Immortal Impatience

Once you were merely a god amongst a pantheon, squabbling with your innumerable and equally immortal equals over how the world should be shaped year after year. Empowered by the worship of lesser beings, you fought for their attentions with blessings and destructive wrath alike, hoping to win their prayers and sacrifices for your name over that of your siblings. You were very good at doing so. Too good, in fact. From what you can only surmise to be the jealousy of your peers, they banded together to bring you low and cast you out of their halls of godhood. Though you yourself could never be destroyed, your temples and idols could. Chained in the deepest dungeon that they could reach, they locked you away from your followers and annihilated every vestige of you from the world while you languished in your impenetrable prison. You could feel the power fade away as your people ceased their once bountiful worship, your many-layered shackles serving as your only anchor to life in the perfect silence and darkness of your cell.

Years passed. Left alone with only your mind and memories for comfort, you cannot even try to guess how many. You would spend weeks doing nothing but screaming or months rending your flesh against the chains, but most of your time was spent in silent introspection. You fashioned a model of the world in your head and pictured the revenge you would inflict on those who had wronged you countless times. Eventually, even this was not enough. The once intricate scenarios became fevered dreams, some lacking sense and others lacking even sensible form. In your diminished divinity, you questioned numerous times whether you were going mad. Perhaps you already had.

It was in the midst of one of these fits that you first felt the divine chains that could show no fault begin to weaken. As a result, it took long hours - perhaps days - before you tested your strength against them, only to find the material that should have been imbued with the divine power of all of your rivals was mere metal. You cannot say how long it took to free yourself from the confines of the planar cell, but time no longer held quite the same meaning for you. Through the aether you flew back to the world in which you were once worshipped, feeling the pull of your shattered temples like a siren's call that drew you ever forward. In what seemed like an instant of flight, you had returned.

The world, however, was different. You knew already that your temples would be no more, but worse still there was no sign of your people at all. Whether they had been wiped out, moved on, or simply evolved into an unrecognizable form, you could not sense a single shred of those who had once been devoted to your divine form. Stranger still, the powers of those who had once bound you was also missing. You will need to find out what sort of powers there are in this at once familiar and alien place, but whether you will find the opportunity for revenge for your unjust usurpation or new rival deities to overcome, one fact remains the same - you must first gather worship by convincing some of the native creatures to place their faith in you with what little divine power you have.

Will you create a signal to draw any potential worshippers to you, or seek out a favored people or nation to bless? If the former, what dreams or messages will you use? If the latter, what people will you seek to become your first new followers?

Walk up to the first mortal you see and demand that they worship you.

Walk up to the first mortal you see and demand that they worship you.

Numerous mortals inhabit the overgrown ruins of your temple. Most of them are very small, and none seem capable of speech. You elect to pass over those scurrying about belowground for now, though you can sense their diminutive lives in the rocky soil, and turn towards what you hope to be worthier followers. The first living creature that catches your eye is a small, feathered thing. Smaller in size than the handspan of your former worshippers, it flutters with an energy that creatures of your time lacked. Rather than merely gliding on the winds, it is capable of holding itself aloft as it darts from flower to flower in search of food.

Though small and almost entirely bereft of the rich thoughts that you seek, you decide that its industriousness makes it a fitting first follower. With a booming voice that echoes with the power incarnate which defines your godly form, you demand its obedience in a tone that brooks no opposition. It doesn't seem to understand you and flies away. Perhaps you should find a more intelligent life form.

find a more intelligent life form

Fuck it just teach these creatures your ways. Maybe earn worship by doing these guys some good

> Well then, time to create a signal. One of interest to all who would be the best for your follower. A signal of... 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffets.

find a more intelligent life form

Spreading a dozen wings of various forms, you surge into the sky. Wrapping the clouds into a robe around yourself, you disguise your flying form and peer down upon the land. It seems that there are cleverer creatures about, but they are not the ones that you remember at all. Though still bipedal and capable of wielding tools, they look nothing like the hairy creatures that gave you sacrifice.

These creatures all bear large, feathered wings, easily double the span of their height. The forested ruins of your temple seems to have been largely ignored by them in favor of the cliffside of the plateau on which the forest rests. There, they have constructed a many levelled city, with numerous balconies jutting out from the cliff face to serve as the entrances of homes, storefronts, and offices. It is a bright and colorful settlement, with numerous colored lamps of burning oils that shine even in daylight to advertise the shops and businesses which they are placed in front of. You can assume that more such lanterns light the walls of the caves themselves, allowing them to be deep and expansive should they desire such space, though their exact size can only be guessed.

From what few children you can see flying up about the city, they appear to have a stable rather than an expanding population. Two or three of the smaller winged humanoids which you presume to be children follow an adult. It is unclear from this distance whether the parent guarding the children is typically of a particular sex or if they are even necessarily following a parent, but your presuppositions based on the races that you remember suggest that this is the case, which would imply small family units.

Rather than the tablets of stone and clay which you recall, these people seem to prefer using something which you at first took to be parchment, but later surmised to be too thin for even skin. This material seems to be ubiquitous, as pieces of it are given out frequently as advertisements to passers by and great piles of it litter the base of the cliff as the discarded sheets are blown about and frequently swept off the balconies on which they settle. If nothing else, this appears to be a literate people - far more so than any that you can remember.

For all of their apparent widespread education, however, there is little that is astonishing about their technology. It is more advanced than you can recall, of course, but given the eons that must have passed since your departure from the world, the weaponry that they wield is all too familiar for your liking. What few guards they have appear to be bedecked in cloth armor of all things, and they wield spears that are barely more advanced than the kind that have been long in use even when you still were worshipped. The only sign of craft of the limited military that you can see are the extravagant designs of the uniforms and the fact their spears are almost entirely metal.

The uniforms are matching in design, but vary widely in color depending on where the presumed guards stand. The highest level of the city wear a bright red, whereas those lowest to the ground wear purple, and a veritable rainbow can be seen between the different levels, with orange and yellow placed above green which are placed above blue. The metals that make up the various buttons and buckles on the uniform vary as well, though this variance appears to be scattered and nearly random. The fact that metals of a kind all cluster together, with gold standing with gold and never found near silver, suggests that either factions exist or that otherwise identically equipped watchmen have been given different purposes.

The fact that this is a tiered society also becomes evident as you look more closely at the levels that the color spectrum of uniforms make clear. The balconies on the higher levels appear to be wider and the lamps outside them more extravagant than those of the levels below. They are naturally also more easily kept clean, as garbage quite literally makes its way downhill, and the blue and violet levels are far more frequently left unclean. Whether this is a caste system assigned at birth or a pseudomeritocracy is not clear from your vantage point.

This civilization's presence at the top of the plateau is limited to a few watchtowers manned by stark crimson garbed guards with elegant looking telescopes and a handful of lumber camps which roll their logs over to the cliff face to be lowered down to factories on the green level which bring the wood inside of a massive cavern for some sort of processing which you cannot clearly see. Most likely this is to feed the city's addiction to paper, as the wood is not widely used in construction that is externally visible.

The area immediately at the base of the cliff appears to be an artificial stream which exists largely to carry away garbage through its carved passage and is fed by a number of small waterfalls which have been carved out from the lower-west corner of the city. It eventually feeds into a natural river, which presumably bears the detritus out to sea.

While the city itself may be vertical, it is fed by the flatlands below it. If there was forest at the base of the cliff, it has long since been cleared away. Spreading out for miles directly away from the city is a vast swath of farmland, irrigated in part by channels running from the river and, closer to the city, by rivulets running from the artificial channel. Though far more sparsely populated than the caves of the city, the flying farmer folk seem to be gathered in either single larger families or a set of several families with a nearly matching ratio of children and adults. This matches your earlier prediction of their stable reproduction rate, which bodes poorly for this people's prospects of growth and expansion should you wish to use them for conquest.

There is some transfer between the farmers and the cityfolk aside from the wagons of produce being brought to the base of the cliff to be lifted up to balconies at every level of the city and manufactured goods being lowered to the ground, but less than would be expected of a truly integrated society. Though you cannot see a physical difference between the ground dwellers and the cliff dwellers aside from the lack of colorfully garbed guards, not many of the farmers fly up into the city and fewer still fly down from the city into the rural lands below them.

All in all, they appear to be a stratified people, who while largely educated are pitifully armed and limited in their ability to sacrifice by their seemingly static population. You suspect that their widespread literacy can lead to them having a larger than average number of mages given the knowledge required for the use of magic, but you see little in the ways of ostentatious displays of magic power, especially given that you cannot see precisely how their factories and elevators function. Similarly, you cannot see any signs of their religion and while their thoughts are warm and varied, you cannot sense the presence of a rival divinity among them. While it may be difficult to win their worship, you at least should not have any other true gods to compete with.

Given what you now know of the locals, you can try to investigate them further, make an immediate bid to earn their worship, or move on and try to find a more suitable people to indoctrinate to your cause. There are sure to be other civilizations scattered about the world and there is no rush to try to use these creatures to be your followers given the lack of a rival deity, but travelling too far or too quickly could lead to your being discovered by another divinity.

Walk among the mortals and become a historian

> Learn more about them.

I say we gain their worship immediately. Given their rainbow coding system, we ought to appear before them in a shroud of infrared light and heat, maybe supplemented by some regular flames, placing us above all of them in the color spectrum and as an added bonus probably cooking any that get too close.

Raise a temple to yourself that towers above the top layer, and then go make yourself at home in it. I'm sure the mortals will come to check out what's going on at some point after we do this.

curse them with colorblindness

Given that you are about to incarnate yourself visibly on the world for your first sentients, what should you call yourself? Your divine name is, of course, unknowable and unspeakable in mortal tongues, but you should still give the mortals some way to identify you if they are to become your people.

Tholo, The Blood Wonder Pup

The Forgotten

Tholo Greg The Forgotten Blood Wonder Pup

Thololololo, lolo, lo, lo