Salutation of brief letter
Dear Sir, I hope this letter finds you in good spirits or perhaps the company of good spirits. Failing that, I hope you are at least enjoying some good spirits. May this letter find you in a spring of your eternal life. I hope you find many chances to get away from the office and enjoy yourself more. We again look forward to many eons of cooperation with you and yours.
I know that it has only been twenty years since I made my last report but in light of progress, I thought perhaps you would like an update. I also wanted to thank you, profusely, for your help in dealing with that unpleasantness with senior God, Httroath-Azu. Lastly, I wanted to thank you again for your laudable financial advice concerning the many divine realm devices and their listing in the deific catalog. I likewise would like to request your further help in determining the value of a new system that I have developed, of course with the help of my wonderfully competent heavenly host, and place it for sale in the pages of the deific catalog.
With everything that’s gone on I just needed to vent a little bit about the world that has been entrusted to me. Not to say that anything has gone wrong but more to perhaps brag. I know that comes across as a bit conceited but I just can’t help bragging on my wonderful team and admiring the great work that they have done for me.
Some time ago I took a trip down to the surface of Islandia to see it for myself. I created a mortal body and gave myself a split personality with amnesia so that I could experience the world from the inhabitants perspective.
I hate to admit that things did not go quite the way that I had anticipated. On the one hand, the body that I inhabited got to experience a grand adventurous life but on the other hand, it did get cut quite short. I discovered through that Experience that there were certain flaws in the system that I had set up for the world under my purview.
The body that I inhabited got to experience the initialization of the new system of which I need to discuss with you. Since learning my lesson with that last debacle concerning the elder God, I won’t be stating anymore about that subject in this letter. Instead I will look forward to your arrival or some correspondence denying my request. You should come though. Then you can meet my daughter!
The items that you had suggested that I place for sale within the deific catalog are all doing quite well. Before you mentioning that to me I had not really considered the notion that other gods and goddesses might not have come up with that idea before. I still find it a bit odd to think that the closest analog to my observational system was a simple scrying spell. I must thank you profusely for recommending the sale of that system. I have received numerous letters of praise since I followed your advice and began listing my ideas for sale. That doesn’t even begin to cover the unprecedented amount of divine currency that has flooded into our coffers.
I Once again hope to express a desire for your continued good health and mental fortitude.
12 of 30/3 of 10/ 22 Yours Sincerely
Deiform Central Bureau, Descartes Malefecto Fujiwara Kaori, Islandia
Descartes once again looked over the strange sideways letter that he had received on his PDI from the very creator of that system. The personal deific interface was a marvel of efficiency and productivity and had made his life unbelievably easier since its introduction. He sat up and willed the screen leading from his office into the rest of his deific domain to open. Almost every entity within view of the now open window was either actively using or periodically consulting one of the devices.
As he sat swiveling back and forth in his softly padded office chair in his almost earth-like office, he considered his vastly less cluttered desk. When Kaori had first started working for him, he had merely hoped for a somewhat competent worldly administrator deity. He hoped that eventually, after a few thousand years, she would be competent enough to help lighten his workload.
Instead, the marvelous woman from the sealed world watched over by The Mysterious Old One that had somehow ended up in his care had shattered all his expectations! In a scant couple of years, she had developed one of the most revolutionary communication systems in all creation. She went on to create multiple systems for administration of a world that all linked to the original system. Then she went on to multiply the types of intelligent beings by over tenfold!
Descartes sat back once again, flicking one of his triangular feline ears due to an annoyance of air current as a smile spread across his many needle-like teeth. His focus zoomed in on one innocuous little sentence and the smile grew much larger. “So, my protégé has a daughter now? I must make every haste to visit. And thanks to her, I don’t have to abandon all of my other duties while I do that.”
The cheshire grin left his face along with the faraway look. Suddenly his whiskers flicked in annoyance and his long almost prehensile tail began to swish back and forth behind his chair. This was a tick that had long since given many of his enemies a notion of his mental state but he had long accepted that it was a part of him and had even turned the tables by faking the movements of his tail on occasion.
This time, however, his tail was not giving false information. His emotional state had soured in response to a letter on the edge of his desk. As his eyes landed on that letter he mentally leaped through its contents once again and came to a quick decision. “I think I’ll tell her to expect more company when I go there. In fact, I’m not sure there’s any reason to delay my trip.”
Descartes typed out a quick and concise letter to his department heads and senior deities and quickly hit the send key. He stood up from his desk, turned off his lights and fan, exited his office and began making his way down the left side of his deific domain. An occasional member of the various administration staff, most of whom had been in his service for millennia, would look up and nod or smile before returning back to their own work.
He stopped and admired his administrative hub for a few moments. The amount of staff in his domain had risen recently. Where before he was the administrative head god of eight-hundred forty-one worlds and had worldly administration deities on seven-hundred thirty-six, he had recently been assigned one-hundred fifty-five more worlds. Each of those worlds was in the midst of the transfer of administrative rights.
The new staff were all working on that and would transition into positions of administration over most of those worlds afterward. Descartes thought that the deities coming from the staff of Httroath-Azu would resent him but it seemed quite the opposite was true. Most of the newly acquired deities seemed relieved to be working under him instead. In fact, many of the deities that recently came under his direction told stories of abuses to their worlds or even their own persons by their former senior god. Almost without exception they spoke of neglect unless something was wanted from their world and then Httroath-Azu always took the opportunity to berate and scorn them for their work.
Descartes pondered on the neglect aspect of this line of thinking and remembered a certain god of the hunt that he had unfortunately neglected just as badly. Following that revelation and especially in light of the increasingly lighter workload created by the PDI system, Descartes had made it a point to personally check the sate of every world and deity under his purview and had been distraught to find a few others that he had been far too hasty with. None were quite as bad as Yaju’s case had been, fortunately, but it had still left him more than a little aware of his failings as an administrator.If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Descartes broke from his dark thoughts as he spotted the very deity that he was looking for in the middle of a small cluster of his long-time staff. The goddess in question was Pedrionosis, Chief deity of Keldovar and eleven other worlds. Last time she had sent in her report on her world, coincidentally, the first time she had done so via PDI, she had asked if she could meet the grand deity who developed such a system. She was shocked to find that it was an almost completely new goddess and far more so when she found out that the goddess in question worked in the same divine realm under Descartes.
Pedri had immediately asked when they could meet but Descartes had to disappoint her. Every time he had checked in with Kaori, he had found her still down on the surface of her world and indisposed. Not that they couldn’t have met with one of her doubles but nobody likes doing that. Doubles are very versatile but it takes millennia working with them to not show the signs that your attention is split in multiple directions.
Descartes called out to Pedri and he could practically see the excitement radiating from her gold-plated horns and scales as the eons-old dragoness actually squeed as she ran over to him practically bouncing on her clawed toes. For this meeting, the goddess had reduced her size to a rather small humanoid and had incorporated many Arc-niel or human characteristics into her gold draconian form, all to seem less imposing when meeting the new goddess.
As the pair set off down the hall filled with doors leading to various worlds or deific domains under Descartes’s purview, he contemplated how far she had come in her millennia working for him. There had been a time that she wouldn’t have hesitated to show up to a new realm in her full size in all its shining glory and would have relished in the terror that it had invoked. Now she was considerate of those around her but no less excitable for it.
They finally made it to the door near the end of the hall with the odd curvy slashed script of the equally odd goddess that resided behind the door. Without preamble, Descartes pushed open the door since Kaori was already expecting him. He waved Pedri through and the draconian deity made it four steps inside the door before pausing in stunned silence.
The room that the pair had entered was unlike most that either of them had ever seen before. Descartes was prepared since he had visited Kaori’s deific domain on numerous occasions but Pedri was left shocked. The room was large but not obscenely so. The center of the room which was easily tall enough that Pedri could have cut her transformation, held a huge sphere that was obviously a world. Along three walls were enormous windows but no two showed the same area and most were from odd perspectives like straight down from a height above a city or slanting down from above a group.
Pedri turned and looked at the wall they had just entered from and was astounded to see an entire wall covered in doors and deities coming and going regularly from them at seemingly random. To an untrained eye, this scene would look like complete chaos but the two deities that had just gotten there both knew better. Almost all of the deities in this realm had the signature screens of the PDI system open near them. There were others sitting at tables or desks and every one of them looked both industrious and happy to be there.
Pedri whirled on Descartes. “I thought you said she was recently appointed? How does she have this many deities working for her if she’s new?”
It wasn’t Descartes but a confident soprano voice behind her that answered. “I scouted and promoted them personally. I much prefer having a decently sized staff to work with than an excess of personal gains that I have no idea what to do with. It was a little daunting at first but I feel I made the right choice and I haven’t had many complaints since.”
Pedri turned to see a human woman with black hair and eyes of only slightly taller build than her current form walking up to them. After the woman’s confident demeanor, the next thing she noticed was that she was wearing the same strange black and white, semi-form-fitting clothing as the rest of the deities here. Obviously, this was the Kaori woman that she had heard so much about.
Upon stopping a respectful distance away from the pair and introducing herself as Fujiwara Kaori, the woman did something else unexpected. She bowed to the pair of them. Pedri was taken aback at her humility at first but quickly realized there was a greater amount of formality than humility in the gesture.
Realizing as Kaori rose from her bow that it was a formal greeting, Pedri placed her left palm in front of her at breast height with palm flat and downward then brought her right hand behind it with the fingers splayed and the back of her hand towards Kaori in a symbolization of a rising sun. After giving the formal good morning greeting of her home world, she introduced herself. “Greetings, esteemed Kaori, high goddess of Islandia. I am Afirex Pedrionosis, High goddess and aspect of the sun to Keldovar, Zaffis, Thurris, Mendoln, Kedrill, Meladar, Bronax, Pintuun, Drogast, Sumrix, Bandelor, and Frentiss.
Pedri could see the smile on Kaori’s face becoming more wooden with every world she named but she had started the formal greeting and felt obligated to finish it. The titles might sound intimidating to a newer goddess, Pedri realized but then she dismissed it. What does this woman have to feel intimidated about, she probably brings in five times the worship points of any other deity in Descartes’s domain, regardless of the fact that she gets almost all of it from deific catalog sales.
Kaori on the other hand was wondering just how much responsibility each deity was expected to handle! By her count, this other goddess was in charge of twelve worlds. Unless those were nations? Kaori decided to ask about that and was a little blindsided when Descartes told her that she would be getting new worlds soon. Due to her aptitude for managing her world and bringing about the rapid development of civilization and culture.
Kaori asked about that before there was some sort of misunderstanding. “Descartes Sama, I read in the deific catalog under the description of the history function that it wouldn’t put tribal peoples into cities but when I used it there were already towns and small cities formed by that system. I don’t want to complain but I was under the impression that it wouldn’t do that.”
Descartes gave Kaori an appraising look before answering. “Miss Fujiwara, where did the souls for all the inhabitants of your new creations come from?”
Kaori suddenly got a look of realization that quickly turned sheepish. Pedri standing to the side couldn’t help but interject. “This sounds like a good story. Please, do share!”
Kaori looked even more sheepish and looked back and forth from Pedri to Descartes. After he gave a brief nod behind his magnificent carnivorous smile, Kaori drew in a long breath and began. “You see, I was facing a little bit of a problem. I had a very big plan but I didn’t have the personnel to implement it.”
“The personnel I did have told me about how other gods threw souls away all the time but the souls persisted in these realms outside their afterlife. I did a bit of research and discovered that it wasn’t against any rules to simply collect souls from these dumping sites. Since those gods didn’t want them, I took them and made several of them *Kaori made a sweeping motion across the room* into new gods.”
“Technically, I made the deal of godhood with each and every one of them. However, some of them will have to develop a bit before their shot at godhood comes around. I have my afterlife as a merit-based questing system for reincarnation. Once the soul has earned enough merit, they will either be transformed into an angel or a demon and will work under good or evil deities to further my goals.”
Pedri was a little shocked. “You employ evil gods and demons? How does that work?”
Kaori explained how the concept of war was fundamentally evil but was also useful for the development of societies and technologies. She explained that there were many evil aspects of societies that were better left to a deity that was more inclined to their use and that by pitting the good and evil at each other in an everyday workplace setting that it made everyone happier overall.
Pedri was a little shocked but then explained why. Her system had a few gods ruling over the four mortal races of her worlds. Meanwhile, the mortal races were ever at threat by the forces of the demons, who were led by demon generals and at war with the gods and mortals for the souls of the mortals.
Kaori said that sounded reminiscent of the way her former world’s religion worked and Pedri asked where that was. Kaori told her she used to live on Earth but Pedri looked blank and asked where that was since she had never heard of it.
Descartes leaned in a bit and told her that it was the world presided over by the Mysterious Old One. He took perverse pleasure at the look of utter astonishment on Pedri’s face and the look of bewilderment on Kaori’s.