“I am not finding him.” The Child-god lets out frustratingly. He is currently opening drawer after drawer of a cabinet. The odd thing here is that he keeps opening the same drawer. Inside each drawer are small globes. Each globe is pulsing with different colors and intensities. Small clouds of color, each looking like a small unique universe.

“Keep looking. We can’t have him running around.” This statement came from an amorphous cloud of swirling purple dust whirling around the room.

“I know, I know. We shouldn’t have put all our dreams in one basket. Dammit, all that power was suppose to be mine. How long do you think we have?”

“I think he is busy elsewhere, so maybe 1000 years or so?” The cloud begins to slowly circle the cabinet, bright sparkles trailing it. “I can’t cover our tracks much longer. It took most of my power to keep that plane of existence hidden from him for so long. Why did you dip into that many planes, all we needed was three planes, not twenty.”

“I told you before, I got carried away. After the first few dips, and he didn’t show up, I figured we were safe. Dammit, I sometimes think my brain purposely shuts down when I am doing something stupid”.

“How are you going to find him anyway, there are billion, billions, of souls in there? You are going through what, fifteen or twenty at a glance. A 1000 years is not long enough.” With this statement, the cloud slowly rises to the top of the cabinet and settles into a slow spin.

“I know, I know. I figured he would have put him at the front of the queue. I should have offered to put him in the queue myself. Dammit! Why does my brain shut down like that.”

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“Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we seed some puppets across a number of years? We can give them some base identification, and have them ‘contact’ us when they find him. We can extend their lives a few hundred years…that should be enough to find him…right?”

With this statement the child-god stops his motions, a complicated look coming across his face. “It will cost a lot of power, I don’t exactly have huge reserves after that last stunt. However, if we find him…I can recover the power, plus a whole lot more. You do always come up with the good ideas”. With that statement, the child-god smiles. He begins to pull globes out of thin air, almost as if they were sitting on a shelf right next to him. Each globe is solid purple, with a light, stirring wind inside, moving with the dust of existence.

With each globe he pulls from the air, he becomes less. His presence in the room seems to fade, like a candle before it burns out. He opens the cabinet and drops a globe in, and then reopens the cabinet to drop the next globe in. He does this time, after time, until twenty globes are dropped. With the twentieth globe, the globe is no longer solid purple. Black and grey dust are mixing inside the globe, stirring with an unseen wind.

“That’s it, I can’t do anymore. If he doesn’t show up in the next 1000 years, I am done. We need to hide until then. If he sees me like this he will know. Let’s go back and play with the geckos.” The child-god turns around, and slowly moves away from the cabinet. His steps are similar to someone walking through a half a meter of snow. After six steps, he disappears from the room, leaving the purple cloud to twist and swirl upon the cabinet.

“He really is a fool, I should have known.” A voice coming from nowhere and everywhere, but centered on the purple cloud. Flowing down the cabinet, the cloud stops at the drawer for the Beshov plane, and opens it with hands of purple mist. With nineteen cloud formed hands, the cloud pulls out nineteen purple orbs. At a single moment, all the orbs begin to deteriorate, their individual colors shifting to purple and merging with the cloud. Their individuality gone only adding to the cloud.

With one last hand, the cloud pulls out the twentieth orb and injects a pure white stream into it. The storm within the orb becomes a raging hurricane of purple, black, grey, and now white.

Silently, the cloud closes the cabinet with wispy hands and moves off six steps, dissipating from the room. Before he completely dissipates, a quiet echo can be heard in the room, “This was a great loss, but necessary.”