Kaori, having found her way forward, made haste to get started. Step one, she needed to find out if the idea was feasible. Step two through everything else would come after that. She descended to her house like a meteor crashing to the ground. On the way she called each of the teams and told them to assemble for a strategy meeting. By the time she got to the trees she could see the outline of an entire plan. She could also see both of the geo groups in the distance and once she got even with her house, she could see Yaju’s group inside.
The moment she stepped through the door, she noticed the swollen purplish color of Yaju’s eye and when she noticed the direction of Kaori’s gaze Einoro looked off to the side and began whistling while Yaju still managed to get a grin on his face. Kaori was about to ask about the circumstances around the black eye but decided she would leave that one alone. Just at that moment she began to hear the furiously flapping wings of the other eight.
Once all of her subordinates were present, Kaori began the meeting. “Sorry to pull you all away from your assignments but I need to consult with all of you about an idea for proceeding forward. Thanks to a suggestion by Yaju, I was able to come up with an idea for how to proceed forward. I need to know from all of you if you think it can be pulled off and if you have any insight into ways to do so.”
“I went looking for new perspectives to gain inspiration. While I was looking down from space, I noticed something interesting. *Kaori points to the globe and has it spin around to display the continent with the elves. * The continents as you all discovered are all hexagonal and evenly spaced over the surface of the world. I saw that the only places there were any vegetation were at the edges of the continents and along the edges of the few seas and the river on this continent.”
“This world is very incomplete. It doesn’t even have weather! But, thanks to the continents looking the way they do, I saw a similarity to early development stages of 4X games I’ve worked on or played. That gave me the idea, what if I made the world in the image of one of the fantasy 4X games? Think we could pull that off? I know that there are some that you can set them up and just let them run on their own and the various factions would build and develop civilizations by themselves. Maybe, if we gave them enough starting points and varied factions, we could get them to compete and challenge each other to build bigger and more advanced societies? Thoughts?”
Yaju looked around at the faces of everyone else and suddenly he felt very left out. He could tell that everybody except him understood what the great goddess had just said. Resigning himself, he bowed and spoke to her. “Begging your pardon great Fujiwara-sama, I have no idea what you are talking about. I hope that my lack of understanding and therefor lack of opinion doesn’t hinder your plans.”
Kaori considered this for a moment but came up blank as to a solution. Everyone else began to mutter to each-other and spin the idea in different directions but the outlook was positive. *I’m afraid that without a gaming console, I won’t be able to explain it to you very well, Yaju. I will see what I can do about making it clearer later but for now I’m going to have to exclude you from the conversation to a degree. I imagine that you will catch on to most of it and you’ll be able to jump in wherever you feel comfortable.”
The talks went on for hours and both the angels and demons had a lot to contribute. Yaju managed to understand a great deal of the plans but he never understood what a video game was. Kaori however, now had her plans set and knew exactly what she wanted to do going forward. All that was left was to execute the plans as they had laid them out.
As the talks progressed, idea seemed to Kaori to be doomed to failure because she wouldn’t have enough gods and goddesses to handle all the other things she had in mind. She very much doubted if she would be able to keep track of it all.
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Just as she was about to give up and rework the whole plan in a simplified fashion, Belle spoke up. “Kaori-sama? While I certainly don’t want to give away my chance at becoming a full goddess, I can tell that you need more help than just the twelve of us. Why not recruit people from different worlds to be gods? I just hope that you will keep us in the head of the line for godhood. Also, I saw a paragraph in the book you were given about new gods. I don’t know if it balances out or not but it said you would be given a small hiring bonus to offset the price of each new god or goddess. If they still give you that bonus, despite not hiring gods from the book, you would come out a little bit ahead by doing this.”
Kaori pondered this but the thought kept getting snagged on a certain god’s words. “Didn’t Descartes Malefecto say that people from other worlds aren’t supposed to end up in other worlds but go to the afterlife of the deity that runs that world? If that’s how it works how can we recruit people? I don’t get that part.”
Belle smirked but Miriphon beat her to the explanation. “That is true but there is a catch. Do you recall that Jesus went to perdition and destroyed it? That was a place for souls that were not in good standing with God the father upon their death. They were faithful but had missed the mark by some act of sin and couldn’t enter heaven until Jesus pardoned their sin through his death.”
“In the same way, if a person from another world is a faithful to a deity but blasphemes soon before death, then that person is unable to enter the afterlife of that deity. Their soul becomes exiled to some version of perdition. The Greek gods had limbo and there was some version of it for each of the differing pantheons of earth. All we have to do is go there and poach souls from the various exile points and see if we can find any that meet your requirements.”
Kaori saw a path through her trouble and forged ahead. “If that’s how it is then I want as many candidates as possible. I want all of you to be thorough and interview each soul to get a notion of their personality and what strengths and weaknesses they have. I want to put each one in charge of a place that they will excel. I also will want each of you to fill one out so I can make all of you gods of something you would be good at. If this is done right it sounds like it will work out even better than I had imagined!”
The angels and demons were all asked if they knew of any other worlds and several demons and all three angels said they did. In the end, there were only five other worlds that they knew about though since experiences overlapped. A pair was sent to each of these worlds to see about recruiting more personnel. Just before they left Kaori overheard the demons chatting and one of them playfully commented that she’s glad to have the workaholic tyrant back, leaving her a little stunned. Only Yaju and Einoro remained on the world with Kaori.
She then walked over to the globe floating in her house and created another one that looked exactly the same as the first. The second one looked a lot like a blue and tan soccer ball just with much, much smaller patches, like the first one. She then began moving the continents around with her fingers and changing the general shape of the landscape.
The continent they were on, if you could really call the hexagonal islands that made up the landmass of this world that, was at the center of the newly formed mega-continent. She pushed all the other land masses together in a random pattern to form a large section of what now looked like a beehive. The reason it looked like that was the greenery around the edges of each hexagon giving slight definition to the edges as they were pushed together. After looking over the odd shape for a couple seconds, Kaori smiled in satisfaction and called the other two over. “Einoro, I want you to rough the edges of the landmass up and randomize it a bit. Yaju, point to several random spots on the map. I’m going to make mountains and lowlands and all the other terrain features of a good map.”
“once we’re done with that we’ll be breaking the map back apart into a lot of small islands around the edges, followed by an area of moderately small islands that gradually increase to larger islands, and lastly there will be three or four small continents in the center with a string of islands between them.”
“Yaju, I just want to confirm real quick, there are no other tribes of any kind are there?” As she feared, he answered immediately.