Kaori had been reading for hours and had yet to actually make any progress on figuring out what she was supposed to do. There were no manuals for sale on starting a world either. She might be able to hire someone from the help section but she doubted she could afford it. Closing the book she looked over at the globe that was slowly getting new landmass revelations and a lot of water too. Past that was the window showing the sunset.
She went to bed thinking about the things she could do to get some ideas for where to go with this world. It seemed that everything was totally up to the deity in charge of the world to decide what direction the world would take. She would have to find the direction for the world to progress along without any help. She thought about Yaju’s contribution, a new perspective. After pondering for a bit, she decided that she would just go about it literally. Starting in the morning she would go observe the elves and see if she could gain some insight by watching them from new perspectives. With that decided she basically ordered herself to fall asleep, being a goddess did indeed come with certain perks.
The next day Kaori awoke a little before dawn just as she had intended. The whole waking and sleeping at will thing was really handy. She quickly and silently descended to the village nearby below and willed her presence to be unnoticeable. There were already a few of the inhabitants stirring. She spotted a few hunters leaving for the nearby woods and several of the women were carrying hollow bones and gourd-like fruit husks to the nearby river. It was a glimpse of daily life for a primitive tribe and she was hoping it might give her the much-needed insight to figure out what to do next.
She spent the whole day wandering about in the village just watching the activities of the inhabitants. There were a group who left a little after dawn to look for nuts and berries and hunters were returning throughout the day. It seemed that food was what occupied the largest number of individuals throughout the day. All of the hunters were using the crudest of spears and the gatherers were using whatever they could find around to hold their findings from the forest. The tribe barely had anything for clothing and many tribe members went completely nude. Kaori realized that if there was no rain then they would likely never figure out how to make clothing or proper shelter.
There were other little bits of insight like this but overall, she didn’t get the answer she was after. That night she returned to her treehouse and checked the globe and found that both teams had circled the globe on opposite sides and had filled in a large chunk of the area around the equator. They seemed to be heading to the poles next and might be filling in the map from there. Any way they wanted to do things was fine by her. She noted that her current position was just a little south of the equator and when she looked, she could see a lot of tiny writing on the globe right there.
Looking closer, she found that it was detailed info about the local vegetation and wildlife in the area. Even as she looked another tiny paragraph appeared on the map and she realized that Yaju’s group was nearby working on that. She had learned a lot today but she still needed to figure out what to do with the world. Tomorrow she would look at the next village over.
Before dawn the next day she was standing in the intended village and watching everything they did. She repeated this process for each village in turn and at the last of the five day visits she went to the large tribe near the sea. This was indeed a bigger tribe by almost three times the size of any of the others. In a hut-like structure near the center of the village was the village shaman. Kaori went straight to this place first. There on a matt of broad leaves was a sleeping girl who looked to be in her early teens or perhaps even preteen. Kaori kneeled down next to her to wait for her to awaken. It didn’t take long. Kaori wasn’t trying to hide her presence and apparently the girl could feel her there watching her in her sleep, quite interesting!
As soon as the girl began to stir, she turned her head and looked straight at Kaori. There was no question that she was looking her in the eyes right at that moment. Kaori willed herself to be fully visible to the girl who was stark naked except for a loose leaf wrap that sort of resembled a fundoshi. She jerked awake and backed away and as she was doing so Kaori noticed that her ears really did droop like a dog’s ears when she was frightened.
Kaori didn’t get up or move beyond looking at her with as gentle a smile as she could manage. The young shaman took a second to come to her senses then she looked around to make sure of her surroundings before asking the simple question. “Who are you?”
Kaori bowed her head just slightly and introduced herself. “My name is Kaori and I am the head goddess of the world. I came to apologize for my lustful lesser god who scared you the other day. I will make sure that he isn’t allowed to do anything to you so you needn’t be frightened anymore. I’m afraid that Yaju is more of a wild beast than a proper god but there are others to watch him now.”
With her first few words the young girl seemed to wither with fright. The more Kaori spoke the longer the girl seemed unable to catch her breath until she almost seemed to be turning blue. She hastily bowed her head to the dirt as though she thought that Kaori would eat her if she looked at her for too long. Kaori reached out and lifted the young elf girl’s face from the packed dirt of the floor then spoke to her. “I don’t mind your reverence but when I come to you alone, I would prefer that you just listen and talk to me like I was a member of the tribe. Aside from apologizing for Yaju, I also wanted to let you know that I’m going to be around the village for a few days but if you see me or sense me just pretend you didn’t and don’t let anybody else pay me any attention if they seem to notice me. Okay? I will probably only be in your village for a few days then I will go back. I just need to see a few things for myself. Can you do that for me?”
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The girl was nodding so emphatically that Kaori thought she might break her neck. Smiling she placed her hand to the girl’s cheek with a warm smile. “It’s okay, be calm. I’ll be off now but just remember what I asked of you, okay?” With a final smile, Kaori hovered off the floor before unfolding her legs and then willed herself to become invisible to everyone. The girl rubbed her eyes for a second then began looking around. For the whole day the girl walked around the village looking for Kaori with her eyes while poorly pretending not to. As a reward, every couple hours, she would get a fleeting glimpse of Kaori, who wanted to see if she would make some overt reaction. Despite the constant teasing, the girl never alerted any of the other villagers.
Kaori decided on one more big prank just for the fun of it. The poor shaman searched high and low for the last several hours of the day with no luck. Unbeknown to her, Kaori had swiped a berry from one of the food baskets a bit earlier and retreated for the evening. The girl finally gave up and returned to her hut and there she received the biggest shock. There in the corner of her hut was a bed made of literally a woven berry bush, full of fruit along three sides and laying in said bed was the goddess herself.
Kaori couldn’t contain the mischievous smile from crossing her face. As greetings go, only one would do in this situation. “Yo!” As the shocked shaman settled in for the night, Kaori prepared for a fun evening of girl talk. While she might be a goddess, she wasn’t forbidden in any way from talking to her subjects or even picking a favorite.
Unfortunately, all her watching and even her talk with the shaman girl, Atha, didn’t give her the insight she needed to decide what direction to take with the world. Going back to her previous plan she tried a new perspective.
The next morning, she told Atha that she was going to use her for a day or two but she probably wouldn’t even know she was there. When the panicky girl asked what she meant, Kaori simply walked into her body and then melded inside her where she took up residence for a couple days. While there she experienced everything that the girl did without having any control over the events. She did this with a couple of the other tribesmen as well but in the end it didn’t give her any new ideas.
The next day she tried the same thing except as a tree on the edge of the village. It was an odd perspective being so tall and yet so passive. She considered perhaps just watching the villagers do their thing without interfering but quickly decided that wasn’t the answer since Yaju had done pretty much just that. The next day she tried melding into the ground and looking out from there like she was part of the planet. Then she tried flipping her orientation over and walking the same surfaces as the villagers but from underneath the ground. This perspective reminded her of a time she was playing a demo of a poorly coded RPG and her character fell through the map. It still didn’t give her any ideas or at least none about how to run the worlds.
She decided to go way above the villages and look down on the activity of all the villages at once. She had proven that she would be able to zoom her vision in on anything of interest so this was just one more new perspective to try. She zoomed into the sky and looked down at the villages. She had to go higher a couple times because the fifth village, the one by the sea, was a bit farther from the others than she thought. Finally, she was in place to settle in and watch them all for a while.
She felt that something was missing and after searching for the answer for a couple minutes she realized that she was missing her office chair. An odd revelation but she decided that if a little comfort was what it took to get herself in the right frame of mind, then she should see about fixing that. She summoned her book and looked through it. Sure enough, in the relic section was an entry called mundane artifacts from another world. She quickly read the description and there were two types, specific and random and the price varied for each based on the level of advancement and amount of materials needed for the item. She thought of her office chair from her work and the price was seven worship points but only because the level of advancement was so far ahead of this world’s that it cost six points. The base cost of the materials was only one point. She bought it without hesitation.
Now seated in her office chair looking down on the world with her arms crossed she noticed several things. First, all the villages were within forests that grew around a river and a sea. There was almost no vegetation anywhere except around the water supplies and she vowed to herself to buy a weather system for the planet if nothing else. Next she noticed that the continent was hexagonal looking. She summoned her globe and confirmed, all the land masses were hexagonal and evenly spaced as well as evenly sized. Looking over the map she noticed that the mapping was complete but there was very little data except that on the map. There was a little bit of metal here and there but not a lot.
Whoever made this world had done a really lazy job. It was almost like looking at an incomplete alpha test of an RPG from one of the software companies she used to staff. The world had almost no development to it. She pondered this comparison and realized it was almost like she was looking at the map of one of her turn based 4X games. She could almost imagine the concept of the game. Each continent had a different starting point on it and every one of them was a potential ally or enemy.
Realization hit her with an almost electric jolt. That was it! She could set the whole world up as a giant game and it would be much easier to visualize a direction for things to proceed in. She began to see ideas for new directions, new twists, new secret paths, and a host of other options. It all started to make sense to her! She had found her inspiration and found that the path going forward was a lot easier than she had thought it would be.