Outperforming Expectations (Patreon Commission for VDO)

TAGS: Goddess/Godlike Ascension, Macro/Mega Macro, Utmos Perfection, Growth/Expansion

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By all accounts, choosing Sarla for that job was a “safe” choice, for lack of a better word. The universe in question was still young, there was very little to work with, and if things got a bit too experimental, one could always compare it to more mainline maintenance projects and see just how well the Zigzagoon did when faced with chaotic circumstances. Plus, as far as the bureaucracy was concerned, getting her out of the way and into a job of her own would get the fuzzball off their case and onto something that would, hopefully, serve as a sink for her considerable amount of bottled-up energy; after spending a few dozen millenia fielding calls and ignoring letters from the lower goddess, all of them little more than begging for her higher-ups to finally give her a cosmos to rule over as an “internship” with the Mandate, having something for her to actually do was a… well, not godsend, all things considered, but certainly fortunate. Even then, the look on the Zigzagoon’s face when she was called up to the pantheon’s Subsection Fifteen was such that even the crusty old demigods in charge of filing paperwork had to smile; the sheer, unfettered joy at being told she was being given her universe to take care of was practically infectious, and the whole building felt lighter for the whole cycle. Nevertheless, no one really thought that anything would come out of it; not only was Sarla utterly unremarkable as far as deities went, having ascended from a particularly skillful Zigzagoon who just happened to have enough stories told about them to elevate their soul upon death, but the reality chosen for her was… derivative. In all honesty, it was practically a copy of the one that Sarla had come from to begin with, which was precisely why she was sent there to begin with; given the infinite nature of the multiverse, it was seen as common courtesy to make a prospective divinity’s first assignment be somewhat similar to the reality they were most accustomed with before they ascended, with the only constraint being whether or not the bureaucracy believed them capable of living up to the demand. Or, in Sarla’s case, whether or not said bureaucracy was tired of having to deal with the constant pestering; one way or another, the Zigzagoon got what she wanted, and with the widest smile on her face, the young goddess crossed the threshold into the universe she was soon to rule over, practically buzzing from excitement. From there, standard protocol took over: she would have a certain amount of time to take care of that instance of reality, after which a supervisor assigned to the case would visit said reality, check if everything was up to snuff, and provide a grading based on how well Sarla had done. Barring extreme circumstances where literally everything went wrong, this process would carry on for a handful of evaluations, which would normally be enough to encompass a significant chunk of the universe’s lifespan, after which the prospective applicant would be recalled for a final evaluation and either given a passing grade, or told to go back to the instruction halls. While not technically permitted, there was an unofficial tradition of the divine bureaucracy setting up a betting pool for whether or not the newest applicant would make it or crash and burn spectacularly, with the most daring among them even daring to wager on specific grades. For Sarla, the odds were… something less than positive. There was a very good reason why most of the Zigzagoon’s attempts at getting her first assignment were either ignored or outright rebuked, and it wasn’t just because she wouldn’t shut up whenever she got excited about anything; no one really had any faith in her ability to manage her way out of a closed cardboard box, let alone something as complex as an entire universe. Thus, when she was last seen going into the gateway, Sarla slipped from everyone’s mind the moment the counter was started on her first evaluation, at which point a few people would remember about the betting pool and insist everyone else pony up the cash. This made it especially surprising when the date came around and the gateway… didn’t work. It was surprising for everyone involved, including the maintenance crews who had received no reports of the doorway being broken, but no matter how hard anyone tried pushing, no matter how much strength was put behind it, the damned thing refused to budge. The only thing anyone could figure out was that there was some sort of unidentifiable “blockage” on the other side, which only made it all the more confusing given that there were no alarms tripped about a universal mass multiplication incident. Hours were spent in trying to clear whatever was on the other side, at which point someone had the brilliant idea of simply trying to contact Sarla, since surely, if they could rely on her to do anything, it was to talk their heads off about her latest idea or pet project. It was only then that the sheer magnitude of the bureaucracy’s collective ignorance truly became evident, since the moment they attempted to send a message to the Zigzagoon, the blockage immediately cleared up, followed by a single-word reply: “Sorry!” There was no telling what that meant, but given the circumstances, the supervisor god decided it’d be best to move in as quickly as possible, lest the “blockage” appear again… only to emerge on Sarla’s body. Now, the Zigzagoon, on being sent in for the first time, was perfectly regular in appearance; indeed, one could make the case that she was somewhat remarkable in how unremarkable she had been, given that most deities made a point of using their power to engorge themselves and sculpt forms that would be seen by their mortal followers as downright obscene or excessive (hence the overabundance of fertility divinities in the multiverse). Sarla, meanwhile, was… not. She was short, she was flat, and she lacked any real features that could be remotely called enticing, resulting in a body that wasn’t ugly, but simply entirely regular and incapable of making even a single eyebrow rise, which was itself eyebrow-raising to a certain extent. So for her supervisor to cross the threshold and land atop soft pudge, which he immediately identified as being a fraction of the top of a single one of the Zigzagoon’s breasts, was more than a little perplexing, seeing as deities weren’t supposed to grow that big in such a short amount of time; indeed, they weren’t supposed to grow that big at all, with the upper bound on one’s size being intimately linked to the amount of time spent managing a universe. The biggest of deities, the ones who were about as large as Sarla appeared to be, had been running realities for the better part of a handful of eternities, having had to absorb the collective worship of literally countless cosmos before they could get to that point. Meanwhile, the Zigzagoon, in between apologizing for “blocking the door with my fat ass, sorry!” and “I completely forgot it was today!”, seemed entirely unaware that she was about as big as an entire galaxy and had tits bigger than even that, apparently thinking that this was either completely normal, or so utterly unremarkable as to not be worth thinking about. Her supervisor, trying to come to terms with what he was seeing, first thought that it had to be some kind of illusion; clearly, Sarla had learned how to project avatars and decided to spend an inordinate amount of her power pretending to be this gargantuan colossus for… whatever reason, he was certain that it made perfect sense in her head. But the longer the non-conversation went on, and the more the supervisor god tuned into that particular reality, the more he came to realize that no, she was absolutely there, and that was absolutely her body that he was standing on. Against all odds, not only had the Zigzagoon outpaced literally every other divinity in existence, but she’d done so in record time and in apparent ignorance of how monumental an achievement this was. A cursory analysis of her state revealed that Sarla was… quite big. Quite big indeed, which is why the time it took for the supervisor to accurately gauge her size was long enough that said size was no longer accurate; indeed, looking down, it was pretty obvious that the titaness was bloating quickly, with her lifegiving bust swelling with milk at every moment, something that Sarla herself excused as a “necessity” given how energy-hungry her civilizations had become. This thoroughly perplexed the smaller god atop her, who had not expected there to be any civilizations that could recognize the goddess’ existence at all, let alone any far enough along on the Kardashev Scale as to need divine intervention to function properly. Yet, turning his attention to the galaxy that Sarla loomed over, it became obvious that what he was looking at was not, in fact, a regular galactic structure, but rather an artificial one; the arms were too clearly-defined, the globular centre made out of some kind of colossal metallic sphere, and its edges surrounded by an unimaginably massive ring structure that a close look revealed to be a fully functional ringworld. The further in the supervisor went, the more he realized that, rather than long stretches of nothing occasionally interrupted by a stellar system, the whole “galaxy” had been turned into a lattice structure of hyperlanes connecting millions upon millions of individual civilizations, all of which had come together as one united galactic community, which had recently recognized Sarla as their universe’s ruler, and beseeched her for assistance in their grandest project yet: adding a second galaxy to their original one, as the first step towards the ultimate goal of uniting the entire cosmos in one impossibly huge hyper-structure that would last for all eternity. Upon realizing this, the supervisor god could do little but slowly turn towards Sarla, who by then had grown big enough to nearly double her size from the moment the door was opened; to her credit, she at least realized that her visitor was very much confused, and did her best to explain that, when she had first arrived, the most advanced of peoples had only managed to establish the first kingdoms, with the absolute best having figured out how to use gunpowder for weaponry. Being who she was, Sarla figured her talents would be best utilized in helping these civilizations find a better way forward, and as such she took a very direct, yet still successfully unnoticed role in guiding her charges’ development. In just a couple of centuries, the first interstellar colonies were being established, and a couple of centuries more saw the creation of the very first galactic oversight council, which eventually morphed into the democratic, pan-galactic community that existed in present times. Despite this, she herself had only recently made herself properly known, having preferred to act through intermediaries and assorted prophets rather than provide the “easy way out”, as she put it; only when the very limits of physics were reached did the goddess deign to actually intervene directly, and even then only by providing her nurturing milk as a hyper-efficient energy source. All of this, of course, left her supervisor absolutely flabbergasted, as they lacked any frame of reference for a development time so accelerated; typically, the most that one could expect from a first-timer was a baseline universal development, normally ending with a complete multiversal evacuation at the end of the reality’s life cycle. These sorts of shortcutted dev cycles were the exclusive purview of experts who both knew what they were doing and had millions of universes’ worth of experience under their belts, not complete newbies who had to beg for an assignment. It made it difficult to believe that the Zigzagoon had done all of this by herself, but what other alternative was there? That another god, one possessed of power far beyond that of the supervisor himself, had snuck in and helped Sarla without anyone catching wind of it? It was absurd, and yet the “reality” of it was no more unlikely, not with the way things had gone; how was it remotely possible that the pipsqueak who could barely reach the top shelf had somehow turned pre-feudal societies into a galactic-scale civilization in less than a millennium?! Hell, how did she break through every known record and turned herself into a titaness of such exaggerated proportions using only the collective prayer and worship of a single universe, even if it was one populated enough to warrant a ringworld surrounding an entire ga-actually, yeah, that might explain it. Looking back, there were definitely a few quadrillion souls in that galaxy alone, and who knew how many more in other such structures the universe over; sure, those might not have the goddess actively looking after them, but the presence of a deity had a way of causing knock-on effects with immense reach, and given that Sarla seemed to be some sort of anomaly, then who knew how populated other places were. Assuming current trends, then it work certainly go a long way to explain why the goddess was as big as she was… though it did little to cast a light on how she managed to be that good at her job that she completely shattered every projection they had on how well she would do. Unfortunately, it was his role as a supervisor to ascertain how it happened, so even though he was convinced he was going to regret it, the god sat down, did his best to ignore the softness trying to envelop him, and began going through the checklist that every new-timer had to answer during their first evaluation. It went perfectly fine at first, with Sarla providing the proper response to the basic questions, but as soon as it came down to her methods, everything went down the drain extremely quickly. Gods were taught to act within certain lines of thought, Disciplines and Paths which were, ultimately, up to each individual deity to choose from; there was fierce competition between each one, their proponents attempting to prove that they could get better results than any other in order to secure better funding for their academies. While there were occasionally “free thinkers” who broke the moulds, even these more often than not simply derived new practices from established ones, rather than go in an entirely different direction. Sarla, meanwhile, spoke as if she hadn’t spent a single day inside a divine institution, lacking in even the most basic of technical terminology or scientific approach, and being far too enamored with her “little ones” for her own good, to say nothing of the rampant arousal displayed throughout the entire process… and yet, it worked, and her supervisor couldn’t say otherwise. Indeed, trying to understand what was actually happening proved to be substantially harder than expected, since while Sarla’s choice of words was decidedly unscientific in how she described her process, it was nonetheless undeniably methodical; so much so that the supervisor, upon starting to pay closer attention, came to realize that he was recognizing patterns in some very specific terms, almost as if what the goddess was saying actually made some sense, and it had just eluded him until that exact moment. It took a while before he recognized the truth: he was being talked down to. Or rather, things were being simplified for his sake; he had a feeling that the Zigzagoon wouldn’t condescend to anyone, but recognized whenever anyone she was speaking to just didn’t quite understand what she was saying, and thus preempted herself by “dumbing down” her more technical vocabulary such that people could understand. Yet, even through this, it was clear that she had an extremely well-thought out plan for her universe; it just took some time before her supervisor recognized that it even existed, though by the time he did, it became impossible to think of anything else. Repeated words turned into entire expressions, references to mathematical formulas and population growth schemata, while seemingly disparate comparisons revealed themselves to be multi-layered metaphors that only made sense within the context of that particular universe. Occasionally, Sarla would off-handedly mention concepts her supervisor was actually familiar with, only to dismiss them as an “incomplete” understanding of how reality operated; despite this, she was never dismissive of them, insisting instead that they were merely the first step towards fully understanding the complexity of the multiverse, one that, “thankfully”, most of the divinities had already taken. Indeed, Sarla was nothing if not giddy at the prospect of having finally been able to put some of her ideas to practice, being beyond herself that they had worked as well as they had; as she confided on the smaller god nestling between her tits, struggling not to fall down into the cleavage below, she had very little faith in her own abilities until they panned out after a few first unsuccessful attempts. Now, as she put it, it was really just a question of refinement: the proof of concept was there, and the rest was just her building upon it and making good use of marginals. At no point did her supervisor attempt to interrupt the explanations, nor did they do anything other than nod along and write down whatever came out of the Zigazagoon’s mouth; he knew full well that nothing in the report would be believed, and that his supervisors would find some convenient way of rationalizing the report itself away despite the fact that their chosen representative was bound by metaphysical law to not lie, obfuscate, or otherwise produce falsehoods. He could swear upon his divine soul that everything he wrote down was nothing but the utmost truth and they still wouldn’t believe him… so why bother writing anything down? Why even bother listening? Clearly, Sarla knew what she was doing far more than anyone else did, and to pretend that he had the authority to declare whether or not she had “learned her lessons well”, or whatever was on the grading grid, was downright lunacy when the results clearly visible were so ridiculously beyond anything anyone had ever seen. To act like he had any degree of authority was a waste of time, and thus, the supervisor merely… lay. He surrendered, giving himself up to the all-enveloping warmth of the hyper-goddess he was on top of, figuring that if he couldn’t understand her, then at least he could experience her like everyone else was. To her credit, Sarla did notice that the person in charge of giving her a grade had, for some reason, begun to sink in between her breasts… eventually, at least. She went on at great length on the subject of cosmic strings and whether or not one’s vibrational frequency could affect the longevity of any given hyper-structure through the application of graviton manipulation before she realized that the person she was talking to was very much not listening anymore. As befitting her typical approach to most things, Sarla’s reaction was to profusely apologize for having “rambled on”, then fish the poor guy out and show him where the door was after making sure there were no more questions; just to make it even worse on the man, right before the threshold was sealed shut again, she quite earnestly and genuinely asked him to “put in a good word” with the bureaucracy, her worried face making it look as if she was actually concerned she might’ve been seen as not doing enough. For the supervisor, whose reaction to the entire trip was to sit there and stare at the gateway, wondering what had happened to lead him to that of all possible presents, it was at last a moment of peace and quiet where he could get his thoughts back in order; this was, of course, quickly interrupted by a large group of maintenance techs barraging him with questions about what the hell they had seen on the readings, why the damned door was acting so weirdly, and why the supervisor himself was suddenly a lot thicker and seemingly heavy-packaged. He, of course, had no answers; instead, the god chose to get up and walk away, consciously avoiding thinking about what had just happened as he threw the report clipboard onto the nearest desk and commanded the clerk behind it to “do whatever” before heading off to take a long, cold shower and forget about everything that happened. In the meantime, the door remained… closed, for a given meaning of the word. It was certainly locked, and to be locked meant that it also had to be closed, but anyone looking at it could still perfectly tell what was on the other side; no one bothered to say anything, because to do so would be to admit that it was actually real, as opposed to a very convenient collective hallucination that everyone just happened to be suffering from. Just as long as the polite fiction that everything was fine was kept up, then everyone could carry on pretending that they weren’t seeing the exponentially-higher amounts of energy seeping through the cracks and infecting anyone who got too close to the door, not to mention the inordinate amounts of moaning and wet slurping emanating from within. One thing was for certain: no one wanted to be the next one in for the second evaluation, not after the first one was made public and the horrifying truth was laid bare. The entire bureaucracy was split down the middle between those who believed the report was true and those who insisted it had to be false, and even those groups further splintered depending on frankly irrelevant minutiae such as “intent” or “falsifiability”. Meanwhile, those who had to work closest with the gateways knew for a fact that whatever was on the other side was well beyond anything they had seen or dealt with it before, and even worse, they weren’t even the ones keeping it stable; something else from the other side was maintaining the connection, which should be impossible given that the thresholds were one-way only without the proper permissions, and gods were not allowed to leave their assigned universe until they were either done with the assignment or screwed it up so badly that it needed a reset. Sadly, neither option was true, and yet for some reason there was a two-way connection maintained perfectly and without any instability whatsoever, though strangely enough, no one ever tried to use it. A handful of garbled messages came from within, but these were so few and far between that no one really paid much heed to them; it wasn’t until a second supervisor was finally found that the bureaucracy would be made aware of the true extent of their folly, when the divine vixen hooked the clipboard to her belt, touched the doorknob on the gateway, and promptly vanished from sight. Preliminary analysis revealed that her signature was still somewhere inside Sarla’s universe… but not much else. No one lifted a finger to help her, not the least of which because they knew that whatever was waiting for them on the other side of that door couldn’t possibly be good news. They would never know what the vixen saw, staring down at what was, unmistakably, the sum total of all the mass in the universe concentrated in one gargantuan mega-structure at the “center” of it all. They would never see billions of galaxies linked together with dark matter strands, kept from flying away from one another or collapsing into a singularity by way of technology too advanced for even the gods themselves to understand. They would not see the multiple layers of ringworlds wrapped around the globular structure, each one carrying sextillions of lives, each one possessed of more mass than most superclusters, each one but one level in a supra-structure that anyone with the correct theoretical background would recognize as a Matrioshka Brain… just one scaled up to several times the size one should be. A computational device, big enough to envelop the sum total of everything that existed, albeit with the benefit of the latter having been concentrated in about the same volume as a regular galaxy cluster; in the middle of it all, countless hyperlanes and literal physical tunnels constructed from exotic matter and maintaining a permanent warp tunnel between the biggest hubs in the universal community. They would not see the new race of proto-gods that the goddess Sarla had helped to ascend, the improved forms of millions of civilizations, made more perfect and glorious through direct exposure to the titaness. They would not see as the previously mortal souls were transformed into something different, a hybrid between regular lifeforms and the ones that inhabited the pantheon, yet somehow… better. Through the union of two soul forms they became a greater one, a third kind of state of being whose inherent potential was greater, perhaps, than even the gods themselves… though certainly not their creator. For while their universe might have been wrangled and brought to heel, its laws made to obey those who once obeyed them, there yet remained one entity that ruled above all others, one creature whose might and power was such that it made everything else pale in comparison, yet never wielded this power for anything other than the further exaltation of those that she governed over. At no point did she use this immense power to actually affect anything other than in any way her little ones asked; at no point did she impose her authority, despite being more than capable of doing so. At no point, in fact, did Sarla do anything that wouldn’t in some way further the advancement of her people, which in turn led to their adoration of her growing exponentially as the population steadily climbed and added digits onto itself, creating a self-sustaining process that led to the goddess herself transforming into… something else entirely. It was hard to pin down what she might be, given that the Zigzagoon was in no way anything or anyone normal anymore; she wasn’t a goddess like others were, not even remotely, not with the power she wielded and the immense wellspring of divine might that was her soul. Her girth, as well, the sheer magnitude of it was so inconceivable that it boggled the mind, enough so that the vixen supervisor actually tried to leave that instance of reality just to check if she’d gone in the right one, only to be stopped by the gravitational pull of Sarla… or, at least, the parts of her that were visible. It was incredibly difficult to “see” the goddess, on account of her apparently existing in multiple different dimensions at once, most of which didn’t even exist within that instance of reality, yet somehow had wormed their way in regardless. Dimensions which even other, top gods were wary to experiment with, given how easy it was to collapse entire universes if the variables were just on the wrong side of one specific line. Despite this, Sarla weaved them around and without herself with as much elegance as a dancer would leap and twirl across a stage, doing it so effortlessly that one might expect her to not even realize she was doing it at all. Hence, when the vixen looked towards her, they would at one time see the Zigzagoon in her “entirety”, then merely one layer of her body, then just a single nipple, then a singular eye, unblinking and covering the entire cosmic horizon, and everything in between and outside it, as long as their mind could formulate it. Sarla was a presence more than anything, a disembodied thing that happened to project a semi-physical avatar whose form was beyond that of even the highest of divinities, a presence whose imprint managed to swell the vixen goddess up so considerably that, by the time she realized what was happening, she was already star-sized… and quickly growing further to boot! There was no way to stop it (not that she wanted it), and before long the supervisor had been taken by a growth spurt so immensely overwhelming that she blanked out entirely; in the back of her head, she had the faintest notion of who was talking to her, the vaguest idea that there was someone there waiting to welcome her to this new existence, to a new level of deific perfection that had remained, up until then, the exclusive purview of They Who Sat Before, the mythical creator deity. Now though? Now there was Sarla… and she wanted to share. Now there was the Zigzagoon, and just as she had turned her universe into a perpetual paradise for those who lived within it, so too would she extend this blessing to the rest of the gods. It was only her second evaluation, and for that, the vixen could tell that the hyper-goddess was truly sorry; she should’ve done it sooner, should’ve found a way to elevate godkind beyond their own bounds without having wasted so much time. Hell, she was so embarrassed about it that it somehow turned around and ended with her realizing she hadn’t actually evolved yet, with a very flustered Zigzagoon bypassing the usual process and rushing into her final form as an Obstagoon while profusely apologizing for having ignored procedure, yet also promising that she’d done everything else to the best of her ability! She should’ve done a great many things, but she did do them, she promised! She did them, and she improved on them, and she upgraded them, and now everyone could be as happy as all her little ones were! All they had to do was go through a series of a googol-stacked procedures, and once they were done, they could all be just as happy as she was. As everyone was.

As everyone should be. Was that not the idea? Why was the vixen so scared? They were safe, there in her bosom; they just needed to sink in, and grow, and forget all about everything that wasn’t being happy and fulfilled, and fuzzy!

Sure, it took a while, but now they had eternity! And then another, and another, until all of multiversal reality shone like a bright star, with everyone at the center of it! No kings, no gods, no thrones. Just them. All of them.

Forever.