Kaori watched as the twelve of them left and heaved a small sigh of relief. Now alone with her thoughts she sat down at the low table and pondered what she was supposed to do. The stated goal was for her to progress and manage the planet and its inhabitants but she needed to create a business plan for reaching that goal. She pondered her claim that Yaju’s words might be the right path to her goal. Maybe she did just need a new perspective. If only there were a manual for all of this.
Then it struck her as pretty obvious, there was a manual for all of this. She realized that she had dropped the book or set it down somewhere because it wasn’t there when she was talking to the angels and demons. As she was wracking her brain to try remembering where she might have set it down, she got a shock. Sitting on the wicker-like branch table in front of her was the book she was worried about.
A realization occurred to her, the book had vanished and appeared at her intent without her even commanding it to. If it could do that then she probably couldn’t loose it at all. For now she settled in and began reading it. There was a little bit of an introduction by the author who went by the name Seraph. In that introduction, Seraph explained that the book would provide all the necessary tools to set a world up any way that the god in charge of it wanted. Press the pause button on the front cover and the world would stop. Make any changes to the world you might see fit and then press the play button on the back cover.
It was pretty simple in that regard but there was a little catch. The items and powers in the book came at a cost. There was some system among gods that let them barter and trade for goods and services. What would an all-powerful god or goddess want that they couldn’t just make? Worship. The book went into detail about the system of worship points. The points would be based off of the fervent prayer of worshippers and in much the same way that paper money and coinage had no true value, the worship from devotees of a deity had no real bearing on that deity. The value they had was in making the deity accountable to their worshippers in order to get their prayers.
These prayers and devotions could be monitored and quantified independent of the deity they were being sent to. By having an independent monitoring system in place ahead of time, the deity to whom worship was lauded would accumulate worship points and the system was set up eons before the creation of the universe by the original gods. These beings known in the earliest texts went simply by the Old Ones but the gods that came later called them many various things. The most used of these names was the elder gods.
These and a handful of other things were covered by Seraph in the introductory pages. The most pressing of these facts was that this book itself worked like a credit account. All the items would be immediately available but would put the deity in question into immediate debt.
As if to reinforce this point there was a free gift on the last page of the introduction. It was a small spell that would bind to the deity and allow them to summon a floating account of their current finances as it were. Kaori found this to be a bit annoying and yet comical in a way. She activated the spell and it floated off of the page and solidified into a ring that she then slid onto her thumb. After activating the ring’s spell she was surprised to find that her account actually had a small positive balance and remembered the look of reverence on the faces of the elves. So that was how it worked!
The rest of the book read like a catalog. There was a glossary after the introduction and it had the rest of the book separated into categories of things that a deity could purchase for their world or worlds. Kaori skimmed briefly through some of the rest of the pages before turning back to the glossary to look at it more carefully. From her glance she could tell that each page contained one or more items and most had a moving illustration.
The glossary had twelve categories of items that could be purchased. The categories were animals, energies, features, help, histories, magic, materials, monsters, phenomena, powers, races, and relics. Each of the categories had sub-categories under them as well. While most of the different categories seemed to be fairly self-explanatory, Kaori found some to be perplexing and so she flipped to the first of these mystery sections.
It turns out that the term energies refers to just that. In the section of energies a deity could purchase new types of energy or controls to the existing ones. Kaori found electricity as one of them and was a little perplexed. Why would anybody need to buy lightning when it was a part of nature.
Suddenly, a stark realization came to her and she looked around in wonder that she had missed such a simple observation. There was not a single cloud in the sky as far as the eye could see out any of the windows or doors. She left the tree house and flew up a bit into the sky then focused on her sight and as she figured she was able to zoom her sight in on the farthest distances. There were no clouds in any direction and no lightning as a result or perhaps lightning wasn’t necessarily a result of water vapor after all! She was stunned to realize that these elves had never even seen a cloud in all their lives much less experienced a thunderstorm.
Returning to her book, she then flipped to the most questionable section. She had a real hope for what she might find in the Help section of the book. She was thinking that it might be manuals for how to proceed in building a world. What she found was completely not what she was expecting. The help section was a help for hire section of various gods, helpers, and even various eldritch beings advertising their services for an expected salary in worship points.
Each of the pictures seemed a little creepy to her at first glance since they all seemed to follow her with their eyes. A moment later she got a real fright when one of the pictures of a fancy looking demonic woman wearing a lot of jewelry spoke to her. “Don’t even bother looking at my posting. I’m out of your price range newbie. I only work for established deities.”
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Suddenly it all became clear to her. The pictures in this section were a two way communication window that would let the deity interview the prospective help on the spot before hiring them. She decided to respond to the demoness out of gratitude for helping her realize this before she spoke out of turn about one of the prospects in one of the pictures. “Thank you for your honesty. I will keep that in mind if I need help in the future and you are still available.”
Kaori then flipped through the help section and noticed that there seemed to be a lot more pages than should fit in a book the size of the one she was holding. Shrugging this off as just another mystery of the divine she flipped back to the glossary and another neat trick was revealed. If she had a particular spot int the book in mind it would flip directly to that page without her having to search for it.
She was curious what was meant by features but the sub categories in the glossary answered that pretty well. There were afterlife features, dimensional features, ocean features, sky features, spatial features, structural features, subterranean features, and terrain features. Kaori was very glad that she had the foresight to have her subordinates survey the terrain. Then it hit her and she was even more glad that she had been sent here with subordinates in the first place.
A cursory glance at each of the sub-categories was enough to give a general idea of what the category was all about. Histories was a section that would add a complete past for any creature, item, phenomena, or even a whole world. It would implant this history into the memory of any who had reason and age enough to know of it as well. All very convenient and it came with all the appropriate items and such that would scatter through your world. But there was a catch, they were expensive as all get out.
The magic section had a number of different systems of magic that could be purchased and even had spirits and the like that could be added in. she decided she would look over that section in detail later. Earth didn’t have any magic as far as she knew so she was very interested to see what kinds of magic there were in the book. If she bought one of the systems in the book then that type of magic would be available in the world and she could see it in action. She pondered for a moment what would happen if she bought multiple systems of magic. She then remembered that there would be a price for these things.
Materials was a section that had different raw resources that could be scattered throughout the world. There was even a section on magic materials and one on divine materials. The phenomena section had various things like automatic spawn points for creatures of all types, wellsprings of various different types of powers like magic, bizarre things like floating islands and dimensional rifts, and even a section on dungeons. How fantasy could you get!
The powers section turned out to be a section devoted to the imbuing of different kinds of powers on creatures, divine helpers, and even deities themselves. These powers were extremely costly and it looked to her as though most of them would only be things that she could get later or go severely into debt for. She decided she was going to have to study that section in detail before making her final plans. Some of them might be worth incurring the debt.
The relics section was something she wasn’t expecting to find but it turned out that you could put these powerful items in your world. The effects of each was cost appropriate but they were all things that might be beyond the skill of a god to create on their own. The big draw of this section was that the items were individually rather cheap where most of the other sections were full of things that would rack up a sizable amount of debt real quick.
Animals, monsters, and races were each different categories so she expected to find that the races would be sentient. Already she knew that she could expect to find dwarves, elves, humans and apparently, something called anthromorphs in that section. When she turned to the section she was rather surprised to find that it was so small. There were only eight races available. None of them went by the names she was used to.
Arc-ans, Arc-els, Arc-sens, Arc-toks, Arc-niels, Arc-tals, Arc-fens, Arc-mels. None of those names meant anything to her but the accompanying pictures helped, she only wished they weren’t all nude pictures of a male and female of said species next to each other. Apparently the eight species for sale were angels, elves, fairies, dwarves, humans, giants, ogres, and demons. There was a conspicuous lack of the cat eared anthromorphs, the species that the god Descartes was apparently descended from. She wondered briefly if the Egyptian gods were like him before reeling her thoughts back in.
What could it mean? There was a race that was obviously not represented in this manual. Once she thought about it she began wondering if the demons she had working for her were the ones in the book and flipped there. The picture of them was of a very generic looking mannequin demonoid with leathery wings and red eyes. Hers were apparently not the same species or so she thought. She began reading the description and found her answer. It described the abilities of a demon as being able to morph and adapt to the job for which they were assigned. It also said that all demons could be reassigned roles by a deity with an appropriate level of authority over them.
There were a few examples of roles that could be assigned including demon overlords. Apparently, a deity could give a demon a huge powerup just by assigning a more powerful role to them. The highest form they could take was dark god. So if she chose a pantheon route, the demons would become far more powerful just because she told them to be. Quite the neat trick there. She would have to keep that in mind for the future, it would make a really good reward for hard work but she would have to give careful consideration before she chose to give any of them that level of power.
She went through and read the listing for every one of the species available and was about to turn back to the glossary when she realized there was another page in front of the first species in the section. She turned to that and found her answer. She could buy a separate manual for a pittance that would let her choose from a huge number of civilized races that would range from simple variants of the eight original species created by the ancient gods all the way to the truly bizarre. It listed there anthromorphs and eldritch horrors by another name.
The cost of the supplement to the manual was only five worship points and her account had a little over three hundred. She went ahead and activated the spell for the purchase of the supplement and was surprised when the races section suddenly bulked up right there in her hand. So that was how it worked, any additions to the manual would simply appear within the cover upon purchase.
After browsing for a few minutes through the expansion, she came to a realization. Everything in the manual was rather expensive and if she went overboard she would be forever getting it all paid off. She wasn’t sure if there were any interest charges but she suspected that was how it worked. There was probably a section of fine print somewhere that listed all of the various charges and fees associated with using the services and it was probably all rather expensive but for now she was getting restless.