Diary of a Teenaged Mimic

Dear Diary,

Of all the weird cultural differences I’ve had to adapt to, one of the big ones kinda isn’t.

I mean, there’s lots of cultural differences. A general lack of meaningful homophobia is nice. Folks assuming half the kids born are gonna die is not, although that one I’m glad to say we’re changing, improving, on the daily. I’m really hoping that we don’t lose the current love of kids, at least the one I’ve seen from most parents here and now. Well, okay, some parents. The idea that race is more than just ugly ethnicity prejudice is a weird one. England being a haven for pirates, not the source of global imperialism and colonialism is another one that we’re kinda dealing with right at the moment.

At any rate, another thing I’ve had to remind myself of isn’t so much a cultural difference as a cultural assumption from back in the day that trips me up on the regular. That’s the assumption that less technologically advanced people are... A bunch of words, a bunch of assumptions flow through my head. ’Backward’ keeps pushing forward, but the thing is I think that might be the least wrong of all of them. Like, ’backward’ usually means living way, way away from the bleeding edge of technology. Doing shit like Amish folks, or primitive tribes living in the Amazon, or those tribes on that island who straight up kill anybody who sets foot on the island.

I mean, if that’s how they wanna live, most of me says ’more power to them’, but there’s one big exception to that, one that jumps up and grabs me by the back of the head and won’t let me look away. Children. I can’t ignore consequences to Children even if I wanted to. The moment somebody pops out a crotch goblin, they’ve got to start thinking of more than just themselves. If some group is that backward, they probably don’t have much in the way of prophylaxis, which means if they’re fuckin’ around, they’re gonna be popping out rug rats. Half of whom are gonna die.

Everything else I could just shrug and say ’okay, whatever’, but that? That one thing I cannot let stand. Maybe it’s the whole ’Goddess of Children’ thing, but I just can’t, no matter how much I might want to. Which, y’know, I guess I really don’t. I mean, I don’t agree with the whole ’genocide by taking kids away’ thing either, but the whole ’those are their parents, they get to decide everything for them’ smacks of ’Children are property’, and I can’t deal with that, either. My kids are my responsibility, my joy, my reason both for being and for restraint, but they are not my property. Which means that I can, if I neglect that responsibility, ought to be held accountable. Maybe even have them taken away.

Fuck, that’s a whole fuckin’ can of worms I don’t need to open right now, because right now one small corner of the world, the Alliance, has just barely started making the changes to drop our infant mortality rate down below fifty percent. Once it’s there and stable we can start spreading the good words of Children Live.

But that’s a problem for tomorrow, and an entirely different cultural assumption than the one I really meant to focus on, which is that technologically less advanced people are stupid. Even those Amish folks aren’t exactly stupid. I wouldn’t want to live like that, but those fuckers can throw barns together and manage farms and memorize huge chunks of the Bible and do all kinds of shit that takes some clock cycles between the ears, all without computers or calculators or any of the modern shit I’d take for granted. They don’t even have Mana Shaping Magic to help out the way we did with the Homestead, just brains and muscles and maybe some community support.

So seeing some people plying the waves in wooden sailing vessels, with the intent of boarding other wooden sailing vessels and taking their shit, which mind you without cannon pretty much needs to be done at bow ranges, I think I got fooled into thinking that they’re, y’know, dumb.

Over the past forty-eight hours I have been thoroughly disabused of this notion.

First there was yesterday, where the three of them had a conversation with Swanson and Saffron that totally... Well, no, it didn’t go over my head. I kinda understood pretty much all of it, even some of the nautical terms Swanson talked about. It just bored the shit out of me right from the start. Worse, after an evening spent aboard the Black Dragon, one where my ladies, meaning the Wifiest of Wifes backed up by both Concubines and all my High Clergy decided that since they were bringing Aisling to me to avoid any explosions, they might as well bring the rest of the Horde Hoard to visit Mama’s battleship, the whole torturous experience continued today.

I learned a lot about Pirate... Shit, I wound up learning the Law and Custom of the English Pirates. My least favorite course, and I wasn’t even gonna be able to extra credit my way out of it, or get bonus points for writing deliberately provocative letters of challenge and shit. I was forcibly reminded about that whole ’nobody knows what bit of what class is going to make or break your life in the future’ thing. Motherfucker cocksucker shit. Which I’m saying here because neither saying it in front of the kids nor the diplomats is a good idea. 

Some of what I learned I sort of expected. Each ship had their own rules on how they divvied up the spoils of any captured cargo, or even ships. They had rules on discipline, like what infractions merited which punishments. I was a little surprised about how hiding loot or stealing shit from crewmates was considered a capital offense, even though I probably shouldn’t have been. But each of them had a whole assed code of conduct, almost like... Shit, it wasn’t ’almost like’. The fuckin’ things were little mini constitutions, one per ship.

Of course, they were also contracts. Employment contracts for the whole crew. Except unlike most of the ones I remember from back in the day, these had a whole assed section on how the crew voted on a bunch of shit. Like, not everything; some shit was decided by the officers, like on Anne’s ship, she decided where they were gonna go hunting, but the Navigator plotted the course. The Quartermaster decided how much they carried in the way of supplies. But even there, where they had the basic sense to let experts make decisions about stuff in their area of expertise, there were rules for how the crew could vote an officer out. Even the fuckin’ Captain.

I mean, on Anne’s ship officers had more than one vote, and from what I could tell she pretty much had to lose like eighty percent of the crew to lose the vote to stay captain, but that shit wasn’t considered ’mutiny’ or anything. Just a Vote of No Confidence. Which, apparently, all three Captains had been worried about before the Alliance restocked them. For free. Because I hadn’t really thought about it, and just ordered Orla to restock them.

Thing is, this year the Alliance had been just raking in the crops. I mean, bumper harvests and everything. I think it might have been something about so many huge Deific things dying nearby, spreading their Mana all over the place, but according to an offhand comment by Saffron as we were getting ready for bed, our problem was storing food, not having it.

Okay, what she actually said was, ”really Goof, if the cost of bringing the English Pirates under our nominal control is feeding them all, right now that would be cheap at the price. We have more food than we know what to do with.”

”Uh, feed everybody?”

She snorted, then laughed, as exhausted kids filed into my cabin, returning from the Mess Hall. Which Marie had them clean after they had a massive food fight. Because either Menace, Anise, or Felicia had heard the term ’Mess Hall’ and decided that was appropriate. While I don’t think any of them actually regretted their actions, spending an hour or so cleaning the whole fuckin’ room until they could eat off the floor maybe let them reconsider whether they’d do it again at breakfast.

”Everyone in the Alliance is fed, love. We’re exporting food to the other Atlantean Cities at the moment. Not that most of them need it, although Jackville doesn’t have very much good farmland.”

”Don’t we want to store some of it? Like, for winter, or for next year, if we can?”

She blinked. ”How?”

I opened my mouth, then sort of froze. ”I was gonna say freeze it, but that’s not gonna work. Um, freeze drying it won’t work for the same reason.”

”I suppose drying things would be one option. Pickling is another.”

”Some stuff can be canned.”

She shot me that look, the one that I’d gotten when I mentioned ’Crossbows’. Weird getting it for a non-weapon, but here we are. ”Explain?” She held up one hand. Marie?

Murder Mittens popped her head out of the head, where she’d been overseeing making sure the kids cleaned themselves as well as they’d cleaned the Mess. ”Yes?”

”I think you might want to hear this. No, really, I think you’re more likely the one who can understand it, and possibly convey it to Mrs. Driver.”

Marie raked her gaze across the not yet sanitized members of the Horde Hoard, then said, ”Get Clean.” before walking over and settling onto the bed next to Saffron and I. ”Go On?”

”Okay, so you know how I’ve talked about germ theory?”

Saffron nodded, and Siobhan perked up from where she’d been feeding Aoibh and quietly talking with Davey and Daya. Saffron said, ”to be clear, you’re talking about tiny organisms that cause disease, yes?”

I nodded. ”Yeah. Viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites. All kinds of little shit that makes people sick. Thing is, some of that stuff makes us sick because it’s not really supposed to be inside us.”

”I’d think none of it ought to be,” commented Siobhan.

I shrugged. ”I mean, yeah, but some of it wants to be. Like rhinoviruses. We’re part of their reproductive cycle. Without us, they’re just rando bits of flotsam and jetsam. But they get into one of us, hijack our bits to make more of themselves, then dump that into the snot our bodies make to help fight them, and then we sneeze out a bunch of them that gets on other people.”

Siobhan’s eyes lit up. ”The masks!”

”Exactly. Anyhow, some of the stuff that makes food go bad doesn’t really want to get eaten. Yeah, it makes us sick and maybe kills us, but that doesn’t help the bacteria or fungus in any real way. So, y’know, bit of a wash for them. Anyhow, my point is that stuff is pretty much everywhere, but not normally inside us. But that stuff that makes food go bad? It’s still germs.”

Siobhan frowned, as did Saffron and Marie. Marie furrowed her brow and asked, ”Cure?”

I wrinkled up my nose. ”Maybe? Like, that might be a great added step, almost like irradiating stuff back in the day? But nah, that takes a Shaper, and you can store food long term without any kind of Shaping. Without anything super high tech, either.”

”How?” Marie definitely wanted to hear details now that we were talking about her area of Special Interest.

”Heat. Like, freezing stuff stops germs cold, because without water they can’t move around. Drying it out does the same. But all of that just kinda slows them down.”

Saffron interrupted. ”So boiling the water away does the same?”

I shook my head, then shrugged. ”I mean, maybe? But that’s not really what I’m talking about. Most living things can’t handle high temperatures. Yeah, boiling them usually kills them, but even the ones where the water boiling doesn’t do them in, keeping them hot enough long enough kills them dead as fuck.”

Saffron nodded, then frowned again. ”But you said those germs are everywhere, yes?” I nodded. ”So how do you prevent...” Her eyes lit up, because just in case it wasn’t clear, my Kitten is smart enough to speed run the Industrial Revolution, and was absolutely intending to do so. ”Sealing them away before they cool!”

I nodded. ”Yep. I never did it, mind you. I just read about it once. So, y’know, trial and error. Somebody’s gonna have to figure out the process. Also, I don’t think wood containers are gonna work, not for that. Whatever it is has to be completely airtight and watertight.”

Marie just kinda whined at us. I rolled my eyes, and both Saffron and I hugged her. ”Go ahead, you big furry dork. Although it’d be nice if you left one of you here in the cabin with us and the kids.”

She grinned that big old Maenad grin full of teeth, and I felt her Co-Locating away. Maybe to the Homestead, or maybe to Drivers. I kinda felt bad for Mama Driver if she’d decided to wake her up, but just then I wasn’t really in the mood to follow and play translator. Instead I snuggled my Wives, settled back, and went to sleep.

Dreamt of my ladies sailing the ocean blue. Okay, they were all mini-versions of themselves sailing around my Maw in gingerbread boats. Mimic Dreams or not, M-Space or not, dreams get weird sometimes.

Today, as noted, I spent more time dealing with Saffron, Swanson, and the Pirate Captains Three. I learned that even if they’re not intellectually stunted or stupid or anything, they’ve still got their own cultural biases that trip them up. For instance, while each ship had it’s own Articles of Agreement, and a lot of them were kinda boilerplate, they only held for that ship and it’s crew. For Pirates like Anne, with more than one ship, she had to have not just Articles of Agreement for each ship, but also a different set, kind of like a treaty, that all the ships in her little ’fleet’ signed on to. Thing is, while the Articles had ways for people to join or leave a crew, it wasn’t simple, and adding or removing ships from a ’fleet’ was even less so. Apparently the three Captains aboard had been working together under yet another Articles of Agreement, one that joined their little ’fleets’ into one bigger ’flotilla’.

Yeah, the English Pirates were reinventing bureaucracy. The paperwork part, anyhow.

I’d have said that proved that they were just as prone to stupidity as anybody else, especially people from back in the day.

Except for the part where part of the boilerplate of all those Articles of Agreement? Universal health care. Including dental care.

How fuckin’ fucked does shit have to be for pirates in sailboats to have better healthcare than I did growing up?