“And there he goes…” whispered the girl to herself as she watched the figure disappear into the glowing gate. “God I am, yet God I’m not. If I were truly all-powerful and all-knowing, I wouldn’t have had to ask a human child to do this for me.”
“Have we still heard nothing from the Administrators over there?”
A figure suddenly appeared behind the girl. It was one of the blond-haired beauties with wings she’d shooed away a while ago.
“Not even a peep. I swear, it’s not like I bite, and I told them I don’t want the administrative privileges back, but they just refuse to believe me. Is the throne of a god really that appealing?” asked the girl with a shrug, her tone slightly incredulous. The lady shook her head.
“I cannot comment on the throne,” she replied, “seeing as I have never sat upon it.”
“You haven’t? Really? You wanna try one somewhere?”
“Surely, you jest. That is a task far too onerous for the likes of one such as myself,” said the lady, declining the offer with a small bow.
“True,” the girl said, nodding in agreement, “that’s probably the wise answer. It’s a lot of trouble for no gain. In fact, if someone offered to do my job for me, I’d take them up on it in a heartbeat. I’d love to live as a carefree human.”
“You wish to surrender your infinite lifespan and near-omnipotent powers to step into the cycle of reincarnation with a life of barely one hundred years and your wisdom and experiences wiped clean each time?” the lady asked with mild surprise. She was met with a blank look that clearly suggested the girl did not see the question coming.
“You think it’s weird?”
“I certainly cannot see myself considering the same.”
“How long has it been since you were brought into existence?”
“If my memory is correct, I believe approximately a millennium ago,” answered the lady as she searched through her vast store of memories, trying to dig up its singular origin. As she did, the expression on the girl’s face gradually shifted from blankness to comprehension.
“Mmm, I guess you wouldn’t understand, then.”
“Is that so?”
“In my case, it’s been about eleven billion two hundred and sixty million years since I formed. That’s what I remember, anyway. A lot of things have happened during that time, and I still remember every last one of them down to the smallest detail. And in case you’re wondering, yes, it’s nothing but pure agony.”
The girl let out a sigh. It was a small one, but it was also deep. There was a weight to that sigh, coupled with a darkness in her eyes when she glanced up, that sent a chill down the lady’s spine. At once, she realized that for her, a being of mere millennia, the sheer depths of that gaping abyss she saw was entirely unfathomable.
“I’m tired… I’ve had enough… Such emotions, I’ve already forgotten. I’ve forgotten how long ago I’ve forgotten. I simply create, destroy, and create again. I’m but a vessel of memories — a mere construct of remembrance — for all that has and will transpire. If this is what it means to be God, then… is there anything left to do but laugh?”
“That is…”
The lady tried to speak, but no words came. She bit her lip, realizing the true extent of the girl’s existence and the immeasurable vastness of her time. There were no words she could say that the being before her had not already heard. There was no comfort she could offer.
“With that said, though, there is a high note every once in a while. Taking a boot to the face, for example. Even for me, that’s definitely on the rarer side of things,” said the girl in a noticeably lighter tone. It was obviously an attempt to change the topic and brighten the atmosphere, but the lady decided to play along.
“By rarer, do you mean to imply that it has happened a few times in the past?”
“Well, it’s a first for a human child. If we’re talking about angels, I’d say maybe once in a millennium or so…”
“So, some basic arithmetic would deduce that you have been kicked over a million times.”
“Yeah. Can you believe it? I gave birth to them, for God’s sake. So heartless.”
While the lady thought that the girl could drastically decrease her incidence of foot-to-face encounters simply by acting more reasonably, she had the good sense to keep that to herself. After all, mobilizing eighty percent of the entire angel population just to welcome a single human child was guaranteed to garner some ill will. While lower-ranked angels might have been indifferent, her close aids would definitely have felt the urge to give her a good kick or two.
“Let’s put those issues aside and discuss something else. We should figure out what equipment we’re going to give Renya. We can’t send him there empty-handed and expect him to survive. That’d be just cruel.”
“True. But since this is you we are talking about, I assume you have already prepared a list of items?”
“Yeah, I guess I have. Wanna take a look?”
The lady was not surprised. She had been dealing with the girl for a good number of years and was intimately familiar with her definition of “figure out,” by which she meant “inform of the fact that appropriate items have been selected and probably already sent to the corresponding world.” At this point, being shown the list was often a formality and she had no actual say in the matter. Resisting the urge to point out that she was not even in any position to say no, the lady approached the girl, who was poking at a new window she’d just materialized. She eyed its contents.
“That is a surprisingly unremarkable list.”
It contained medicine and food, some cash on hand, as well as weapons and armor. Quite ordinary. So much so, the lady thought, that she saw no need to seek another’s approval.
“Personally, I’d have given him maybe a weapon from around here. Some godly thing, you know? But my aides, ugh, they were like, no, there’s this and that and blah blah blah. I told them that considering we’re the ones asking him to cross over into that world, we should give him some amount of power to guarantee his safety, but nope, they just wouldn’t listen.”
“It would be a problem if whatever you gave Renya remained in that world after his death,” the lady pointed out. As far as she knew, the people in the world that Renya traveled to believed that Artifact-class items were created by the gods, but they were wrong. Items like those had only two possible origins: they were either created by the Administrators and left in the world, or made by humans through some miraculous coincidence and people just decided to believe it was a gift from the gods. If real gods actually went and made a weapon with their own hands, its power would defy the comprehension of mere humans. Were such a thing left behind in a world, it would almost certainly be the cause of much trouble. In that sense, the opposition of the girl’s aides to her idea was doubtlessly justified. With those thoughts in mind, the lady’s gaze stopped on a certain row of the list.