Carry on up the Pantheon
Carry on up the Pantheon is the opening paragraphs to yet another fanfic, written to a nonexisting book. It is more of a fanfic to a particular author's style, rather than an existing story.
It might have been on a Tuesday or possibly a Wednesday. Of course that was if you actually called the weekdays those names, and if your week actually was seven days and if there actually was such a thing as a week. In The Pantheon ™, quite a nice neighbourhood actually, the word spread that there was a New People.
Somewhere in the galaxy on a small populated planet, a group of people who were more than eighty but less than an already established population like for example a 200 head community, had been sheltering from the hardships of nature by staying together for more than a year and had started breeding. Among them there was now a soul who had started pondering the age old question of “how things work, when you come to think of it”.
The committee for “shaping things up around here and not leaving things all willy nilly” had agreed on that definition some time ago when it had become obvious that the wooing of disciples was handled on a very happy go lucky basis where the deity who happened to be in the vicinity of a gaggle of sentient beings basically dropped off a few folders and buggered off - not very useful if the group had not invented reading yet - or as the case were with the less refined gods, set some bush aflame to impress. First of all it was agreed that there really was no point of actually trying to woo groups of less than fifty, since they usually would be completely wiped out in less than two years anyway. There had been rather embarrassing instances when the storm, forest fire, flood or other awe-inducing device had backfired, killing the prospective proselytes stone dead before anyone even had the chance of saying, “May we come in? We would like to talk to you about -insert deity here”.
It wasn’t that he was a bad father.[1]
He thought.
It was just that whenever he could zone in on his daughter’s incessant prattle, it always failed to interest him, and now not listening had started to pay its tribute by her going off on her own, doing things that were not sanctioned by parenting, claiming that “daddy said I could”.
It wouldn’t have been so bad, had these things involved, in various degrees, boys, fermented drinks and those new fangled “wheels” everyone kept talking about. But the girl simply sat beneath a tree and… stared for hours. Or she would drive her mother crazy by going through all the carefully chewed string, making contraptions that would invariably fail to do anything. Just the other day, she had upset her mother, not a little bit, by standing for several hours tossing things in the air and watching them fall down. He was afraid his daughter had caught a bad case of thinking.
In The Pantheon™, discussion was underway as to who should be sent to greet the new sentients. It was no secret that factions were formed, reorganized according to a new management chart and then reformed again. During the course of history - and that is a long time - the Pantheon ™ had been reorganized more times than a large computer/service company. It had had a stint as an anarcho-syndicalist commune with rotational executive power, it had been a flat organization, and then an accredited firm. It had been ISO-certified so many times they had run out of multiples of 1000.(Contrary to popular belief, they are actually finite) It had been six sigmaed within an inch of its life, diversified, nucleared - even outsourced a couple of times. (That had proven a _really_ bad idea, since the human representatives tended to get the mission statements all wrong. “THAT was a bloody mess, literally, let me tell you” - as big Zioux would say whenever the idea of franchising would come up during meetings.) Now the waves of discussion roared across the table in the round table/think tank/brainstorming session while the gods tried to come to a conclusion. The New People, or People X as they were referred to in the discussions, had just reached status D4. They had been stuck in status D3 for some time, but finally one of them had asked the question “How does it all actually work?” and they now needed to be taken care of.
In the ungodly pits of theocratic bureaucracy Herman, slight deity of Godly Communications was composing a letter. It was in reply to the complaints of the much tried Gob Gobson whom some monotheistically inclined joker of the more malevolent gods had heaped troubles upon in such an extent that Questions had been Asked during the Monday morning Q and A. The god in question was now “concentrating on his family” and it was Herman’s thankless task to write to Gobson, outlining the measures taken regarding his case.
Gob Gobson had been a fervent believer in Manny, a mid level god with questionable hygiene and a bulldozer personality that had ensured the elevation to mid level, and equally safely ensured that he would never, ever rise above it. Stuck in career limbo, Manny had started abusing his followers for kicks, more so than anyone the rather fanatical Gobson.
“Dear Mr Gobson. Thank You for Your letter. The board of directors has found that you do have a valid claim. Unfortunately our customer database informs me that you have been deceased for 2345 years come this June. As you are probably fully aware, deadness voids the contract between The Pantheon ™ and the customer. I apologize for any inconvenience this might cause. Ys. Sincerely etc…”
The minor deity of administration known simply as Mr. Anderson, pulled the sheet from the typewriter, rolled the parchment and stuffed it into a tube, inserted the tube into the tube mail system piping and decided to take lunch. It was a shitty job, but someone had to do it. In the universe, whenever there is a shitty job to be done, someone like Mr. Anderson will emerge and do it. It is practically a law of the universe, that there will always be someone there to do the job, whatever the job might be. There are those who call them the Lawful Neutral, and where the evil may do horrible things, simply for the sheer evilness, the Mr. Andersons of the world will do things simply because someone thinks it needs to be done. The nature of the job is of no significance to Mr. Anderson. He will simply pop into existence whenever someone says things in the nature of: “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” or “And exactly where would we find 2000 kg of Zyklon B at this hour?”
They also are the ones who change the coffee filter in the office coffee maker, empty overfull waste baskets and clean up after messy suicides, (making sure to leave passive aggressive little notes about people’s maternal entities not being employed in said area)but those feats tend not to go to history.
[1] As a matter of fact, he was a rather bad father, but only in normal terms of not really listening, not really paying attention and not really understanding the greatness in badly drawn family scenes or interestingly shaped pieces of rock - but still not really up there with “The worst Fathers in History” or “When Dads go Bad”. Counting roughly, he was possibly the ten millionth worst father in history, so far. He was for example by no means up there with Attila the Hunter-Gatherer who would eat his young for a lark, and neither was he on par with Wilhelm the Conker who tried to marry off all his sons to goats. Probably the worst father in history, though, was Harun the Rational, who would meet his eighty-one daughters’ insecurities and pleas for attention or affection with a logical refute, who would laugh derisively whenever he proved them wrong or irrational and who was also, at times, rather sarky. His wifes would excuse him with “Daddy’s rather tired, you know” but history showed the far reaching effects of his bad parenting when all his daughters decided they wanted to become “It-girls”. Except for Valerie, who never paid attention, and became an IT-girl, and, apart from utilizing a useful storage system for information by inserting compartments in her desk drawer, but also revolutionized communication technology on her home planet forever by inventing a rudimentary smiley that could be attached to carrier pigeons, thusly completely eclipsing her fathers life time hard work with algorithms and connecting the name of Rational into history as a means of organizing your stuff, causing hilarity in any English speaking society and overshadowing her fathers efforts for ever. Let that be a lesson to all sarky fathers.
To be continued.
It might have been on a Tuesday or possibly a Wednesday. Of course that was if you actually called the weekdays those names, and if your week actually was seven days and if there actually was such a thing as a week. In The Pantheon ™, quite a nice neighbourhood actually, the word spread that there was a New People.
Somewhere in the galaxy on a small populated planet, a group of people who were more than eighty but less than an already established population like for example a 200 head community, had been sheltering from the hardships of nature by staying together for more than a year and had started breeding. Among them there was now a soul who had started pondering the age old question of “how things work, when you come to think of it”.
The committee for “shaping things up around here and not leaving things all willy nilly” had agreed on that definition some time ago when it had become obvious that the wooing of disciples was handled on a very happy go lucky basis where the deity who happened to be in the vicinity of a gaggle of sentient beings basically dropped off a few folders and buggered off - not very useful if the group had not invented reading yet - or as the case were with the less refined gods, set some bush aflame to impress. First of all it was agreed that there really was no point of actually trying to woo groups of less than fifty, since they usually would be completely wiped out in less than two years anyway. There had been rather embarrassing instances when the storm, forest fire, flood or other awe-inducing device had backfired, killing the prospective proselytes stone dead before anyone even had the chance of saying, “May we come in? We would like to talk to you about -insert deity here”.
It wasn’t that he was a bad father.[1]
He thought.
It was just that whenever he could zone in on his daughter’s incessant prattle, it always failed to interest him, and now not listening had started to pay its tribute by her going off on her own, doing things that were not sanctioned by parenting, claiming that “daddy said I could”.
It wouldn’t have been so bad, had these things involved, in various degrees, boys, fermented drinks and those new fangled “wheels” everyone kept talking about. But the girl simply sat beneath a tree and… stared for hours. Or she would drive her mother crazy by going through all the carefully chewed string, making contraptions that would invariably fail to do anything. Just the other day, she had upset her mother, not a little bit, by standing for several hours tossing things in the air and watching them fall down. He was afraid his daughter had caught a bad case of thinking.
In The Pantheon™, discussion was underway as to who should be sent to greet the new sentients. It was no secret that factions were formed, reorganized according to a new management chart and then reformed again. During the course of history - and that is a long time - the Pantheon ™ had been reorganized more times than a large computer/service company. It had had a stint as an anarcho-syndicalist commune with rotational executive power, it had been a flat organization, and then an accredited firm. It had been ISO-certified so many times they had run out of multiples of 1000.(Contrary to popular belief, they are actually finite) It had been six sigmaed within an inch of its life, diversified, nucleared - even outsourced a couple of times. (That had proven a _really_ bad idea, since the human representatives tended to get the mission statements all wrong. “THAT was a bloody mess, literally, let me tell you” - as big Zioux would say whenever the idea of franchising would come up during meetings.) Now the waves of discussion roared across the table in the round table/think tank/brainstorming session while the gods tried to come to a conclusion. The New People, or People X as they were referred to in the discussions, had just reached status D4. They had been stuck in status D3 for some time, but finally one of them had asked the question “How does it all actually work?” and they now needed to be taken care of.
In the ungodly pits of theocratic bureaucracy Herman, slight deity of Godly Communications was composing a letter. It was in reply to the complaints of the much tried Gob Gobson whom some monotheistically inclined joker of the more malevolent gods had heaped troubles upon in such an extent that Questions had been Asked during the Monday morning Q and A. The god in question was now “concentrating on his family” and it was Herman’s thankless task to write to Gobson, outlining the measures taken regarding his case.
Gob Gobson had been a fervent believer in Manny, a mid level god with questionable hygiene and a bulldozer personality that had ensured the elevation to mid level, and equally safely ensured that he would never, ever rise above it. Stuck in career limbo, Manny had started abusing his followers for kicks, more so than anyone the rather fanatical Gobson.
“Dear Mr Gobson. Thank You for Your letter. The board of directors has found that you do have a valid claim. Unfortunately our customer database informs me that you have been deceased for 2345 years come this June. As you are probably fully aware, deadness voids the contract between The Pantheon ™ and the customer. I apologize for any inconvenience this might cause. Ys. Sincerely etc…”
The minor deity of administration known simply as Mr. Anderson, pulled the sheet from the typewriter, rolled the parchment and stuffed it into a tube, inserted the tube into the tube mail system piping and decided to take lunch. It was a shitty job, but someone had to do it. In the universe, whenever there is a shitty job to be done, someone like Mr. Anderson will emerge and do it. It is practically a law of the universe, that there will always be someone there to do the job, whatever the job might be. There are those who call them the Lawful Neutral, and where the evil may do horrible things, simply for the sheer evilness, the Mr. Andersons of the world will do things simply because someone thinks it needs to be done. The nature of the job is of no significance to Mr. Anderson. He will simply pop into existence whenever someone says things in the nature of: “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” or “And exactly where would we find 2000 kg of Zyklon B at this hour?”
They also are the ones who change the coffee filter in the office coffee maker, empty overfull waste baskets and clean up after messy suicides, (making sure to leave passive aggressive little notes about people’s maternal entities not being employed in said area)but those feats tend not to go to history.
[1] As a matter of fact, he was a rather bad father, but only in normal terms of not really listening, not really paying attention and not really understanding the greatness in badly drawn family scenes or interestingly shaped pieces of rock - but still not really up there with “The worst Fathers in History” or “When Dads go Bad”. Counting roughly, he was possibly the ten millionth worst father in history, so far. He was for example by no means up there with Attila the Hunter-Gatherer who would eat his young for a lark, and neither was he on par with Wilhelm the Conker who tried to marry off all his sons to goats. Probably the worst father in history, though, was Harun the Rational, who would meet his eighty-one daughters’ insecurities and pleas for attention or affection with a logical refute, who would laugh derisively whenever he proved them wrong or irrational and who was also, at times, rather sarky. His wifes would excuse him with “Daddy’s rather tired, you know” but history showed the far reaching effects of his bad parenting when all his daughters decided they wanted to become “It-girls”. Except for Valerie, who never paid attention, and became an IT-girl, and, apart from utilizing a useful storage system for information by inserting compartments in her desk drawer, but also revolutionized communication technology on her home planet forever by inventing a rudimentary smiley that could be attached to carrier pigeons, thusly completely eclipsing her fathers life time hard work with algorithms and connecting the name of Rational into history as a means of organizing your stuff, causing hilarity in any English speaking society and overshadowing her fathers efforts for ever. Let that be a lesson to all sarky fathers.
To be continued.