Kaori stepped into her apartment for the first time ever and found it to be blank and boring. Sure, there was a bed, a dresser, a closet, a mirror, and she even thought to provide each room with a rug. The problem was that there wasn’t anything else in them. The bedrooms were the same cream and chocolate with vine motif for the walls that the office was and the furniture was white cloth on wood. They were elegant and functional but not much else.
Kaori wrote a program real quick to let the gods change the colors and scheme of their rooms. She was amazed again at her speed when it came to producing the programs but she set that aside as she wrote a message to everyone explaining how the new interface worked. She was certain that it would be appreciated by the deities under her care.
She had used an idea from a mobile game that had a temple as your home base. In the game, you were able to change the main, secondary, and tertiary color of the temple as well as the pattern theme for the basic furnishings. The basic themes for the temple ranged from a western style Catholic church all the way to an eastern Buddhist temple and there were even a couple of fantasy themes thrown in. She had been begged to work on that project because they knew that she was Christian and would have a better idea than them for what would be in that setting.
The rooms would have overarching themes such as barbarian, knight, monastic temple, Space Family Jetson, other generic sci-fi, wizard’s lair, alchemist’s lair, steampunk, neandertal cave, as well as an elegant and rustic setting for European, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, and American. The last was every setting style that she could remember from any manga or anime she had seen. Along with the themes she gave them the ability to change five color schemes to anything on a 400 million color palate with the ability to darken or lighten the shade. They could also color any particular component of the room separately if they wanted more variety.
When she got finished, she played with the controls on her personal deific interface until she found a combo she liked. She settled on an elegant Chinese bedroom with colors in the reds, golds, and greens. She then added a program to create an interior layout as an addendum to the earlier program. This would allow every deity to have an entire mansion as their personal dimension if they so choose and every room could have a different theme and color scheme that would all be saved into the personal preferences of that deity’s interface. Kaori followed this up by writing a notification to her deific co-workers and friends.
She spent another hour setting her personal preferences up for what was now a rather decent sized apartment. The design was a lot like her old apartment except it was easily twice the size of her old apartment. Kaori didn’t feel the need to be greedy. She would add extra rooms later if she felt the need.
The extra space was because she had also added in a portion of the program that would allow deities to add various basic furnishings to the layout of any room and it could be in any quantity they wanted. In her own case, she now had bookshelves on every wall of her bedroom and even a third of her room set aside as a library with literal rows of bookshelf nooks.
Kaori intended to go to Earth and buy all the light novels, manga, anime, and video games she wanted. She would treat herself for her hard work this past… She was startled to realize that she had been working on this world for almost six months! She had fallen into her old routine of working so much that she didn’t even realize how much she had been working. Kaori vowed to take more time off and set an alarm to go off every day to tell her to go rest and one for the weekend as well.
Having settled on her ideal vacation plans, she stood in front of the mirror and changed her clothing to be casual and then walked to the door. In her mind, Kaori thought of a certain alleyway near one of her favorite bookstores and concentrated on it before opening the door. In front of her was the very alleyway she had thought of and she realized she was stepping out of the back doorway of the old temp service that occupied one of the two buildings to either side. When she closed the door to her apartment and tried the knob again, it was locked. She then imagined her apartment and the knob opened easily and the door revealed her apartment again. “That’s convenient!” she mused.
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Kaori used a bit of her divinity, in part as a test, to make sure there was nobody looking at the alleyway as she exited. She was honestly unsure if her powers would work on Earth but she figured it was a fair bet since she was able to summon her apartment. That was a different dimension directly connected to her own, however, so it did still leave some doubts.
When she activated her divine aura, she was focused on detecting and found she could practically see the entire street for a block in both directions. Kaori could feel a bit of resistance but it was minimal and didn’t stop slow her down in the least. There were a few people on the street but nobody was paying any attention to the intersection where she would exit.
After exiting the alleyway, she made her way a few blocks over to her favorite bookstore. She considered going to her favorite manga shop but she wanted to see if she could find the latest release of this one novel series she had been following for years, even with her busy work life. The writer had just released a new novel shortly before she died. In fact, Kaori hadn’t even had a chance to read it before she died so she wanted to rebuy that as well.
That was why she was so perplexed when she could find the one she had but not a new one. The author was very reliable and produced a new novel in that series every four to six months. It was only then that Kaori happened to observe the date on a newspaper near the front of the store that the clerk was reading. Kaori was stupefied, only three weeks had passed since she had died!
Kaori started to go into a bit of a panic. The time differential was horrendous between the two worlds apparently. What would they do if she wasn’t there? If she hadn’t noticed and spent the entire couple weeks on Earth as planned, she would returned to find another several months had passed there. That reminded her, she really should think up a name for the world she had been entrusted with.
Kaori almost rushed out in a panic but then caught herself. If the roughly six months she had been there was equal to three weeks here, then the two weeks she intended to spend on Earth should translate to roughly an hour and a half with a margin of error. She decided that it would be okay to spend an hour or so shopping for a couple books to read at her leisure back in her own realm. She marveled at the notion that she now thought of the other world and it’s heavenly places as her own realm but it was true. She was literally the one who created it so it was hers!
Kaori poked around and found a couple more books and a couple manga and was just making her way to the front counter when a realization stopped her cold. Kaori had forgotten that she had died and currently had no money here on Earth. She considered putting the books back or just setting them down and walking out after apologizing to the clerk. Then she remembered that she was a goddess and she should be able to make a few pieces of mitsumata paper with a bit of ink on them.
She concentrated and felt the expected resistance but the 1000-yen notes appeared in her hand all the same. She marveled at how easy it was but wondered for a moment if this was forgery. Certainly, there was some kind of system in place for times like this, right? Sure, she remembered what was on a 1000-yen note but that didn’t mean she knew what the actual ink was and yet this one looked perfect.
Too late now, she was already at the front counter and the clerk was looking at her with a weird expression. “Pardon, do I have something on my face or something? Sorry but you have a weird look right now. Is everything all right?”
Kaori was in a full panic now. What if the clerk had heard about her death? Surely he wouldn’t be that obvious about it right? If he thought something was weird, surely, he would chalk it up to bad information. The clerk looked a little relieved for some reason. “Ah miss, it really is you. I haven’t seen you in the store for… I think it’s been over a year since you were here and you were one of best customers. Then one day you just stopped coming altogether and I always wonder about people that I don’t see anymore. That’s all. How have you been?”
Kaori breathed a sigh of relief. Thinking back she remembered that the last few books she had bought, she ordered online because she didn’t have the time to come to the store anymore. “Sorry, I got a job that kept me busy and didn’t have time to come anymore. Actually, I’m only here because I got a different job.”
She felt a chill run up her spine as she realized just how true that statement was. If not for getting her new “Job”, she would be dead right now instead of shopping for books. She would have to thank Descartes the next time she saw him. For the time, she completed her transaction as normal and left the store. She had to hurry back to her own realm. Her own realm… She liked the sound of that!