“To appear requires an appearance, and this is as good as any. When I show myself to people looking as they do, it helps form a connection.”
“Then why don’t you look like someone from my world right now?”
“Because you didn’t come here for a connection. You came in wondering what happens when an atheist meets a god, so I met you as I would anyone else here. But now we have met, and the questions you came in with were not about me.”
“Yet I can’t seem to help myself,” Jason said. “Why would a goddess even bother to answer any of my questions?”
“I am Knowledge. It is my nature.”
“That feels like a lie.”
The corners of her mouth twitched up in a slight smile.
“Call it an incomplete truth.”
Jason laughed. “You have your own agenda.”
“Don’t we all? But whatever my motivations, you still have questions, and I still have answers. If it makes you feel better, know that you are insufficiently consequential to be worth manipulating.”
“That’s a little hurtful, but kind of reassuring, I guess. Can you actually smite me down?”
“We transcendent beings are limited in our ability to affect physical reality. We can affect magic, creating essences and awakening stones. We can also affect our area of influence. I am Knowledge, therefore I can bestow any knowledge I have at will.”
“And you have all the knowledge.”
She smiled.
“So, can the god of the oceans or whatever create tsunamis and such?”
“Yes, but direct intervention is antithetical to our nature, other than to redress an imbalance. More often we work through our followers.”
“So if you wanted to smite me, you could just find the nearest silver rank on the membership rolls and point in my general direction.”
“More or less,” she said. “Of course, another god could send their own agents to intervene. It is something akin to a matter of etiquette to let our followers determine the outcome of a conflict between deities.”
“Who doesn’t love a holy war?” Jason asked. “I suppose I should get on with the actual questions I came in here with, shouldn’t I?”
“Please do.”
“Alright, then. When I was brought to this world, was I chosen?”
“No, it was happenstance. While your world is magically barren, this one is magically rich. That magic builds up over time, finding various forms of release.”
“Is that why the monster surges happen?”
“Indeed it is,” she said. “The magic can also be released by flaring out from this world, sometimes coming into contact with another. If conditions are just right, that contact forms a connection, an inadvertent bridge across which someone can be drawn.”
“If it’s just random chance, where do my outworlder abilities come from? They feel designed.”
“They are designed,” she said. “By you. The journey between worlds altered your body, flooded it with magic. Outworlders like yourself unconsciously shape that magic into a form they can understand, to help them navigate this world using the rules of their own.”
“So, I gave myself powers?”
“It would be more accurate to say that when the power came upon you, you chose its form. A way of framing this world through your own in order to make it comprehensible. As is so often the case when dealing with the dark depths of the mind, the results are more intuitive than practical. But what I am describing isn’t what really happened to you. It is simply the closest I can get to an explanation you could understand. Trying to explain the true forces at play would be like explaining mathematics to a rock. You fundamentally lack the capacity to perceive what I would need to show you.”
The goddess held her hands in a show of helplessness.
“If you were one of my followers,” she said, “I could do better. Imbue the knowledge directly into your mind.”
“No thanks,” Jason said. “I’m all about that self-determination.”
“Our followers are free to act as they will. We are not tyrants.”
“Of course you don’t think that. To you, being all-powerful seems natural. If you know everything I know, then you know I’ve heard all that ‘freedom within faith’ nonsense before.”
“But the gods of this world are not remote entities that never show themselves or take action.”
Jason laughed.
“And you think that makes it better?” he asked. “I never abdicated my moral responsibility to an absentee sky wizard in my world, and I’m not doing it now that the wizard’s shown up to enforce it.”
The goddess chuckled.
“I didn’t think so, but I had to try,” she said.
“I get it,” Jason said. “Got to get those bums in pews.”
“You’re stalling,” she said. “Going off on tangents to avoid the question you’re not sure you want the answer to.”
“That’s a go-to move for me.”
“I know. You won’t find me easy to manipulate.”
“I didn’t think so, but I had to try.”
“We are both beholden to our natures,” she said. “Ask your question. The only real question you came in here with.”
“You already know the question.”
“Yet you must ask it. Only then will the responsibility for hearing the answer be yours.”
Jason nodded.
“Is there a way for me to go home?”
“Do you want there to be?”
“I don’t know,” Jason said. “I mean, that should be the goal, right? But there isn’t a lot waiting for me back there. Here, I see potential. What I can become. The wonders waiting over the next hill.”
He looked at the goddess.
“You know everything, right? You tell me if I want to go back.”
“That is a question only you can answer. That is why I asked it.”
“Is it possible?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“You have possessed the means from the beginning, but you are not ready to use it.”
“From the beginning?”
Jason thought back to the day he first arrived. The first time he opened his inventory there was an object inside. An object his ability couldn’t, or wouldn’t identify, and had been sitting in his inventory ever since.
“The world-phoenix token,” he said.
“Yes. I would advise against trying to learn more about it. Anyone who would actually recognise it would be unwilling to leave it in your hands.”
“Why do I have it?”
“I am possessed of every piece of knowledge in this world,” she said, “but that is a question to which I do not know the answer.”
“That’s only mildly terrifying,” Jason said. “You said I wasn’t ready to use it?”
“Choosing to use it would require an act of faith.”
“And faith is very much not my thing.”
“Of that, I am very much aware,” she said. “When circumstances dictate, the token will use itself.”
“Even if it’s in my magical void storage thing?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not going to tell me the trigger conditions, are you?”
“You were warned that I would answer or not, as I choose. In this case, I choose not.”
“So I could just be walking along the street and whoosh, back home I go?”
“If you decide that that you do not wish to return to your world, then discard the token.”
“So I have to choose if I want to stay,” he said. “Either I throw this thing away, or hang about until these mysterious circumstances to come about. What do I do in the meantime?”
“Get stronger. You will need that strength for what is to come.”
“You told me you couldn’t see the future.”
“I’ve been known to make some bloody good guesses.”
Jason laughed, and the goddess smiled.
“You know,” he said, “I didn’t know what to expect from a goddess. I figured, if you were real, that I wouldn’t handle it very well.”
“You could have done worse.”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing, though; I should have. When I came to this world, the magic changed me. I’m not even human, now. Did it change the way I think? Is that how I’ve been getting though all this without losing my mind?”