CH696

“Apologies for the delay,” Quilith said, gently bowing his head. “As I’m sure you can imagine, rearranging a schedule when someone comes back to life isn’t the easiest thing, especially when we didn’t immediately notice you lived.”

“No worries, almost dying is inconvenient for a lot of people,” He shrugged. “So how have you been? Did I miss any exciting news?”

“A bit. Shall I go through your usual reading and update you?”

“Sounds good.”

Taking a seat, the grey brought up all of the new information they’d learned about the universe in a series of rapidly switching slides, letting Ben take it all in while they talked.

“We still haven’t found a world we’d want to talk to if your planet fails,” He admitted. “It’s a big universe, there’s probably plenty that would meet our desires and be willing to help us but it’s a matter of finding them among everything else. If you lose and we keep not being able to find other options we might need to settle for picking the lesser evil.”

“And what exactly does that mean for you?”

“In general? It means limiting ourselves. I won’t lie, not many of us are attached to the thought of being ruled by gods who can force their whims and desires upon us, it seems like a recipe for stagnation in general. The fact that the gods of this world act through community makes it a lot easier to stomach when one can’t unilaterally decide that something is forbidden with no obvious reason.”

“Mmh, true, I don’t really know what things were like on a lot of their old worlds but I sure wouldn’t want to be under a couple of the ones I know about.”

“Ha, your personal issues are one thing but we’ve already seen plenty of planets I would describe us as being wholly incompatible with. Even aside from all of the ones I’m comfortable describing as evil gods, we’ve seen peoples who are forbidden from working metal or preserving food because of whatever strange sensibilities their gods hold, in essence stagnating their entire races. There’s an entire universe out there to explore but the sensibilities of the divine mean so many races will never get off the ground, even if it’s all just a step away.”

That had to be a particularly difficult idea for the grey as a whole. A technologically advanced race who could have easily gone out to conquer the stars of their homeworld if not for how incompatible their home universe was to the very idea of space travel, locking them all onto a single planet that was slowly dying after losing its sun. To escape that situation may have been the dream but no matter how better it could have been, they didn’t want to be once more trapped under a single world without even the right to leave it.

“Well, hopefully you won’t have to. If things work out here then we’ll get you settled and we can all live happily ever after. Speaking of, how goes trying to rip a hole in your universe?”

It was one of the many shortcuts they were trying to take to reduce the cost of the summoning spell and despite everything else, Quilith seemed pleased.

“We’ve had success in our trials, the only thing left is trying to keep it open for your gods to come through while making it safe for us to be close by. Viewing the effects of what happens when a body is exposed to the naked chaos is enough to make us want to avoid it at all costs.”

“What? Did you guys have an accident or something?”

Quilith shook his head. “Animal testing. The things that are exposed to it for long enough seem to mutate, we’re still trying to understand what happened to some of the bodies we’ve managed to retrieve, and those who stare into it go insane by all accounts we’ve seen so far. Bar one of course.”

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author’s consent. Report any sightings.