As it turned out, playing god wasn’t quite as fun as I’d thought it would be. The effortlessness of Greg’s actions had gotten me lulled into complacency, of which I was swiftly disabused. Things got a little easier when I embraced the mess and let my inner child run amok, which was relatively easy, given that she was a never-ending source of wild new suggestions.

I’d been particularly taken with Andalon’s recommendation to upgrade my cube-wrought body from pangolin to pangolin-dragon.

I flapped my mighty wings as I soared alongside Greg, currently in the form of a fuzzy, frost-spewing panda-dragon. The wind licked through his fur. As for me, the wind was little more than a constant background tickle itching away at the gaps between my thick, keratinous scales.

“You don’t need to flap your wings so much,” Greg said. “Or at all.”

The menu made flying a cinch; it was just a matter of toggling on or off the button labeled “flight”.

“I like using them,” I said.

“Well, just try not to get shot down this time.”

I looked down to the distant clifftop. With my zoom-capable pangolin dragon eyes, I saw a little blue wyrmling waving a flag at me—a pangolin-depicting flag, at that—smiling as she bristled with support—emotional support. Alas, Andalon was not much use in combat.

“C’mon, let’s get going!” Greg said.

Nodding, I tucked in my arms and legs. And then, I dove.

After a brief, vociferous argument about how dragon’s fire-breathing abilities worked, Andalon had suggested that we use the power of yelling. And what a wonderful suggestion it had been. We settled on a mechanic where the magnitude, range, temperature, and intensity of fire breath were determined entirely by the volume of our speech. Yelling anything at all resulted in classic fire breath. Speaking at an ordinary volume caused nothing, except the occasional plumes of pale gray smoke. Growls and whispers sent out pixelated clouds, black and thick.

I had no shortage of things to scream about, and plenty of things to scream at.

Piercing through the blocky white clouds, we emerged in sight of the stark, ochre cliffside below. Long ago—as the procedurally generated lore went—some artful souls had carved a city into those cliffs to serve as a sanctum to hone their arcane pursuits. But they were artists, scholars, and dreamers; they were not built for war. They hadn’t stood a chance against the onslaught of the Great Horde, and so, the City of Windows fell, and then the Horde left it alone, to die in empty silence. But new guests had moved into the ruins. Now, the arches and sweeping colonnades littered with the slumbering wreckage of crystal sky-ships and interplanar portals had fallen into the hands of a vile tribe of what Greg insisted were goblins.

Whatever you called them, they were two blocks’ height worth of irate, red terrors, with teeth like daggers, pointed ears like longer daggers, and heads as bald as rubber. Long, pendulous, lazy paint-drop noses sat above their dark, zigzag mustaches, above mouths that knew but one word, and one word only:

“Reeeee!!”

Thus did the horde shriek its ridiculous war cry. The ear-splitting sound shattered sacred panes of stained glass, spilling shards of color down the cliffside.

“Don’t forget to dodge!” Greg yelled. A storm of frost and snow blasted out from between his jaws, pelting the city’s colonnades, freezing the goblins where they stood. The magicked cold made their teeth clatter as it slowed them to a feeble crawl.

“I know! I know!” I said, loud enough to spew some fire Greg’s way.

He banked off to the side.

“Like now!” he yelled back, shooting out another cold front. It made ice pops of the goblins below.

If the goblins weren’t angry before, they certainly were now.

A volley of green rays shot out from the City of Windows, loud and blisteringly hot, enough to cauterize the air as they sliced through it in a wide sweep.

I did a barrel roll, spiraling out of the way of the laser fire, but not far enough to keep the beams from singing my scales.

Why did they need to have laser rifles? Goblins had no business wielding laser rifles. I’d tried making my case to Greg earlier, but my pleas had fallen on deaf ears; deaf, furry panda-dragon ears.

I winced at the stinging pain.

Another tangle of laser beams raked across the sky, and I barrel rolled back the way I came. This time, I managed to dodge them all. My wings were one of the few spots on my body not covered in my protective pangolin-dragon scales, and, on our first two play-throughs of this battle, the goblins’ lasers had sliced clean through my wings, sending me plummeting to the sandy grid down below.

Not this time, though.

Extending all four legs, I swooped down. I landed on the wall of a cliff-carved palace, scampering across the tiled-paved floor as I came to a halt. Rees and green laser beams alike shot out from galleries of arches and columns stretched out into forever. Scrambling backward out onto the balcony, I flung my hind legs over the balustrade while reaching out with my front claws to grab hold of the ledge, clinging to it like a rock climber. The talons on my feet scraped furrows into the sculpted cliffside below. I folded my wings against my sides and ducked my head, waiting for the feeling of heat radiating through the horns at the back of my head to pass. That would be my window of attack.

Wait for it… wait for it…

The heat stopped. The laser fire fell silent.

Now.

I hit back, hard. Clambering to the side using the ledges of windows, balconies, and archways, I grasped my left hand around a sturdy column and used it like a handlebar to pull myself up and lunge at the city walls. With my right hand, I bashed at the stone, clawing into the rock face. The walls crumbled like chunks of dried sand—one of the advantages of being big. Plunging my arm into the hole, I swept my claws through the opening, grabbing clawfuls of squirming goblins and tossing them over my shoulder one after another as they plummeted to their doom. Enraged, the goblins fired more volleys of laser beams, but, tightening my grip on the column, I pulled my head and arm away until they had to stop to reload their rifles’ capacitors. I ran through this cycle several times until my claws came up empty, upon which I jammed my head through the hole and I flushed the halls clean with a fiery scream.

Angel, that feels satisfying!

Pausing for a moment, I pulled my head out of the hole. I waited for the pixelated smoke to clear before turning my neck to bring my ear close to the opening.

Somewhere, punctuated by rasping coughs, a trembling, stupefied “Ree?” echoed off the red-hot tile.

I stuck my head back in and screamed them all to cinders.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

— — —

The battle ended in victory; complete, glorious victory. Greg and I basked in our sense of accomplishment by landing on a sweeping hillside, near an orchard of trees rich with golden apples. With a little guidance, I was able to select the “human form” I’d saved in the transformation menu, and could then join an also-now-cubic-human Greg in plucking the apples and eating our fill.

They tasted like cotton candy.

Andalon had spent some time darting around the tree, but I’d managed to coax her back into her blocky human form so that she might better appreciate the apples’ taste. Eventually, she’d decided to take her seat on the grassy, terraced hillside, in the shadow of a pile of golden apples that was tall as she was—though it didn’t stay that way for long. Meanwhile, Greg and I ended up resting on a couch I’d successfully conjured from nothing onto the hillside, after several failed attempts. Granted, it would have been more comfortable if I’d also conjured some cushions for it, but… one step at a time. At least it was better than my first few efforts at being a god, although, I suppose Andalon felt differently; after all, my failures entertained her far more than my successes ever could.

Indeed, our battle against the goblins hadn’t been my first proposal, but rather a ‘safe’ alternative that Greg had suggested after several increasingly embarrassing failures on my part.

For my first act of divinity, I’d intended to make myself into a giant pangolin, but it hadn’t panned out well, by which I mean, I ended up turning myself into water, and a great deal of it, at that. I’d splashed on rocks, poured over cliffs, dripped down tree trunks, melded into mud, and then disassociated myself, merging into—and becoming—a sea. You might think being water would have kept my tumble from having become a harrowing experience—not having senses and all that—and if you did, you’d be wrong. Having to put up with kelp and coral and slimy, creeping sea-cucumbers lounging about the sand of my sea was very disconcerting. And don’t even get me started about all the polygonal marine life I’d had to deal with, swimming around inside me.

After helping me get out of that mess and back into my default blocky “human” body, I’d tried to make an ice-cream sandwich—and a big one, at that. While I’d succeeded in making a (house-sized) ice-cream sandwich, I’d also succeeded at giving it life. The frozen dessert broke up into thousands of kitten-sized insect-things that quickly dug into the snowy mountainside and set themselves up with an underground hive, tunnels and all. Greg—who, at the time, was a ferocious, furry, half-fox half-dinosaur abomination—laughed so much he grew himself two extra heads to help get the laughter out, though he stopped and apologized as soon as he noticed the fear that the sight of the triple fox heads drew from Andalon.

At that point, I’d tried to turn myself back into a pangolin, but ended up making a rather misshapen-looking creature. I’d tried to defend my creation by saying I’d been trying to make myself into a pangolin dragon, a claim Greg had been all too happy to make reality. As I said, the goblin siege had been his idea; something about wanting to test how the AI could react when under attack from multiple players. If you ask me, though, I think it was another sign of him having gone mad with power. Or, more graciously, maybe it was just his way of coping, or maybe just trying to cope.

I’d gotten quite angry at the goblins for having shot me out of the sky. It led me to release more pent-up rage than I’d ever thought possible. Then again, given what was happening out in the real world—to me, to everyone… in hindsight, the catharsis I’d felt wasn’t entirely surprising.

To my pleasant surprise, this whole deliriously weird experience ended up being rather therapeutic for me. Andalon, my transformation, and the plague—they’d all taken away what little control I’d felt I’d had over my life. In that respect, it was refreshing to be in the driver’s seat of my own existence for once. Through my successes and failures, I ended up recapturing a sense of control that I’d lost ever since first gazing at the wyrm-scales sprouting from my chest. It wasn’t as much control as I would have liked—and I had a sinking feeling that I’d find a way to screw it up at some point—but, still… it was better than nothing.

I swallowed my last cotton-candy-flavored golden apple.

I just wished my other concerns could be as easily addressed.

My thoughts turned to Lopé's words.

“Greg… you wouldn’t happen to be the philosophical type, would you?”

“If I wasn’t, would I have minored in Philosophy in college?” he replied.

I craned my neck back. “Did you?”

He nodded. “Guilty as charged.”

“Well then, what do you think of the statement ‘You need pain to know what love is’?” I asked. “I was in an argument, and I thought I was winning, but then my adversary unleashed that doozy on me.”

Raising an eyebrow and cocking his head, Greg stared at me as if I’d stuck my head in a garbage can and inhaled the putrid stink with moans of rapture. He narrowed his gaze.

“You know those spin-and-say toys for kids? You pull them, the arrow spins around, it lands on a cow, and then a recorded voice says ‘the cow goes mooo’, and plays a clip of a cow goin’ moo—those things?”

“Yeah,” I nodded, “although I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”

“Just watch.”

Suddenly, a spin-and-say toy appeared in Greg’s hands, bright colors, rounded edges, cartoon stickers, and all. Instead of animals or vehicles or the like, the toy’s panels displayed human caricatures, each engaged in some sort of vice, much like in a political cartoon. There was a housewife in yellow leaning onto a dining room table as she gulped down a bottle labeled “booze”; a little boy with a propeller hat sawed the head off a hapless kitten and flashed a frightful, pearly-toothed grin. There was a slender man festooned in fine robes and fluffy slippers standing atop a castle balcony with a pile of treasure beside him—jewels and coins and gold galore. Streaks of spit came out of his wide-open mouth as he yelled at a crowd of haggard, impoverished folk gathered below him in the castle’s dismal shadow.

And many, many others.

The words Assholes were embossed around the wheel’s center. Andalon, meanwhile, clapped excitedly at the sight of the colorful images, none the wiser.

Greg pulled the lever. The crooked, cartoony arrow of blue plastic—currently pointed at the wealthy man on the balcony—span around briefly before coming to a stop at a depiction of a brutish man in a wife-beater pinning a woman—clearly his wife—against a wall as he beat her with his fists.

A recorded voice played from the speaker slits in the middle of the wheel. “The abusive sociopath says, ‘You need pain to know what love is’.” The voice changed to that of a wrathful, almost feral, adult male as it said, “You need pain to know what love is”.

The spin-and-say of human failings disappeared with an exaggerated poof of white smoke.

Greg didn’t say anything. He just tilted his head toward me slightly and stared for a moment.

I nodded. “I—I see…” I sighed. “So much for the Angel’s great Plan for us.”

Greg pursed his lip. “Sounds like you were arguing about teleology.”

“Theodicies, actually—or, well… at least that was what mattered to me,” I said.

He nodded. “Ah yes. Theodicy: the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil.” Greg scoffed. “It’s such a load of bullshit. So is teleology, though theodicean arguments stand out for the sheer jerkassery of what they’re trying to justify.”

My eyes widened. “That’s certainly… an interesting take,” I said.

“Dude… you need to stop thinking of the world as a story with a hero, or a plot, or a moral,” Greg said. “Because… it’s not. It isn’t anything one way or another, it just is. It is what it is. Shit just happens.”

“It is what it is?” I said. “So… you’re a nihilist?”

“Nihilism is such a loaded word,” Greg said. He bit down on the golden apple at the end of his handless, rectangular arm. “Nihilism, relativism, atheism…,” he said, “We can hardly think of them without imagining decadence, decay, a lack of principles… a lack of honor. Rampant immorality. But that’s a load of crap.”

“Why?”

He rolled his eyes at me.

“You religious?”

“What’s religious?” Andalon asked.

I turned to her. “It’s… well… it’s about what you believe.”

“And what do you believe, Mr. Genenth?”

I twiddled my blocky arms’ non-existent thumbs. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”

“So, I take it your answer is a no?” Greg asked.

I shook my head. “I… I don’t know. Maybe?” I sighed.

“Close enough,” Greg said. “So… tell me… which is the bigger miracle? That the world is a pre-programmed narrative, imbued with lessons, rewards, challenges, and punishments all meant for us? Or that the world just is, and all those perks and bugs came out of the woodwork on their own?”

I knew what the answer was, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

“People need to grow up. Life sucks… except for the parts that don’t. Those bits are precious. They’re worth preserving, and—sometimes—even fighting for. Cherishing them is the only way to keep them around in the long run. There’s your responsibility. There’s your honor. When you screw up, try to do better. That’s all you can do—that’s all anyone can do.”

“And what of pain?” I asked. “Or love?”

“Pain’s the stuff that sucks; love’s the stuff that doesn’t. God either doesn’t exist, or—if It does—It’s either an asshole, and we should scorn It, or It’s only slightly less clueless than we are, and we should pity It for not knowing how the world could have been made better.”

It was a lot to take in.

We sat still for a moment, neither of us saying anything. Then Greg lifted his head to the horizon.

“Huh…”

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don’t suppose you have a console on you, do you?” Greg asked.

I nodded. “Yes, I carry my PortaCon in my coat-pocket.”

“It’s ringing,” Greg replied.

With a jolt, I rose from the bench. “How can I get to it?”

Greg closed his square eyes.

“One sec.”

I waited.

“There we go,” he said.

I shot off like a torpedo, launching backward into the sky.