A Whole New World 8 (1/2)

“Can I get you anything before we get started?” Bob asked invitingly. “Some tea? Juice? Fresh blood? Or maybe coffee? You’ve always struck me as a coffee person. Box. Whatever.”

“Stop this!” Boxxy snapped. “I demand you answer my questions!”

The man smiled. It was a dry, lifeless, emotionless grin that a bank teller might give to a rude customer.

“Come now, old bean. Surely we can be a bit more civil about this.”

“I’m not here for your petty entertainment!”

“Or are you?” he quizzically raised an eyebrow.

“No, I’m not!”

“Then I suppose you have this life thing figured out after all, have you?”

“I… What?”

“Last I checked, you had no idea what you were ‘here for,’” he made exaggerated air quotes. “If that’s still the case, then how can you say with absolute certainty that the purpose of your existence isn’t to provide me with a spot of fun?”

Boxxy felt an odd sense of dread fill it as those words sank in.

“Is that it, then?” it asked warily. “I exist just so that you have something to laugh at?”

“Of course not, don’t be silly.”

The shapeshifter groaned. It should’ve known better than to take those words seriously. A good chunk of what the God of Chaos said was usually just his attempts to mess with people, but there were some harsh truths hidden between the bullshit. Boxxy had difficulty telling the difference between the two even after working with the guy for most of its life. That perpetually jovial tone of voice was partly to blame.

If nothing else, that dumb joke had at least somewhat curbed the monster’s insolent attitude.

“Now, seriously, how about that drink?” Bob offered once more. “It’s very rare that I can play the part of the host, so I’d like to make the most of it.”

“You know what? Fine,” the monster relented. “What did you have on offer, again?”

“Everything, really. I can conjure anything you can conceive, and a few things you can’t.”

“Yeah, yeah… Hm… What’s this coffee thing you mention earlier?”

The man beamed a wide-eyed smile that oozed with delight.

“Only the greatest beverage known to mankind!”

“If it’s so great then how come I’ve never heard of it?”

“Oh, sorry. I meant mankind in general, not the ones on Terrania. Our version went extinct before it could be cultivated, sadly.”

“Uh-huh. Is it tasty, though?”

“Uhm, in a way. It’s more about the aroma than the flavor, you see.”

“Then I’ll pass. I’ll just take some liquefied human liver.”

“Ah. Well, there’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.”

With a snap of his fingers, Bob conjured two white porcelain mugs - one for himself and one for Boxxy. The monster’s was appropriately sized for its body, which was to say about as big as a barrel. It was filled with a viscous, sloshy liquid that had a reddish-brown hue to it. The deity’s cup was more reasonable in its dimensions, though it also said ‘#1 GOD’ in big, blocky letters. The smaller dish was holding a steamy near-black fluid. Judging by the powerful yet unfamiliar aroma wafting from it, Boxxy assumed it was the ‘coffee’ Bob had boasted about just moments before.

Both parties took a short, polite sip of their respective beverages.

“Mmm, that never gets old,” the man said with a relieved sigh. “Now, let’s hear those complaints you had, hm?”

“You know why I’m here.”

“Just humor me.”

Boxxy rolled all twenty five eyes, but played along regardless.

“Well, there’s a few things I’d like you to address. The biggest one is that the thought of eternity scares me and it’s making me feel terrible. I’m confident that if I knew what life was all about I could just accept it and focus on the tasty and shiny things instead. Issue is, it’s really bloody difficult to figure out.”

“I know, right? It’s almost as if someone’s trying to keep you from realizing the purpose of your existence.”

“Is that someone you?”

“Oh, yes. Why do you think I created the awareness filter in the first place?”

“Is that what you call the thing where people don’t seem to hear what I tell them sometimes?”

“Mhm. That’s the one,” he nodded and took another sip. “It keeps the wrong ideas from spreading, you see.”

“What sort of wrong ideas?”

“Like the ones those damned tourists bring with them. They’re always trying to force their world’s politics and ideologies and technologies into yours. If not for the filter, they’d leave their intellectual litter all over the place. Except coffee. I really wish they could bring that with them somehow. Unfortunately, it’s a lost cause.”

There were so many things loaded into those few sentences that Boxxy found it difficult to restrain its curiosity, but it tried its best to keep the conversation on subject.

“So, I guess that means you won’t tell me what I want to know.”

“Not at all. I have every intention of giving you the answers you’re after.”

“Really? But you said you didn’t want me to know.”

“No. I said I was keeping you from finding out via the awareness filter. Not the same thing.”

In other words, Bob was obfuscating the big truth not because he wanted to, but because he had to.

“Then tell me, already. What is the ultimate purpose of my existence?”

“Entertainment.”

There was a brief, awkward silence as the God of Chaos sipped on his coffee with delight.

“But… just now… you said…” Boxxy mumbled in confusion.

“I know what I said.”

Something clicked in the shapeshifter’s mind.

“Whose entertainment, if not yours?”

“Now you’re asking the right questions,” Bob smirked knowingly. “Go on, then. Follow that train of thought to the last station.”

The monster momentarily put away the nagging thought that it was being lied to or otherwise misled and tried to follow the deity’s advice.

At that moment, there was little doubt in its mind that Bob had a hand - or at least a finger - in an uncountable number of events throughout history. In the past he’d mentioned that he hated intervening directly in mortal matters, yet he had done so at least eight times just during Boxxy’s relatively brief tenure as Hero of Chaos. And those were just the ones the monster knew about. At first the shapeshifter had assumed that the deity was simply being a lying, hypocritical bastard-

“Takes one to know one.”

-but now it seemed as if he had to do things he didn’t want to.

Unrelated, Boxxy wished that Bob refrained from reading its mind just so he could interject with distracting comments.

“Sorry. I just like watching your gears turn. I’ll be quiet.”

The bottom line was that Bob seemingly had responsibilities he didn’t completely agree with, but was obligated to fulfill.

“So is this like a job for you?” Boxxy asked aloud.

“I like to think so.”

“What kind of job?”

“Well, it has no breaks, no vacation days, no pay, and no chance for promotion. At least I get to make my own fun, but I can’t slack off too much. I’ve got a strict deadline to meet.”

“I meant to ask what you actually did.”

“Hah! What don’t I do!?” he exclaimed. “You would not believe the monumental effort I go through every second just to ensure that this stupid project doesn’t implode on itself. I’d never be able to manage it if I couldn’t think about two hundred different things at once.”

“Two hundred? Really?” Boxxy asked dubiously.

“Oh, yes,” he nodded reassuringly. “Granted, so far the most I’ve been tasked with was fifty six simultaneous issues, but the capacity is there in case I need it.”

“Uh-huh. And what sort of grand project would require that much mental effort from a God?”

“I’ll give you three guesses,” he said evasively.

The shapeshifter wasn’t sure why the deity got coy all of a sudden, but at least this one was fairly obvious. Bob had a job, which meant he also had an employer that demanded some kind of service or product. It was up to the God of Chaos, as the acting manager, to ensure that it was delivered on time and up to quality. And considering how the deity had just claimed that life existed for the purpose of entertainment, there was only one logical conclusion.

“You’re cultivating Terrania into a playground!” Boxxy shouted accusingly.

“Hey, you said it, not me,” the man shrugged smugly.

“It all makes sense now! That’s why you’re so adamant about life prospering, and why you care so much about new races and species! Even the Shifts that throw the world into chaos are just you stirring the pot every few hundred years so that things don’t get stale!”

Boxxy wasn’t an expert on history, but it had studied the past quite a bit as part of its Artifact hunting hobby. During its studies, it had noticed that a Shift seemed to occur every time a single race, nation, or ideology was in a position to take over the world. Then, without fail, the dominant faction would be reduced to a broken husk within the span of a decade or so. It happened to the nosferatu-run Adams Theocracy, it happened to the old Elven Dominion, and it was in the process of happening to the Lodrak Empire. It wasn’t just Boxxy that had noticed this trend, either. Though nobody had really studied the matter in great depth - likely because of that awareness filter - every enlightened society had learned to fear these Shifts and the turmoil they brought with them.

Of course, Bob’s meddling must have gone beyond mere politics and war games. He had reshaped the entire pantheon at one point. He also didn’t shy away from influencing mortal life on a large scale. For instance, Boxxy had always wondered why so many of Terrania’s species had appearances that shared a certain… human-centric appeal. It was a trend exemplified not only by enlightened races like elves, dwarves, and beastkin, but also monsters like harpies, dryads, alraunes, and succubi, to name the most obvious ones.

The shapeshifter had always wondered how come so many things had large breasts and other feminine features that human males would find attractive. Sure, there was always one explanation or another to justify those assets from an evolutionary standpoint, but such cases seemed far more numerous than they should have been. The idea that those things had boobs by design rather than by accident made so much sense that it seemed stupidly obvious in hindsight. Boxxy felt like it really should have seen that sooner. Then again, it was possible it had reached that conclusion many times, but Bob’s awareness filter made sure the epiphany didn’t stick.

“Wait…” the monster reigned in its excitement. “How come your filter isn’t affecting me now?”

“Oh, that? It was because you went outside of its effective range.”

“You mean when I fell into space?”

“Precisely.”

“That seems suspiciously convenient.”

“I assure you, it’s just the regular kind of convenient. See, I made it so that it would latch onto every single newly born lifeform capable of thought, like an invisible leash. I also made it stupidly long. 21,474 kilometers, 836 meters, and 47 centimeters from the planet’s center, to be exact. That still gives it about seventeen thousand kilometers of coverage going up into space. You just kinda went beyond that for a while there, and the leash snapped as a result.”

“And once it’s broken, it can’t be reattached?”

“Very good!” Bob acknowledged.

“Don’t patronize me,” the monster grumbled. “It’s blatantly obvious considering I’m not under the filter’s influence.”

Incidentally, the shapeshifter wanted to tell the God of Chaos off for messing with its thoughts without its knowledge or consent, but that was an argument for another time.

“You’d be surprised how often people fail to notice what’s right in front of them.”

Bob whimsically raised an eyebrow while sipping on his coffee.

“But why does the filter work like that?” the shapeshifter pressed. “Surely you can make it reconnect somehow. Make a new leash?”

“I could, but that’s a lot of upkeep. The filter is an automated process, you see. The less work it has to do, the more resources I have to play with. It could, theoretically, scan the entire planet for every soul not being filtered. However, that takes an immense amount of effort, especially if it has to be done with any sort of regularity. It’s way more efficient to just have it do the leashing once and give it a very long tether.”

“I don’t know all the specifics, but that sounds like it was designed to fail. Like, why does it need to have a limited range in the first place?”

“My good fellow, are you implying I intentionally sabotaged my own creation?!” Bob feigned ignorance. “I assure you the filter was made in such a way as to operate at optimum efficiency with an effectively perfect track record!”

“Uh-huh,” the monster said flatly. “Define ‘effectively perfect.’”

It was a dubious choice of words eerily reminiscent of Bob’s favorite and equally nebulous phrase, ‘a non-zero chance.’

“Well, let me put it like this. If I had to enumerate its failure rate as a percentile, it would be a zero with so many other zeroes past the decimal point that it is practically indistinguishable from a perfect track record.”

“That’s… How are you measuring that, exactly?”

“Well, I divide the number of times the filter connection broke by the total number of times it has attempted a connection.”

Considering that thing supposedly latched onto every single thing that had ever lived, it was safe to say that the divisor was an inconceivably large number. But what of the dividend?

“Oh, that’s just one.”

“Seriously? Just me?” Boxxy asked, somewhat surprised.

“Yup. Just you.”

“Surely other people have fallen into those anomalies before.”

“Absolutely. However, none of them have ever made it back. Not alive, anyway. I honestly didn’t think it was possible to survive the trip all the way from the edge of the universe.”

“… What?”

“Okay, I admit, I figured it was possible in theory, but the odds of someone actually doing it were-”

“No, no, no, hold up. What do you mean the edge of the universe?”

Bob paused, blinked, and looked around in confusion.

“Why, exactly what I said. Where you wound up was quite literally the end of this reality. You could have turned around and touched it, even. Probably best that you didn’t though. Things kind of just blip out of existence when they go that far.”

“But… but what about all the stars and the sun and-”

“Just an elaborate illusion to keep the masses from figuring out that they are, in fact, the center of this universe. It’s very important that people never have reason to question the nature of their reality.”

That was precisely what would have happened if Fizzy had been allowed to finish her calculations. She might have deduced that Terrania wasn’t hurtling through space in an orbit around the sun, but rather sat perfectly still while the tapestry of stars spun around it. Boxxy would have noticed it as well if it had paid any attention to the sun’s trajectory during its voyage through the void. For better or for worse, it had been far too focused on its survival and reaching its destination to even think about the ball of light making impossible circles through the cosmos.

In any event, this revelation filled the monster with an all new kind of dread. Earlier it had figured that either Bob or his bosses had scanned the infinite void of space until they found a planet suitable for their elaborate entertainment endeavor. If that were the case, then they would have chosen Terrania because it was the best candidate for the project. However, if the deity’s claim was true, then he didn’t just stumble upon the world. Rather, the mini-universe was created with the sole purpose of becoming a playground.

This threw Boxxy’s thoughts into a chaotic mess just when it thought it was starting to figure it all out. It had been so sure that Bob’s employers were highly advanced humans from another world. After all, he looked human, the aforementioned titty-paradox was aimed towards humans, and all of the otherworlders in history have been human. Predominantly male humans, at that. However, no matter how ahead they might have been in terms of technology or magic, it seemed inconceivable that mere humans could create a pocket-universe.

“Is it, though?” Bob responded to the monster’s thoughts. “You’ve already experienced what my Divine item can do. How is that any different from creating an entire universe?”

“… You mean other than the ridiculously larger scale and extended time period?” it countered. “The mana requirements alone seem practically impossible.”

Bob paused to take another noisy sip of his coffee.

“You’d be surprised how little energy is required to make a world out of nothing. All it takes is imagination, creativity, and a medium. Artists have their paintings, musicians have their melodies, and authors have their stories. Even a child’s imagination arguably qualifies. However, no matter how much effort a person puts into their artwork, they are incapable of making their creations self-aware.”

“Is that what I am, then? Just a sentient piece of fiction in some made up world?” Boxxy’s tone was heavy.

“In a way. The truth is far more complicated than I’m at liberty to say, but ‘sentient fiction’ is a good summary.”

The shapeshifter didn’t have anything to respond with. No witty remarks, bad puns, curious questions, or insightful observations sprang up in its mind. It had just been told that its collection, its flesh, its memories, and even its very ego were all just figments of someone’s imagination. Its first instinct was to immediately dismiss the notion that it wasn’t real as ridiculous, preposterous, and downright silly. Boxxy still had that voice in the back of its mind that kept warning it that Bob could have been lying, but it was drowned out by a new flavor of existential dread.

“What happens when the ‘play’ ends?” it asked weakly.

“Why, this universe goes poof, of course. All of it will just disappear as if it were never even here. Well, except for me. Once I’m done I’ll probably get transferred to another world to do the whole thing over. This is actually my second try at this, you know. If it doesn’t go too well, then I guess the third time’ll be the charm,” he chuckled.

Surprisingly enough, Boxxy found a bit of solace in that. Every universe had to end eventually, it imagined. At least the shapeshifter had some insight into how its own reality would disappear. That thought also allowed it to reassure itself that everything it had experienced and would continue to experience in the future was, in fact, reality from the monster’s point of view. And, ultimately, that was the only perspective that mattered to the shapeshifter. Was it really all that important that the world wasn’t actually real if the illusion was so damn convincing? Boxxy would need a lot of time and thinking to properly tackle the question, but for the moment its answer was a firm ‘probably not.’

That aside, there was one factor that required immediate elaboration.

“So how long do we have?”

Boxxy hoped that it would be a very long time before things went ‘poof.’ If that were the case, then it wouldn’t have to worry about the end of the universe since it would most likely be dead anyway.

“Ah, hm. That’s a bit of a tricky question to answer,” Bob frowned. “Let’s just say that, once this phase of the project is complete, there will be a sudden influx of tourists. They probably won’t have the filter on at that stage, so I expect them to trash the place in no time flat. Once they’ve sucked the fun out of the world they’ll forget about it and move onto the next thing, as humans often do.”

The man made no effort to hide his displeasure at the thought that millenia of his hard work would be reduced to rubble by a bunch of plebeians.

“The beginning of the end, huh?” Boxxy mused aloud.

“Pretty much, yeah,” he shrugged.

“When’s that phase scheduled for?”

“Been awhile since I checked, actually. Let me see,” Bob stared off to the side for a moment. “Twenty-two days and three hours. Roughly.”

“Seriously?! That soon?!”

“Oh, no, that’s from the outside. Time flows a bit quicker here than it does out there.”

“How much quicker?!”

“By a factor of fifty thousand.”

Boxxy took a few moments to make a few calculations.

“That means it’ll be another three thousand years, you asshole!”

It tossed the nearly-forgotten barrel-jug of liver-juice at Bob, prompting the man to duck out of the way.

“Hah-ha!” he laughed merrily. “You should’ve seen the look on your face-analogue! It was priceless!”

“Go jump up your own ass and die!”

Without really thinking, Boxxy ripped open its Storage and started throwing everything its tentacles could grasp at the mischievous deity.

“I’ve had it with you constantly trying to pull one over on me!” it chucked a spear at him.

That dumb prank had uncorked a lifetime’s worth of resentment and frustration at the deity’s antics, and the shapeshifter was letting it all boil to the surface.

“How’s about you chew on my bullshit for a change?!” it tossed several grenades while Bob ran down the hallway.

It wasn’t actually trying to kill him, of course. It knew full well that this wasn’t the way one destroyed a deity. Even then Bob’s position as overseer likely made it so he could just ignore the world’s rules if he so wished. However, it felt good to let it all out, so the monster didn’t hold back and just kept at it while Bob played along.

“Some God of Chaos you are! More like a God of Accounting!” it threw a satchel of coins next. “What kind of dumb name is Bob anyway?! It totally doesn’t fit!”

The next improvised projectile was an Artifact-grade fishing rod that the man caught in his free hand.

“Oh, hey!” he exclaimed. “That’s the Pillar of the Caged Cod! Since when did you have this?”

Bob’s momentary distraction led to him finally getting nailed by something. It was, fittingly enough, an enormous fish that Boxxy had acquired during its recent drunken bender. In fact, it had used that very same pointlessly magical rod to catch it. It had the Artifact with it because it was a curious treasure that might have appealed to the collector’s spirit of an elder dragon. It had mentioned it to Arisha at some point, which inevitably led to the titanic trout winding up in the shapeshifter’s pocket dimension.

And now that expired fish was behind the curtain of the personal domain of the God of Chaos, where endless hallways lined with infinite doors traded motes of light with each other.

*Fwump*

One of those balls of energy drifted away from the nearest gateway and sank into the fish as if drawn in by it. What should have been a suffocated carcass then started shaking and flopping right on top of Bob while Boxxy looked on with curious amusement.

“Ah, shit,” the deity cursed. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. Hold on while I fix this.”

The resurrected fish floated off of him and then exploded into a fine red mist. The ball of light from earlier drifted out of it and hovered in place for a bit. Bob stood up and shoo-ed into the nearest opening, then started straightening out his outfit. It was also worth noting that throughout all of that, he hadn’t spilled a single drop of his coffee.

“In retrospect, this probably wasn’t the best place to start roughhousing,” he mused.

“Where are we anyway?” Boxxy asked, its petty revenge fulfilled.

“Like I said, some people fail to notice what’s right in front of them. This is the Well of Souls.”