A Gamer's Guide 351

Your name is Desput XVIII, though you were born Desput Hertig Rular Kaisa Ceezer Head Xing Haverdoer. 

According to your father, Kaisa XXIV, this was in order to ensure that you would be able to pick a suitable royal title when you ascended, no matter the political state at the time. Even as a child, you thought this was picking stupid. You are 688 years old. If you were a filthy little snub-nose with satellite dishes for ears, you would have been 13 Earth-years. You hate that place though, so you would rather have your purple tissue bashed out of you by a warpan than admit that you knew how their ridiculous years worked. 

At this moment, you are watching said planet using your trusty throne. One of the pink flappers is watching a show wherein a pinker is killing evil little creatures that look just like the goblins in purgatory. You find it very fascinating. Did the god of multitudes know that humans thought goblins were like upright jvargs? If you had known that this were the case, you would never have attacked that stupid planet. What were you even thinking? Oh, that’s right—you were stupid enough to want servants that didn’t look like mud-grovelling tarrads. 

To think your father would have ever tried to handle them with diplomacy. Ridiculous! If you had been the God of Kings then, you would have done as Ceezer III Luvud did and attack before they could even pretend to want trade! 

Oh, hang on, the human is switching to something else. Damn it, and it was just getting good, too! You’ll have to make a note to send soldiers to his house next. Now, where did you put your geltube…?

“Mother!” you screech. “Bring me my writing tools or you’re FIRED!” And now that you take the time to think about it, you’ve run out of grapes, too. “And grapes!” you add. “More grapes!”

“Coming, My King!” your mother’s shrill voice replies. While she’s on the way, you might as well try to find something else to watch. Earth—or, as you like to call it, Mud—has a surplus of entertainment, a lot of it in a visual nature. You are not jealous of this fact, and as a matter of fact, you do not care. The pinkers can entertain themselves while they can, soon you will rule them! Mohahahaha— “Here you go, My King!”

“Argh!” you exclaim before gracefully tumbling off the throne, your visual feed cutting off. “Disease upon ye!” you shout at your mother. “How dare you surprise me? Jail! Jail!”

“Oh, no, I’m so sorry My King! I truly didn’t mean to. Please don’t send me to jail, I would be so very sad without you to attend to!” 

Your mother makes some convincing pleas. Perhaps she is worthy of mercy? After considering it for a second, you decide to—in your magnanimous graciousness—spare her. As you clamber back onto your throne, which is really way too big for you, you tell her, “Very well, mother. You may live!”

She goes down on her knees in front of you, bowing so deeply her long, slim nose pokes against the ground. “I thank you ever-so-deeply, My King!” Then, standing up again, she hands you a plate with grapes, holopad, and geltube. You take one look at it before slapping it out of her jade hands.

“Peasant!” you tell your witless mother. “This is the yellow geltube! I want the purple glittery one. How would future historians know that I wrote it unless it’s in my color? Do you want me to be forgotten?”

“No! I would never want My King to be forgotten—I cannot bear to imagine such a future.”

“Good. Now, go get me more grapes and the proper color geltube. And, before you go…” Grunting, you lean down over the right side of the throne to grab… No, wait, was it the left side? Switching to the other side, you lean over the edge and grab for the spire. It’s only barely out of your reach, but if you just stretched a little farther, then…

Your mother walks over, hunches down, and grabs it for you. Smiling, she holds out the spire to you. Beyonds its ornate handle, you see her eyes gleaming—a perfect, pupilless purple. “Th—thanks,” you mutter at her, taking the spire from her grasp. “Now, kneel.” She does. As lightly as you can, you touch the spire to her forehead. A number of webs and matrixes pop up, each one a piece of the divine framework you used to program how she should act. Most of your citizens were easy to program; you just had them repeat the last day over and over again, always eating the same things and doing the same things and saying the same things. It will eventually cause issues when they can no longer eat the same thing, but that doesn’t matter. You just had to collect a few more complete divinities and then you’d be golden and this nonsense could all end. Then, you would be known as the first and only lesser god to have more than a single divinity, and your citizens would forever praise your illustrious name: Desput XVIII, savior of Crown II!

For now, though, you have your hands full reprogramming your mother to stop being so… grovely. A few turns here, and one there, and…

“How dare you!” she shrieks, still kneeling, still unmoving. “How dare you! How dare you! How dare—”

You undo that last move. That was clearly not the right string to pull. In that case…

“Oh, My King, I love you, you’re the greatest—”

Not that. This was the worst. Would you ever learn how to do this properly? You were starting to have your doubts. But maybe if you…

Something tugged at the back of your mind. For a moment, the feeling of someone praying to you was so intrusive and unexpected that it made you shiver. But then the contents of the prayer made themselves known in the form of the divine web.

<Prayer received:

Desput could you please come

meet me I really need your advice>

You pause. Drawing yourself up, you feel a new sense of purpose arrive. Well, if he prays for your presence so sweetly, then it is only just that you answer that prayer, no?

Resetting all of the changes you made to your mother, you hop off your throne and go running towards your room. 

“My King?” your mother calls after you, but you decide not to deign her with an answer. Visiting your right-hand man would not take much time; you wouldn’t even be late to dinner. However, the weird time displacement also meant that whenever you chose to visit, you had to prepare for it and leave quickly, since time there moved right around 30 times as quickly as everywhere else. Another ridiculous experiment conducted by the god of curiosity. What a serf.

Well in your room, you’re greeted by a number of servants who all want to help you. “My most regal gown!” you order, and so it shall be. Working in perfect unison, they remove the purple payamas you were wearing previously, replacing them with the crown jewel of your outfit collection. The style is similar to the warrior uniforms worn by the god of kings’ from the fifteenth millenia, with small alterations here and there. For one, you wear it in purple. Always purple. The outfit is perfectly designed to go into war wearing, with puffy shorts, puffy shoulder pads, and a frilly neck-guard. Then, white stockings to highlight your handsome legs (you have the best legs) and white gloves that reach the shoulder to match. You are, at this moment, the very height of fashion. If you hadn’t been in such a rush, you would have done a brief reprogramming of all your citizens to make them clap for how handsome you are. 

To finalize the outfit, you put on a pair of sleek lilac shoes, and all the jewelry you can fit before time runs out. You’re not vain though, so you skip the tiara one of the servants is offering you.

All changed, you rush back out into the hallway of the castle, not bothering to listen to the preprogrammed flattery and applause. There are few things you love more than the clinking and jingling of jewelry. 

Once you’re back in your throne room, you throw yourself back onto your throne. Your mother doesn’t have time to return to her previous line of thought before you activate it, specifying your transmovement to the one and only church you currently have. 

With a few button presses and a little nose-wax, you’re sent off. 

You appear floating in the air above your right-hand man, in a position which scientists spent one and a half millennia perfecting for the use of the god of kings. The room is dark, but you can still see him perfectly thanks to the light reflected by the planet's many satellites.

Lett does not appear impressed. 

“Well?” you ask him. “Your God has arrived. Aren’t you going to praise me?”

“No,” Lett says. “And I still don’t like that you’re…”

“I meant to tell you,” you lie, “but I just couldn’t! What happened last time was a mistake, I swear. Back then, I thought you were going to turn against me!”

It almost looks as though he’s going to complain about this whole thing again, but luckily for you, he stops himself. Instead, he turns to look out the window. Once again, the garden has changed a lot since you were here last. Where’s the fun in flying around over a mowed lawn? The whole thing was ridiculous. “It’s been an hour since I prayed,” Lett grumbles. “You said you’d come as soon as I called.”

“I did!” you say. “Ugh, I told you the time dilation thing is super weird.”

He shushes you. “Don’t shout.”

He shushed you. You! Wow. Wow. Crossing your arms and legs, you let yourself flip around until you’re hanging upside down above his head. “You’re top lucky I like you. If one of my serfs had said that, I’d explode him!”

Still not looking at you, his fingers gingerly caressing the crystal grapes you gave him, Lett mutters, “I still don’t understand that.”

Neither do you. But you don’t want to question your friendship with your only friend, so you pretend not to have heard it. “Well,” you say, “it’s been… What, a week or something? For you, that is. For me, our last flight was, like… Half a day ago. Half a day since I came clean. With the way you shrugged me off, I really thought this was going to last longer. Did you get a sudden change of heart by remembering all the good times?” You grin at him, because you read in a brief that friends tease each other. 

Lett turns to look at you. For some reason, his eyes are reddish. You try to recall what kinds of physiological stressors might cause this, but come up with a blank. “I’ll do it.”

“Do what?” you ask, because you’ve completely forgotten what the two of you discussed only earlier that day. 

He wipes at his eyes—another incomprehensible movement—and looks up at you, his gaze as fierce as the royal war paintings at home. “I’ll become your apostle.”

You forget to float for a second and almost drop down on top of him, catching yourself barely in time to flip right-side up. “Wait, seriously?” You float close enough to almost poke him with your proud nose. “For realsies?!”

Sitting in bed, it is with difficulty that he’s able to keep your nose out of his face, pressing himself into the headboard. “Keep it down, Desput. Someone will hear you.”

“Oh, you mean—?” The most annoying face you can imagine pops into your head. Stupid friffman. First he separated you and your friend, and now he came back just in time to try to do it again? If only Lett hadn’t liked him, then…! You clench your gloved hand. “Jan-Erik…!”

Lett seems to want to correct you, but eventually decides against it. 

Suspicion rears in your chest. “Didn’t you tell me you were going to go travel with him when he finished the garden?”

Showing no respect to the god in the room, Lett’s face falls to his covers. “Yeah,” he says, his voice wavering oddly. “I did. But… The plan has changed.”

“I knew it. I knew that scheming coward would refuse you! Everyone has, now! First your father, and then this whole childplace, and now—”

“He couldn’t even say it to my face,” Lett continues, blasphemously interrupting you. “He sent aunt Gyrdle to do it.” Pale, gleaming drops of liquid fall from his eyes. Another weird goblin trait. 

“Coward,” you hiss. “Muddy stinking coward.”

“Yeah,” Lett replies, removing the eye-liquid with his blanket. “That’s why I want to go now. Take me away from here. I wish to see no more of this church, nor this world.”

You pause. “That’s a pretty big request,” you mutter at him. Hypothetically, you decide to run the numbers in your head. A proper apostle acting in his name would need a minimum of §0,01, which Lett’s body is clearly not capable of adapting to. Instead, you would need to give him a certain amount of shards, enough to keep him from turning too quick and thus becoming a herald, but still enough to make the ascent speedy… Not to mention your current budget which was strained already… “Um… Best I can do is, like… Three months in your time.”

“Three months?”

“Yeah. However, by that point, you’ll be totally super powerful! Heck, you’ll have as much divinity as any of these so-called multitude gods—heh, more like multirude gods, am I right?” Lett does not laugh. But you did not want him for a sycophant, so you decide to be okay with it. Totally okay. “And, and…” He isn’t looking very interested. As a matter of fact, he seems less and less excited about becoming your true right-hand-man by the second. Desperate, you begin rummaging through your mind—didn’t you come up with a gift for him to convince him to do the apostle thing earlier to day? Yeah! That’s exactly what’ll win him over, no sweat! “And,” you say theatrically, “I’ll get you a mount. Heh, it was going to be a surprise, but now that you’re going along with it, I think it’s about time you got it. Though, it’ll take some time to get here, and I also need some time to prepare it. But! But! Once you get it, I promise you’ll be all over it and under it! It’ll be so macking umami. When you see this thing I’ve prepared, you’ll be all ready to leave everything and everyone else behind, no snot!”

Lett’s hollow eyes stare at you, as empty as if you had poured an ocean into them. “Will it really?” he asks. 

“Doy-oy!” you say. “Obviously! The god of kings does not disappoint. Especially not when it comes to my friend!”

“Okay,” Lett says. “When will I get it?”

“When? Umm, I’d say…” You make the mental calculation. “About a month, I guess? For you, that is. For me, it’ll only be tomorrow. Haha! This is going to be grand, Lett! I’m so gorged you decided to agree to it. Now we’ll be able to fly around always and always! No more leg-less bed-stuck Lett, no, now you can fly as much as you want. And magic? Magic galore! These famished multitude gods could only give you a fraction of the kind of magic power I can grant. This is going to be awesome!”

“Okay,” Lett says. “Then… What must I do?”

“What must you…?” You feel a grin bubbling up to your lips. Finally! You were beginning to think he didn’t really want to be your friend. But this makes everything much simpler. Floating closer to him, you take the crystal grapes from within his hands. They make such a lovely sound when then clack together, click-clack, click-clack. “All you have to do,” you say, “is open wide. Will you do that for me, Lett?”

He looks up at you, cheeks sunken and eyes empty. “Okay.”

His mouth opens. You feed him the grapes.

Once he’s been fed, all you have to do is complete the ritual. In the hundreds of millennia the god of kings have spent ruling Throne II, the ritual has always been the same. Whether it be to consecrate a church, appoint a new pope, or choose the next god of kings. Slinging your arms around Lett’s neck, you press your lips against his, sealing the friendship and oath with a kiss. Now, should either of you break it, it will be a matter of divine recourse. 

“Thank you,” you tell him—shameful words you would never even speak to your mother, “for becoming mine.”

He stares back at you blankly. “Okay.”

Now, all that’s left is to grant him his little gift. How hard can it be?

The mere thought makes you smile.