Moira
Moira woke up, and was unsurprised to discover that she was still in an acute amount of pain, that seemed no less than yesterday. However, for some reason, today she felt she could overcome it. To her surprise, however, the very first challenge of the day she had to overcome is that she had bled through her pad.
She made her way to the bathroom, carefully disposed of her pad, and cleaned herself as best she could. Unsurprisingly, she then felt the strong urge to pee so she had a minor setback before she could move forward. The next problem is that she lacked a clean pair of panties and so would be unable to get dressed.
Just as she was about to scream out of frustration, Yulia walked in carrying a complete change of clothes for her. "Sorry, I could smell the blood, so I could tell you would need new clothes."
Moira was truly grateful to her wife at this moment. Unfortunately, she would have to ask for her help once more. "Hey, do you think you would be able to go out and get some Ibuprofen? I heard it can help a lot with things like this."
Yulia wore a pensive expression for a moment before turning and exiting the room without giving a reply. Moira had hope that her wife was willing to comply, so she turned her attention to the shower. She knew that Yulia would probably prefer she took a bath, but she really wanted a shower. She distrusted sitting in the same water with the dirt from the day before.
She used the search function on her phone and then carefully read all the instructions for the products she found therein. She even managed to find product warnings and frequently asked questions. She also saw, based on her reflection in the mirror, that she was lacking several necessary bath products, as her hair seemed to be a collage of multiple types and textures, let alone colors. It was uniformly short, only one inch long, as she had had the misfortune of coming into this world bald.
She carefully removed the tag from a loofah, and then adjusted the temperature of the water until it nearly burned her skin. Before she forgot, she set her panties and pajama bottoms to soak in the sink under cold water.
Stepping under the spray after closing the shower door was like a revelation. The pressure from the water felt like it was gently massaging her scalp. The warmth did a lot to relax her muscles, even and maybe especially those in her abdomen.
She took this time to think. Very clearly, this bet she had made was no longer just about her. She was now carrying the torch for 13 other women. Women who were rightfully upset and even angry about the end they had received. Women who seemed utterly convinced that the best form of vengeance was a life well lived.
While she thought, Moira cleaned herself thoroughly, using soap and then a rose scented body wash. Each time she rinsed herself, she felt the smell of sickness that clung to her so strongly wash away, replaced with something else. For lack of a better option, she used the shampoo and conditioner she had been given on her hair. Clearly, it had been purchased with Yulia's extremely thick, luxurious, and flowing hair in mind. Moira suspected that that could describe at best 20% of her hair.
Moira considered shaving her arms, legs, and other areas, but decided that maybe meeting American beauty standards when it came to personal grooming was not worth a potential visit to the hospital. More importantly, it wasn't worth the chewing out she would get from her wife. She made a note to research alternative solutions and put the matter aside for now.
She was feeling a little tired, so out of respect for that feeling, she sat down cross legged beneath the spray. She truly appreciated how large this shower really was, as it had been made to accommodate a woman who was 10 feet tall, with proportionately large legs, arms, and chest, as well as a 35 foot combined wingspan. Obviously those wings could fold up much smaller for everyday use, but they also had to be cleaned, and their owner needed room to maneuver.
So, of course, the shower she was currently barely occupying was 14 ftx45 ftx45 ft, and there were enough water sources to basically fill up the entire area with spray if she so wished. It really hit home to her how tiny she really was.
This house had been designed by Moira herself, who was a competent architect and a better civil engineer in multiple of her past lives. This shower may represent the water use of a small to mid sized waterfall, but the water was then filtered, purified, and recycled, so that technically by this point she was almost certainly showering in her own previous shower water. At the very least, the water had been treated as it cycled!
The floor was also one large, continuous drain, with no one opening visible to the naked eye unless you were up close and really looking for them. The top layer was a material that was flexible and comfortable to sit or stand on, while being incredibly resistant to slipping, especially when wet. Below that was a more rigid framework that was crosshatched with the openings in the top layer, and below that was a very powerful support frame that allowed the shower to support up to 800 kg per centimeter squared. This was sadly necessary, as Yulia weighed approximately 600 kg and enjoyed balancing on the tips of her toes to reach her shower products, which she had on a shelf mounted unnecessarily high. Below that it funneled down into the filtration system, where the water would run through a series of filters before being pumped through a reverse osmosis system.
All the water that entered the house also went through this filtration process, and then ended in an adamant reservoir capable of holding an hour of peak usage for the house. Since Moira had never tested the solubility of adamant in water, the water went through a softening process before going through any of the fixtures.
To power all this, in the basement and continuing on for another 45 feet or so, was 3 NuScale small modular reactors. It was actually possible for the house to retract the section of roof and living room covering that section of basement, allowing one to simply remove and replace these as needed with a crane.
This was also how all the water was heated, as a heat exchanger with the coolant coming off of those tiny cores was more than sufficient for any heating and water heating needs she might have.
Pipes carrying a closed system of heated water flowed throughout the house, which was of course rather large with high ceilings to accommodate its largest denizen. The multiple heat zoning throughout the house basically allowed the temperature to be controlled to the nearest degree by expanding or constricting a set of valves to increase or decrease flow rate through the heating pipes in the various rooms.
On the ground level was a massive, Olympic sized swimming pool as well as a hot tub the size and shape of a small pond. It was designed to look as natural as possible, and just past it was a massive indoor terrarium with all sorts of plants and other features, with the last room being a trio of relatively small greenhouses for Moira's personal use.
The first contained a variety of roses, and was surprisingly high maintenance. These roses had been deliberately overgrown so they formed deliberate walls of thorns in various configurations, but turned into beautiful works of art when they bloomed.
The second contained mostly produce, such as cabbages, lettuce, carrots, and potatoes, and was shockingly low maintenance. So far, she had yet to actually receive anything from her efforts there, but these things take time.
The third greenhouse contained things for her own personal use. Once she was honest with herself, she could admit that she was by every possible definition a witch, and some of the spells she was practicing needed exotic herbs and poisons.
Moira still wasn't perfectly comfortable bearing that title. She may be an individual with a strong connection to one or more spirits from which she derives power, but she remembered with a certain level of anguish her experiences through the 12th century and into the 19th. So many of her previous lifetimes had been persecuted for her power, because she dared to have it and be female.
As she continued pondering in the shower, she realized that technically in all of her previous lifetimes she had been female. She may have been born male, but she was never even once male in spirit. The times when she was hiding who she was, unintentionally or not, and called herself a "paladin" instead of a witch she had remained mostly untouched, except for those who became her enemies on her own merits. However, invariably, her female incarnations were seen as servants of the devil and were hunted down by the very people she sought to protect.
She either got to live a half life, unaware of why she just felt so…wrong, or she got to live a very short life indeed, but at least felt at home in her own skin. This pattern did not bode well for her future.
One might say that this is the 21st century, and people don't hunt down witches anymore, but they would be very wrong. First of all, fringe elements of the catholic church still gleefully did so to this day. Second of all, a ridiculous number of municipalities still had laws on the books recommending punishments ranging from whippings to public hangings and even torture. Some of those might be considered 'dead letter', but it was always suspect that they had those at all. Finally, even to this day society as a whole was deeply suspicious of women with power. She suspected she would likely fare no better.
Aside from her health issues, those would likely be the primary barriers she had to completing her divine mission as well as living her best life. She would be lying if she said that concealing her own power somehow fit into her definition of a good life, so she understood that she would have to balance her own pride with other people's feelings.
Furthermore, many of the mistakes she had seen the other women make were very much alive in her. It was stupidly easy for her to plan things out, and then execute them, at the expense of actually enjoying her participation in them. Likewise, it was easy when she was excited about something for her to dive into it with no planning whatsoever.
It was also easy for her to allow herself to struggle needlessly when she could easily ask for help. It was even hard for her to accept help when she very obviously needed it. For better or worse, she was more than willing to get her hands dirty for those she cared about, and it was not exactly her first thought or instinct to pretty herself up to those on the outside looking in afterwards. She was also not willing to open herself up to humiliation in exchange for accommodation, so she easily saw how she could have fallen victim to the same thing as Kathleen.
Moira deeply wanted to see the best in people, and to prove herself to them, and she knew herself well enough to know that she would need to work counter to that instinct in order to protect herself.
Finally, her love could be a violent and destructive thing in its own right. Despite that, it was easy for her to miscommunicate herself even to those she cared about, and almost impossible to get herself to clarify later.
To admit that these things were or could be mistakes, meant that she had to consciously work to temper them. If she wanted to realize even a fraction of her full potential, she would need to overcome even herself to get there.
Yulia reentered the bathroom, and Moira was recalled to the present. She washed and rinsed herself one more time for good measure, and then shut off the water. She stood there for a moment, and then walked over and opened the shower door. She reached over and grabbed a normal sized towel, drying herself off as best as she could with a body that seemed only barely willing to follow her directives.
After several moments of watching this, Yulia let out a sigh of exasperation before grabbing another towel and picking up Moira to dry her off completely. Afterwards, Moira was set down to continue getting dressed.