Krathe slunk quietly across the wall of the massive area looking about in equal parts amazement and panic. Everywhere he looked was a hive of bustling activity. There were gods and angels and even demons running about everywhere with a determined stride.
As he looked about, his master was watching the whole scene through his eyes and guiding him through whispers in his ear. At least, he should have been hearing whispers in his ear. Ever since he had stepped a careful foot into this supposedly young and inexperienced goddess's domain, his divine patron had been as obviously flummoxed as he himself felt.
This was a realm of ornate opulence but in contrast with every other gaudy or gauche godly domain he had ever witnessed, this place seemed to have a decided purpose for every item visible. And there was no end to the things to look at here!
Krathe looked about in bewilderment at the area around him. He quickly realized he had been lucky so far. He had a spell of concealment cast on himself but it wouldn’t help very much if he were looked at directly in front of a blank flat wall. The spell was even worse when viewed from multiple directions at the same time. Worst of all, whatever these windows were showing made him stand out even worse and they wrapped around three entire walls of the room!
The only wall that would have let Krathe blend in easily was the back wall covered in doors. The problem with that wall was that it happened to be one of the busiest areas of the whole room with gods coming and going constantly.
Almost from the moment he had set foot into this room, he felt he was in the wrong place. This was not the abode of a young and inexperienced goddess in the first hundred years of her reign. There were far too many gods here to be working for a new goddess. This felt like the kind of numbers he had seen in the halls of the upper gods that he had stepped out of to get here!
How could one new goddess command the loyalty and servitude of so many? This was ridiculous!
Then there were the items he saw everywhere. Supposedly, this was the goddess that had made the new communication spell that everyone was so enamored with. Krathe had his doubts but almost every god or goddess here seemed to possess the glowing golden screens in their hand or hanging around in their periphery. Every one of these deities seemed to know exactly how to use the spell and were obviously using them for way more than just talking to each other.
Krathe looked about the huge room until his eyes landed on the giant sphere in the center of the room and then at the image set into the ceiling that he had completely missed up to this point. The image seemed to be moving very slowly but he couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to represent until he realized that one of the dots was named the same as the planet, according to the glowing ring hovering around the base of the globe.
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Many things about the workings of the room started to fall into place bit by bit as Krathe looked about. The globe in the center of the room was a piece of equipment. It was a huge spell of some sort and let the deities assembled look at the spots that were highlighted on its surface.
As Krathe watched, one of the goddesses stepped up to the side of the globe and pointed at the central island and a tiny glowing gold circle appeared on the map. The goddess then turned and looked at the wall and Krathe almost had a panic attack! He felt as if he would have died from heart failure if he still had a heart and were still alive.
After a terrified moment, Krathe realized that the goddess wasn’t looking directly at him but at the desk in front of the windowpane next to his current location. He took a moment to look at the window near him and almost recoiled in shock. The scene was rapidly changing and there was a god sitting at the desk in front of it moving his fingers across the top of the desk in some arcane movements. The two deities seemed to be conversing as well and as Krathe watched they settled on a scene of a small tribe of some kind of creatures the like of which he had never seen before.
As Krathe was staring transfixed at the scene on the screen a harsh guttural whisper jolted him out of his daze. “Stop gawking and find her already! The longer you are there, the more chances you give them to find you.”
Krathe began scanning the area again and came to the startling realization quite a while later. “She’s not here at all! Master, what shall I do now? The Kaori goddess isn’t here.”
An annoyed click came from the other side of the mental link. “Come back Krathe. I will send you to invite her here another time. Perhaps we can use that time to figure out a better way to do so. I don’t want to explain to Descartes why you were in his favorite’s domain, uninvited. Besides, you gathered enough information in the time you were there that we will still garner a certain edge from this scouting mission. Indeed, this wasn’t time wasted!”
As the door at the end of the line, next to the wall closed, Krathe breathed a proverbial sigh of relief through his skeletal mouth and began hurriedly sneaking his way back to his master’s domain, a dozen offices down from Descartes's own.
Unbenounced to the lich, a goddess trailed after him with a calm demeanor while typing silently on her PDI. Risse, Kaori’s personally appointed goddess of knowledge and wisdom was so used to the devices at this point that she didn’t even have to look at it to type. [And that was the last thing he said before leaving your domain. I’m afraid that I cannot perceive the other side of the conversation.]
[Very good, I appreciate your help on this. I don’t want you to enter anyone else’s domain though. Just find out where our little friend goes and then report back to me. As a reward, when I get back next, I’ll take you to Earth and treat you to a totally new experience! I can’t wait to show you what roller coasters are like!]