Day One Thousand One Hundred And Ninety-Eight

Dear Diary,

While I am relatively familiar with being the member of the Mom Collective most likely to meet the Kid Collective on their own terms, meaning playing with them, talking with them as something like equals, and even literally squatting down or otherwise trying not to loom, I am not familiar with being the one with the most experience in any given situation.

Seriously, Tallulah and Marie are both older than me. Shit, Furtim is too, although if she wasn't really paying attention to mom stuff before she became the mitochondrial Eve of a revitalized Troll race, I could definitely understand why. Saffron is the tiniest bit younger than me chronologically, but between most of my pre-Isekai experience being with video games and surviving a dystopian capitalist hellscape, and her being a driven overachiever long before she met me, my general assumption is that she's got more practical here and now experience.

Siobhan's only a year or two older than me, but she's a little sheltered, so I might have some experience advantages when it comes to practical stuff, but frankly we've hit a point where we're not in a position to need 'practical, street smart' stuff. Seriously, anybody trying to con Siobhan out of her purse is clearly not as smart as they think they are. Not only does she not carry a purse that I'm aware of, she'd probably just give somebody her money if they asked nicely, and if they outright mugged her there's like half a dozen different groups of people who would make a contest out of who could catch them first. Shit, there'd be a secondary contest where we all tried to find some way to visit consequences on the asshole without doing anything that would upset our Darling.

Okay, some people like a certain elder Lancaster might just kill them, but then his connection to Siobhan isn't nearly as intimate as most of the rest of us. His only dog in the fight is somebody disrespecting an Academy Healer and the Concubine of the Imperator. Basically 'somebody did something that disrespects him by proxy' kind of upset, which means he's not upset for Siobhan, he's upset for how somebody conning her makes him look.

At any rate, ability to con and resist being conned aside, I'm not used to being the most familiar with anything practical here and now, but I realized today that I am, in fact, more familiar with military parents than the rest of the Mom Collective. Which wouldn't be super shocking, with the general lack of professional militaries here and now, except I'm including Furtim in that assessment, because while she's got military down, parenting seems a foreign thing to her, so she's falling back on 'military training'. At least I'm guessing at that.

Which, to be clear, is far from the worst thing somebody could do, but... Honestly it might be equally far from the best. I was in ROTC long enough to learn what boot camp was all about. While making sure the troops know what they need to know in order to survive any situation they're likely to be in isn't bad per se, and definitely something I might want Furtim's help teaching all our kids, there's the other part of boot camp. The military is not generally trying to produce well rounded, healthy individuals ready to prosper. Not unlike the Academies here and now, they're forging people into weapons. Not only that, but where Academies, especially the Heroic Academies here and now, are custom crafting each Cadet into the best weapons of whatever kind they can be, boot camps for enlisted are generally trying to produce mass quantities of fundamentally identical weapons.

Children are not fungible assets, nor should they be made into fungible assets.

After we got the fam home from therapy, while everybody else was eating, I snagged Furtim and pulled her up to the showers. While she proceeded to manhandle me a little, which really did wonders for muscles aching from, y'know, overwork and not resting enough, not to mention all the fuckin' scar tissue that must be lurking under the surface scars, I prodded her just a little.

"Do our girls have to head back to Troll Home tonight, or is the morning soon enough?"

She sighed, then asked, "what do you think?"

"I dunno, Furtim. I want to make sure that they're getting everything they need to be everything they can be, but you've made it pretty clear that you're, I dunno, more invested in them than I am."

She froze for a second, then returned to mauling me disguised as scrubbing me down. "Really?"

I shrugged, or tried to, as she worked on my shoulders. "Not saying I'm not invested in them, but you've got pretty strong opinions on where they belong."

"I shouldn't?"

I turned to face her, and realized that while she had the strength and size to massage me, she was not in fact strong enough to hold me in place. I reached up and took her hands, holding them gently. "Of course you should. They're your girls."

"Not ours?"

I rolled my eyes. "Of course they're ours. I might have just found out about them, but..." I chuckled when I realized what I was saying, "I'm gonna take responsibility here. I helped you make them happen. I don't want to..." I thought about what I wanted to say, then asked, "do you know anything about butterflies?"

She shrugged. "Not much."

"Yeah, you get how they start as caterpillars, then go into a cocoon and turn into a butterfly, right?"

She blinked. "Really?" I nodded. "Okay."

"You didn't know that?"

She got a little sheepish look and said, "no military applications."

I heaved a sigh. "Yeah, that would be part of why I want to be part of parenting our kids." When she just looked at me, waiting, I said, "you realize not all of them want to be part of the Legion, right?"

Yeah, she kinda wound up on her ass on the floor. After a few seconds, Siobhan showed up. "What happened?"

"I think I said something that shook her."

"Yes."

Siobhan blinked a little. "And she fell down?"

"Yep."

"I was in the toilet in the bedroom and I heard that."

I chuckled. "Yeah, our Furtim is not waifish and skinny, unlike some Ice Pops I know."

She pouted, about to say something, and I kissed her. When we came up for air, she said, "pardon, Mistress," then turned to Furtim. "Are you injured?"

Furtim pushed herself upright. "Only my pride."

"I'll be heading back down to dinner then. Unless?" She fluttered her lashes at me.

"Later," I whispered into her hair, and she disappeared with a giggle.

I gave Furtim a hand to her feet, and she stuck her head under the shower head. When she came out, she said, "sorry."

"Don't be. How long have you been in the Legion?"

She shrugged. "Awake?" I nodded. "Millennia."

"Were you... Did you do anything before that?"

She shook her head. "Born to it."

"Okay, What I was gonna say about butterflies is that some of them really struggle to get out of their cocoons, but if you cut them out to 'help' them? They wind up unable to fly." She still looked confused, so I added, "I don't want to do that to our girls. Do something to help them that ultimately hurts them."

"But...?"

"Yeah. Sixth. Ha ha. Anyway, just because I'm worried about maybe ruining their chances to get with the boy Troll of their choosing later in life, or otherwise screw them up, doesn't mean I think all of them are gonna want to live the Legion life." I waited, but apparently she'd rebooted with that information in place, so other than shaking her head, she didn't react. "Before... Uh... Before you guys, the Legion... You all went into hibernation at once, right?"

"More or less."

"Okay, but all of you there were part of the Legion?"

She clapped her jaw. "A few... Nobles? Clergy? Wound up officers. Also wound up dead after Honey Seeking Bear."

"Okay, so pretty much every Troll here and now is part of the Legion, and has been for at least a thousand years, right?" She nodded. "Back before then, before you all slept the eons away, were all Trolls soldiers?"

She shook her head. A moment later, the lights went on. "Our children... Nobles? Clergy?"

I shrugged. "Or maybe makers. Shopkeepers. Fuck, housewives, if that's what lights their hearth fires."

She frowned. "Their... They should be important."

Marie? Murder Mittens showed up a moment later. A moment after that her Maid's uniform disappeared, and I slipped a tentacle and an arm around her waist with a laugh. "Not at the moment, Mittens." She blepped. "Okay, if Furtim doesn't object, once the kids are in bed. But I wanted to ask you something." She head tilted, and I tugged at Furtim's hand. "I think she needs to hear it."

"Hear what?" asked my Prefect.

"Mittens, you're queen of the murderfuck cult, Dionysus' Champion and basically Chief Maenad, right?" She nodded. "You're also a Psychopomp, and Head Maid at the Academy?" Again, she nodded. "Okay, so what's your most important Title?"

Without the slightest pause or hesitation, she replied, "Wife."

"Not Mother?"

She chuckled. "Same?"

I nodded agreement with her point. "Okay, yeah, for you I guess they are, right?" I turned to Furtim. "Housewife isn't unimportant, Furtim."

She clapped her jaws a couple times, then nodded. "Point taken."

I nodded. "So yeah, I know you and our girls talked it out yesterday, or talked about it a lot, but... Did you want me to mediate for you and our girls?"

Furtim just sat there in the shower, thinking, as the kids started trickling in. Eventually she nodded and said, "please."

So, y'know, not there yet. But like so much else in life. Baby steps.