Humiliation. That was the feeling Order was blanketed with as she took brisk steps away from Life’s home. She was the most knowledgeable God in the divine realms. The smartest, by far. She could recite the number of pi to the 52nd digit. She could solve complex mathematical equations in her sleep. Hell, she’d even discovered three new elements, two of which were fundamental to the stabilization of the forces which kept the bulk of the divine plane firmly in a tangible state. It was thanks to her (and Life for providing the juice to implement her suggestions, she supposed) that the divine realm could even function in the state that it currently did!

And what did Life do to that unparalleled genius? The one that worked day and night to maintain detailed records of his lesser Gods, that met up with him on a daily basis, and kept him company where no other Original Existences spared the time to do so?

Place her under the thumb of a complete imbecile.

“Oh, don’t look so glum, my dear Order! You got to keep your experiment going, didn’t you? Crack a smile!”

Great, now the damned fool was gloating. He hadn’t even done anything of substance to deserve the role; Life only picked him as her caretaker because he just happened to be there. If his presence were to be replaced with a block of wood sculpted to vaguely resemble the shape of a humanoid, that role of supervisor would have been filled just as sufficiently.

And a block of wood couldn’t speak either, so it’d be a major improvement over this halfwit.

“Hey, when we get to the next planet, don’t forget who calls the shots, ok? Just a reminder, it’s little ol’ me! Not you, me!”

“Do you ever shut up?” The two entered Order’s log cabin and she stomped towards the hidden button for the entrance to her Library. With the new limitations imposed upon her, she’d have to rethink the structure of the testing procedures. One more suited to the greatly reduced sample size of one planet per God.

“Hey, uh… what are you doing? Don’t we need those?” The query came from Stories just as the two Gods had entered the elevator. Order had begun to tear out a number of pages from her planner and crumple them up into balls of wrinkled parchment; pages that Stories could see pertained to the planets that had already been selected beforehand, which held basic information for those planets like lifeform data and feeding patterns.

Crucial information, one would assume, for capturing subjects for testing.

“Ha! Like you’d care, after your blundering about just ruined days of meticulous planning.” Order scoffed, cramming the balls of paper into her pouch for disposal at a later period. “There’s no point to using any of these if I’m limited to a single planet for every test. So I’m making do. I’ll reselect my testing sites based on new criteria and formulate a new course of action.”

“Criteria like…?”

“You don’t need to know. All the God of Life and Creation has empowered you to do is merely to observe and speak up if you want me to halt. You’ve lost all rights to get to learn more about my selections beforehand the second you decided to sabotage my experiment. From now on, all information relating to the chosen planets are on a need-to-know basis - specifically that you don’t need to know any of it.” Stories looked at her incredulously, his mouth hanging open from shock at the audacity of her to obscure vital information from someone that was participating in the experiment.

“Are you seriously this petty? If I don’t know about the mortals we’ll be working with-“

“Don’t overstep your bounds, fool.” Order snapped back, seething with rage. She had the methodology of the transmission down now – if required, she could use her own ability to demonstrate it to the lesser Gods recruited for her tests. There was zero need for the God of Stories to still be tagging along: if she needed someone to slip in and out of the divine realm to ferry new Gods to her location, she’d only need to get a hold of one of the tens of lesser Gods returning for a refill of their divine energy reserves weekly. If it weren’t for Life’s command, she’d have long dismissed the simpleton and carried out the experiment herself.

“You’re the God of Life and Creation’s errand boy - not my better. Learn the distinction. Now, isn’t there someone you need to go pick up now, errand boy?”

“…you really are a piece of work, you know that? Anyways, I’d have gone by now, (after all, who’d want to stick around with you?), but this stupid thing’s still pointing to Renewal’s position. And I don’t know how to-”

Order ripped the aura scanner from his hands. Idiot. Typical.

“Whoa! No need to get all physical just ‘cause you’re mad at me. I’d have handed it over if you just asked nicely.” Order didn’t reply, simply working wordlessly with the dial on the side to bring up the saved data for the next lesser God on the list.

“There. God of Survival. Genesis 15. Leave.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

She tossed the black box at Stories, who caught the projectile with both hands. He opened his mouth to throw out one last indignant taunt, then decided against it, turning instead to phase through the side of the metal box. What was the point of fuelling her anger? In the end, he was still the one who’d have to work with her, and he didn’t need her screwing up and murdering a bunch of mortals – again – just because her mind was clouded with anger at him, at Life, and the new conditions she was working under. Better to just back off and let her cool down by her lonesome during the period of time that he was gone to collect Survival.

This small gesture of goodwill was left unnoticed, of course, as when the elevator doors finally opened again, she’d stormed out angrily towards the nearest bookshelf, thoughts still swirling with rage. The floor she was on was the same as before – floor 223. Planets within Dimensional Wall.

While inwardly she was still fuming, frustrated at all the stumbling blocks that had been scattered in front of her path, outwardly she’d shifted into her problem-solving mode, discarding all extraneous thoughts about getting back at those that had wronged her. The only things left in her mind was a general sense of bitterness and the ever-present need to prove her superiority.

So Life wanted to restrict her in this way and that? Fine, if that was his intention, then the kiddy gloves were off. She removed the first ten tomes of recorded planetary data from the bookshelf closest to the elevator, with the intention to select all testing grounds solely from these ten books.

The choice of these books in particular was due to the fact that they pertained to the planets closest to the divine realm proper – in other words, the most intelligent and longest lived of the mortals in all of reality at any given point in time.

Oh Life, your daughter has heard you loud and clear, she thought defiantly. You want extrapolation? I’ll give you extrapolation. It wasn’t hard to see why this was the only logical choice – in her mind, if she’d selected for dumb, shorter-lived mortals like she had done before, any success with them might earn a scoff from Life, perhaps a quip from him to double-check her work for mistakes. Why would he care about a few ducks or horses on planets that he would never visit?

No, the root cause of why that oh-so-powerful God was on this quest in the first place, the quest which consumed his every waking moment, was solely because of those initial interactions with intelligent mortals. The ones that could communicate with him, that could endear themselves to him. The ones that died just a few decades too soon - just as he’d fallen in love with them.

She should have just done this from the beginning; if Life’s goal was to improve these mortals, any tests other than ones involving them would have been pointless. To hell with back-ups and control groups! If she had to produce results with limited tries, she’d skip straight to last-stage testing with the desired target mortals.

Of the restrictions placed on me, nothing prevents me from testing with developed mortal lifeforms, Order reasoned. If Life wanted me to keep away from them, he should have specified in detail exactly which planets and which species I should refrain from touching. Therefore, I have his implicit consent to conduct testing on any mortal I wish.

But deep in the back of her mind, she knew that it was a technicality – that Life didn’t give the go-ahead for this course of action. She was being stubbornly pedantic; there was absolutely no way that Life intended for her to touch those precious gems of his even if it was for the sake of making them sparkle and shine. Even if he hadn’t interacted with them for centuries now.

His one and only approach to solving this problem for four centuries and counting was attempting to pointlessly cover the boundless Sea of Stars with Gods of his making, to have them assist him with spreading a dusting of godly aura onto the bodies of mortals - a herculean task that would take an uncountable amount of time. Even discounting the fact that the Sea of Stars was constantly expanding, it would take millennia for one God to produce enough lesser gods to cover even a tenth of it; let alone all of it. Considering all of this, it was apparent that he was afraid of what might happen if he interacted directly with those mortals that he cherished - if he caught wind of what she was intending to do, she might even see him blow up in rage at her for the first time in her life.

That didn’t matter to her, though. What she wanted at the moment wasn’t accurate data or useful results. No, what she wanted now, the desired objective that her impeccable problem-solving mind had been working towards wasn’t something as trivial as that.

What she really wanted was payback for the slights directed at her.

So her selections would remain the same – intelligent mortals.

The ones that Life loved.