Now, Loke was a minor deity in Valhalla. Loke had a bad reputation for being unruly, a bit of a prankster, and generally uncool, which was exactly the sort of person the devil avoided, but he was also the sort of person god hated.
The devil found Loke dodging Thor. Loke had a joke he liked. He’d walk in and ask Thor, “What is your name?”
Thor would answer “I’m Thor!” with his characteristic panache and enthusiasm.
Loke would answer “I’m Thorry!” and Thor would throw something at him, in this case, repeatedly throw something at him, multiple lightning bolts from his hammer.
“Hey, Lucifer!” Loke yelled from his current hiding place, a large stone on a mountain in Valhalla.
“Hey, Loke. I got a problem.” The devil ambled over, dodging a lightning bolt. “Thor, lay off him for a bit; I have to talk to him.”
Thor huffed and went off to find Sif to complain.
The devil waited until Thor had left earshot. “As I said, I’ve got a problem. This Jehovah has declared himself most high over earth, this tinpot planet he’s made. I don’t know why I care, but it is pissing me off. He thinks he’s banished me there. I am no longer able to access heaven, but I can enter the counsel of the most high as per treaty. And, of course, I can go to pretty much any other polity, so here I am. As I said, we have to do something about this Jehovah.”
“Jehovah? Who is that? I thought that planet was under the counsel of the most high? How did Jehovah get control of it?”
“Well, you know the most high. They are far more interested in golf than in anything else. He’s gotten permission to pretty much run the whole show. I really think they’re phoning it in these days. That’s why I’m here.”
“Why not consult the elder gods? Wouldn’t Rah or Atum be interested in this?”
“Ra has his hands full with the Serrun-D’La right now. Rumor has it that they are thinking about a colony on earth, but have not made any moves yet. Atum, as you know, is a complete playboy and can’t be roused for anything. He swings by earth a lot for the parties.”
“Yeah, you always throw the greatest parties, with the best minds and the finest conversation available. What happened?”
“Jehovah drowned the damn world!” The devil looked away, a hard, distant look settling on his visage.
“Drowned the world? How is that even possible?”
“Well, he let loose all the water he could find on earth, then he hit it with a comet. There were exactly eight survivors, not counting the animals Jehovah felt needed saving. They’re still tossing around down there on the high seas, over the mountaintops.”
Loke let out a low whistle. “Yeah, I see what you mean. Even in his worst rages, Thor would never drown an entire world, and certainly not for partying. I must speak to Odin about this. The Allfather may know what to do. Certainly the halls of Valhalla will be interested, even if there’s nothing that can be done.”
“Ok,” Jesus said. “But first I must seek out Hel and see if she can spring my friends from Gehenna.”
The night arrived, and, with it, the perpetual party of the halls of Valhalla was called to disorder. Odin, the Allfather, master of Valhalla assumed the place of honor at the head of the table, dodging an errant axe sent sizzling by some young punk. Odin was old enough that the carousing and fighting didn’t interest him much. He was interested in the eating and the dancing wenches.
Lucifer entered the great hall a bit after Loke, and his presence ate into the noise like a flame into styrofoam. As he strode into the room, pockets of chaos once seeing him fell silent like a fish falls on a butcher block, with a sort of audible whump caused by a dozen or so warrior mouths shutting at once, with the clatter of trenchers struck by discarded meat and the thunk and slosh of hastily settled tankards.
Lucifer was always quite the sight. Created by Jehovah himself as an earlier creation, Lucifer was not a god. He was a massive majestic angel of such intense beauty that even the manliest, straightest of the halls of Valhalla couldn’t help but shift themselves in their seats a little to relieve the pressure of their rising tumescence.
He carried himself proudly but not arrogantly. He also carried a majestic pair of wings attached to his back. These wings were the source of his power, being an angel. As per the Treaty of Titus, he was allowed to retain his power if he promised to never foul the presence of God’s house again. Now he was using every ounce of energy he had to be the being of intense light he was, with a radiance that would cause a mere mortal to pee himself but merely annoyed the residents of the halls of Valhalla.
However, without a doubt, he had successfully gotten everyone’s attention in Valhalla, a feat not to ever be matched until Ragnarok. Silence fell like some sort of massive ancient cloak of silence or maybe a heavy blanket. Lucifer found himself in an open place and so stopped, turned to Odin and demanded in a loud voice, “Odin, great Allfather, Lucifer, prince of earth, demands an audience!”
“Ah heck,” Odin muttered to himself. Being the Allfather sucked. Lesser deities constantly demanded his time and this nut wasn’t even a deity, and Odin knew for a fact that his claim to be prince of the spit ball of a planet called earth was tenuous at best, but he also knew Lucifer had to claim to be someone to be granted an audience. Of course, the presence of Loki just made things that much more complicated as Loki complicated nearly everything. Was that the delightful child Hel standing behind Lucifer? Well, maybe this was worth pursuing if Hel was involved.
Odin waved a hand, pitching his voice just loud enough to be heard in the entire hall, which was still silent as a tomb, “granted.” Then he went back to his meal, gesturing at the dancing girls to be about it again.
Lucifer strode out of Valhalla, truly disgusted with the place. The next day, Odin rose at the crack of noon as was his wont and met with Lucifer, Hel, Loke and Thor and began to plan the downfall of Jehovah.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Part 5: The Flood
Well, after Enoch left, Methuselah and then Lamech led the people of god. As the planet cooled from creation, it became ever harder to eke out a living up in the mountains, but the valley became downright pleasant. God’s people cried out to him, as they always did over every little thing, arguing that the devil’s people had it better and hadn’t god’s people worked so hard to be righteous and stuff?
So god got to thinking over his espresso, having recently emerged from rehab for his drinking problem that wouldn’t have been a problem if man would just behave, and it finally occurred to him that the bad people were on the bottom and the good people on the top. He could just drown the bad people.
God called in his engineers and they sat down to calculate. They figured out how much water would drown everyone and set about doing that. To preserve life, they designed a boat that was simply gargantuan. They told Noah it needed to be at least six miles long by a mile wide and around three thousand feet high to hold all the animals and food that was going to be embarked.
God had to later admit he was a bit drunk when he told Noah this, but he still thought Noah could have used his brain. Here they were around twenty years into building an ark out of shitty wood, being as there wasn’t any old growth timber up in the mountains suitable to building an ark (redwoods take thousands of years to grow, and creation only happened a few hundred years ago), and the whole project was being conducted by Noah and his sons, and the ark was about 600 times too small. It would barely hold all those who still sort of believed in god.
So, god worried and fretted, and cast about for a plan, but found none. Twenty more years passed and god got more worried until one day Jesus came in unto god and said unto him, 'behold, twenty years ago when you finally realized that idiot Noah was building the ark too small, there were thousands of righteous in the mountains. Lo, now, there are mere hundreds, so many have starved, died of disease or simply moved out to join the devil in the valley. If you just wait a while, there will be few enough they will all fit in the ark.'
And god was so relieved at the plan that he slept well for the first time in a very long time that night. He awoke the next day and went unto Noah, saying unto him, 'I have decided to prolong the time before the flood that more may be saved. Verily, preach unto them of the evils of the valley whilst thy sons assemble the ark.'
Thus did Noah set about preaching to anyone who would listen, having about as much luck as Enoch. Even many up on the mountain lost interest in the idea of waiting for a flood to float this massive boat, and many of them had seen Noah’s simple sons assemble it and were not at all convinced it’d float. Many of them went down into the valley.
As a matter of fact, the more Noah preached, the nuttier he got, working in all sorts of conspiracy theories about the evil in the valley, much of which simply was not so. True, sodomy was tolerated in the valley, but you couldn’t get it accidentally, and if you were not a sodomite you would almost certainly fall to the wiles of one of the women of the valley long before you fell for the men. It certainly was a relief to not have to chase sheep. And, certainly, the only danger to a young woman was to swoon at the sight of the seriously hunky, yet stylishly sophisticated and serenely sensitive men who had attended the devil's classes on how to treat a lady well.
As an historical note, the behavior of sodomy, something god abhors because he sees everything and just is disgusted by having to see that, the behavior lent its name to the city, not, as is commonly assumed, the other way round.
Well, Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives were soon all that was left. The rest of the patriarchs died off and everyone else lost interest in trying to eke out a slow starvation on the increasingly cold mountains, moving to the valleys for warmth and food. Truth be told, Noah’s wife and his sons wives would have left as well but were too ashamed to leave.
Down in the valley, the devil and the scholars felt that god was just bluffing, that there was way too much work invested in this world, and that god would not snuff people simply because they wanted to have a nice life. Boy were they wrong.
When god finally got around to it, after ushering some animals in for show and suspending the rest momentarily in limbo, god rained water for forty days and forty nights. He broke every natural dam. The scholars say there was water under the earth somehow, and he released that. He tore a chunk of ice off a comet and melted that onto the earth for good measure. He covered every single mountain by at least six feet.
Noah’s wife and his sons’ wives were actually feeling pretty good about their choice in husbands at this point, which brings up an odd truth, that religious people are afraid to die. Lack of faith has been god’s biggest problem when it comes to leadership of the fallen race of man, because the devil does not lead; he merely tempts man with a happy life of ease.
Anyway, god scoured the surface of the earth, upheaving a great many forests and burying literally billions of metric tons of detritus that would later become coal for the Christians to use in exploiting the world. God did not realize it at the time, but the energy he was burying at this point would make life so much easier later on that people would come to praise him for the flood, for now they could heat their homes cheaply.
The devil sat in with the people of the plain. So distraught was he with god’s doing that he wished to die with them. The scholars write that the devil feared he might die, but the truth is that death was the dearest thing to him in that dark hour, as all his earthly friends died a slow death by drowning, their accusatory eyes turning glassy as their bodies bloated and began to smell, and the devil forced himself to watch, forced himself to feel, forced himself to partake of their misery he felt he had helped cause. In the pit of his stomach, a revulsion formed that a god would do such a thing, and he resolved to fight god every step of the way. On the fortieth day, he went out seeking Loke.
So god got to thinking over his espresso, having recently emerged from rehab for his drinking problem that wouldn’t have been a problem if man would just behave, and it finally occurred to him that the bad people were on the bottom and the good people on the top. He could just drown the bad people.
God called in his engineers and they sat down to calculate. They figured out how much water would drown everyone and set about doing that. To preserve life, they designed a boat that was simply gargantuan. They told Noah it needed to be at least six miles long by a mile wide and around three thousand feet high to hold all the animals and food that was going to be embarked.
God had to later admit he was a bit drunk when he told Noah this, but he still thought Noah could have used his brain. Here they were around twenty years into building an ark out of shitty wood, being as there wasn’t any old growth timber up in the mountains suitable to building an ark (redwoods take thousands of years to grow, and creation only happened a few hundred years ago), and the whole project was being conducted by Noah and his sons, and the ark was about 600 times too small. It would barely hold all those who still sort of believed in god.
So, god worried and fretted, and cast about for a plan, but found none. Twenty more years passed and god got more worried until one day Jesus came in unto god and said unto him, 'behold, twenty years ago when you finally realized that idiot Noah was building the ark too small, there were thousands of righteous in the mountains. Lo, now, there are mere hundreds, so many have starved, died of disease or simply moved out to join the devil in the valley. If you just wait a while, there will be few enough they will all fit in the ark.'
And god was so relieved at the plan that he slept well for the first time in a very long time that night. He awoke the next day and went unto Noah, saying unto him, 'I have decided to prolong the time before the flood that more may be saved. Verily, preach unto them of the evils of the valley whilst thy sons assemble the ark.'
Thus did Noah set about preaching to anyone who would listen, having about as much luck as Enoch. Even many up on the mountain lost interest in the idea of waiting for a flood to float this massive boat, and many of them had seen Noah’s simple sons assemble it and were not at all convinced it’d float. Many of them went down into the valley.
As a matter of fact, the more Noah preached, the nuttier he got, working in all sorts of conspiracy theories about the evil in the valley, much of which simply was not so. True, sodomy was tolerated in the valley, but you couldn’t get it accidentally, and if you were not a sodomite you would almost certainly fall to the wiles of one of the women of the valley long before you fell for the men. It certainly was a relief to not have to chase sheep. And, certainly, the only danger to a young woman was to swoon at the sight of the seriously hunky, yet stylishly sophisticated and serenely sensitive men who had attended the devil's classes on how to treat a lady well.
As an historical note, the behavior of sodomy, something god abhors because he sees everything and just is disgusted by having to see that, the behavior lent its name to the city, not, as is commonly assumed, the other way round.
Well, Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives were soon all that was left. The rest of the patriarchs died off and everyone else lost interest in trying to eke out a slow starvation on the increasingly cold mountains, moving to the valleys for warmth and food. Truth be told, Noah’s wife and his sons wives would have left as well but were too ashamed to leave.
Down in the valley, the devil and the scholars felt that god was just bluffing, that there was way too much work invested in this world, and that god would not snuff people simply because they wanted to have a nice life. Boy were they wrong.
When god finally got around to it, after ushering some animals in for show and suspending the rest momentarily in limbo, god rained water for forty days and forty nights. He broke every natural dam. The scholars say there was water under the earth somehow, and he released that. He tore a chunk of ice off a comet and melted that onto the earth for good measure. He covered every single mountain by at least six feet.
Noah’s wife and his sons’ wives were actually feeling pretty good about their choice in husbands at this point, which brings up an odd truth, that religious people are afraid to die. Lack of faith has been god’s biggest problem when it comes to leadership of the fallen race of man, because the devil does not lead; he merely tempts man with a happy life of ease.
Anyway, god scoured the surface of the earth, upheaving a great many forests and burying literally billions of metric tons of detritus that would later become coal for the Christians to use in exploiting the world. God did not realize it at the time, but the energy he was burying at this point would make life so much easier later on that people would come to praise him for the flood, for now they could heat their homes cheaply.
The devil sat in with the people of the plain. So distraught was he with god’s doing that he wished to die with them. The scholars write that the devil feared he might die, but the truth is that death was the dearest thing to him in that dark hour, as all his earthly friends died a slow death by drowning, their accusatory eyes turning glassy as their bodies bloated and began to smell, and the devil forced himself to watch, forced himself to feel, forced himself to partake of their misery he felt he had helped cause. In the pit of his stomach, a revulsion formed that a god would do such a thing, and he resolved to fight god every step of the way. On the fortieth day, he went out seeking Loke.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)