Dear Diary,

"Before you pursue Vengeance, First you should seek out Justice, When Justice fails, then Vengeance." - Tabitha Diaz, Doctrine of Tabitha, Book of Vengeance

With this second Verse of the Book of Vengeance, Tabitha again reminds us that Vengeance ought not be our first recourse. She commands us to seek Justice before Vengeance, once again making the implication clear, that Vengeance and Justice are not the same. Vengeance is about doing harm to those who have done harm, where Justice is about bringing balance. While these can occasionally align, restorative Justice is far more productive, healthier for all involved. So our Goddess commands us, before we seek Vengeance, to at least attempt to seek Justice. Only when Justice fails ought we follow the path of Vengeance. - Priestess Most High Above All Others, Archmage Imperator Saffron Aetos-Diaz, Commentary on the Doctrine of Tabitha

So weird, the things that people start thinking are synonymous when nuance gets lost. Justice and Vengeance. Envy and Jealousy. Anger and Hate. Shit that's normal and natural and honestly can serve to light a fire under us to make the world a better place, each with its own dark mirror that turns it into an unmitigated disaster waiting to happen.

The Anger and Hate one is kinda huge, one that I remember from back in the day. Hate... Hate is what happens when somebody gets so wrapped up in having to hurt somebody else that it doesn't matter what they do, who they are, or anything about them; its all inside that first person's head. It twists them and there's no way to untwist it. Anger... Anger is just a response. A reaction. Sometimes it's a completely legitimate one, where some asshole has sprayed shit all over something important, and they need to be thoroughly kicked. 'Righteous rage' or whatever. But the thing is, once the problem is resolved, the anger fades. Yeah, sometimes if you're angry enough long enough, you start hating, but despite what that little green grammar murderer says, Anger does not always lead to Hate.

Envy and Jealousy are even worse. Envy is when somebody else has something and you want it. Not great, but shit, maybe they'll share, or they can tell you where they got theirs, or they're tired of it and you can get that wireless controller from them for the price of a smile and a swallow and a lie about them being the best you've ever had. Jealousy, on the other hand, is when you'd rather see shit burn than let someone else have it. Yeah, Envy can lead you to popping a cap in your neighbor to get a chance with their partner, but Jealousy is gonna have you shooting that partner rather than letting them stay with their one true love. Way better to glue a horn on your forehead and being their very special unicorn than that, if you ask me. And, y'know, people are asking me now, so I'm gonna be telling them that chasing something you want is way better than setting it on fire.

Back to Justice and Vengeance, I do get how sometimes the only way to balance things is to execute a motherfucker. But that old saw about 'an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind' played itself out in my neighborhood back in the day. I... That's it. Vengeance doesn't build shit. It just breaks shit. Making the fucker who burned your house down build you a new one is Justice. Yeah, you could also balance it by burning their house down, but then nobody's got a fuckin' house.

Maybe that's true of all of those. Vengeance breaks shit, Justice can build. Jealousy hoards shit, breaks it if it can't, but Envy can be the impetus to make more shit. Hate is purely destructive, but Anger or even Spite can make somebody mad enough to build themselves up.

Maybe I'm just a dumb kid who's tryna pretend like I understand shit, because I've got a couple million people looking to me for leadership.

At least they're not looking to me for management. I would absolutely suck at that. But leadership I can maybe fake, especially if I pull some Trickster bullshit and hand out food and hand jobs until everybody's inspired enough to make shit work.

After the kittens got their nom on and made my tits feel a little less like water balloons about to pop, leaving everything coated in milk, it was time for dinner, and after delivering stuff to the dining room, I collapsed all of me back to the two of me nursing. Because I'd had two of me there, one with a pair of kittens attached, one with one kitten and a really janky primitive breast pump, all day long.

Kinda fell asleep nursing. Dreamt of my ladies riffing on their choreography, but now centered on Madeline. She tasted buttery savory and crispy. No idea how someone can taste crispy. Dreams, even Mimic dreams in M-Space, are still fucked up sometimes.

Saffron showed up a couple minutes after I woke up carrying a big tray of spicy eggs. She started feeding me, what with my hands being full of kitten and pump. Between bites, I sighed and said, "I think maybe the past couple days have been staving off a spiral or crash. Or maybe I never really got fully rested from the whole birthing thing."

My Kitten snorted and filled my mouth with fiery eggs again. "Or you're just learning what life is like with a newborn. Sleep and rest become fond memories, until the state of 'being rested' becomes an almost mythical thing."

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I sighed, then smiled. "At least I'm not leaving Marie as the only one stuck here feeding twenty four seven."

As Marie snorted out a chuckle, Saffron pulled me into a side hug before filling my mouth again. "That is one big advantage of a household like ours." When I blinked and looked the question at her, she explained, "more hands makes the work lighter. Not to mention when one of us is hindered, the rest can share their overflow."

"Huh. Guess I never thought about it that way."

For the next little while we lay there chatting while she fed me and I spent some time focused on whichever kitten nursed on me. First Erato, with fur the golden brown color of my skin in summer back in the day, her hair a deep, rich chestnut. Mine was never that nice back in the day, but that's... I guess that's what I thought my hair would have been like if I'd taken care of it or had it professionally styled or whatever rather than me grudgingly scrubbing it out with dial soap when it got too greasy. Her eyes, because they'd all opened up over the past couple days, were a deep, rich brown that flashed tawny when she got cranky. Which meant hungry at this point.

Then Garde. My breath still caught when I heard her name. I'm not sure I'd ever be able to hear that name and not feel like I had to do everything in my power to make her life just a little better, to make sure that my little one never fell into the kind of despair where she'd just check out. Not a bad thing for a mom, I guessed, wanting to make life better for her kids. The gray tipped fur forming her tabby stripes had gotten crisper, little gently curving lines across her back. The rest of her, fur and her hair, was a deep matte black. Her eyes... I couldn't tell where her pupils ended and her irises began except when the light hit them just right, and they reflected it with a kind of silvery sheen.

Little Anise, because she was the littlest of them, even smaller than Hailee, packed away milk like me eating eggs; no idea where she put it all. She had black 'false eyes' on her forehead and another pair on her cheekbones, along with fuzzy black markings everywhere Marie had gained thick black stripes on our wedding night. Anise's actual eyes were a little freaky to look at. Not unlike Garde's eyes where the pupil and iris were indistinguishable, Anise's irises blended into her whites. In bright light, they looked almost like solid white orbs in her eye sockets. Her hair was the same bone straight platinum the Maenads had, though.

Once her eyes slipped shut and she went from suckling to snoring, I slipped Anise off and scooped up Isadora. Who... I really didn't want to think about how her pattern would, without a doubt, make people think 'cow cat'. White with big black blotches, including one that took up the right side of her face. Her hair was striped the same way, black and white in broad uneven stripes. She had... was it heterochromia if it was black and white? One white eye like Anise's, one black one like Garde's. Black on the white side of her face and white on the black side. Of course. Poor kitten. On the other hand, she was already literally twice Anise's size. Which... yeah, it made that whole 'cow' comparison worse, but holy shit right now she was a big ball of clumsy, but she was maybe already bigger than Menace's default sizing. Definitely bigger than she had been at nine months when I met her.

When Isadora finally topped off enough to drop off, I swapped kittens around because that breast was just about done for. Felicia didn't mind nursing from the other side, though. Then again, it might be hard to tell. She was definitely the most reserved. Or maybe that was me projecting, because she absolutely looked so dapper with her little white socks and gloves, white belly, chest, and face making her look like she was all dressed up and ready for a fancy party. I was absolutely not going to get her a tiny top hat. Which is a lie, I'd already asked Conrad to make her one. Her irises were silvery white starbursts in a field of black, and I found them endlessly fascinating. Until they too slipped closed and she drifted off to sleep.

Borysthenis. Funny, I guess either I was super tired the first day or I'd gotten better at names or maybe I'd lost something less important than my daughter's name, like how to spell my own name. Her body, eyes, and hair were the same gray as the armor of the Black Dragon, with three sets of beautiful symmetrical markings across her face, chest, belly, and back.

Calliope had the same kind of gray tips as Garde, but all over her body instead of in a tabby pattern. Even her hair hung long and straight and platinum white with gray tips at the ends. Her eyes were gray, but a sparkling silver gray unlike Borysthenis' battleship gray. She purred the entire time she nursed, and I dunno, seemed almost like she was singing while she did it. I mean, obviously not singing with her mouth, that was occupied with the serious business of eating, but making music with her purr.

She almost put me back to sleep by the time she was done. I realized right around then that lunch time was fast approaching and I hadn't done jack diddly shit other than feed kittens and pump today, all while Saffron shoveled eggs into me. Before I could say anything, she lay a hand on my shoulder and pushed me back onto my pillow. "Let's perhaps let you get some rest."

"But..."

She smiled, even laughed quietly, and lifted a snoozing Calliope off me, snuggling her as she shifted her into the sleeping kitten pile in the middle of the bed, extracting Hailee from Marie and plonking her down on my tit. Dunno why, but that shut me up. "I never realized quite how satisfying doing that is. Small wonder you used to do it so often to me."

I smiled my own self, chuckling until I looked down into Hailee's stormy eyes. She was the leanest of her sisters, and her colors were superficially similar to Erato's, only with olive undertones and highlights rather than golden ones. But her eyes, oh, her eyes. I wasn't exaggerating or even really being metaphoric when I called them stormy. Gray and green, ever changing, with sparkling bits of light flashing in them. I hadn't yet been able to tell if that was light reflecting off bits in them, or some kind of natural freaky Mana luminescence, but whatever it was it fascinated me. She stared at me, and I at her, as she filled her belly with milk and my brain slowly shut down and let me sleep.

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