I zoomed in a bit and quickly scanned the island. Looks pretty sunny. The leaves look green. Not a lot of people, but everything looks… fine. I zoomed in to see if I could find some mortals. I found a couple shacks, but I did not know how to operate the god globe to see inside. Maybe you can’t even do that. I didn’t know. I never thought to ask.

I wanted to take a look at the edges between the area of light and the darkness, thinking that would tell me, I don’t know, something. So I followed the bridge back to the mainland and began to scan towards the edge when suddenly I saw them. Some humans in the light. And they weren’t doing anything weird or freaky.

What they were doing was circling up. Holding improvised weapons and a few swords and spears. The children were being pushed to the centre of the circle. It all seemed very disorganised, but you could tell what they were trying to do.

I was really glad to find some people acting sane. Maybe there were others. Maybe it wasn’t so widespread. Maybe everything would recover and… no. No way. I saw the rest of the globe. Even at a glance at a high level, even with a lot of the globe not working, I would have noticed if there were a lot of lighted areas. This was the only one I had seen, which meant there was a decent chance that this was the only one there was.

Anyway, I felt glad to find people acting sane and then immediately felt scared for them. And they were acting scared too. What was coming for them? What were they trying to defend against?

I scanned around a bit and found some more movement. More mortals, but strange. The way they moved was jerky and uncanny. I scanned some more. There were a bunch more of the strange ones coming.

Why were the normal mortals forming on the hill? They needed to get away. They needed to get to the bridge and maybe burn it down or something. Otherwise, they were going to be swamped by the huge number of strange mortals and probably gross murdered after that. They might be able to fight off the ones they could see. But the hordes coming after that were way beyond what they could beat. What were they thinking? I needed to get down there and tell them. And maybe, after they get to safety, they can tell me what exactly happened on Yiaya.

Ok. So what I’m about to tell you might seem stupid, but understand that I was still in shock and that there are a lot of rules, protocols, and techniques that gods are supposed to use when they communicate with mortals. Now, I went to god school where I learned some of these, but I never applied them because I didn’t really hang out with mortals. A lot of young gods did, and it always seemed a little… uncomf to me.

Don’t get offended if you are mortal and happen to be reading this. Let me explain. Actually, let me give an example. So this one god I know, we’ll call him, uhh… Demosthenes, is hanging around with these mortals in the city of Veronia.

One of the mortals he knows has a daughter from a previous relationship and the daughter gets sick. So of course he uses some of his god power to heal her daughter because he knows her. But evidently every mortal knows at least some mortal that has a health problem. Now Demosthenes knows he can’t heal everybody in the world. He can’t even heal everybody in the city, he doesn’t have the god power for that. So he makes a rule that miracles are for friends only, but he knows a lot of people at this point. Which ones count as friends and which ones are just a nice guy he talked to at the forum one time? Technically, the girl he healed wasn’t even his friend, it was his friend’s daughter. So now everybody is kissing up to him even more than they would if he were just someone that, you know, is super beautiful and immortal and controls the weather and the good or bad fates of mortals and so on.

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Anyway, now Demosthenes is surrounded entirely by people who desperately want something from him and are willing to do anything to get it but don’t actually give a crap about him as a person. They start fighting with each other. Demosthenes starts fighting with them because they are fighting with each other. It’s a whole problem. Meanwhile, people who were blacksmiths or counsellors or musicians have given up their careers to come and be part of Demosthenes’s retinue full time. I mean, if you could get the kind of gifts that only a god can give, how could you resist the temptation? Maybe you have a sick kid, or maybe you just want to be rich or perform for the gods or even have a shot at being made immortal.

So Demosthenes gets called away on some godly duty, and to be honest, he is pretty fed up anyway and ready to leave. (Maybe he was after some kind of golden chicken feathers, or that might have been the time there was a hole in the sea, and he went to go plug it. I don’t remember.) Anyway, he ends up having to search around a bit and go on some adventures in order to complete his labour. By the time he gets back it’s been like sixty years or something, which isn’t that long, but it’s long enough for most of the people that quit their jobs to wait on him to die without ever getting anything for their service. But that’s not the worst part. Demosthenes’s former followers were eager to be the first and best ones to welcome him back when he returned; they ended up splitting into religious groups who began to fight over that honour. By the time Demosthenes returned, there had been generations of clanish violence.

So anyway, it’s situations like that that are the reason gods have all these rules and guidelines for interacting with mortals. The rules aren't good. Actually, they are one of the reasons I didn’t hang out with mortals, but they were created for a reason.

Which is why my mind immediately went to Prophecy Minimus. This is where you give the mortal a prophecy but in a very gentle, subconscious kind of way. This method has a lot of benefits, but one of the biggest is plausible deniability on both sides. The prophecy feels almost like a typical idea in the mortal’s head. That way, they can tell themselves they just imagined it if they want to. The god isn’t exerting undue influence on them or messing with their free will. Plus, if things go sideways and the prophecy does not come true for some reason, the god can always claim they never made a prophecy or that the mortal didn’t interpret the prophecy correctly.

I was not at all powerful enough to make use of any of my god powers from a god globe on the mountain of the gods. So I was going to have to get down there and quick. Usually, I would not be able to use the teleporters… Actually, given the state of the god globe, the teleporters were a bad idea period. They could be finicky even at the best of times. I was going to have to jump.

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