The people of Batavia were raised on signs.

Consider an eye. Over one hundred million cells, each their own unique organism, somehow working in tandem to detect light and deliver it to a mass of electrically powered cables so small a thousand could fit on a fingertip, thus transforming it into the phenomena known as ‘sight’. What were the odds all those rods and cones could stay coordinated, not just in one individual but across millions, and that such a trait was passed from mother to child without constant defect? How easy it would be, and more likely, for them to slip apart into mush, or better yet, lack the spark of ‘life’ entirely?

When one thought about it, the whole of existence was statistically improbable. Why would water conveniently contain all the elements needed to make proteins when shot through with lightning all those billions of years ago? And what were the odds those proteins would create little, self-replicating capsules for themselves? How would they have realized they required sustenance, be it sunlight or other organisms? What told them they needed to perpetuate their existence, and how would they understand or even desire to do such things?

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There had to be an external guiding force. The Sign of Kib was in all things, if one knew where to look.

But as she made her blessings, so too did Kib make her omens. Why, for instance, did the Silent War between Mars and Venus, a conflict that had lain dormant for thousands of years, suddenly roar to life, torpor bombs reducing both planets to little more than barren wastelands in a matter of minutes? It was because Mars and Venus had grown decadent under a corrupt universal order, and the solar system needed to be purged lest the universe fall out of balance and MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI awaken from her eternal slumber, ending all that was and would be. Even when the people of Venus tried to resist Kib’s will, fleeing the Motherland in feeble life ships to the Buffer Planet, Jupiter, Mercury, and star systems unknown, they could not escape Kib’s divine gavel. Life ships ran into stray comets or combusted if they were fortunate enough to be deemed worthy of merciful death by the All-Arbiter. In those ships particularly ransacked by mortal vice, the passengers would find themselves slowly poisoned by leaking solar radiation, or the ships would be personally blessed by Kib herself, becoming sentient so that they could mutilate their wards in any fantastic fashion they saw fit. A karmic end to race who had fiddled so arrogantly in Kib’s domain.

In the case of HEG-2522, judgement came in the form of a plague.