"There's so much here..." I muttered as a goofy grin emerged onto my face. I was reading over countless entries that detailed how various mortals, fey, abominations, and more than a few extraplanars of all alignments had begun to worship me. I took a few minutes to read through the enormous trove of data the menu was giving me, and I learned a lot from that.
Many sapient creatures, particularly humanoids and good-aligned dragons, leaped to the conclusion that I had wanted them to leap too. They viewed me as a god of love, mercy, and freedom, and some even worshiped me as an altogether good god. Handfuls of them were even wondering how to get into contact with me rather than waiting around for me to perform another miracle.
Extraplanars and fey were wiser, at least on the society-wide scale, and their response to me was colder and more neutral than that of humanoids and dragons. Unsurprisingly, they tended to react to me in ways that fit their alignment, which in turn made me feel a range of emotions.
Seelie fey were excited by me so far, but even they were cautious. Plenty of them began to worship me as a god of healing and as a potential focus for their powers, a provider of magic. I intended to be that for them, so this excited me. The system also informed me as to what Seelie fey were in the first place.
Seelie fey were, generally speaking, the members of the fey that were warmer to humanity and other humanoids. They included most of the world's dryads, pixies, sprites, satyrs, nymphs, and other, often humanlike fey.
Unseelie fey was the other type of fey. They were a faction of fey spirit that was far more aggressive and hostile to humanoids than their Seelie counterparts. This faction included hags, nuckelavees, redcaps, primal goblins, boogeymen, and a range of other fey. They were far diverse, in appearance at least, than their Seelie relatives.
Extraplanars who were located on Torus had a far more complex set of reactions to me. Celestials, the universal term for good-aligned extraplanars were some of my biggest supporters among the extraplanars. Fiends, the universal term for evil-aligned extraplanars, were not excited by me so far.
The few angels on Torus, including a once hidden angel of lies, were no longer hiding. The angels were the neutral-aligned extraplanars who most liked me which was unsurprising since angels had been created to serve gods.
There were under three hundred of them in the world, scattered throughout the continents, and of the extraplanars they were the least populous group on Torus. Among them there were angels of nature, love, faith, law, nobility, lies, truth, war, life, dreams, creation, and other domains and subdomains.
They were the only group of extraplanar beings I immediately reached out too in the wake of studying the menu. I could barely contain myself after actually sitting down and learning about them.
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Alert: A Choice Lies Before You
Althos has noticed your existence and is aware of the history that ties together the gods and the angels. He wishes for you to come home, to the home he built for himself but will happily welcome you into. And to that end he will tell you of his true nature.
Althos is a neutral god who aspires to gain omnipotence and omniscience. One of his minor goals is to rid the multiverse of slavery. He is worshiped by a nameless legion of the undead and by an enormous swarm of evolved, eusocial insects known as 'The Swarm', as well as by various families and individuals throughout the solar system.
Althos will not force you to serve him or to worship him, but he would be pleased if you did. If you tire of the mortal world, if you seek a place to call home, and to serve a higher purpose, Althos would gladly welcome you into the solitary, floating island sanctuary he calls home.
If you choose to stay among the mortals, Althos will respect that. He wants you to come to him willingly. If you do decide to come to him, know that Althos will respect you and will seek to use your talents intelligently. He will give you purpose and power.
He believes that many of you will come. That many of you tire of the land of mortals. That you seek, in your heart of hearts, a purpose. Come. Find your purpose. Join your god.
Ask to come home. Pray to Althos. Inform him of your desire to join him. To work to achieve his goals. To be the first angels in all of existence to gain purpose anew.
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When Althos reached out to the angels with his customized alert, he also touched their minds. In doing so he inadvertently empowered them, by giving them a taste of something they had forgotten: the touch of true divinity. The undivided attention of a god did something to angels, on a genetic and biological level and even the slightest bit of attention from Althos was a religious experience to the angels he sought to bring to his side.
Althos had no way of knowing this. He had only encountered two angels in his life, and they were broken but then healed by him. They had had the needed time to adjust to his power, to feel it caress their skin and touch their souls before directly encountering the god. The other angels weren't that lucky.
Angelic anatomy was not like mortal anatomy and angelic minds were both stronger and weaker than those of mortals. They were wired differently than mortals were, and even among extraplanars their nature was odd and sometimes frightening to behold.
Angels were not created to be independent beings. They were an artificially constructed servitor race, made of soul-stuff and powered by the will of the gods and the angels of Torus had been running on fumes for over half a million years. With the exception of the volcanic angels, they had no way of resisting the drug-like divine touch of Althos.
It was by the will of the old gods that the angels were created with the power to handle domains and subdomains. Angels could faintly mimic the powers of the gods and the domains they influenced and they used those powers to serve their masters and enact their wills. Such powers were not free: for angels to use their powers they must receive power and life from a god they served. Otherwise they would die, eventually. Even if it took them millions of years.
Althos did not know this, at least not a lot of. He knew bits and pieces of it, subconsciously, but he did not know the dirty details. He did not know of aetherium, the name that was given to soul-stuff by ancient, long-dead scholars of the domains. He did not know of the sacred processes that were involved in creating angels. He didn't even know that angels themselves were physically dependent on gods. If he had, he probably would have approached them earlier.
Althos' touch wasn't a maddening one to the angels he reached out too. If anything it was the opposite, just too much so. It repaired them, strengthening their senses, and their ties to the domains they were created to embody. Each of them were reminded of their old masters, and those memories made them immediately more fond of Althos.
Every angel on Torus felt what they hadn't felt in hundreds of thousands of years. They felt the faintest touch of a god and the restorative powers of such a subtle action.
Their bodies, auras, powers, and even their souls were turned and tuned to the inaudible frequencies of Althos' peerless, godly soul and the inscrutable nature of his whims. They felt his power. And they submitted to it. To him.
At once, every angel who lived on Torus prayed. They asked to be given a new home. A new destiny. To serve the whims of their new god. Althos replied to them without words, and merely by opening portals in front of them to his home. None of the angels hesitated and they walked through the portal. At once the angels stood up, and walked into the portals in front of them.
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My mind was fast. Far faster than the physical bodies of the angels. And in the time after the angels prayed to me, but before they stepped through the portals, I learned of the other types of extraplanars that existed on Torus.
None of the truly rare extraplanars that lurked in the multiverse were hidden within the secret swamps and cryptic caves of Torus. But there were still thousands of fiends, celestials, and other, neutral types of extraplanars in the world.
Devils and leyes lived within the Reconquista empire. The respectively lawful-evil and lawful beings didn't even try to hide their presence. They were openly accepted within the cities they made their homes as a quick inspection of a few members of either species revealed that they were authorities within both the centralized government of Reconquista and the individual communities they were part of.
A part of me wanted to reach out to both sorts of lawful extraplanar beings. If I wanted to build a real empire I'd need their aid. I'd also need the help of the pedidos, the lawful good extraplanars. Pedidos lived in Ansari, but not in Reconquista.
Salvajes and demons lived in the Ansari empire, but neither were accepted by the elves. My stellar awareness made it clear to me that both types of creatures lived far away from elven settlements, but for some reason both were common on the continent of Mysteria which wasn't fully settled by the elves even though all of the civilized parts of it were within the borders of the Ansari empire.
The continent of Iredale housed the world's largest population of pain-bringers. Anterior housed a fair amount of extraplanar beings, but no group had its population center within the mysterious, monster-led continent.
A part of me wanted to reach out to all of the assorted extraplanar beings who lived on Torus. I knew that if I reached out to them I'd gain even greater power. And that it would be safer for me to reach out to them than for me to summon extraplanar beings on my own.
That was what I was thinking about when angels began to appear in front of me. I turned my mind away from such distractions so that I may properly greet my angelic servants, a wide smile on my face as the creatures began to walk out of portals that had just appeared in the chamber I occupied in my tower.
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One of the reasons why gods as a species were so powerful was that they weren't burdened by range limits on their abilities. This was something that the young god named Althos was taking advantage of in the wake of his decision to expand the size of his religion.
Even a god as young as Althos, one less than a month old, could easily create an intergalactic faith. And that was what he was in the process of doing.
The god may have physically been in the presence of his angelic host, but that wasn't where he really was. The truth was that at that moment it would have been easier to say where the god wasn't, than where he was.
Althos had momentarily hidden in the hearts of every living or undead creature in each of the seven planets that orbited the sun he had visited earlier this week. And he intended to seize those hearts. Now that he had an objective in mind, he was capable of incredibly fast and life-changing movement. Which he demonstrated in a single flex of his newly upgraded healing powers.
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The entire solar system felt the eerie and wonderful healing powers Althos possessed at the same moment. Each target felt a lifechanging amount of life or unlife energy seep into their bones, into their very cells. Their wounds were healed up and closed, their sicknesses were defeated and even amputated limbs regenerated.
It mattered not if they were living or undead they felt the terrifying and equally wonderful power Althos could easily use, it mysteriously healed them. It touched and altered their souls, burning away pain and discomfort with positively divine ease.
They weren't done receiving proof of Althos' touch. Seconds after the healing power changed their lives or unlives they saw physical proof of the god's merciful intervention: every organism that was targeted by his power, living and undead alike, was abruptly illuminated in a radiant silver glow. The silvery glow clung to their bodies and gave them a strange, harmless, aura that would persist for hours, though they didn't know that it would eventually fade away.
For a single moment, the first moment in which Althos' power blossomed across the solar system, entire worlds held their breath in confusion. Battles came to a halt. Hope crept into people's hearts. Lives that had been torn apart by tragic news hours ago were suddenly and impossibly mended.
Creatures, be they extraplanars, abominations, undead, or mortals, or fey, were confused as to the source of the healing. They didn't just experience the pleasant obliteration of the pain and aches of life, or unlife, they also received various notifications. They were all simple but annoyingly long things that all contained the same basic structure.
"Althos has healed you," The notifications would begin, and then they'd proceed to list all of the things that Althos' powers had cured, fixed, or healed.
Many creatures who read the notification were surprised at what all Althos had healed. They weren't sure, but they suspected that whoever this "Althos" was had just healed them of every single condition they were suffering from, and in many cases that included conditions they hadn't even known were affecting them.
Creatures across the solar system began to weep and silently thank their mysterious savior. This included people suffering from what had once been thought to be terminal conditions and illnesses, and people who had been left to die from wounds in battle or assassinations. And they weren't the only people who had been eager to praise the saintly figure who quietly healed the solar system.
A consequence of healing the entire planet of Torus was that Althos had gained influence over the majority of lifeform-based subdomains. And with those subdomains came powers that instantly awoke animals and plants that received his miraculous healing. That caused the number of sapient beings found throughout the solar system to multiply exponentially as all sorts of lifeforms felt the power of a god who was fast becoming a god of life.
All manner of lifeforms spontaneously became sapient in the wake of Althos' merciful touch. And those creatures who received sapience as a result of the gentle hand of their healer immediately became the newest althonians in the solar system. They numbered in the quintillions.
Undead creatures existed in five of the six planets that had just felt Althos' touch. And they were not excluded from the god's potent powers. The ghoulish god of the grave touched and restored them as easily as he touched and restored the living. His power indiscriminately repaired their bodies and their minds, as well as boosted their terrifying powers.
The undead who had been touched by his powers almost immediately knew they were healed by a god. This was because Althos introduced himself to them as a god, moments after healing them. He sent them the same notification he sent Torunian undead, unedited and unchanged because he quite liked it.
This caused the second set of new creatures to worship him in the wake of his extraplanetary mischief to be an unimaginably vast horde of the undead, including undead who had been reanimated by necromancers. The hearts and minds of the undead legions of the solar system now belonged to a single entity: the phantasmal god of the grave.
Their hate infused and strengthened their new god. They didn't know it, but in his palatial tower Althos shivered as he felt the incredible hatred and loathing the undead felt towards all of the entities they defined as "alive". Their passionate urges to inflict violence on the living seeped into their master, and he had to struggle to resist it, for now.
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The violent misanthropy that plagued the undead wasn't exclusive to them. Demons, devils, and pain-bringers were some of the creatures that had generally misanthropic hearts, as well as serial killers, and tyrants. And the powerful extraplanars that stealthy hid and worked to cause evil in each of the planets in the solar system were the next group to be contacted by Althos.
It mattered not how well-hidden the extraplanar in question was. Their type didn't matter, nor did their goals. Althos reached out across the cosmos, across hundreds of billions of kilometers, and spoke directly to them.
When they received the notification, they heard it in his voice, a first for the strange god who was undergoing the single biggest explosion of power that he had ever undergone. His powers would only continue to grow over the next few minutes.
More than that though, the dark god used the newest set of upgrades to his powers that he had received to cause the creatures to experience the pain that would come if they clung to their pride.
He made them experience a single instant of searing pain brought on by slamming them with invisible holy energy. This infuriated and terrified the demons and devils, but was seen by the pain-bringers as a sign of the divine variety of power Althos could wield, even as it inflicted pain on them. That he could do that at all was a sign of his terrifying power, something they recognized immediately.
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Alert: The Emperor Of Evil
The time has come to rededicate yourself to evil. And to give yourself to evil's last emperor: the god of darkness, Althos.
Althos is a god who was born on the world of Torus. Until today he has kept his influence contained there, but now he seeks to build an interplanetary cult. And he has already succeeded. Undead creatures as well as animals, plants, and other, lesser-lifeforms, have already converted to his worship. Now it is your turn.
Althos is destined to become the tyrant's tyrant, a god who rules over an interuniversal empire and he is offering you a chance to serve him. The wisest action would be to serve him. If not, he will punish you and his punishment will be swift and severe.
He cares not for the finer details of your old mission, or even your old life. He cares only that you submit to him and join him. If you do, he will empower you, give you chances to inflict pain and suffering on the living, and give you a renewed purpose.
Right now mortals foolishly believe that Althos is a god of their kind, one with their best intentions at heart. He is not. He is a god of deception, darkness, evil, plagues, and pain. Serve him, or be the first of his victims. Worship and praise him. Submit.
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In my tower I felt an incredible surge of power infuse me. It came in waves and was breathtaking, even for a god.
The first wave was the one I received from all sorts of animals and plants awakening at once and their first actions being to give their hearts over to me. That brought a simple smile to my face, even if it was the single biggest burst of power I'd receive.
The second wave I felt infuse my soul was the tidal-wave like amount of simple emotions of the undead inhabitants of nearby planets. Their hatred of the living and their love for me seeped into my soul like a life-altering drug. It made me feel a variety of emotions, emotions I was had to take a deep breath to combat and calm down.
The third wave was the one that felt the most satisfying. That was the one that was infused with concentrated evil, as opposed to the generalized nihilism and misanthropy of the second, undead-filled, wave. Demons, devils, and pain-bringers all across the solar system pledged their hearts and souls to me, largely out of fear for the power I possessed and my ability to devastate them even if they were worlds away from me. Their decision was an understandable and intelligent one.
Millions of demons, devils, and pain-bringers abandoned their old masters and quietly began to fearfully "praise" me. I sensed their mental words of fear-tinged "admiration" and "fealty" and I chuckled.
It felt nice to be feared and to know that some of my newest followers were afraid of my powers, rather than in awe of them. As I thought that, a voice I had only heard a few times spoke into my mind, and judging from its tone it was having fun.
"A god should inspire a number of emotions in their followers. Not just awe and love, but also fear. It amuses me to no end to know that your first real followers who are afraid of you are devils and demons." Whispered the domain of evil, amused by my newest followers.
I mulled over its words while I examined the evil powers I had earned as a result of a number of upgrades I had recently received due to the overall amount of worshippers I possessed.
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Evil domain passive powers:
Curse: You can now curse someone in ways that affect things other than their stats or are domain or subdomain specific. You can now craft generalized curses and use them against your enemies.
Corruptive pain: Your power over pain and evil allows you to inflict pain on mortals that can persist perpetually and is only lessened when they behave evilly. This power exists to twist and warp mortals towards evil alignments.
Demonic evolution: As a synergistic crossover of the domains of evil, life, and chaos, you've gained the power to cause lesser-tiered demons to evolve into medium-tiered demons. As an example of this, praereptor demons are lesser-tiered demons and succubi and incubi are medium-tiered demons. You can also cause medium-tiered demons to devolve into lesser demons.
Demonic rampage: You can cause demons to rampage and inflict harm on anyone or anything close to them, aside from other evil servants of yours by manipulating the domains of war, chaos, and evil.
This power affects all lesser demons regardless of who they serve and can be used on medium-ranked demons who serve you. As you gain greater influence over evil, corruption, and emotion, chaos, and war, this power increases in potency.
Devilish infusion: This power is the devilish version of a demonic power you possess with a very similar name. One difference between the two is that devils don't possess mortals, so instead of opening up victims of this power to possession, you render them more susceptible to being permanently dominated by you, or by a greater devil, such as a blitzkrieg or vizier devil who serves you.
This power allows you to infuse non-devils with devilish qualities and mutations.
Devilish menu: As a consequence of gaining a number of devilish servants you now have access to a menu that tracks your order-oriented devilish minions. It lets you keep track of devils who worship you, who serve you, and who are on missions you or another of your servants have assigned them.
Hate inducement: You can induce feelings of hatred in mortals. This hatred can easily be stoked into violence and discrimination, which ambiently increases the amount of evil in an area over time. This makes an area more appealing to all types of evil outsiders.
Malignant mutations: You can mutate someone and cause them to experience potent urges to act maliciously. This power doesn't cause someone to experience urges to behave in any specific malicious way, just more generally cruel and wickedly.
Nightmare master: This power takes from the domain of dreams and fuses it with the domain of evil. With it you can freely cause mortals to experience nightmares.
Violent inducement: This power is a synergistic one that utilizes parts of the war domain and the domain of evil. It allows you to manipulate people who feel anger and hate and force them to commit acts of violence. This can lead to war, or murder if done intelligently.
And those were only some of the new powers I possessed. The list was an impressive one that brought a smile to my face.