"So you want, me to pee for you?" Eve's cutting tone was painful.
"No, I don't want to, I'd just rather not start cutting you open if I can avoid it. Don't forget, painkillers won't work on you for long, they will have to be administered the whole time, I would need assistance, the clinic would have to be closed and quite frankly the thought makes me tremble."
"Aww that's sweet, but I choose that over the option where I pee for you. Just wait until Doran annoys Valo, use him as a dummy to train Fala and then let her operate on me."
"No. look just let me explain the process before you focus on the pee part." she then let me explain, begrudgingly, at least until she realised it wasn't as bad as I made it sound at first.
"Ok, that doesn't sound so bad..."She spoke suspiciously, like she was still waiting for some perverse ulterior motive to be revealed. "Show me this kit, walk me through it step by step."
I did as instructed and she was suddenly thrilled with the idea, even wanted to test it then and there, then she panicked when it showed her she wasn't ovulating. "Eve... In all seriousness, do you know anything about this stuff? You were desperate enough to ask Ever for help with other things so I have to ask."
"I don't know anything about it." She stated bluntly, clearly embarrassed but confident I both already guessed and was ready to educate and support her as much as needed.
I gave her a clinical run down of the basics, luckily she at least mentally tracked her cycles, if only instinctively. I then used that to do some rough calculations and told her we had about seven days depending on how long her cycles lasted and whether or not they were even the same as standard in this time, but decided it might be best for us to speak to Karla about it to be safe.
"She will want to know about the mana fertility trick as well if it isn't just my ignorance."
"Eve, ignorance is stupidity in spite of education.... You were never educated on this stuff... I'm truly angry about that, many illnesses, ailments and complications can occur in the face of such things, things which knowledge can prevent entirely. In fact I intend to write a paper at once and have it distributed to every nation who accepts it, anyone that doesn't accept is a country I will avoid."
"You would go that far over this?"
"In my original time, diseases like these were wiped out, do you know why that was allowed despite the government treating its people like livestock?"
"No, but I imagine it must be something potentially detrimental to them."
It was a long and educational conversation and by the end all Eve said was "So that's why Ever was so upset by me not being taught."
The sentiment surprised me, Ever never seemed that gung ho about sexual education... Sexual humour, sex and "Sexual Theory" as she used to call it, which translated to a normal person as smut books and pin up posters... But sex ed importance in terms of societies' well-being and psycho-sexual development? No, never would have guessed, there must be a more Ever-esque reason for getting mad.
Regardless we ended up late and Quatal was not happy.
"Mama lied... Papa ran off angry... Now I'm hungry, sad and angry with both of you." Eve got teary, she may not have been ovulating, but she was most definitely hormonal. On that, the test was adamant.
"Quatal. Shush." The girl... Actually everybody, was gobsmacked. The doting dad had just shushed his beloved daughter. "Mama and I were discussing your future sibling, we're sorry we're late, it's Papa's fault. He had to make Mama something to let her know when she can start making a baby."
"REALLY!?... But Papa, I'm not ready yet, I need to be ready to be a big sister."
"Since when were you so excited about being one and what does getting ready involve."
"Since my snake siblings got eaten by the male snake along with the female one.... Well, I have to get stro-"
"Quatal, why are all your memories from snake life so bad? and I know what you're about to say and no, you don't need to be strong to stop them getting eaten."
Quatal thought about my question then simply walked up to me, put a hand on mine, shook her head, exhaled sharply, then said "Dad. Being a snake is hard." Then she trailed off into a thousand yard stare and left all of us with no clue as to how to respond.
"Sooooo.... Since our daughter is trauma, I mean drama queen, maybe we keep her involved in the pregnancy and early days so she doesn't panic and make us all cry like children?" I said with increasing speed as though I had only that one breath to speak with.
No one answered, just nodded, then I picked up Quatal and finished replying to her initial line. "Oh and if you think I forgot about the ungodly amount of snacks in your pocket space, you are wrong young lady."
"Oh... I wasn't lying Papa, but I missed you, got scared and forgot."
"How can you forget snacks but not snake trauma."
"Papa... those two things aren't related in the slightest... Oooo wait I guess they are. You're smart Papa, now when I think of snakes I can think of snacks instead...."
Eve and I both had to choke back the urge to point out that that went both ways, but luckily we made it to bed and were distracted, by Quatal asking why she smelt blood. We explained why and she seemed reasonably ok, even if she did point out that Fala was the doctor and not Mama, apparently we had failed to explain Eve's role as High-priestess, Oracle and Grand healer of the theocracy.
"Mama is better with magic healing than anyone princess." I said trying to earn some brownie points.
"Yeah but didn't you teach Fala, that magic healing is unpredictable and untrustworthy?"
"Yes and Mama beat that opinion out of me, besides I heal so quickly now I don't need healing, now stop trying to get Papa in trouble, or he will go sleep at the hot spring."
With that Quatal went and got into bed, I was not blind to the ambient judgement, just wilfully nonreactive, then Eve came up with a very devious plan to make me suffer, without disrupting family time,.
As we lay down and watched the memory of an animated movie about some robot policeman or something Eve revealed that Ever had been all too happy to teach her the language of my original time and whilst she was far from fluent, hew teacher was made obvious by the broken but still graphic things she wanted to do to me.
Now, that might not seem that bad, but Quatal inevitably asked what every single one meant, which meant I had to give a false translation that both made sense and wouldn't come up regularly enough for her to try using it.
Eventually though I excused for a while with the excuse. "Right princess, Mama just asked me to help her use the [insert random complex words here] test, so we're just gonna go to the toilet so I can talk her through it.
When we got back, Quatal was fast asleep. Since we didn't want to disturb her, we slept on the very edges of the bed, which is where she usually kicked us regardless.
The next day, for a change, we weren't apart. it was the opposite and we were close, very close, bone crushingly suffocatingly close and held that way by a feathered serpent, miniaturised but still that of the anaconda that inhabited the Unified Western Continent of my time before they were declared extinct.
When we finally broke free Quatal apologised, we had breakfast, then headed to Karla to ask her everything that was known about what we had discussed the day before. The answer was depressing and I had to plan to set time aside to pen educational materials on the subject.
I couldn't be too mad, their woefully lacking scientific advancement and "magic will solve it" way of thinking was fairly normal, but as someone who preferred prevention to cure and avoidance to overcoming it was tragic.
The thought of mortality rates alone depressed me, not that I was opposed to the natural order, as with anything it had its silver-lining. Eras like that didn't have the issue of overpopulation for the most part and that led me to my first real moral conundrum since transcendence.
I had to decide, how much to share. I know. "Share it all, saving lives is good, don't play god." That would have been my choice, except that I was a god, even if I were just a fledgling one.
To make the decision harder still, I was a god that had argued about the necessity of divine intervention. From what I remembered, I was the god of suffering, It was my job to provide enough negativity to promote positive growth, whilst my opposite produced enough positivity to stall it, but the system broke because I stopped making people suffer, then when people stopped praising my counter, they stopped seeing the point.
"I will give basic knowledge..." Eve held my hand, she understood what such a decision meant for me, but as a god herself she also understood something that we were increasingly aware of. We were the first gods to live amongst mortals in their world, we had to restrain ourselves for the sake of them and us and we were not obliged to do so, we were having to write a moral code that had never needed to exist before now, just as I did when I became a judge,
And then my head split as a revelation came...