"Ooooh, too full to dodge! What a concept...

I can't actually say I've had to learn to control myself in that regard, the other girls would never let me stuff them that full all at once. I guess you'll just need to help me figure it out.

And then maybe, once I do, then sometime we're damn sure a mission isn't coming up I could get you so bloated you can't pick yourself up to move at all, and play with you while you're like that, helpless for me to do whateeeeeeeeever I want to..."

One of her hands has returned to Katie's hair while the other continues squeezing her boob.

"Those calories are a valuable long-term investment in future monster-killing ability! We can write it off as a business expense!"

"Indeed."

"I hope you'll be able to do the same for all the beds we're gonna break."

"'Team bonding activity' might be a bit of a stretch for some noob guard in the Midwest—no offense, Gwen—but they wouldn't blink twice at it for us."

"The Midwest, huh? Surprised you guys have a presence out there. Where is it? Is every Amazon-the-corporation warehouse secretly housing soldiers?"

"Most of 'em have a corresponding underground base beneath, yeah."

"I'm from St. Louis."

"Wow, so like, how many of you guys are there?" Katie's hands take a break from fondling Raven to google how many employees Amazon has on her phone.

"A few thousand divine descendants, total population of the empire including nature spirits, monsters, and anomalous tribes that recognize our authority is in the tens of thousands. We're by far the most populous faction; Rome and Delphi are picky about which divine descendants they want and we take anyone."

"Hey, wait a second, hold on. How much divine blood do you need to be aware of the supernatural? Because if it were any amount at all, and the gods have been interbreeding with mortals for thousands of years, wouldn't everyone be at this point?"

"There isn't an exact formula? Different demigod bloodlines vary in potency at penetrating the Mist. We try to encourage marriages in a way that keeps the divine blood spread around effectively."

"Huh, how do they rank? Also, now that I think about it, do you guys kidnap men to be your husbands, or do you have some other way of dealing with the fact that your whole thing probably appeals a lot more to women than men?"

"The gender disparity in our recruitment goes the other way, actually! A few of our warriors have two husbands."

"Wait, really? No fucking way. There's no way there are more male lifestyle subs than matriarchist radfems." Fuck, have they been lying to her this whole time? Would really suck to have to bail now.

"What about, like, the intersection of 'male lifestyle subs' with 'female lifestyle doms, plus those matriarchal radfems cool enough to work civilly alongside the female lifestyle doms when they do stuff like 'put collars on their boyfriends' and 'invest in the porn industry as a vehicle for propaganda'? For that matter, add in men and women who think, respectively, 'stay at home, take care of the kids, run major medical and financial decisions by my wife' and 'fight monsters, plot world domination, have a dating pool full of pleading faced submissive twinks' are worthwhile prices to pay for 'getting rich, taking transhumanist magic drugs, and being waited on by automata'."

"And remember this is all being drawn from a population with the ADHD-autism-dyspraxia-dyslexia-dyscalculia cluster of neurodivergence."

"I mean, ideally we'd be acculturating new recruits into our own thing, which could be oversimplified to be somewhere between 'matriarchal radfem' and 'lifestyle domme'?"

"Fuck all of you for trying to fit millennia of glorious tradition under the umbrella of your bullshit 21st century mortal concepts."

"Love you too!"

"There has to be some kind of catch here. I'm in Omelas mode. Omelas brain. Omelas mindset. I'm Omelasmaxxing."

"I think generally people see the 'hordes of monsters are out there killing people and it's on our heads to stop it' thing as the catch!"

"Or the 'we have to figure out how to rule a population of billions when there are only thousands of us' thing."

"You know, if we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams at our plans to fix the world there would be a bit of an Omelas child situation? Most of the horrific Underworld punishments were imposed by Zeus's nepo baby diversity hires on the courts, not Hades himself, and would thus cease under a less Zeus-centered Olympian hierarchy. But Hades does really have it out for people who create lots of extra work for him, especially mass murderers, especially especially Hitler for staining the family name. And if we got it down to just Hitler, or even just people with similar body counts, I think the leadership would say 'good enough' and not pick a fight. But that's, like, the least sympathetic possible Omelas child, right?"

"I guess if that happens I won't be able to have 'omelas adult' as my Twitter handle anymore."