Kaori spent the rest of the day traveling to the nearest two elven villages and observing them. The lives of the elves was fairly consistent, with each of the villages focusing heavily on hunting and various aspects of nature. Yaju explained that he couldn’t figure out a way to make elves into dwarves. Though he called them the people of the forest and the undermen, she understood what he was implying. Trying to figure out how to advance the civilization of the elves was too much for him to figure out how to do. Once he found that he could help them in less civilized areas like honing their hunting and senses he admitted that he basically forgot what he was supposed to be doing.
Watching the elves go about their primitive lives was interesting in some ways. It was almost like watching shows about a lost tribe on a certain channel with a yellow rectangular logo. The hunters would leave early in the morning and hunt for hours to bring back animals for food and hides. Some of the women would go out and gather plants for food and medicines while others stayed in the village and tended to the children and worked on making things from the supplies available.
The elves seemed to be rather sensitive to her presence so she had to stay a decent distance from them. This surprised Yaju, who had to try making his presence felt before any of the elves would notice him. He suggested that it was probably her overflowing divinity but she suspected that he simply had a harder presence to sense since he was more… feral.
After watching the villagers of the second village begin preparing for supper, Kaori realized it was getting pretty late and decided to find some place to sleep for the night. She asked Yaju but he told her that he just slept in the first tree he found. She asked if he ate and he seemed to hesitate for a moment. He finally admitted that he would go chasing things down and eat them from time to time. As he said that, he reflexively flexed the claws on his fingers and she understood that he wasn’t talking about hunting with a bow or spear and he didn’t mean that he cooked it and then ate it either.
She noticed that Yaju seemed to be a bit ashamed as he spoke about his eating habits and decided not to ask about it further. One of the demons seemed to be smirking and nodding along the whole time. The angels and a couple of the other demons all seemed a bit disgusted though. She asked them about where they would sleep and they just shrugged it off and said they didn’t have to sleep. After she considered it for a moment, she realized that she wasn’t tired but she could make herself tired if she tried. So much for insomnia.
After a bit of thought she decided that she would just sleep in a tree like Yaju. That still left the question of what to do about the rest of her entourage. She called them all together and asked what they intended to do and they all looked a little surprised before one of the angels spoke up. She told Kaori that they would do whatever she asked them to do and would simply wait for her to give them orders otherwise. She expounded on this by saying that was the role that angels and demons always had in relation to gods.
Kaori thought about that for a moment and decided she didn’t want a bunch of angels and demons hovering around her while she slept. She had a sudden and chilling revelation that the whole time she was alive, that was the way things had been. Even though she couldn’t see any of them, they had been there still. In order to keep that from being the way things were from then on, she would have to have something for the sleepless minions to do.
After wracking her brain for a few moments, she came up with a plan. She thought about it and willed a translucent sphere into being between them. She then asked them to go out and collect data on the geography of the world around them. She wanted to know the shape of the world she was assigned to. As soon as she finished speaking, all eleven of them disappeared and left her and Yaju alone. She told him that she would be up for a while so he should go ahead and get some sleep. The truth was that she just didn’t want to go to sleep with him there.
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As soon as he left, Kaori went to the top of the forest and found a particularly tall and wide tree. When she approached the tree she could tell that the branches of this tree were certainly large enough for her to sleep on. She decided that she was going to see if she could make it a bit more comfortable. She started by trying to exert her will on the tree branch and see if it would respond to her.
At first the limb didn’t do anything. She was a little disappointed but then she asked herself what did she expect it to do. Once she said it out loud it was like a lightning bolt struck her. She had simply looked for the branch to do something but she never had anything in mind for it to do. She tried again with the idea that she wanted the limb to shake and at first it didn’t seem like it would but then it finally started to sway slightly and she confirmed there was no breeze.
With confirmation that it would move she willed it to move harder and the reaction was immediate. The branch started swaying and creaking ominously. She relented but understood the problem immediately, it was her own imagination. She was the one who had to have a picture in mind and will it to conform to her image of it.
Kaori pondered for a moment then got an idea. She wanted to see if she could make the tree reshape to her will. She started with having one of the branches straighten out and become smooth. The moment she willed it to change shape to fit her image it was almost like the whole branch turned into a putty and in seconds it was exactly how she had pictured it.
Armed with the knowledge of what she could do she wondered to herself what she wanted. While she was in thought on that subject, she spotted one of the elven hunters returning late to the village and an idea struck her. She conjured an image of the type of houses she would have expected to see elves living in. A home made from the very branches and leaves of the tree around her.
In her image of the perfect elven home, she imagined a somewhat dome shaped inner space with the branches interweaving thickly into each other and leaving no gaps or protrusions in the floor areas. She imagined the walls woven the same way but with more in the way of gaps to let a breeze through and several circular openings for windows where the branches simple wove around instead of into those areas and a larger one on each side as a door. The roof she imagined having a very thick canopy of overlapping large leaves that would pass all the rain away from the inner space.
As soon as her image became clear the tree started growing new limbs and foliage to fit her image. It came out exactly as she had pictured it but it was just a large open room with the trunk in the center. Looking at the trunk gave her an idea. She got and idea of the trunk molding itself into a basin to one side with a though leading up to a spot in the center of the roof of leaves. She imagined the leaves being open over this trough and actually slanting inwards in the center so that rain would collect in the basin.
After that the only things left were a bed, table, and a platform to hold the human high globe that the others would be filling in the blanks on. The bed was simple enough to imagine and thus to make appear. For that, it was simply a rectangular grouping of very thick leaves that tangled themselves together to weave a futon. The table was simply the same but using branches without leaves. The stand was possibly the easiest since it was simply held in place by a few branches growing around it from top and bottom. With that, her ideal elven home was finished and she crashed out on the futon. It was a lot softer than she imagined it would be and she was asleep in no time.
That night she had a very vivid dream about her old boss coming to look for her and showing up in the office of Descartes and the two ending up in a screaming match before finally coming to an agreement that she would have to do both jobs. The dream continued with Yaju, the demons, the angels, and all of her former coworkers swarming her from all directions with dead eyes and thousands of questions until she felt like she was falling through the floor. She then saw a jungle world zooming up to meet her falling body and just before she hit the ground she jerked awake with a scream.