back when dealing with the after effects of Bonnie's Prophecy, at one point when we had nothing better to do than lie around talking in post coital bliss, I picked Saffron's brain about it a little bit. Technically I'm pretty sure Loki knows more about both than Saffron, but let's face it, it's way easier for me to concentrate on Kitten's mouth than Loki's.

Somehow I'm surprisingly sanguine about that.

At any rate, apparently Divination and Prophecy are sort of related, but definitely not the same thing. Or, well, Prophecy is a special case of Divination, with its own special dangerous shit. Divination is, at its core, just looking at shit. Well, looking, listening, probably smelling and touching if you know the right spells or don't mind sticking your hand on or even through a portal of questionable duration and capacity. I think there's some bits that Saffron's done some work with where the Divination uses other senses as well, maybe even ones that aren't normally part of the normal Human loadout. So I guess it would be more accurate to call it 'information magic'. Finding Out without the Karmic backlash of Fucking Around, even.

And then there's Prophecy, where all that Fucking Around comes back to bite you directly in the brain ass.

Technically Prophecy is just Divining the future. That's kinda hard to do, because when anybody or anything with any kind of Free Will decides to, y'know, make a decision, 'the Future' winds up being a kind of, what's the fuckin' word? Quantum Uncertainty state? Fuck if I remember. I read it once when some nerdy edge lord didn't even have fuckin' Netflix. What an utter shitshow that was. If I wanted to self service I could have stayed home where I didn't have to have pants on. Not that I had pants on at the time anyway, but you get my point. At any rate, every one of those little branches can affect the course of time. Now some of them don't really matter, especially if you're not trying to 'know all the future' or some stupid shit. Like, if you're trying to figure out if your favorite Troll is gonna beat the next Undead they throw down with, it generally does not matter what the fourth guy in line at Drivers' chose to eat that morning. But no matter how narrow you bring your focus, there's still a chance you're gonna be wrong.

Thing is, just like the 'Gods saying shit makes them make it true'? Which, by the way, I'm entirely uncertain how that affects me as an Avatar of a Trickster God with enough Mana to spontaneously generate a forty of malt liquor like it ain't no thing. However, a Prophet who declares something as a Prophecy while they're doing their Divining thing kinda locks their mind into the branch of the future where that shit happens. That means that if it doesn't? They slowly start going nuts as their brain or mind or Soul or whatever is firmly stuck in a world where it did happen, and if it was anything that could come back and bite them in the ass, they'll wind up going more and more bonkers until they aren't seeing the same reality as everyone else. I'm guessing at that point, since they're by definition Magi, either some Hero has to put them out of everyone else's misery before they kill somebody, or maybe they just off themselves when they take a big swallow of what was supposed to be an after dinner nightcap but is, in fact, drain cleaner.

On the flip side of all that Divination and Prophecy bullshit, which is not 'bullshit' in the sense that it doesn't exist, but 'bullshit' in the sense that it's not something you want to fuck with, because the existence of bullshit presupposes the existence of a bull, and those bitches are way bigger than a city girl like me ever thought they'd be. Anyhow, flip side, Mimic. Her enormously fat ass now covers everything from Long Island halfway down to Jackville along the coast, and while there's a big old bite taken out of it where she won't go too close to Calverton, I think she's starting to ooze her way across the Great Lakes. Yeah, she's thankfully stuck in M-Space, but M-Space is connected to the Mortal Realm, so I think she gets some kind of sense of what's there. Like, why the fuck else would she not be going near Calverton? It's officially part of the Alliance now, so they don't have anybody holding up Divine No Trespassing signs, so the only reason she wouldn't be just slopping her way toward Rich Man's Port is if she knows about the Undead.

Hell, we first learned about the Undead because she literally sniffed them out.

So I guess what I'm saying is that while I've limited my Divination to the simplest, stupidest 'gimme a Predator recon drone camera view of shit', and I'm not going to be touching Prophecy with Big Jarl Johnson's ten foot pole, I really do have a Bad Feeling About This, and something tells me it's not just nerves.

So Monday night I put in my requisite 'keep my shit together while distracted practice', and late Monday morning the fleet set out sailing line abreast up the Chesapeake. My initial idea of 'just the big combat units', because I refuse to use the B-word to describe anything that isn't carrying nine sixteen inch phallic symbols that can yeet a grape shot Volkswagen over the horizon, got nixed because the Chesapeake is, in fact, almost twenty miles wide at some points, and nineteen ships sailing a mile apart do not so much make a 'battle line' as 'bite sized morsels' for whatever the fuck could make a Legion of Trolls retreat. We also have a few, as ten, big Jotnar with us along with Skasn and Olga. None of them are fighters, though. They're... I'm not sure what the actual word is, but my brain alternately hears 'farmer' or 'fisherman'. Skasn and Olga are both armed with those massive ski poles, and also now are each carrying a short sword the size of a moving van and a round shield that looks like they straight up stole the roof off somebody's house. The... I'm gonna call them 'Fishermen', because it makes me feel better if I think their shoes are made for wading in, have clubs hanging from their waists, but mostly are using these big assed woven sieves to basically dredge the bottom of the bay.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

This is not making our progress any faster, but apparently the reason the Centuria Cauda was sent is they're the Legion's equivalent of Marine Recon. The sneaky bastards. Furtim is the dude the sneaky bastards apparently call 'Sneaky Tail'. Which makes me wonder if they are, in fact, a dude or a dudette, but right now neither of us have the time for me to explore the potential Just Happening implications of my Lizard Bois having genders. Mostly because while the Jotnar are dredging the, to them, waist deep water trying to flush out individual Trolls, either survivors like Furtim or Undead, whether completely converted or, like Furtim, still fighting it, Furtim and I are zigzagging back and forth from shore to shore doing the same thing.

As to why I'm doing that instead of playing Admiral, there are three good reasons and one awful one. The first good reason is that I can, in fact, hold my breath for, at a minimum, hours at a time. It's a little weird at first, but after like five minutes I just stop noticing the whole 'not breathing' thing. Of course when she realized that Saffron decided that 'maximum distraction' me wouldn't be breathing either; I'm not complaining, Marie is an absolute S tier treat, but once in a while I wish my Saffron was a little less good at distracting me. Then again, I figure she'll either cut the distractions out entirely or move to something super anti rage inducing when shit goes sideways. The second reason I'm swimming with Furtim as backup is because I stole their Swim skill, and even though I suspect my Swim is limited more by my Mimic: Skill than Furtim's Swim, I'm still moving at Phelps shaming speeds in the water now. Not quite Aquaman, but definitely cheap cabin cruiser speeds. The third good reason is that unlike my scaly buddy and everyone else not blessed by Mimic, I can see just as well under twenty feet of murky water as I do in pitch blackness.

The awful reason I'm not being Admiral Diaz is obviously because I'm still pouting about not getting a fucking Actual Battleship. I mean, shit, I didn't really expect BB 62 in all her Draconic glory, but fuck, even that fuckin... Olympia, I think it is, over in Philly, even that would have had some cannon, not to mention being made out of something tougher than kindling. So no, I'm not riding in the misnamed Sailboats.

Of course, the Good Reasons are still good. Monday the Jotnar found four Trolls; three who ashed completely when a Hero hit them with Smite, and one who wound up nearly dying; they're aboard one of the second line ships, Furtim tells me they'll be back in something like fighting trim by Wednesday. Of course, while the Jotnar found four, I found another twelve. I didn't bother bringing up the ones who disintegrated when I hit them with Smite, but that brought the grand total of convalescent Trolls to five.

At dusk we brought up some big fishing nets the fleet had intended to use to resupply during the trip up and strung them along between the ships. Not a perfect solution, but I can't be everywhere at once and Furtim does, in fact, need sleep. I mean, six of me took turns swimming laps along the front of the fleet, trying to make sure no Undead got behind us, but everybody else hunkered down and got some rest, while Saffron made sure I did not, in fact, need anything resembling sleep. Food may or may not replace sleep, but Worship absolutely fuckin' does, at least it did for one night. That's really the reason we're moving so slow as well; I may be a world class dumbass, and I know to some degree I'm fighting last week's war, but a big chunk of why the Trolls and Jotnar got cornholed is, in fact, because enemies got behind them and attacked right when they were fully committed to fighting the Calverton Undead. So our slow, steady approach, which Swanson tells me should get us there sometime around the Eighth of Door, or nine days from now, is entirely to keep that from happening.

Don't get me wrong. I'm gonna wind up getting fucked over somehow, but I will at least avoid getting sloppy seconds by the cornhole machine.

Today we advanced about the same rate. We kind of had a pattern down, but the Bay kept getting wider up until the end of the day when it narrowed down to maybe fifteen miles. We found another twenty trolls, and saved five.

As we settled down for dusk, I got a sudden rush of brains to the head. Kitten, I know you're having a blast playing around with my cake and Drivers' icing, but I need one of you down here.

Of course, love. What did you need me for?

Plausible deniability.

I Co-Located to the deck of the ship where our convalescent Trolls were curling up, bivouacking for the night. I nodded to Furtim, who stood, and then Saffron was there wreathed in Glowing Midnight. "I am here, love."

"Thanks, dear. I know this is asking a lot, but could Mimic see her way clear to granting our Trolls here her Boon of Vision?"

She smiled beatifically, as befit a Highest Priestess who'd just swapped places with our Maid back in the Love Shack, and said, "of course." She stepped up and lay a hand on Furtim, who blinked, then indicated his thanks. She repeated the process with each of the Trolls, and as she did each of them looked a lot healthier as well. "My Goddess is a Goddess of Healing as well as Darkness," she said by way of explanation, then came back to me. "Will that be all tonight, love?"

"I'd kinda like to follow their example and settle in to watch the stars with you for a while? We're ten miles from shore, more or less, and once the sun's down completely the view is incredible."

She smiled, walked over, lay her hands on my cheeks and kissed me. When she pulled away to a distance of maybe six inches, her eyes locked on my face and she just melted me with three words.

"It certainly is."