The Devil You Know 1.4 - The Demesne .2 (Patreon)

"What do you mean?" Theo asked slowly.

A crab was able to roll it's eyes in a very expressive manner, Theo decided.

"This is the Endless Chaos, right? Look at the border of your realm for a second."

Theo lifted his gaze and did just that. In every direction the same sight greeted him: ten metres of blasted, black rock, followed by a twisted blackness The only exception was above where for some reason he could see through the dark to take in the burning sky of the Chaos in all its endless rage. 

Ignoring the sky above, Theo peered closer at the dark curtain that fell over his realm and realised he could make out more details. What seemed at first to be a still wall was actually in constant motion. It shifted and swirled, twisted and danced in an endless cycle that never seemed to repeat. Half-glimpsed shapes whispered to him of fractured memories and faces he couldn't quite recall before they changed or shifted into something new. Each new shape teased his mind and bewitched his eyes until he couldn't look away. A sharp pinch at his leg snapped him back to reality and he looked down at an unrepentant Bbl.

"Yeah, you get used to it" he shrugged.

Theo nodded, not trusting himself to speak in the moment.

"So that, is the Chaos. Always changing, ever unstable stuff of non-reality. Don't try to stick a hand in it, you won't get it back" Bbl explained, "we exist in an entire universe of the stuff. To get anything done here you need to get hold of the only thing that really matters here. The currency."

"What sort of currency?" Theo gulped. He wasn't sure he was going to like the next bit.

If a crab could grin evilly, that's what Bbl did in this moment.

"Pain. Agony! There is only one coin here in the Chaos and it's the anguish and suffering of mortal souls! With that energy you can expand your realm, create whatever you want, give life to demons to serve you, anything. Inside the Chaos you can turn that pain into the stuff of reality. Make chairs and tables out of it, or giant statues of your own glorious crustacean form. Every rock, every tree, every atom inside the Endless Chaos has been crafted from the suffering of mortals."

Theo didn't want to deal with this.

"What does that have to do with the realm stone?" he diverted back to the original topic.

He may be a Demiurge who ruled over his own personal hell-kingdom, but all the talk of agony and suffering was making him queasy. He'd have to confront it eventually, that much was obvious, but for now he wanted to deal with one thing at a time.

Bbl seemed a little deflated and not being able to go into greater depth regarding the torture of souls but did continue his explanation.

"Right, so. The realm stone, together with you, are like the heart and mind of the Demesne. All of the agony units, that's what we call our the currency here ok? Au. All of the au will be drawn into the realm stone and you can commune with it in order to utilise that energy."

Theo looked at the stone. There didn't seem to be anything special about it other than it's spherical shape.

"Commune with it how?" he asked doubtfully.

Bbl bobbled in place in what Theo would come to learn was a crab giggle. 

"Well, my own advisor was home office supplied and she told me that in the old days, waaay back when the multiverse was fairly new, Demiurge were required to perform rituals involving spilling their own blood to invoke the power of the realm stone!"

Theo was aghast!

"What?!"

"Oh yes! Imagine that! Want to expand your realm? Stab yourself and scream these words. Want to create a wall? Stab yourself and howl at the sky! Must have been nuts back then."

The crab wiped a tear from one of his eyes with a delicate claw.

"What about now?" Theo asked.

"Now? Heck man, we use the fucking menu. Touch the stone, you'll see."

Menu?

The idea seemed odd to Theo. How was a stone supposed to produce a menu? Never the less, after a moments' hesitation he reached out with his right hand and placed it squarely on the stone. 

The stone was hot. Burning hot. Theo couldn't understand how it could be suffused with such searing heat but not burn him at all. In fact, it felt right, as if the stone were welcoming him, as an enthusiastic pet might.

And then, Theo leapt back as before his face a flame erupted with a flash. He leapt back with a shout as the flame expanded outwards in a ring that hovered in the air before his face. He was shocked to notice letters of flame form inside the ring and in seconds he was standing in front of a menu that he had to admit had the distinct flavour of hell.

When he focused, the flaming writing was easy enough to read. It said:

Preliminary domain licence has been issued. Menu functions and marketplace access are restricted. 

"It says that my access is restricted?" Theo asked his advisor in a puzzled tone.

"Oh, right" the crab responded, "yeah, until you finish your trial period and training you won't have access to the full menu or market. Pain in the shell admin rules."

"Trial period? Training?!" Theo groaned.

"Of course! As savage as they like to pretend to be, the administration of the Chaos has worked on the process of preparing new Demiurge for trillions of years. The current system provides enough support that the failure rate of new Demesne is kept to an acceptable 50%. I even had to go back to training to ensure I had the knowledge to make a useful enough advisor."

Can't have been very strict, Theo thought to himself, this crab is useless.

Wait, 50%?!

"So half of all new Demiurge fail?!" Theo demanded.

"Yep! Fall apart in the first year! If we stretch that out to ten years, the figure is more like 70% My story isn't so uncommon, except that not many of us manage to be accepted as an advisor. Thanks for that by the way."

Theo felt his heart palpitate in his chest. There was a decent chance he would fail in the very first year, which meant having his soul cast into limbo for eternity!

Breathe, Theo. Just breathe. Keep learning, it's all you can do.

After a few moments he felt steady again.

"Okay. I'm okay. Let's get through one thing at a time" he muttered to himself.

He focused back on the menu and noticed a small symbol in one corner that looked like a hand waving. He tried to intuit what it meant and waved his hand in front of the flaming menu, which caused a new series of burning letters to appear.

Demesne: Unnamed 

Area: 314.1592653589 metres squared

Souls: 0

Demons:0

AU Balance: 100

Expand territory.

Material change/creation

Access Restricted Marketplace.

Theo read carefully through each word, trying to seek any sliver of knowledge he could infer from what he was given. When he was done, he read through again, just in case there was something else he could garner. Even this tiny piece of information was precious to him in his knowledge deprived state. His mind came alive at the challenge, a dog catching the scent and tugging at the leash. He relished this kind of minute analysis, he could feel it. As he continued to ponder he felt a languid malaise that he hadn't realised was there slough off like dead skin. He breathed deep for the first time since his awakening and pushed distractions aside so he could sharpen his focus.

His Demesne wasn't named. That much was obvious. The question was would there be a formal naming or would he think a name and it would appear. Bbl had mentioned further training and the 'trial' period, he could infer with a high chance of likelihood that the administration couldn't be bothered to establish a Demesne and handle the paperwork in the first year when half of them would fail anyway. Which meant he would be asked to come up with, or perhaps assigned a name at the completion of his trial period.

The area he understood. His domain as it stood was a circle with a ten metre diameter. Using the formula for the area of a circle he understood that pi times ten squared would give him the number he saw in the menu. He thought about it and decided that he didn't like it. A non-repeating decimal like this felt unordered, added unneeded complexity and felt offensive to his eyes. He decided he would change the shape of his realm to a square when he got the chance.

The next item spoke for itself. Souls, he had none. He didn't know how he got them, or what on earth he would do with them when he did, but that was a problem for the future.

Demons made him uncomfortable. But there was also information here. He knew that 'demons' was his own term for the servants that he could create. Bbl and Adelaide had both mentioned he could bring forth … entities, to help with the management of his realm. The fact that the number of such creatures he had in his realm would qualify for its own menu item indicated that may end up with a high number of them. Another thing he didn't want to think about right now.

His balance in Agony Units was 100, which made sense, Adelaide had told him he had been given an initial 'loan'. He wasn't informed what the interest rate would be, which was a problem. He'd need to investigate that if he could, and pay it back as soon as possible. He still wasn't sure of much but Theo was deeply sure that he hated paying interest.

The options he had available underneath told him more, but he knew he would have to 'select' them to learn as much as possible. He considered for a moment before he waved his hand, much as he had before, over the 'expand territory' option.

The fire writing changed in an instant and Theo stared at what he understood to be a three dimensional render of his Demesne, created from fire, suspended in the air before him. The small, circular island that he stood upon was written in clear flame, even the plinth on which the realm stone itself sat was detailed, though he needed to lean forward to see it. A thin veil of flame in a sphere existed around the outside of the island, encompassed it in every direction. Theo could only theorise that the sphere represented the outer boundary of his realm, the atmosphere, so to speak. He would need to expand that boundary if he wanted to increase the size of the land mass. 

It did seem to hint at the possibility of expanding upwards or downwards though. Nothing said that the territory needed to be one flat disk. 

He walked around the ring that represented the menu and he saw that the image of his territory was indeed three dimensional, and didn't merely appear that way. He moved back to the front and searched for any instructions or information but he quickly saw there was none.

Bbl piped up, his voice broke the bubble of concentration that Theo had built up for moment, long enough to take in the words at least.

"You have to use your claws… ah, hands."

Theo nodded slowly and reach out with his hands. He felt no heat from the fire. That was the first thing he noticed. He screwed his courage and stuck one finger into the flame that represented his domain. It was the strangest thing. Not only did he feel no heat, the fire itself felt malleable, when he poked it, it moved.

Curious, and no longer afraid of physical harm, Theo used both hands to begin to touch and shape the fire. It was a strange thing, as he manipulated his hands to pull and tease the shape of the flame, he felt it responded as much to his thoughts as it did to the movement of his hands. He thought for a brief moment before he reached out and squared off the edges of his domain, the circle changed into a square with a side length of twenty metres, bringing his total area up to 400 metres squared. He noted that the outer boundary extended itself automatically to incorporate the new territory he would he would make.

When he was done a new icon appeared in the menu to one side of his island. It gave a number just above another hand wave symbol. The number was 8, which he assumed was the price, and the gesture indicated that he needed to approve the change before it would occur. He thought for a moment before he approved the change with a wave of his hand. 

This was an experiment after all, he would learn more if he enacted a small change and it remove the minor irritant that his circular island caused him.

The moment he waved his hand he felt a slight rumble beneath his feet. After a few seconds it faded to nothing and he looked back to the menu to see he was now in the main screen again.

Demesne: Unnamed 

Area: 400.1 metres squared

Souls: 0

Demons:0

AU Balance: 92

Expand territory.

Material change/creation

Access Restricted Marketplace.

He looked at the menu, confused. He was sure he'd set the size of the domain to a square, twenty metres each side. What had gone wrong? After a moment, he shrugged it off. A rounding error, perhaps he'd made a mistake shaping the land. It didn't matter.

He wandered to the edge of his territory and was pleased to see that the round edges had been squared off, the corners jutted hard out into the chaos beyond. It wasn't much, but Theo felt better knowing that he had been able to effect some kind of change, take some sort of control over his situation.

After inspecting each of the four corners he returned to the menu and prepared to dive into the second option.

Material change/creation.

He waved his hand over the option and the menu changed onec again. This time, the three dimensional model of his realm appeared, but half the size and moved to one side of the ring shaped 'screen'. On the other half was a squarish block of flame. 

Theo felt more confident this time and reached out to the block. Just like before, once he touched it he was able to shape with a combination of his fingers and thoughts. After a few minutes he'd crafted a simple enough chair and when he withdrew his hands a number along with the hand wave symbol appeared. The number was '1'. To craft a chair he would need to spend one AU. He wondered if that was the actual cost or if a minimum cost of one had been implemented.

He'd need to experiment some more.