Reyal suddenly burst into Varla’s room in tears! The three sisters had set their privacy settings so that any one of them could enter the other’s room at any time.
Varla looked up from the book that she was reading just in time to catch her sister mid-flight. Of her two sisters, Reyal was by far the closest since Varla had spent most of her adult life as a mortal trying to protect her supposedly younger sister. The reality of it being that she was in fact the youngest of the three sisters but since she had spent all of her time pretending to be a boy she was automatically seen as the oldest among them.
She watched as the frills of her poofy dress flared up from the impact of her sister. Varla was only just starting to accept that she could be as girly as she wanted and no one would reprimand her.
Setting those strange thoughts aside she comforted her sister in her arms before asking quietly what was wrong. “Why are you crying? What’s got you so spooked?”
After a series of racking sobs that seemed to take most of her stamina from her Reyal looked up into her eyes. “They’ve… They… *Sniffle* I can’t believe they…”
She didn’t seem like she was going to be able to articulate so Varla hugged her close before whispering in her ears. “Calm down.”
After crooning to her for a bit longer she finally calmed down enough that she was able to say what was on her mind. “My followers that I was put in charge of attacked Kaori-sama’s Risukagen girl! I’m going to be thrown into the fire!”
After saying that she burst into a fit of sobs and cried herself to sleep. Varla just held her sister’s limp snoring and occasionally sobbing form and pondered with an expression of worry.
This early in the world’s initiation there weren’t any tribes that were at war, at least not truly. This was pertinent to her since Varla was the goddess of warfare. This gave Varla a great deal of freedom to do other things with her excess of time.
She thought about all the possible repercussions and outcomes of what her sister had told her had happened. She investigated the events on her PDI and settled on talking to Lethris about the boy whose system had failed to initiate. She was a little worried about the actions of the Reporingen tribe that had chased the two away but it was mostly due to the system problem.
Sometime later in the sub-dimension set aside for working on the System.
Lethris looked through the System initialization logs and scrolled down till she found the Reporingens. It wasn’t too hard to find the offending soul. “The soul that was used for that boy had a soul curse on it!? Just great! Now we have to screen every soul in the world and all of the ones in the afterlife and screen them for soul curses.”
Varla looked over the many lines of text uncomprehendingly and just nodded her head. “So, you don’t think that Kaori is likely to try to burn my sister to a crisp over this? If she is going to do so, she will have to find a new goddess of war because I will stand in the flames with my sister. I won’t be separated from her again.”
Lethris looked thoughtful for a moment before she replied. “I’m not sure but I don’t think that Kaori-sama meant that she was literally going to burn us if we failed in our jobs. I know that she said she was going to fire us but I don’t think her culture even uses kilns and pottery anymore. There’s probably a different meaning to what she said.”
Varla looked thoughtful at that. “I suppose that would be a little too harsh coming from Kaori-sama. It did seem a little odd when she said that but it really scared my sisters and I when she said that with a straight face. I know that I saw several other deities becoming rather nervous at that time too. I still serve her unreservedly but those words left me in terror for both myself and my sisters.”
Lethris looked to the side at Reyal as she nodded along with her sister. “Well, that aside, I can tell you what you need to do from here. You need to go to the afterlife icon on your PDI and open the waiting souls tab.”
“Don’t worry about the password. The PDI screens are all transparent so Kaori-sama made the login screen and the person’s hand both blur while they are logging in. Nobody but you can see you put in your password.”
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Lethris guided the fidgeting young goddess through the process. “Now, you want to look for souls with both very high and very low Karma levels. If there are any that have a high or low enough Karma then you can promote them to angels or demons and you need both.”
When both sisters looked at her with faces full of confusion, Lethris let out a bark of laughter. “I know. It seems counterintuitive but Kaori-sama has a plan. She told everyone this but I think perhaps a class to guide everyone might be needed. You need demons to urge the population to do evil things.”
“If the actions that some people take are evil enough then those around them will back away from those individuals. If everyone goes along with those evil people then the tribe is perhaps better off following a path of evil. After all, war is an evil act and nobody goes to war with peace in their hearts.”
“Anyway, you have demons to encourage evil and angels to encourage good. You might need the populace to fight or commit evil for the greater good of the world. You don’t want angels appearing to the people and urging them to do evil, right? Certainly, you shouldn’t show up yourself to deliver such a message! So, you will have to have both.”
Seeing concern written on the features of the young Reyal, Lethris looked at her screen. “If you don’t find enough high or low Karma souls in the waiting souls tab you can always look for them in the main section of the afterlife. The souls can be pulled directly from there just as easily. And with billions of souls running through the afterlife, there are bound to be a few that are very pure good or pure evil.”
After the sisters left, Lethris called Merin. She needed to talk to the senior goddess about her domain over the afterlife but more than that she needed clarification. Did Kaori really mean to roast her underlings if they failed?
Below on Islandia
The next couple of days Aiko and her new friend Brass made haste in the direction that Aiko was told to go, to the middle right of the rising sun.
The going was actually rather slow though because now she found herself burdened with the company of her new travel companion. This meant that she could no longer travel at top speed through the trees like she had before. She still stopped fairly often and made her way to the top of trees to get her bearings but most of her time was spent on the ground walking beside Brass who she found couldn’t climb trees.
The boy was lively enough and mostly just seemed despondent that his family and community had thrown him out just because he didn’t have one of those system things like everybody else. They wandered daily from the early morning through just before the setting of the sun. Every day they would stop a little bit before the setting of the sun so that brass could dig a burrow for them to sleep in.
Aiko set her magic up for them to cross any difficult terrain or any streams that they came across. The two of them made great time for several days only stopping occasionally to eat food bathe and the like.
Of course, it was a little bit wearing on Aiko because she wasn’t used to having to walk across the ground the way that she was now. However, she figured that all things considered this was an easy trade-off when Brass was in such danger of being abandoned had she not taken him.
So they continued their trek for a few more days until the weather clouded over and the threat of rain made them begin seeking better shelter than the roots of a tree. The two managed to find a small cave with a bit of effort and set up a temporary camp inside.
The next morning it hadn’t begun raining yet so Aiko planted a few seeds and began urging them to grow. Their store of berries had become precariously low and they didn’t really have any nuts to speak of.
It didn’t take all day for her to urge the plant into producing several large vegetables. This was one of the plants that was very quick to fruit and wither being more than capable of producing several crops in a single growing season.
The two of them made haste to harvest and secure their vegetables before the rain started in earnest. They still got rained on a bit on the way back to the cave but not too bad.
They then used the rain as a chance to bathe again because unfortunately being closer to the ground meant being closer to the dirt and grime. Constantly walking meant that they were constantly sweating and getting covered in whatever detritus might blow up off of the forest floor.
After bathing they settled into the cave and Aiko brought out the toys that she hadn’t had a chance to do much with. Since there wasn’t much else that they could do they decided that this was the perfect opportunity to try them out. Some of the toys were in the form of small wooden spirals that were meant to spin while others were small wooden balls and small wooden blocks.
As nightfall approached Aiko set up a fire and began chopping up the vegetables to make a stew. Stew was something that they hadn’t had before and Brass was very curious about what she was doing. Aiko considered herself to be a decent cook and looked forward to seeing the boy’s reaction as she went about chopping up some of the herbs that she had dried in small grass pouches within her backpack.
After the two of them had enjoyed a hearty meal and Aiko had enjoyed much praise for her cooking abilities they began the process of cleaning up. Once all of the dishes were clean they sat next to the fire and played with toys until sleep overtook them. Before they both fully drifted off Aiko could swear that she saw a large hand pull her blanket over the top of them both.