As Kaori sat in this cave that was barely big enough for her to fit she absent-mindedly stroked the pair of furry children that were laying in her lap. She used this time to review the many notifications that she had awaiting her attention on her PDI.

The first thing of note was the many requests from various gods and goddesses to be the deity in charge of pestilence. She didn’t particularly care for this and gave a canned response to all of them. The truth was that she really didn’t want to make a goddess of war nor a god of death but they were entirely too necessary.

However, she saw no reason whatsoever to include in her retinue a god or goddess of pestilence or famine. She knew that logically there was no reason for her to avoid the supposed four horsemen of the apocalypse from her previous religion but she couldn’t help the feeling of cringe every time she thought of it.

On the other hand, she did have a logical reason to avoid those two particular appointments. Since her world was just getting started the deity of pestilence was something that she wanted to avoid. The population of each type was entirely too small to let a plague loose in their midst. In fact, she had one of the minor benefits of the system set to be a larger resistance to viruses and bacteria. That would give her citizens the best chance of avoiding plagues and other types of pestilence.

All of that in an attempt to bolster the population of the world and thus get a better base for eventually upgrading their level of civilization. The history function had done a marvelous job of adding a little bit of civilization to the various tribes. But she couldn’t push that too far.

She considered herself lucky in that all of the tribes that they had placed down with the exception of the elves were starting from a blank slate. That gave her a lot more freedom to do with them as she will but she still wasn’t able to add a full civilization.

Still, having half a dozen starter towns on each of the major continents and at least one starter city was a step in the right direction. Once the various tribes got bigger and stronger the natural conclusion would be that they would set up nations and begin conquering the area around them.

For that reason, she had to have War right from the outset but that didn’t mean that she had to like it. And death being an inevitability she would have to have a god or goddess for that anyway. But Famine was another story. Since starvation was a likely outcome for many of the tribes she considered relenting and making a deity in charge of that but thought better of it.

It would be entirely too cruel to have a deity that was literally forced to starve people. That didn’t mean that there weren’t any demons or gods that were willing to take the position but She certainly didn’t want to encourage that. For the same reason, she was unwilling to agree to make anybody the deity in charge of pestilence.

Besides the history function was the only reason why anybody wanted to be the deity in charge of that particular domain. Kaori scoffed at that and then moved on to the next point of interest. Many of the deities had sent inquiries about the names of the various races that she had put on the planet and so she decided it was time to put together a notice to address that.

Kaori then briefly described the scientific naming system. She started with domain and proceeded through kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. However, she found it increasingly hard to explain what each one of them meant and realized that she had never paid that close attention in biology class.

She made a mental note to herself to provide all of the scientific literature that she could possibly lay hands on to all of her staff. If everybody were as up-to-date on scientific understanding and mathematics as well as a few other fields as Earth’s people then things would proceed a lot smoother.

She then explained briefly about the complexities of her native language. She explained a brief history of the Japanese language and the reason why so many of the symbols that everybody was curious about in her language didn’t seem to make sense when compared to others.

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She explained that there were a lot of other cultures on Earth that found her own language to be complicated and even incomprehensible. The notion of having three different written languages that were all used in conjunction with one another at the same time in any given sentence was fairly confusing she admitted. The fact that a word would change depending upon how it was paired with other words was also a point of contention.

She then apologized to all of the lesser deities that had to work for her and thus, work with the language. She went on to explain that since there was no other species besides humans that were intelligent to the point of sapience, that she was forced to create new words for each of the species that she had created.

Lastly, she included a comprehensive list of all of the complete scientific names of every one of her newly created species. She then checked with the deity catalog and found that it did have a listing for every one of the scientific names of every species that could be purchased for every world. She didn’t get it though because the price was eight trillion worship points and it had thrice the number of pages as it’s cost in WP.

Kaori admitted to herself that she was very interested in this book but she couldn’t justify spending the WP just for a flight of fancy. Perhaps much later when she had so much WP that she couldn’t even imagine what she might do with it then it might be something worth considering. Out of curiosity she checked to see who the author of the book was and found it to be Ehoba.

This startled her a little bit and she quickly checked with the catalog to see if it would translate the name to Hebrew. When it complied she found herself staring at a name that she knew very well. Just to be absolutely sure she asked the catalog to translate it into English, Jehovah there was no doubt left in her mind. The god of the Christian church was the author of the Book of Life.

The next morning brass awoke to find Aiko still lying in her blanket. He decided to leave her nestled in her blanket but he began wondering why she hadn’t awoken yet. He wandered over to her side and noticed that he could barely make anything out in the gloom within the cave.

He turned to look at the fire and found that it had completely gone out but it still felt warm just not aflame. Brass remembered what Aiko told him about being careful around the fire and that sometimes even if a fire looks like it’s dead it’s really not.

Since he didn’t want her to get cold Brass decided that he was going to bring the fire back to life. He looked around the cave until he spotted the little pile of wood that the two of them had gathered up the day before. The pile wasn’t much, just a couple of branches that had been split up into pieces.

He pulled one of the thinner pieces from the pile and raked about in the pile of ashes until he found what he was looking for. There near the bottom of the pile of ashes were a few pieces of burnt stick with some glowing orange on them.

Brass began breaking pieces of the branch that he was holding up and tossing them on top of the glowing piece. He had seen Aiko do this a few times and figured that it probably couldn’t be that hard to do. After Brass had put another four broken-up branches on top of the small glowing orange piece he still couldn’t see any difference.

He began digging around in the pile and found that the piece at the bottom was no longer blowing orange. Also, the pile seemed to be completely cold now.

Frustrated a bit Brass sat down and began thinking about what he could possibly do for Aiko and realized that he couldn’t do anything. This more than anything else in the past few weeks broke his spirits and so he did the only thing he could he sat and cried. After crying for a few minutes Brass began to notice a subtle change in the air around him before he heard something strange. Looking up from his damp pause Brass was startled to find a fire was now merrily dancing in the broken pieces of twigs that he had left in a pile.

Scrambling brass ran over to the pile of logs and found a few of the larger pieces which he quickly put on top of the rest. That was the thing that he always saw Aiko doing once the fire started going. Brass didn’t really understand why the fire had to start with smaller pieces but if Aiko said that’s how it was then he knew it had to be true. Since the fire was going Brass decided it would be safe to put a few more pieces of wood on there.

Brass found that the rain was still going outside and left a slight chill in the air but not as cold as it had been during the last season, where the ground was covered in bitter-cold white snow. Brass was thankful that it wasn’t snowing anymore. He found that he really didn’t like snow or the cold.

Brass then looked at the clay pot that Aiko had used for cooking and realized that there were no more vegetables to cook. Seeing that Aiko wasn’t awake yet Brass decided that he would go out and find them something to eat.