Petty Squabble [ROUND 3] [Goldhenge]

Alison might've liked the look of what the acid had done to her outfit if she hadn't been quite so preoccupied by the voice of what was apparently an evil god.

"Eeevil," Song agreed. "Evil is his one and only name."

NOW, THAT'S HARDLY FAIR

CAN'T HAVE YOU TELLING THIS YOUNG LADY SUCH UNTRUTHS, CAN WE?

"Eeevil," Song repeated. When he started on the next line, though, he only got as far as "In his mind" before his voice just... dissolved. The backing music went as well, just fading into static, and after a moment of struggling, Song just collapsed into a heap.

EVIL IS SUCH A LOADED WORD

I MEAN, SURE, MY END GOAL IS KIND OF MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE WITH YOUR CONTINUED EXISTENCE

BUT THERE'S NOTHING MALICIOUS IN IT

"Nothing malicious?!", Fertility shouted. "How is wanting to end all life not malicious?!"

IT'S NOTHING PERSONAL, REALLY

YOU JUST KEEP TAKING PERFECTLY DISORGANIZED MATTER AND ARRANGING IT ALL ORDERLY

Fertility shouted something back, and the two of them kept up arguing about the semantics of morality while the rest of the small crowd that had been packed into the RV stopped paying attention to the argument and turned instead to the situation at hand.

The main chamber of Dice's temple was... really rather overdone. Don't get me wrong, there were lots of extravagant temples in the city, but Dice had gone and taken a step further than most others.

The chamber was, for those for whom this particular analogy is useful, a little longer than a football field and approximately as wide. The roof stretched up such a distance that the columns standing a bit out from the walls on all sides towered very impressively, and the details on the roof were difficult to make out clearly.

That's not to say they were hard to guess. Everything else in the chamber was done up in a green-and-white dice theme, tiles with between one and six pips on them covering practically every surface. Even the rather unconfortable-looking throne at the distant end of the room looked like it was meant to be made of stacked dice. The columns around the room? Square. You can guess how they were decorated.

Originally, the place must have shone. Every surface there would probably look magnificent, gleaming like so many emeralds. As it was, though... not so much. Mosses and lichens were growing on the walls and columns, and the floor's smooth surface had worn away in places, no doubt thanks to the acid dripping in through holes in the ceiling. The worn spots on the floor, for obvious reasons, tended to grow once they'd gotten started, and now there were a number of large pools of acid scattered around. In addition, there were a rather large number of holes in the walls and floor. Apparently it was common practice for people to simply make their own entrances and exits, much as the Broderburg's RV had.

All in all, as it was... it actually seemed to suit Dice rather well. The pristine, orderly temple of old, worn down and eaten away by the ravages of time. Entropy.

---

In Chess' inner temple, pieces were whirling. Nancy stopped just inside the door and looked around, trying to work out what she was looking at.

The priestess who'd been guiding her stopped as well, but rather than pay attention to the demonstration of her goddess' thoughts, she simply reported, "Messenger is contacting your equivalent in the other Pantheon to make the offer. The endgame-"

THE ENDGAME IS ALREADY UPON US

She blinked.

PIECES ARE ALREADY MOVING INTO PLACE

Slowly, the pieces on the board came to a stop. A few were still shifting, gradually, between spaces, but the rest had settled into their final positions.

DICE IS NEARING HIS CHANCE FOR CHECK AND MATE

THERE IS BUT ONE MOVE LEFT TO MAKE

The priestess bowed her head. "I am yours to command."

NO

NANCY LITTLE MUST BE MOVED

Nancy looked up from the various pieces with a start. "Me?"

YOU, NANCY LITTLE

YOU MUST GO TO DICE'S TEMPLE, AND QUICKLY

Nancy nodded. The move didn't exactly make much sense to her, but this was the goddess of chess. Whatever she was setting up had to make some sort of sense.

"Where's is it?", Nancy asked.

SOMETHING WILL DESCEND

YOU MUST GO WHERE IT GOES

Kind of vague, but she could live with it. "Alright," she said. "I'll scoot. What do I do when I'm there?"

A PROMISE WAS MADE TO YOU

Nancy sighed. "Make sure she isn’t harmed," she told the priestess. The priestess nodded, took Alison by the hand and led her down a hallway.

ALISON BRODERBURG IS NOT TO BE HARMED

"What does that have to do with me going to this temple?"

I ACT BY MOVING PIECES

IN MOVING YOU, I PROTECT HER

"...You're using me to pay off a promise you made to me in the first place?"

DEBTS MUST BE OBSERVED

THAT IS A FUNDAMENTAL RULE OF THE GAME

HOW THEY ARE PAID OFF IS IRRELEVANT

"Alright," Nancy sighed. "As long as she's kept safe, I suppose I'm happy."

GOOD

NOW GO

TIME IS SHORT

AND MATE IS RAPIDLY APPROACHING

With a nod, she headed for the door, and as she left, her piece on the board started to slide. The game moved one turn closer to its end.

---

Tlaloc and Yaretzi weaved their way through the busy street, she pulling him along along by the hand and he doing his best to keep up. He didn't have the slightest idea where she was going; all he knew was that they were spending the day together, and that was all that really mattered. He'd go anywhere with her, and she wanted nothing more than to go places with him. They were each other's worlds, in that late-adolescence sort of way, and their two families were already used to the idea of becoming a single extended family one of these days.

The couple wasn't focused on that, though. For now, their only concern was being with one another, and everything else could wait a while.

Yaretzi didn't know where the door led when she opened it; all she knew was that it moved when she pushed it and that it opened into somewhere dim and cool. The streets were warm and busy and they'd worked up a sweat running, so somewhere quiet to relax for a bit was just perfect.

She led him inside, and with their eyes still adjusted for the light outside, they couldn't discern much about where they were. Reaching out, Yaretzi felt a wall to one side. A moment later, she felt one on the other side as well. No wall straight ahead, though; a hall, at a guess, and as soon as she'd worked it out, they were off once more. Where they were off to neither knew, but it was dark and cool and they were together, so all was well.

Well, not all. There was one little matter that was less than well.

As the couple moved deeper into the building, voices began to echo around them, a conversation carried from elsewhere in the building.

"...don't know that there's anything left to be said," someone was saying. "It's one of those fundamental ideological differences that always tends to make mortal enemies, and I don't see this one being resolved any time soon."

There was a second voice. "Until I succeed, I'm still technically here to maintain the day-to-day, and that includes my bimonthly reports. Which you're required to sit through." He was trying to be businesslike, by the sounds of it, but the smirk in his words were plain. He was the sort to work the letter of the law, plainly, and to enjoy every pleasure he could weasel out of it. "For up to four hours."

The first speaker sighed. "Alright, fine, let's get this over with. What's been going on lately?"

There was a brief pause, and Tlaloc and Yaretzi could just hear the slimy grin spreading even further on the second speaker's face. (Incidentally, they could also tell that maybe this wasn't something to be eavesdropped upon, but neither was about to admit to being lost, so they didn't have someone to decisively lead the way out.)

"Well, two nights ago, there were complaints of an out-of-hand gathering in the eastern side of town. A great many drank of the truth of life, and the rowdiness was audible from across the city."

The second speaker chuckled. "Yeah, I remember that. Heck of a night."

"At this revel, one of the main strains of conversation was on the subject of peoples' duties. Blacksmiths complained boistrously about the unyielding demand for nails, the marshalls (who, incidentally, ought to have been citing the event for noise disturbance) decried the rise of crime, and, most notably, a certain deity went on at great length about the hassle of reigning over the population."

There was a near-audible eye-roll. "You know how much the day-to-day stuff bores me, come on."

"True, true. The important thing, however, is your particular phrasing." Yaretzi decided that, damn the darkness, they'd just pick a direction and leave. The first speaker's tone was getting colder and colder by the second.

"You said," the second voice continued, putting exacting emphasis on the words, "and I quote, 'I'd be way happier if I didn't have any subjects at all.'"

The door Yaretzi picked was the wrong one. It swung into a smallish room, and she entered just in time to see realization sweep across Dice's face.

Management grinned even more. Standing behind a big, dark slab of stone, he pulled an extravagantly-carved knife out of a pocket. "That's right. I'm going to stop this now, put an end to your control, and eliminate the damned deficit in one stroke. Are you ready, Dice? I'm about to make you very, very happy."

The door slammed as Yaretzi ran, Tlaloc in tow, but Dice couldn't run. His thoughts just ran in circles, searching for a way to prevent Management from doing him what amounted to thousands, millions, of favours.

He couldn't find one.

With a thrust and an incantation, Management slammed the dagger down into the slab.

And then, Dice didn't have any subjects at all.

Just debt.

---

"There," Carnea said, "it's done."

John bowed slightly. "Thanks for the help."

Carnea chuckled at him. "Remember, you are in my debt. This is not something I'll forget."

"Of course," he replied, already heading down the stairs that the unlocked doors had revealed. "I'll see to it that you are repaid just as soon as I get the chance."

"See that you do," the goddess said, raising her voice a bit to make sure he heard. He'd been going down the stairs very quickly.

"You got it!" He was already a ways down. The words echoed off the walls, and soon the sound of his steps faded out completely.

With a fresh debt under her belt, Carnea headed off. That was one person, at least, who was going to have to take her seriously.

---

"So," Tom said, not really sure what there was for him and his family to do, "what exactly can we do about this whole situation?"

"Well, there isn't much Ms. Obligatory Sex Goddess Representing an Ultimately Misogynist and Regressive Romantic Ideal or I can really do here," Name replied. "Just look at Manifestation of Cultural Impacts on Situations. This is the center of Manifestation of Entropy and the Chaos that Implies' power, so we're likely even less powerful than you right now."

Tom frowned. "Okay. So how about we get into the RV and see if it whatever Management did to it still works?"

Name shook his head. "Even if it can still fly, even a tiny bit of entropy in an engine could cause a fairly serious explosion. Flying out of here's just a good way to commit suicide."

"Well, I'm sure we'll think of something," Clarice said. She had her children all together, and she was content to just sit tight for a bit until an option presented itself.

---

"Blast it, Archibald, this is no time to run off!"

Sir Archibald had, for whatever reason, not responded well to whoever-that-was-back-there shouting at them in capital letters. He'd said something about an "UNAUTHORIZED ANNOUNCER". Apparently that meant "BROADCAST FORMAT VIOLATED, RECTIFICATION NECESSARY", which, as it turns out, roughly translated to "boy I guess I should run off and try to find something in the maze of hallways around the temple".

In the end, as loath as Parsley was to leave the family behind, someone had to tend to the knight, who'd clearly gone even further around the bend than before.

---

As a trio of interns rushed out of the room, each loaded with several reams of legalese-coated paper, Eva Nguyen (Actual Diplomat) leaned back in her seat and sighed. She needed a break. Much of the rest of the Council was out just at the moment; a motion had passed that they would use the few minutes while Envoy was flying to and from the eye of the acid-storm to grab some food, and Eva had been picked to head the skeleton crew assigned to hold the fort.

"Right," she said, yawning, "how long until Envoy makes it back to the ground?"

"Two minutes," a tech replied.

"Good. I move-" A burst of static cut the person off. Eva sighed. Couldn't things take a break from happening for just a few minutes?

"Hello, COFCA, do you read me?"

"Someone's hijacked the audio feed," the tech stated.

"Yes, thanks, I figured that out." Reluctantly, Eva stood back up. "Hello, Mr. Smith. I imagine this is you 'calling us back in a bit,' is it?"

"Not just at the moment, actually! I mean, if you have thought about it, that's excellent, but right now, this is more of a temporary offer. There's a thing that a big robot would be extremely useful for, and you're the only ones I can think of that happen to have one in the area."

A few people wandered back into the room bearing some sort of kebab. Eva gestured for them to shush.

"And you want us to just divert from our current plan-" (which amounted to "fly back to the ground" and not much else, but Smith didn't need to know that) "-in order to do a favour for you?"

"Well," John replied, "when you put it like that, it does sound like a bit of a weak negotiating position. Thing is, you wouldn't exactly be doing it for me. Wouldn't it be nice to have the local reigning deity owe you one?"

Eva raised an eyebrow.

--

"Okay," Tom said, standing up sharply in an attempt to trick his brain into being more decisive, "what is it that Dice is most likely to do?"

"Well," Name replied, "he's likely aiming to use what power he's currently gained to get back to where he was before. Probably he'll try to pull off a sacrifice that's big enough to pay back the debt that got him chained in the first place."

"How big was that?", Alison asked, doing her best to be helpful.

"I'd need to consult The Ascended Entity Responsible for Maintaining Records of Debts Accrued and Fulfilled for a precise amount, but since the marginal value of a sacrifice drops after the first thousand or so, a few individuals either way won't make a different."

"I'm sorry," Clarice responded, "the first thousand? Are you saying that Dice intends to balance out more than a thousand sacrifices with what he's got on hand?"

"I can only assume so," Name said. "Management sacrificed the lives of almost the entire population in order to get the upper hand over Dice, so Dice presumably has a similarly valuable sacrifice to make."

"And what could he have to sacrifice that could possibly outweigh the sacrifice of an entire culture?"

Name blinked at her. "Well, you, of course."

---

It hadn’t been long before Nancy spotted the object falling from the sky, and though she couldn’t make out what it was at a distance, she could tell whereabouts it was coming down towards. She set out at a decent clip, and she was just getting to the point where she was close enough to need a more detailed indication of where to go when the object- Envoy, as it turned out- shot out of a nearby temple, flying skywards once more and giving Nancy a fairly good idea of where she was meant to go.

Soon, she was reaching the bottom of a long set of stairs, and the doors at the bottom swung open easily, letting her into a room that didn’t really reflect the building outside at all.

It was a small, low-ceilinged place, no ornamental carvings or fancy statues anywhere in sight. The only source of light was the dark green glow emanating from the black, coffin-sized slab of stone that took up a good chunk of the room. Runes flickered across its surface, appearing and disappearing, incomprehensible.

Aside from the slab, the only other thing of any note in the place was John Smith, moving around and haphazardly attaching little metal discs to the wall. He didn’t really seem to notice Nancy- his focus was pretty much entirely on getting the discs put up around the room.

After waiting a bit, Nancy dove into conversation. "Um. Hello?"

"Yes?", John responded, not taking his focus off what he was doing.

"What-"

"Teleporters!", he supplied, apparently very eager to tell someone just how brilliant his plan was. "I had COFCA stash the components for a transporter array in the time capsule their robot found, and now I’m setting them up to turn this room into one big teleport chamber!"

"I’m afraid I don’t follow," Nancy replied.

"In order for the Council to be able to stash things for themselves to find later, they have to not know about the thing already existing. What they’ve done is given the robot a suit, so they can sew things into the lining someplace they don’t think there is anything, then have the robot take things out, avoiding a paradoxical loop. In this case, they made a note to include some nice, compact teleportation technology, and these little nodes are small enough to conceal. Once they’re all set up, they can be used in the same way a full teleportation chamber would."

She shook her head. "Still not making sense."

John affixed the last node on the wall, then frowned at her. "What’s not to get?"

"...'Teleportation'?"

"Oh. Right." With a bit of a sigh, John leaned against the edge of the big slab. "Basically, what a teleporter does is take everything that's in one place, then instantly move it to another point, no travel involved. Just, one second, here, the next second, there."

"What, just like that?"

John grinned like it was his own idea. "Precisely!"

Nancy looked back at the door, apparently giving serious thought going back out through it. "So, whereabouts are you going to be going?"

In response, he pointed straight upwards.

She responded with the "I don't understand that either and you damn well know it, so cut the crap and explain yourself like a normal person" expression that she was quickly getting used to using.

He grimaced. "Dice's temple. It's way up in the sky."

Nancy's eyebrows went up. "You're going up to Dice's temple?"

"That's the plan. Now that the teleporter nodes are set, all that's left to do is wait."

"And everything in the room's going to get shuffled on up there, you said?"

"Mm-hm." (John, terrible at just waiting, had already started poking at something on his sleeve and staring intently at it.)

Settling in to wait, Nancy leaned back against the wall. "Well, that suits me just fine."

John just grunted something and kept poking at his sleeve.

"Good," Nancy responded, making it quite clear that she was content to lean against the wall and not talk.

After a minute or so of continuing to be okay with it, she demonstrated just how okay with it she was by asking, "So what is it you're doing, anyway?"

"Hmm?"

"With your sleeve there, I mean."

"Oh, I'm trying to convince Base here that he should share his records with me."

Nancy looked around sharply, wondering just where this creep Base was and why he was hiding, and she was plainly about to ask a question to that effect when John just cut her off and explained anyway.

"This big slab here is Base, a local god. He used to be just an enchanted slab of rock, but the more and more data the other gods wrote on him, the more and more power he was imbued with. Eventually, anything with enough power becomes sentient, and being the definitive storage space for all debts between gods imbues a hell of a lot of power."

"Wait, so-"

"Let me finish. These days, Base is one of the more powerful gods. He doesn't exactly do much with his power, and he's content to just sit in his basement and monitor the other gods' transactions."

"And... you're talking to him with your sleeve?"

John sighed. She could grasp the concept of gods storing records of their debts in a slab of rock turning it into a god itself, but somehow he didn't think he'd be able to explain computers to her in the time he had available. "It's, uh... It's like a fancy telephone you can type into."

"Oh," Nancy replied, gesturing a bit with her typewriter, "sort of like this, then?"

John glanced at what she was indicating, thought about it for a moment, then said, "Sort of, yeah. Like one of those, only it sends the words directly to Base instead of sticking them on paper."

"Ahh, okay. So what's he saying?"

John turned his attention back to the screen on his sleeve. "He's just complaining because I'm from out of town and we do things a bit differently back home."

"What, regular folks can't have debts?"

"Well, sure," John replied, "but they're not exactly significant on the same scale as gods' debts. Now, seeing as I'm not regular folks, and I've already made several deific bargains, I should-"

It was Nancy's turn to interrupt. "Hold up, you're what now?"

John shook his head and sighed again. This was going to take a bit of explaining.

---

"Me?!"

"Not just you," Name clarified helpfully, "your family. You, your husband, your children..."

Clarice's voice dripped venom. "My family? He wants to sacrifice my family?" Emma began to stir at her tone, so she handed the child off to her husband before starting to stalk closer to the god.

"I can only assume so," Name continued, unperturbed by the woman bearing down on him with daggers in her eyes. "It would more than balance the scales to sacrifice a family such as yours, especially your d-"

An inky-black fist slammed into his jaw, sending him thudding to the floor like dead weight.

"Especially during the eclipse," Dice kindly provided, dusting off his knuckles and looking all too pleased with his entrance.

Everyone stared at him, including Fertility, who'd been mid-sentence in her shouted argument with the ceiling, and Clarice, who'd been rather hoping to take that shot herself.

"Don't try to get back up," he advised the god on the floor. "I'm going to be busy, and I'll be rather impatient if I have to deal with you further."

Shockingly, Name didn't respond.

Dice grinned down at him for a moment, then turned to the Broderburgs. "Now, the last of the supplies are nearly here, so we'll be able to begin shortly. I think starting with the first-born child would be best, don't you?"

"Stay away from her," Clarice snapped, doing her best impression of a wall between her children and Dice.

"Oh, please. First off, I'm a deity, there's not a whole lot you can really hope to do with your mortal little body. And secondly, well..." He pointed at something behind her, back towards where the RV had entered the temple. Everyone turned to look.

As soon as everyone was watching, nothing of note happened. A bit confused, Clarice turned to look at Dice. The god just held up a "just a sec" finger and nodded back towards the entrance. As it happened, though, Envoy had managed to pick the few seconds when Clarice was looking away from the entryway to make his big, dramatic appearance.

Studies commissioned by certain beverage companies have shown that the use of existing entrances is barely half as impressive as creating a new one upon arriving at one's destination. In addition, experiments performed at various aquatic entertainment facilities have also shown a direct correlation between an audience's enjoyment of a performer's entrance and the number of big, showy splashes that occur throughout.

Envoy, having only been instructed to make his entrance "nice and showy", had consulted the scientific literature, analysed its knowledge of the area, and come to the obvious conclusion. One quick structural stability analysis, and...

With a deafening crash of demolished stone and the trademark splash-hiss of caustic fluid splashing onto moss-covered tile, Envoy burst up through the floor of the nearby acid pool, did a mid-air somersault to turn around and fire full reverse thrusters, touched the ceiling only long enough to push off, and landed in a heroic crouch in a wide-open section of floor, positioning himself directly between the open-air entrance and the god's grand throne, a perfect position for all to see.

(Well, it would've been, if Dice hadn't been pointing everyone present in the other direction entirely. Instead, everyone but Clarice just heard a loud crash and turned to look just in time to see Envoy crashing to one knee. I mean, she did find it suitably dramatic, so that's something, but still. Could've gone way better.)

His thrilling acrobatics complete, Envoy got down to business. He flung teleportation units out in all directions, sending them haphazardly thudding into walls, ceiling, and floor until the net was complete, and then, his task complete, he shot back out of the temple, leaving most everyone blinking in confusion at just what had happened over what amounted to the last ten seconds or so.

Of course, as luck would happen, they then got the opportunity to be blinking for purely physiological reasons, as that's when the teleportation system kicked in, filling the room with a blinding flash of light and throwing in some disorientating sound effects to boot.

As far as Dice was concerned, it was absolutely perfect. The humans were stunned, the other gods were either incapacitated already or just as bad off as the humans, and his accomplice was leaning against a column and looking confident. With the kind of quick motions and implausible covering of distance only really possible for a cocky deity at the center of his own domain, he lifted Alison Broderburg off her feet and carried her down the length of the room in just a few strides, going from place to place and not really bothering much with the intervening steps. Base, the big smooth slab of rock that was to be her sacrificial altar, was waiting.

John Smith met him there. "It took some doing," he said, "but Base gave in eventually and granted me access. The Broderburgs, sacrificed during the eclipse, directly in the center of your temple and in direct contact with Base himself? I double-checked it for you, and it's more than enough to pay off your debt."

To say that Dice grinned would be an understatement. "Perfect."

It was now coming on thirty seconds since Envoy had first made his sudden and disorienting entrance, and various senses were coming back to their respective people.

Clarice's first instinct was to check on her family. She accounted for two children and one husband, and the moment she realized where Alison was, she started running. The room was too long, though, and she would not make it in time to stop the sacrifice.

Tom's first instinct was to check on his wife. She was staring around, looking for something, and when her gaze finally landed somewhere definitive, he followed it and saw Alison. He too started running, but he was several steps behind her and carrying a baby. He would also not make it in time to stop the sacrifice.

Ethan's first instinct was to get help. He was nearest to Fertility, and she'd been a Nice Person in past. He went over to her with his best Scared And Confused Child face on, and while she instinctively put one arm around him and said some vaguely comforting things, her focus was mostly elsewhere.

She was looking down at Name and Song, who'd both been silenced with barely any effort on Dice's part. She'd known, academically, that at the heart of Dice's power, other gods would probably be a few steps down the ladder from even a vanilla mortal. It had been a well-established fact in the rational part of her mind. Seeing two friends tossed aside with so little effort, though... it brought the fact home in a much more visceral sense. Her mind wasn't on the situation at hand. She would not be any help in stopping the sacrifice.

John, standing barely a meter from the slab, was in a fine position to stop the sacrifice; he just had no interest in doing so. As a matter of fact, he was barely even paying attention. He'd just received an unexpected call and was in the middle of a conversation with Messenger, who was down on the surface. (For the record, Messenger was probably not in a position to stop the sacrifice either.)

Gamehost Six, elsewhere in the temple, was, quite rationally, going door-by-door until he found the audio booth the other announcer was hiding in. ("...Question 84: Open," followed by a brief pause, then by "INCORRECT" and liberal application of handsaw. Rinse and repeat.) He was not in any way paying attention to the sacrifice.

What Parsley was thinking at that moment is a mystery. He'd apparently decided that trying to reason Sir Archibald out of opening the door was the best approach, and he was in the middle of trying to get the knight back to reality with amusing anecdotes from their past. Had he been aware of the sacrifice, he most assuredly have done everything in his power to stop it, but he, like Six, had no idea it was even taking place.

"Alison Broderburg," Dice began, pulling a knife out of nowhere important and twirling it around his fingers, "in this moment, I restore balance. With your death and the deaths of the others, I restore the rightful order of things, I restart the inevitable grinding of time, and-"

Not many people have ever heard a Remington-Rand Portable No.3 typewriter hit a god square on the back of the head before. It's a surprisingly loud noise, thanks to the multitude of small metal parts encased in the machine, and it's the sort of sound that really fills your ears, all sorts of highs and lows coming together in a cacophony of clashing sounds that really drills in deep and bounces around.

Nancy Little, you see, was quite nearby when Dice brought Alison to the altar. She'd been teleported in in behind one of the columns, and to be perfectly frank, she'd been quite content to stay there until the whole sacrificing business started up. She wasn't too keen on the idea, and after a brief moment's psyching-up and gathering of fortitude, she'd started forwards, brandishing her typewriter and readying her strike. She'd been barely five meters away. Dice's attention had been solely on relishing his victory. She'd been in a prime position to stop the sacrifice.

So she did.

Dice tumbled to one side, dropping the knife and falling to the ground. Nancy followed up with a second blow, this time to his torso, and she connected solidly. Unfortunately, Dice was actually paying attention at that point, so he managed to grab her wrist before she could pull back. With a sharp tug, he brought her tumbling to the ground and shot to his feet.

He didn't have time to get a single kick in before Clarice tackled him and he went down again, this time with a murderous mother lashing out at him with fists and feet and knees and anything else she could use to hurt him. He might've been able to get out from under her blows if Tom hadn't also shown up, bringing with him two feet of lashing, vicious kicks and not enough sense to maybe not be going into a fight with a baby in tow. The god was being beaten and pummelled and thrashed.

But come on. Dice was a god, and he wasn't going to fall to the clumsy bludgeoning of two irritated primates. All he had to do was stop manifesting himself physically, and there wasn't anything they could do. The body he'd been in just... dissolved away.

Well, then it sort of exploded. I mean, it didn't really explode, but when something stops being there one second only to be replaced by a violent, rage-fuelled shockwave the next, the difference is academic. Clarice was thrown upwards, high enough to bruise her shoulder against the ceiling, Tom flew backwards, curling his body around baby Emma to keep her safe- Heck, the only person nearby who wasn't affected was John, who hadn't done anything to irk the god and therefore really had nothing to worry about.

Of course, Tom and Clarice didn't hit the floor after all this; instead, they just stopped about two feet from the ground, hovering there. That fall could've killed one of them, and that would've made the whole sacrifice impossible. Everything had to be just right, and that meant all five Broderburgs, sacrificed directly on Base, in the center of Dice's power, in the middle of the-

"Uh, Dice?"

There was dead silence for a moment, then,

WHAT

WHAT IS IT

"Well, I just got off the phone with Messenger," John said. It didn't sound like he was delivering good news, and any sane observer would be quickly reassessing whether or not he still had "nothing to worry about."

AND WHAT DID HE WANT

"He was delivering a message from Calendar," John continued. "Apparently he decided that he wasn't going to stick out his neck for you after all. Your plan-"

In an instant, all of Dice's rage and anger slammed upwards, pounding a massive hole through the ceiling. Sunlight shone down, clean, bright... and unobstructed. The eclipse had passed.

With a bellow of near-literal flame, the god's hatred, wrath, frustration, and pain all slammed together. Dice reformed, manifesting himself as something twelve feet tall and only really solidly definable as pissed. He'd been robbed of his chance to take back everything he'd lost. At the last second, it'd been taken away. He'd had it. Right there.

He was going to make them pay.

Who? Doesn't matter. Everyone. Base was right here, and he was conveniently immobile.

The beast started forwards, lumbering towards what would be the first of many dead, demolished gods.

"Hey," John said, sounding somewhat irritated, "are you going to let me finish?"

Dice paused.

"Thank you." Doing his best to keep his frustration down, John strode forward. "Now, as I was saying: Your plan's kaput. Is that bad? Yes. That hardly means we're all out of options, though."

He ran a hand across Base's surface. Runes were appearing and disappearing, detailed records of every exchange of godly debt ever made.

---

Dice chuckled. "Yeah, I remember that. Heck of a night."

"At this revel," Management continued," one of the main strains of conversation was on the subject of peoples' duties. Blacksmiths complained boistrously about the unyielding demand for nails, the marshalls (who, incidentally, ought to have been citing the event for noise disturbance) decried the rise of crime, and, most notably, a certain deity went on at great length about the hassle of reigning over the population."

Dice rolled his eyes. "You know how much the day-to-day stuff bores me, come on."

Management nodded at him. "True, true. The important thing, however, is your particular phrasing. You said, and I quote, 'I'd be way happier if I didn't have any subjects at all.'"

A young couple barged in, just in time to see realization sweep across Dice's face.

Management paid them no mind; he just grinned even wider as his plan came together. "That's right," he said, drawing the ceremonial dagger out of his pocket. "I'm going to stop this now, put an end to your control, and eliminate the damned deficit in one stroke. Are you ready, Dice? I'm about to make you very, very happy."

The kids were obviously scared, and they ran. Dice didn't have that luxury. His thoughts could just run in circles, searching for a way to prevent Management from doing him what amounted to thousands, millions, of favours.

He couldn't find one.

With a thrust and an incantation, Management slammed the dagger down. He was ready to rid Dice of all those pesky subjects, ready to take control of the world, ready to finally get the books in order.

What he wasn't ready for was for the dagger to keep going, rather than striking stone. He stared down at the gash that had opened in Base's surface, not sure how to react to his arm being halfway inside a tear in solid rock. Someone grabbed for the knife on the other side. He tried to wrest it away from them, but they had all the leverage. He pulled his hand out just in time for the hole to close again, leaving Base's surface untouched and the ritual incomplete.

---

John tossed the knife down at Dice's feet. "There," he said, "Plan B."

Dice stared at it.

John rolled his eyes. "You just going to stand there like some sort of idiot monster, or are you going to thank me?"

The beast rolled its eyes back and reached down, and by the time he picked the knife up, Dice was looking like his old self again. "You stopped the sacrifice," he said, still working through the implications.

(As far as Clarice was concerned, they were just talking. The danger of being sacrificed had apparently passed (somehow), so her attention turned straight to attending to her family.)

"Yes, I stopped the sacrifice," John replied, using the same tone a teacher would when helping a student through a particularly obvious math problem. "The original one, where Management offed the entire population as a favour to you."

(Alison had been knocked several meters away, but she was mostly unhurt. Her mother hugged her tight, and she hugged back.)

"I'm not all that well-versed in Calendar's realm," Dice explained, "so I'm not exactly clear on this. What happens next, then?"

(Tom was suddenly very concerned when he realized that Emma wasn't crying. When he looked down at her, though, she made one of those little noises that babies make back up at him. She seemed fine, and Clarice bustled over a moment later to give her a good once-over. Tom hugged Alison as well.)

Before John had a chance to explain, Base vanished into nothingness, providing a perfect visual aid. "Things are going to shift from how they were before, when Management's ritual had succeeded, to how they are now. Base, for example, apparently doesn't end up up here in the new chain of events."

(Emma, Clarice certified, was in perfect health. She handed her daughter off to her daughter and hugged her husband.)

"So, what, we just wait and see?"

(Ethan ran up to the others, Fertility close behind him. He hugged everyone at once, because efficiency.)

Fertility laughed, leaving the family to their business. "Like you'd have it any other way?"

John chuckled. "Exactly right. There's nothing quite like-"

He didn't get to finish his sentence, though. He'd vanished, and so had the Broderburgs.

Dice looked around at his temple. There were a lot of holes in the thing, he realized. Things'd been smashing in and out all day. Those'd probably be gone soon.

He turned to make some sort of comment to Fertility. She was gone too.

---

Nancy was falling, and she wasn't sure how she felt about the whole experience. (Other than annoyed that someone would leave all those big, gaping holes in the floor for people to tumble through.)

She'd fulfilled that oath, at least, she thought to herself. The one that... had been made to her in the first place? It was all rather confusing. I mean, it made sense, somehow, that much she knew. She just didn't know how it made sense.

"I'm curious," someone said, startling Nancy quite a bit. Doing her best to turn and look, she found a cloaked figure falling next to her, all black robes and tattered edges.

Realizing he wasn't at an optimum viewing angle, he moved around to be in front of Nancy instead.

After the surprise wore off, Nancy waited for the figure to continue. When he didn't, she prompted, "...You're curious?"

"Ah, right. I'm curious, why not use your weapon?"

Nancy blinked at him. "I'm sorry, I'm confused."

"Oh, right." The figure executed a sort of mid-air half-bow. "I'm Death, pleased to meet you."

"...Oh." That made sense, really. I mean, she'd attacked a god, after all, dying from the experience wasn't exactly unpredictable.

When Death didn't say anything, Nancy took a few steps back in the conversation, then realized, "No, wait, that's not what confused me. I mean, okay, it did, but, I mean... What weapon?"

Death pointed a finger at her purse, and just as he did, she remembered: She'd forgotten entirely that she'd had her pistol with her.

"Okay," she said, "that might've been a good idea. Better than wingin' him on the melon, anyway."

"If it's any consolation," Death replied, "things don't look all bad."

Nancy frowned. "How so?"

He gestured again, this time downward.

Nancy looked, and she saw the city in the distance. (It really was approaching rather fast, wasn't it?) "Y-yeah, what about it?"

"Look at it," Death replied.

Nancy looked.

She couldn't make out much, and the wind wasn't exactly helping her keep her eyes focused. There was motion down there, though. There was movement in the streets.

"Is that... people? Are there people down there?"

"That's right. The population's coming back."

Nancy thought about that. How many people were there down there? Thousands? Tens of thousands? So many people, all brought back, restored to life.

After a minute or two of silence, Death coughed. "I'm afraid I'm a bit out of practice at all this," he said, "but I do still have a job to do around here."

Nancy looked over at him. "How do you mean?"

"The ground's getting a bit close there," he said.

"Oh. Right." She sighed. "So, uh, how..."

Death held out a hand.