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Dear Diary, you know the drill.

Things looked pretty dark there, for a while, yeah?  Fourth Fist’s maddening inability to be predicted had let them not only survive, but prosper, and actually wrangle an invite back to the center of things.  Back to MY vicinity, where they might suddenly realize that they needed to whack me at any time.

Naturally, that couldn’t last.

There were a few lines to just get Prevailer to kill them off, but I rejected those.  After the Redo debacle I wasn’t super confident in my ability to aim her that precisely in their vicinity, and also another crisis was coming up which would be vastly complicated by the fallout from having Peggy splat them.

I’m referring, of course, to Adder’s end.

Dude is just about out of life, and that is a very serious problem.  Basically She has always been supported by a three legged stool of relationships.  She was Adder’s surrogate daughter, Subtracter’s beloved leader and Snitcher’s owner.  Snitcher’s death wrenched everything out of whack, and now Adder dying was going to force me to intervene nearly constantly in order to keep Prevailer from just kicking the earth out of orbit in a snit fit.

I decided to help these problems solve each other.

I got Her pregnant.

The details aren’t important, it is mostly down to Dale’s gift, but the key is that I led Her to realize it before she warped, and due to recent stuff She is finally in the state of mind where She wants to have the kid.

I am replacing the three legged stool with a solid block.  Peggy will be consumed by that child, just absolutely enthralled by it.  Instead of managing a trifecta of complicated relationships I’ll only have to handle one.

Moreover, once She had this notion to fixate on it was easy to steer Her into a place where She was willing to let Adder and Indulger go.  (Prevailer has some Daddy issues, and doesn’t  want Her kid to have one.)  I refined the basic ‘boat with a nuke’ mission into a kind of floating deathtrap so ridiculously dumb I actually feel kind of bad about it.

Fourth Fist and Sixth Fist are going deep into enemy territory, at the very time when the Union/Pantheon war is coming to a head.  They think that they are on a mission of peace, when in fact Adder has orders to wipe Australia off the map.  They are staggeringly fucked.

This whole war also serves another important function.  Peggy isn’t going to be warping for nine months, which makes Her more vulnerable than She ever has been.  But no one will take advantage of this, because they will be busy fighting one another.

There are a lot more pluses about this plan that I don’t need to  write out.  The funniest one is that the part of Remover from beyond the Gate won’t be able to stomach being near someone who is bringing new life into this world, so First Fist is going to wander off and fuck with the Union for a while.  I’ll have Her all to myself.

The only downside to my gift is that I can never astound myself.  Having said that, this was fucking slick.