Dear Diary, you remain a polite fiction,

All right, so last time we chatted I ‘got rid’ of Fourth Fist by sending their useless and disruptive asses away on a boat primed to explode.  I also had the bright idea of replacing Adder’s portion of Prevailer’s support network with the joys of motherhood.

The first part of this plan has gone about as well as I could hope.  They are out of my hair for the foreseeable, and their odds of surviving all the hell that is heading their way is negligible.

The second part…was a mistake.

It is super important, by the bye, to be able to say that.  If you have to defend everything that you ever do then you are a chump.  A smart person can say that the things that they did in the past weren’t the things they would optimally have done.  I don’t exactly claim to be all that smart, but shaping destiny is a hell of a crutch.

But Answerer, you ask me, how could you make a mistake?  Aren’t you the one who charts our collective future, who navigates around the shoals and perils of the wine dark sea that men call provenance?

Well, yeah.  But it looks like I was a bit lazy.

In particular, I never actually verified any of my visions that had to do with pregnant women before.  In my defense, they aren’t generally given responsibilities that I need to do my snooping on, but I still should have tested this out before staking our future on it.

The thing of it turns out to be, my gift can’t see the baby’s souls’ influence on the mother.  So I get invalidated and have to refresh any time mommy dearest deviates from the actions she would take if the baby wasn’t doing anything.  Kicks and the like can throw it off.

Not by much, hopefully, and I get back on track the next time I refresh my vision, but all of a sudden the fact that I’ve put a ruthless killer with a hair trigger temper in charge is kind of staring me in the face.

So I have to get out of dodge.  Once Prevailer finishes shitting out this wonderful new contribution to the great tapestry of souls that I have the onerous duty of tending to I can take back full control.  But I can’t be around in the meantime, in case one day her heaving gut tells her to eviscerate everyone nearby.

But, if I go into hiding (thank goodness I let Snitcher die so that is even a possibility, eh?), then how will I protect her?  At least three times in the last decade she survived assassination attempts only due to my nudges.  In my absence she might very easily get herself killed.

I’m going to try and resolve this by using Subtracter as my proxy.  It lacks the certainty of my usual methods, but its the best I can come up with.

If I go down, this was where the error lay.  I tried to solve a lot of problems at once, with a certain elegance.  If things ever get back to normal, then I swear that each bird gets its own stone.