Interlude: The Tragedy of the Divine

Think back to the moment Page hugged Minimine.

A goddess was a mere cogpiece of the System—a crystal precipitated from a soul bloom, fractals of their core built up like corals, until they can feel, until they can think; and when they prove the sanity of their mind, rewarded with a bundle of privileges and the burden of obligation.

The work was long, boring, but effortless. In being divinity, there was no scarcity, and no lack of provision for wants and desires. Anything could be fulfilled within one’s own domain, and a stock of power provided to influence the worlds below, and yet, there was a paradox.

In being so large, so all-seeing, and sometimes all-knowing, they sacrificed the concept of inconvenience, sacrificed the concept of challenge. How did fulfillment arise? Wanting something, being denied it, and finally, defying the barriers between it and you—no, that’s called “achievement,” a lesser, impure form of fulfillment with which the goddesses of the worlds desperately fueled themselves.

Wanting something, attempting to defy the barriers between it and you, and finally, regardless of reaching it or losing it, realizing the meaning of the struggle each time … this was not a “place” that could be traveled, nor was it a “thing” that could be gained. It was simply a pattern of outcomes etched onto the soul, independent of the thing being taken, independent of the place being reached. It was something so immaterial, something that, even to the divine, existed on its own plane, that no amount of allocation of the System’s local engine power could find a conclusion to the problem of its scarcity.

The scarcity was paradox. All could be fulfilled, and because of this, fulfillment had become the very object of scarcity.

Losing fulfillment, for millennia they wither.
Drained of fulfillment, they die.

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With great expense, the System creates another.
Over and over, the Tragedy of the Divine.

To find a source of fulfillment was thus the “Great Task” that no one, from Minimine to even the System, was excluded from.

Minimine herself could have chosen to engage in games against her fellow goddesses, or even to spur her followers to greater heights of faith, maybe even to the point of conquest, but she knew these were stopgap, feel-good measures which amounted to winning bigger and bigger trophies from meaningless contests—a terrible rush hour of eternity, of goddesses stepping on each other just to survive.

She wouldn’t have any of that. May she wither and die like all the rest, but to climb on top of someone else just to survive … may she wither and die, instead.

“Wither and die” … she might not, after all. Page’s hug, one borne from innocent misunderstanding, opened a new door when only the one at the end was left.

Tell me, what was that? Minimine spoke to the air in her mind. When Page enveloped her, restricted her, wordlessly claimed to be her guardian and protector, what did she feel? What was that?

It was not fulfillment, but it was something close, or maybe something along the way. No matter what, it was a lead. Hypothesis: Hugs are the first step to fulfillment—no, no, that was too vague and untestable. But, it was an idea.

New experiences, new names; new nations, new Heroes; new generations of queens, kings; empires, republics; and yet … no ripples of these could ever measure up to the splash that a new idea could produce.

It was in this moment that, whether Minimine knew it or not, she’d set herself on course for a revolution.