This one got away from me a little bit, and so while I'm at a good stopping point, I think there's going to be at least a part 2, if not more. enjoy day 10 - God of Something.
I stumbled into the atrium of a building that didn't look familiar at all, though to be honest, nothing looked familiar yet. I didn't look familiar to myself. Up until a breath ago, I hadn't existed in any form, and suddenly, there I was, standing in a room surrounded by pillars, trying not to fall over, and really wishing I had some idea of what the hell was going on. And what the hell "hell" was. And who was talking when I was hearing all of these things.
"Hello?" I called out, and jumped. My voice was...unexpected. It was high, and there was some kind of accent, but I couldn't place it. (I didn't even know how I knew it was an accent, to be honest...) My voice echoed around the room, and somehow seemed to get louder as it echoed. I didn't think that was how echoes were supposed to work, but maybe I was wrong? I was probably wrong. I found my feet beneath me and stood up straight, feeling a lot of cloth fall away as I straightened my hunch. I looked down at myself, trying to figure out what I was looking at.
There was a lot of cloth on me, that much was obvious. I couldn't see my legs without grabbing through handfuls and handfuls of thick, white, stiff fabric. All of it was attached to itself, and it all came up to my waist and met at a thin belt of silver. My hands were tan, with long, thin fingers that had several fine silver-colored rings on each one. My arms were covered by the same type of fabric as my legs, though there wasn't as much of it. I wish I could see more of the rest of me.
"Department of new deities, this is Denise, how can I help you?" I heard another voice in the room, that somehow didn't echo the same way my voice had. "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And your sphere of influence?...Uh-huh. Well, That's something that I'm going to need to know so I can log you in our records appropriately, so please get back to me as soon as you have heard from your creator and/or your first prophet, acolyte, or believer. Uh-huh. You're welcome." There was a sound of a chime, and the voice changed in tone. It had originally been high-pitched and friendly, but after the chime, the voice came out much lower in tone and not anything that I would consider to be friendly. "Ugh. Why can't these people just tell me what they're the gods of? How do they not know this stuff?"
"Hon, you know as well as I do that the creators work in mysterious ways," another voice replied. Before I could start looking around to see where the voices were coming from, I heard footsteps on the marble floor. They were heavy, making much more noise than I imagined my own footsteps would sound like - my feet didn't have any kind of covering on them, so I didn't imagine there would be any sharp or hard edge to ring out against the marble. "Oh! Denise, this one of yours?"
The feet had stopped within my line of sight, and I could see they were shiny and brown, and there were four of them. They led up to legs that were splotched with cream and brown, and looked like they were covered in some kind of hair? It didn't look like the skin that covered my legs - I stuck my own foot out of the yards of fabric and wiggled my toes, comparing my foot to the feet in front of me. The legs were different, and my feet had toes with silver rings, while these feet didn't have toes at all. Huh.
"Denise!" I jumped, realizing just how close the voice was to me now, and I looked up to see where it was coming from. The head attached to the legs looked more like mine, as far as i could tell - it was shaped the same way my head felt, at least, and there wasn't the same kind of hair on it as were on the legs. Were my legs supposed to look like that? There was hair on their face, too, coming down in a point at the bottom of their face, just below their mouth, which opened again and let loose another shout.
"I'm coming!" The high-pitched voice was back, and I could hear it was moving, but I couldn't tell where it was coming from. I looked around me frantically, trying to figure out where I could go if I needed to run, and tried to grab enough of the fabric around my legs that I wouldn't trip over it if I needed to run. I still hadn't figured everything about these legs out, but I didn't imagine that having fabric wrapped around them would help me run. I was still battling the cloth when another set of footsteps clattered to a stop in front of me. This time, the feet had something red over them, and the bottoms were hard and came to a point in the front and swooped up onto a high tip in the back. The legs looked mostly like mine, but more pale, and the fabric around them stopped much higher up and away from the feet. It seemed a lot more functional that way, but I wasn't sure about the feet.
"Well, that's new," the high-pitched voice said, and I saw it was coming from another head that looked to be shaped like mine was. There was no hair on the face this time, but the mouth was very red, and there were three different colors smeared together above the eyes, in a way that the other head didn't have. I wondered if my eyes had the color smears on them, too, or if only some people had that. "You must be a new deity. Do you know what your domain is?"
I heard the words. They didn't make much sense, but I heard them. I turned my head to the side, staring between the two heads, and finally moved my mouth to see if I could make any noise like they did. "Domain? What... huh?"
"I think I know why your callers seem so confused now, Denise," the first head said. It came closer to me and leaned forward. "I apologize for the confusion. You appear to be lost. Do you know where you are, or where you came from?"
I shook my head and heard a jingling when I did so. It made me jump, which made something jingle even louder in my ear. I reached up to cover my ears, but when I did, I felt something handing from the hair in front of my ears - something metal, that jingled when I touched it. I tried to pull it out far enough to let me see it, but it wouldn't come out of my hair, so I just kept pulling that part of my hair forward and tried to focus on the little bit I could see.
Denise watched the new god spin herself in a circle, trying to look at the tiny spoons that hung from a flower in her hair, and sighed. "Yeah, OK," she said to her centaur co-worker, who was covering his mouth to hide his smile. "I guess the deities really don't know too much about what they're about when they're first created, if this one is any indication."
"How'd she end up here, that's what I'd like to know," Roman replied, once he'd gotten his expression under control. Regardless of how powerful a deity might be, they're still a god, and it's not worth finding out about their vengeance by laughing at them outright. "Their creator must be here in the Library, do you think?"
"Maybe, but that still doesn't tell us much." Denise sighed and looked at her watch, seeing her last five minutes of work tick down. "Come on, we'll get her settled in the break room and let her be the night shift's problem. Unless you want to work overtime?"
She watched Roman's blond tail twitch at the thought. "Hardly. I've got a date tonight. All right. Um, miss?"
The goddess stopped spinning and glared, cross-eyed, at the centaur. "Me?"
"Yes, miss. If you'll come with us, we have a room where you can lie down and freshen up, take a look in the mirror and answer some of your questions for yourself. My colleague and I are getting ready to leave for the night, but I'll make sure to introduce you to the next shift, so they'll be able to help with any concerns you may have." Roman offered the goddess one of his arms, and she stared at it, holding up her own arm to compare. When it got close enough to his, he gently took her arm and started directing her to the break room.
Denise followed, scribbling notes on her clipboard and thanking the innumerable and unnamed gods that she was leaving for the day. This was so not her style of thing. Surely Erica could handle it, right? Everything would be fine, right?
Right.
TO BE CONTINUED
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