Of Souls and Serpents, Pre-Tia Draft

The Goddess stared at the tiny mote of light floating in the air. She looked at the hovering, glowing panes that she had summoned to record the choices of the diminutive soul.

A series of emotions flickered through her being; confusion, wonder, respect, admiration, and just a touch of jealous indignation.

"How?" she asked, narrowing her metaphysical gaze. When one was the Goddess of Dungeons, having a Dungeon Core as your default form sounded like a perfectly good and rational idea. Not for the first time she lamented having chosen a glowing, crystalline orb set in a snake's mouth as her divine avatar.

The mote gave the glowball equivalent of a shrug, "I dunno. It's just something that seems to happen? When you create something, very often you're thick in the middle of it and can't see the forest for the trees. When you make a bunch of things over a long period of time you're not thinking of all the ways they can mesh with things you've made in the past, and cannot predict the ways they will work with things you make in the future."

It began to trace slow, lazy figure eights in the air. It didn't even have a body and yet somehow it was obviously still having trouble figuring out what to do with its hands while speaking. "You know what you intended when you made a thing and as a result, you're going to have a much harder time taking that thing out of the box you made to put it in and connect it up to other things. Even if you are a powerful divine force, there's no substitute for putting a few thousand minds to the task of completely and utterly taking the intended mechanics and spanking them over a barrel."

The Goddess drew in a deep mental breath and gave a slow mental exhalation. This was her last chance. She'd already incarnated four souls and sent them out into each of the worlds within her reach. Each of them had failed, bringing the Goddess that much closer to oblivion. Each loss annihilating yet another portion of her Divine Domain, blocking off the hallways of her once titanic dungeon form.

"Are you sure this is what you want to go with?" she asked of the disembodied soul, "Because this is not going to be… pleasant. In fact, this is going to hurt a lot, and you're not going to remember very much, just dribs and drabs of what I'm able to release to you."

Another glowball shrug, "I'm used to it. I'm sure Auntie told you about what my life was like. The moments I wasn't patched into one of her servers were complete and utter agony. Yay genetic insensitivity to sedatives and car accidents pulping ALL THE BONES!" the orb said pleasantly.

"You are very strange."

"Well, yeah. You shouldn't expect to have a big ball of normal pop out when you take a human brain whose body might as well be one of those sci-fi show transporter accidents that does nothing but wail "KILL MEEEEEEE!" and then in order to give it social interaction splice it directly into a set of VRMMORPG secretly run by an extradimensional space dragoness, and leave said brain to grow to adulthood with nothing but the Internet and game spaces for social interaction."

The disembodied soul puffed up a bit and turned slightly red, "Honestly, I'm astonished I'm as normal as I am!"

The Goddess wished that she had both a face and a hand with which to palm it. "Those are all perfectly recognizable words, mostly, and yet remain utterly incomprehensible."

More soul shrugs, "Well, you can send me on my way to get started with the whole experiencing excruciating physical torment in order to be remolded as your divine champion thing."

Soul orbs should not be able to grin like this one was, somehow.

"Plus," it continued, "The sooner I get out of your metaphorical hair, the sooner you can go back to your brooding. All alone. In the dark. Just waiting for the opportunity to angrily shout 'WHO INTRUDES UPON MY PERFECT DARKNESS?!'"

And while she was wishing for things, eyebrows to scowl with would be nice. Very, very nice.

"If you are utterly certain of your incarnation. Once you leave here it is completely immutable, save for the choices left up to me. Which you will be unable to ask for deviations from due to your chosen path."

And now the featureless glowing orb was floating smugly. The Goddess knew not how, and it bothered her immensely. Mostly because she wanted to take notes on how to emote as a perfectly smooth sphere and didn't know where to begin.

"I don't think I'm going to get any readier than I am, Subby." the glowball said happily.

Profane Goddess of Labrythine Darkness, Underworld Serpent thought to herself that dead things had no right to be quite this chipper and cheerful.

"Subby?" she repeated incredulously.

"Well, I can't just call you by your full title, Underworld Serpent isn't a name, and it's five whole syllables besides! So you need a nickname! So with my rudimentary Latin that would be Submundus Anguis. Subanguis? Sanguis? Sanguis!"

Oh by her own sealed corridors, it was singing.

"Sanguis! Bibimus! Corpus! Edimus!" the orb warbled. To be perfectly honest, though the words had no meaning and the soul's vocal ability was lacking, the tune did sound acceptably sinister enough to serve as a hymn to a Goddess of Darkness and Dungeons.

"Tolle corpus Satani, aaaaaave! Ave, ave versus Christos!" the orb sang happily as it began to fade, made to incarnate upon the World of Stone, the lowest of the four realms the Goddess had access to.

Finally.

Quiet at last.

There was something wrong with that soul.

And Ancestral Divines help her, she'd went and staked the minuscule remainder of her faded power upon the silly thing.

She was doomed.