Dear Diary,

Y'know, sometimes I wish I could just telepathically communicate to the assholes as they're pulling shit.

Hell, not even 'telepathically'. Just 'empathically'. Like, 'this is my emotional state; as you can see, I am not becoming intimidated or scared or any other kind of "less willing to throw down" because you're pussyfooting around'. With an add on of 'as you can also see, I am sliding steadily toward "I'm going to rip your cunt mouth out your ass" instead'. Yes, while Saffron apparently decided to scry on Physics textbooks, I had my priorities straight. That shit is, in fact, absolute fire.

Inigo Montoya is my spirit guide, because he, like me, hates waiting, and just wants to cut a bitch. Okay, he wants his father back which... Shit, I don't know if I want that or not? Maybe.

Wait. I think I had about three ounces (by weight) of hesitation before slotting Loki firmly into the 'dad' slot in my emotional makeup.

I'm so glad you weighed such a momentous decision with the gravitas it deserved.

Emotions don't weigh or ponder, Boss. Just are. Sorry, you didn't run fast enough, now you're stuck with me, Dad.

Stuck implies I'd wish to get free, Daughter. Which I not only do not desire, I believe I may actually fear such an occurrence.

Aww... thanks, Boss. You're the best.

I know.

Anyway, staggered up to bed late last night. Saffron showed up right about the same time, and we barely had the energy to lean on each other as Marie undressed us and tucked us into bed. Then tucked Isnomi's chosen gaggle in around us, blocked off the bathroom with the armoire, and made sure her hoard of flotsam and jetsam children were all snug in their pile around her, while she herself curled up so no one could open the living room door without pushing it through her.

As I drifted off to sleep, a process made just a touch harder by my hindbrain's refusal to acknowledge my exhaustion when Saffron was Right There, I thought about that. My first reaction was amusement that she'd made our bedroom into a vault for her hoard, but that didn't quite feel right. Kind of like laying skin to skin with Saffron without either of us being even slightly sexually gratified. No, I'm not going to get freaky when our bed's covered in K through Five, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to feel some kind of way and bitch about it. My meandering train of thought finally wound up end-over-ending to the low key horrifying realization that Marie would hardly need to secure the room for herself, or even really to protect the kids.

She'd done it because they needed it. Needed to feel safe, that nothing would come and snatch them away in the night. Or snatch us away from them. Even through my exhaustion, a tiny fire lit deep inside me. Rationally? I had no reason to blame those asshole Rogue Calverton Heroes for these kid's trauma. Emotionally? I'd hit the point where those assholes would be lucky to wind up like Oliver fucking Orange.

And now I was too pissed off to sleep, while simultaneously being too fucking tired to even move.

But you should go to sleep, love.

Seven notes, and my beloved Magnificent Bitch flooded my brain with post-coital bliss, bypassing the actual pre- and mid- coitus states. Said bliss then teamed up with my exhaustion to pile drive me directly into unconsciousness.

Mimic dreamt of disco dancing at a rave, where the black lights under the floor made every nonexistent white thing glow, except the three tiles where some dumbass had pogoed too hard and cracked the floor.

Woke up halfway through the night, vaguely disoriented and annoyed at nonsensical dreams that weren't even my nonsense. Except I guess maybe they were? Not like Mimic had ever seen a disco in the here and now. Unless maybe Metaphoric Space is where the afterlife is for, like, every universe? That might be nice. I could see my mom again. Shit, now I was confused, maudlin, and depressed.

Saffron felt me tense, shifted to snuggle herself closer to me, hummed her magic tune, and my depression and maudlin cracked as those seven beautiful notes picked my recalcitrant brain up by its ankles and shook it until the Happy Brain Chemicals fell out of its pockets and I slipped back to sleep.

Mimic dreamt of the stars. Mom was out there somewhere, and if that wasn't quite the happy thought it would have been for me, it wasn't, y'know, confusing as fuck.

I woke up to Saffron lying atop me, arms folded across my chest, her chin braced on them as she stared up at me. "I find it endlessly fascinating how you wake up."

I smiled at her. "Same back at you." A second later I realized that she hadn't said 'cute' or 'adorable', or anything like that, but 'fascinating'. "How so?"

She shrugged as if to say that it wasn't something that mattered, just something she found intriguing. "You go from utterly still, barely breathing if you're breathing at all, your heartbeat so slow and shallow I can barely feel it, to completely animated, alive, awake, and aware, with no space in between."

I snorted. "Guess you've been asleep the days when I wake up slow."

She shook her head, which did interesting things to her arms, and more importantly to my chest beneath them, but a quick glance showed the room and our bed still occupied by the horde hoard. "No, it's not that. It's not even really 'asleep' and 'awake'. It's more like you go from a state so close to death as to be nigh indistinguishable to so full of life that it fills the room around you."

"Huh. Maybe it's a Blend thing? Y'know, subconsciously telling everybody around me 'nobody to see here, just a mannequin, no need to look closer, please move along' or some shit like that."

She tilted her head, smiling as she did so, then shrugged. "Maybe. I don't think so, but I could be wrong."

Stolen novel; please report.

"Pfft. As if."

She rolled her eyes and somehow managed to pinch me without moving either of her hands. "Goof. I am fully capable of being incorrect about assumptions. Even ones I've thought through carefully, especially when there is some pertinent facet of the situation of which I'm unaware. In things like this, where I'm, as you'd say, spitballing? Throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks? Intellect has no influence on correct or incorrect, and thus? I might be wrong."

"Pfft. As if."

She laughed, somehow pinching me again in an even tenderer spot. "Such a stubborn Goof. I should tell your wife to punish you."

"Wait, isn't that you?"

The Grin snuck across her face like a spouse trying to sneak into bed at three AM after an absolute bender. "That would make it exceptionally easy for me to tell your wife, wouldn't it? All I have to do is not keep secrets from myself."

I shook my head a little. "Is this, like, a Co-Location thing, or a shapshiftey thing? Are you actually me Co-Located and Shapeshifted? Or am I actually you Co-Located and Shapeshifted?"

She rolled off of me, laughing. "No, no, no, nothing of the sort, love. I was, as you're so fond of saying, just fucking with you."

My brows beetled and my mouth scrunched into a moue. "How do I know you're not some Bad Guy who's whisked my Saffron away and replaced her with Folgers' Crystals?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter who I am though. What matters is what you are."

I pulled her to me, kissed her, and she definitely smelled and tasted and felt and kissed like my Saffron. "So what am I again?"

Imperator's Attack Dog.

When my eyes uncrossed I said, "woof." Then went on an absolute tickle rampage against my naughty little Imperator.

After about ten seconds Isnomi woke up and joined in, and less than a minute after that the entire room was a vast sea of tickle and counter-tickle, giggles and squeals echoing from the walls. Eventually we tired out, as did the kids, and we all lay there panting and amused. Saffron pulled me close, our noses almost touching, our gazes locked together, and whispered. "There she is. My Goof, my silly Goof who grabs the cup of life with both hands and quaffs it to the dregs." She sighed, a long exhalation as she went deliciously limp in my arms. "I needed that. Thank you, love."

"What's up, Kitten? Council misbehaving? Need me to come and bark at them?"

She smiled. "No, nothing like that. Mayor McCann has actually been most patient with us, since the General and I both spent all day yesterday Curing plague victims. Every person we find in every building we come to is either ill or dead."

"Shit. I'm sorry. Do you need me there?"

She shook her head. "I want you here terribly, and the moment you've put these Rogue Heroes in the ground, I need you to join me and help us end this thing. But there's a reason there is a whole protocol for Rogue Heroes. While I am of course biased and believe our own Heroes in Phileo are better than those of any other City, any Hero is, fundamentally, a force to be reckoned with. A group of eight of them? Could do as much damage as a whole army of bandits."

I pulled her against me, rubbing little circles on her back as Marie started the horde hoard moving toward the bathroom. "So. End these Rogue Heroes, End Apollo's fucking Plague, with ending the sunny asshole himself as a potential stretch goal, and then we get to get back to important shit, like you teaching me written Celtic?"

She laughed as she kind of oozed over me, planting little kisses along my shoulder, up my neck, and down my jawline as she did. "That's my Goof. Ever with her priorities in order."

"You know it, babe."

"Hmm... No. I prefer Kitten."

I smiled at her, put my arms around her and rolled us off the bed, landing on my feet with her in a princess carry. "Kitten it is then, Kitten." Then I carried her into the bathroom and dropped her into the tub, splashing us both as I did. The kids laughed, Marie laughed, Saffron laughed, I laughed. The armoires did not, in fact, laugh, and therefore nobody felt a need to kill the Mimic. What, you think I'd never heard that joke before?

When we made it to breakfast, we found the buffet and table terrain dominated by an absolute wafflepalooza, although a surprising newcomer entered the fray. Equally good with butter, fruit spread, and surprisingly adept at soaking up syrup, Marie's cornbread wound up the object of many noms, especially among the kids too young to care about it being 'livestock feed', who paid more attention to 'sweet, syrupy goodness', because they had their culinary heads on straight. Meat was a little thin on the ground; the folks going through the buffet got two sausages each, although they got a couple boiled eggs as well. Rationing, but not, like, stupid starvation rationing.

After breakfast Isnomi, Marie, and I glomped Saffron and smothered her with kisses before she managed to step away, laughing, telling us she'd be back at sundown.

Down in the Scrying Room, Larry and I had figured out that if we weren't the ones actually looking through the scrying pools? We could each maintain another one, which made five for me and three for him. He rotated through the eight farmsteads around Lancaster House in fifteen minute intervals, I did the loop around that with twenty five minute intervals. It meant we were each Shaping a scry every five minutes, which wasn't exactly restful, but it was sort of like running at a jog; both of us could do that shit all day if we had to. Which we did.

The remaining Cadets and the Calverton Heroes on standby wound up doing the actual 'staring through the pool, watching for any evidence of Rogue Heroes' part of things, although they got help from an unlikely yet adorable source. Isnomi and her growing army of little playmates rolled into the room right around lunch, ostensibly bringing us food, more realistically glomming onto the watchers in twos and threes, asking them questions about what they were looking at. Weirdly, it kinda helped, since instead of just staring at farmstead after farmstead, the nominal adults in the room had to actually, y'know, look at what they were looking at. Think about it, at least enough to answer all the questions a pack of curious K through Five kids could come up with.

Maybe an hour before sunset, Isnomi slipped away from Liam and a couple other kids she'd been circulating with and came over to me, holding her hands up. "Up! Up!"

I smiled, yoinked her up with my right hand and settled her on my hip. "Hey, Menace."

She nodded at me, that super-serious look only little kids could pull off on her face, and she leaned in and whispered, "we hep?"

I nodded back, bunting her forehead with mine, whispering back, "you have been the biggest help, Menace. I'm so proud of you."

"Frens help?"

"Yes, you and all your friends, Menace. I'm proud of all of them too, but you'll always be my one little Menace."

"No mow sissa? No mow brudda?"

I chuckled. "Not any time soon, no. But... maybe. Possibly. Probably. But not for a while. And then you'll be a Big Sister."

"I'm biggest sissa!"

"Yes, you are, Menace. The biggest of all."

She preened as she rode my hip for the rest of the day. Maybe fifteen minutes later, Saffron pinged me. Are you in the Scrying Room, love?

Yep.

I expect you to catch me and carry me up to bed. Ravishing is definitely an option, but only if you do absolutely every bit of the work.

What about the kids?

I'm too tired to eat, so you'll have to ravish quickly, while Marie watches them denude the dinner buffet.

Well, I'm not too tired to eat.

That got me a long pause, followed by, are you actually turning down sex for food?

Oh, no. I was letting you know what variety of ravishing to expect.

The next moment she slumped against me, whispering, "so poetic, I am defenseless against your wit and ardor. Carry me off and do as you will with me."

As I scooped her up opposite the menace, pretty much carrying her the exact same way, Isnomi giggled and said, "mom siwwy."

Before I could figure out how to offload Isnomi to Marie, Lachlan unknowingly put his health and welfare at risk with three words. "I see them!"

"MOTHERFUCKER!"

Apparently not tonight, love.