Dear Diary,

I am an idiot, and this time I have no one to blame but myself.

Seriously, I deal so much with Saffron, who by now probably knows more about my world of origin than I consciously do, Marie, who takes everything in stride, and Loki, who can just scry on my old world when I stop making sense, that I don't really think about that dividing line. Definitely don't think about it as much as I should.

Perhaps it helps keep you yourself, Tabitha Diaz.

Yeah, maybe.

So we all woke up in a fuzzy pile this morning. I'm really glad none of us seem to shed, because if we did, after at least sixteen straight hours of being piled in with three of us at maximum fuzziness, Saffron would have been just as fuzzy as us. If you're wondering, I'm definitely feeling that word at the moment. Fuzzy. Fuzzy skin. Fuzzy me, fuzzy Marie, fuzzy Menace. Fuzzy feels about my dream last night, because for once I hadn't even felt the edges of the Trolls trying to shove Shit Pyramid up my ass. Last night had been a pure, joyous celebration of life and everything in it. Ecstasy given flesh and blood and bone and muscle and sinew, uncaring as to how it destroyed itself as we reveled beyond the limits of anything wearing flesh.

Yeah, even when everything is joyous and right with the world, I'm still fuckin' Mimic. Who apparently thinks she's the center of the universe. I know I've read that somewhere, but I can't remember where. Weird thing, because I'm sure I read that fuckin' mythology brick cover to cover at least twice. Something like 'center of the universe' ought to fuckin' stand out, y'know?

Still, even if shit looked a little more nightmarish in the morning light flowing in through the curtains, the time since Saffron's implementation of Smite as a Global Spell had been absolutely wondrous. I couldn't help smiling at Menace when she poked at me and tried to shrink down and nurse. "No, Menace. You are way too big for that."

"Nad big! Smol!"

I laughed. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're as small as you wanna be, I get it, but there's a problem." I giggled a little at her mulish look and said, "No milk. Lactose free. Not getting nothing out my titties. Sorry not sorry. It was fun while it lasted, but to every thing there is a season, and Isnomi Nursing Season is over."

"Mama be Ma!"

I snorted. "Nice try, Menace, but it's been a couple months since you nommed on Mom. Nothing there now either, the bodacious nature of Mom's boobs is just for show and attracting her mate." I gave Isnomi a hopefully quelling grin and said, "trust me, I've tried."

She just pouted a bit while expanding closer to her normal size, then got a sly look. "Made!"

"Uh..."

"Wanna bruddah. Or Sistah. Made it!"

I snorted, then scooped Saffron up and snuggled her under my arm. "You hear that, Kitten? We've got marching orders, we're supposed to make Isnomi a playmate."

Saffron, who'd just finished her whole taste test the world boot up sequence, said, "plans are already in place, but not now, and definitely not for her nefarious ulterior motives."

"Ulterior..." A second later enlightenment hit, and I prepared to tickle Menace into submission. "You little schnook! We are not having a baby just to inflate Mom's tits just so you can drink breakfast!"

I launched my tickle attack much to Isnomi's screeching glee, only to have Saffron freeze me in place with a quiet, "who says I'll be the one lactating, love?"

I turned to look at her as Menace expressed her displeasure with the end of tickles by glomping her mouth on my hand and idly pressing her teeth into it. Said a lot about my state of mind that I completely ignored the lack of a 'horseshoe shape' to her dentition, except in the most general of senses. "I... wow. I hadn't thought... wow."

"You're a woman, love. You can't tell me you never thought about becoming a mother?" I lifted my arm and waved Menace at her. She laughed, probably because she wasn't feeling the gentle yet unmistakable interior of the unholy mating of Shai-Hulud and a garbage disposal. "I mean getting pregnant. What were your thoughts on that, before?"

I shrugged. "Mostly? Don't. Like, yeah, I figured it would happen eventually at some point, if only because there would be a Venn Diagram intersection of me being a freak, some dude wanting a wiling hole, and a broken condom. But," I shrugged. "I never really thought about it all that much. I sure as shit didn't daydream about it like some girls do. Maybe I had too many little cousins. Shit machines, all of them."

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She snuggled into me, not trying to titillate, but doing so anyway just by her being her and me being me. "So you're telling me if I could, you wouldn't want me to?" She sighed a little. "I suppose Marie could fill in. It is another traditional role of the Concubine." I almost lost my shit at the sudden wide-eyed look of terror on Marie, who a moment previously had been lying with her eyes closed, wrapped around the three of us.

"Hey now. I mean, yeah, part of me kinda gets the weirdest of lady boners at the idea of pumping Murder Mittens so full of baby batter she spawns a whole dev team, but I didn't say 'no'. Just... wow." I now had one of Murder Mittens' murder mittens sinking claws into my thigh, but if she wasn't running with the look of pure unadulterated panic on her face, I figured she wouldn't be running soon, which made me think really detailed thoughts of her in a wedding dress. I assumed she picked up on those, as her claws got a little closer to breaking skin every time I added another layer of ruffles to the blindingly white dress on our blindingly white Marie. Then I added me and Saffron to the picture, standing to either side of her in Raven-drawing tuxedos, and suddenly I needed a bath before leaving for the day. Or, y'know, at least needed my leg cleaned up, because she definitely broke skin that time.

If Saffron observed any of that, she didn't give any sign beyond a serene smile. "Wow?"

"Yeah. Wow. Mostly because I kinda... I'm not terrified or nauseated at the idea." She just raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, I know, ringing endorsement, but that's the thing. Before this? Before here and now and..." I stuttered to a stop, then smiled at the two of them. "Before you two? I absolutely wound up terrified to the point of puking at the thought that I might be pregnant. I mean, I literally puked at one point, back then."

Saffron put her arms around me, comforting. "Did you think you were? Perhaps you might have been?"

I shook my head and laughed. "No. No, I was just stupid." Before she could act on her sudden irritation with me saying that, I followed up with, "trust me. In this case, stupid. I'd had sex ed, or at least enough that I should absolutely have known there is zero chance of getting pregnant if you swallow."

That got everybody except Menace laughing, even Marie, although hers might have been a little more brittle than mine and Saffron's. The Menace wasn't laughing because she'd apparently decided to clean up my thigh. Which the speaking brain part of me wanted to squick at, but the deeper part where real squick happened liked it too much, thought it was too right for me to feel anything but something vaguely like what I'd felt while breast feeding her. Again, should have been squick, again, wasn't, and I have no idea why. Of course, at that point Saffron decided to hop behind the wheel of the messing with Murder Mittens mobile and shot us both an image of a very pregnant Marie with very ready to nurse mammary glands making her silhouette just a lot more distracting. "So, Marie, is it possible for a Maenad to become pregnant?"

Apparently, the view of herself as mom-imminent didn't freak her out as much as that of being spoused at any moment. "Maybe."

"Would you like to be?"

Her voice said, "Maybe." but her purr said probably.

"Would you like to bear our child? Our children?" Of all things, Marie purred and looked sheepish. Saffron tilted her head, then smiled softly and said, "you want to bear Tabitha's daughter. Daughters?"

Marie hung her head. "Sorry."

Somehow without ever leaving her spot tucked under my arm, Saffron pulled Marie to us, her hands framing Marie's sheepish, blushing face. "No. No, Marie. Never be sorry for that. We love you. I love you. With everything I am." Then she kissed her until we all melted back into a purring pile. Except Menace, who'd cleaned my bloody thigh off then climbed up onto her toddler bed, curled up, and fallen asleep. No idea how, but my five new puncture wounds had stopped bleeding and looked to have scabbed over already.

I sighed. "Its time to get up, isn't it?"

"I told them I'd be back when I'm ready. I'm not ready."

That made me smile despite my now suppressed need to get active. "I do have to check in with Swanson and get the Norfolk ships ready to move as soon as the rest of our Alliance fleet gets there."

"We had to shift many of our troops to bring them to Phileo to deploy by sea, including all of Calverton's troops. We're also juggling getting their Cold Iron armor into the same place as them, not to mention making sure we bring just enough food to keep the troops fed without any of it going bad."

"Yeah...?"

She shook her head. "They won't be arriving in Norfolk until Saturnday."

I rolled my eyes. "I've still got to let them know that, then."

She wrapped herself around my head, and beyond her I felt Marie adding another layer to the 'keep Tabitha pinned by surrounding her head with girl-flesh' anchor. "Marie has delivered a missive to Olga letting her know the new schedule, as well as our full deployment plan."

I flopped back, wanting to do something productive, but at a loss to think of anything useful for me to add. "Not that I ought to mind, but what the fuck am I supposed to do at this point?"

"You, my love, must find your happiest of places."

I reached up and found warm soft places for my hands. One fuzzy, one mostly not. "Not that I'm complaining, but why?"

Her tone soothed me even as her words ratcheted up my tension a bit. "When we assault Calverton, we will need you."

"Well, yeah, duh."

Her tone still soothed, and her hands stroking my hair doubled down on that. "You will not be able to fight anything with your hands or Mana Blades, lest you feed the Undead until we have no hope of stopping them."

I buried my face in her cleavage as I thought about how much I wanted to rage, to rip and tear and destroy the Undead root and branch. How likely I would be to lose myself to rage. Oh. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck.

"We need your power, love. We cannot hope to win without your strength. But we cannot risk your rage." Her tone shifted, from soothing to so full of amusement and wicked creativity I knew the Grin had manifested. "And so, as a terribly fitting mirror to what we did to build that rage to the point your fury burned through Cold Iron?"

I didn't get to see the Grin I loved so much, because she never let my lips break contact with her skin as she dragged my face up through her cleavage, her neck, my eyes closed until her lips met mine.

Oh, fuck, indeed.