Vignette 2
Aren’t You Lucky She’s a Lady?
Terra Torus, The Fractured Plate, Castle of Clouds – A. F. 451,208:
Lady Luck, Goddess of her given name, scowled at the wine in her glass. One of her followers had been lucky enough to score a shipment of the rare vintage and had made an offering of one of the bottles. The wine was said to taste like one’s sweetest dreams, but to her it tasted like a bitter nightmare.
Rainbow eyes stared back at her in the surface of the crystal glass. When would those jumped-up demigods finally get put in their place?
“Let me through!” shouted a familiar voice, ringing off the hallways and up to Lady Luck’s room, destroying her peace as always.
“I can’t; the Lady has a very important meeting—” a woman's voice began, trying to dissuade the rowdy intruder, but she was cut off by a grunt of indignation.
“I assure you, no one more important than me would care to visit the goddess of good fortune.”
“How dare you! Her name is Lady Luck, and she is—” Before her assistant could say something that might get her injured by the muscle-for-brains god, Lady Luck called out in a most ladylike voice:
“Shelly, he may enter. I have been expecting him.”
A sound like the grinding of teeth could be heard as Shelly reluctantly led the loud intruder to the stairs. The Goddess took the time to check herself over in the cloud mirror, straighten her cloud dress, and place a cloud clip in her platinum hair. Luckily, it fell into place on the first try, making her look just so.
She couldn’t have been a second slower; as soon as she deemed herself presentable, the door was kicked down, sending wisps of midnight cloud dissipating across her chambers. Lady Luck turned gracefully, no hint of surprise on her face as she raised a pristine eyebrow at her glowing intruder. In her doorway there stood a tall, well-built man, as bald as he was angry. Steam billowed from his nostrils, and his red skin reflected the fiery corona that surrounded his body.
“Lumious, what a… pleasant surprise,” Lady Luck said in such a way that made it clear seeing him was not at all pleasant.
“Five thousand of my soldiers are dead,” Lumious seethed. Without waiting to be invited, he stormed across the room and slumped down into one of the cloud chairs, changing it into a seat of burning orange plasma.
“Really, how fascinating,” Lady Luck replied, her sarcasm not immediately evident as she returned to the mirror and pretended to take care of her already perfect face.
Stealing the glass the Goddess had set aside and downing it in one, Lumious continued his unprompted complaining.
“Five thousand soldiers, veterans from the Sixth Plate, armed and armoured in the best equipment my Empire of Light has to offer, killed by those mana-starved weaklings on the First Plate – how, I hear you ask?” Lumious spat, not having heard anything of the sort, “attrition. God’s damned morons were attrited down to nothing!”
“Logistics are the heart of any army,” Lady Luck commented dryly as she touched up her eyebrows.
“Quite,” Lumious growled, refilling his glass with the last of the wine. “I had my generals track exactly what went wrong. Do you know what they said?”
“Why would I?” The Goddess asked in response.
“Why indeed,” Luminous muttered darkly, before clearing his throat and continuing with his unsolicited story. “The reports say the reason my army was left to starve, alone in a mana-poor environment, and with little more than the equipment on their backs, was the failure of a teleportation gate; the one between the first and second plate. It took a month before it burst to life once more, by which time an army of barbaric humans had made camp.”
Lady Luck shrugged nonchalantly as she walked over to a wardrobe and started picking out an array of colourful, cloudy scarves. “That’s not so surprising; those things are remnants of the Great Empire—
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“Empire of Darkness,” Lumious corrected with vehemence. Lady Luck looked at the perpetually angry bald god for a moment, wondering if he had been fooled by his own rhetoric. In the end she concluded it wasn’t worth fighting over.
“Empire of Darkness,” the Goddess gracefully allowed. “It’s been thousands of years since they constructed the gates. There's no one left who really understands them. Sometimes they stop working, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“I’ll have you know that my people have been studying the gates, and while it’s true they’re nowhere near replicating the magic, they have discovered their function is tied to the movement of the stars.” Lumious bragged.
“Truly?!” Lady Luck asked, gasping, to sell the shock and humour the lesser god, as if this was news to her.
The puffy-chested god didn’t catch any of the subtext behind the Goddess’s exclamation and just beamed with pride, as if he had gotten one over on the elder deity.
“Truly,” a smug Lumious confirmed. However, after a second his gloating grin twisted back into its regular, sinister snarl. “Despite this knowledge, there are still mistakes.”
With anger returning to him, the large god jumped out of his chair and began pacing, too excited to stay seated. “My generals say there was a comet that passed by just at the wrong time. A comet that my Astrologers and Seers hadn’t predicted.”
“Ohh, how… unlucky,” Lady Luck insincerely consoled. Lumious looked over to her sharply. Lady Luck straightened imperceptibly; perhaps she had been a bit on the nose with that one, but she didn’t panic; he had no proof.
“Yes,” the god of the sun drawled, “very, unlucky.” Luminous stepped up to the seemingly unbothered Goddess, his eyes inches from hers and searching for any sign of deceit. For her part, Lady Luck crossed her arms with painful casualness and examined the other god right back.
“If I find out you had a hand in this…” Lumious growled, the threat remaining unspoken. If it came to a fight, the god of the sun would win, and they both knew it. Still, Lady Luck just looked on, unimpressed.
“Really?” She scoffed, “Remind me: who was it who helped you take down the Great Emp— I mean the Empire of Darkness?”
“And ever since they fell, progress has been impossibly slow. It has taken me thousands of years to incorporate the lands they once possessed – constantly fighting, all the way from the eighth plate right round to the first, and always there are these unforeseen hiccups, nothing major, but combined the effect has been infuriating!” Lumious ranted.
Lady Luck stared the god down and asked provocatively, “What are you saying?”
“No one shall stop me from ruling Terra Torus. No one.
I’m sending one of my champions to the First Plate; it will be conquered before next century.” Lumious replied in a low tone. A moment of tense silence lay between them before Lumious finally broke it by stamping away, his footsteps cushioned by the cloud floor.
The god clearly thought she might be responsible; this was not the first time he’d come storming in, but like all the other times, he lacked evidence.
“I don’t know why I came; the goddess of gamblers doesn’t have the power to do anything to stop me,” he mumbled over his shoulder as he left.
The bait wasn’t taken. Lady Luck maintained her cool facade as she listened to the grumpy emperor god trudge down the stairs, barge past Shelly, and leave her castle. As soon as she was sure he was gone, the Goddess of Luck stopped reining in her feelings.
With a sudden burst of frustration, she screamed, grabbed the chair that man had sullied by turning it into a mini sun and defenestrated the offending piece of furniture. It wasn’t enough, so she snatched up the empty wine bottle and threw it at the wall. Ordinarily, the glass bottle would have been caught by the cloud castle’s walls, but her throw was a lucky one, and the bottle tagged a small pebble that had been sucked up into the clouds, causing it to shatter, creating a satisfying display that did little to soothe the lady.
“That bastard!” she railed. “Who does he think he is?!”
“A lesser god who needs the belief of the people to stay in power,” a fluffy-haired sheepkin woman reminded, trying to cheer her mistress up. “Unlike you, he wasn’t born of the true Gods.”
Seeing Shelly enter, Lady Luck reigned herself in. She brushed back the hair from her face and tried her best to look regal. “Sorry you had to see me like that,” the Goddess apologised.
“It’s fine,” Shelly consoled, her grin as infectious as always, “I know what he does to you.”
The platinum-haired Goddess narrowed her eyes at her assistant but ultimately chose not to look too deeply into that statement; innocent Shelly likely didn’t mean anything by it.
Noticing the look, the sheep person asked, “Mistress, do I have something on my face?”
“Hmm, no. I was just thinking.”
“About our next move?” Shelly asked eagerly.
Deciding to go with it, Lady Luck nodded magnanimously. “I think our next move should be—” she began when a very fortunate notification interrupted her.
One of Your Blessed has Returned to Terra Torus!
Blessed: Elijah L. Chim?ra has returned from off-planet!
Shelly, concerned by her mistress's vacant expression, coughed and prompted, “Our next move should be…”
“A champion,” Lady Luck replied with a grin that split her face from ear to ear. “I think it’s about time I got my first champion.” Her lucky find was finally ready to be put to use.
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