Like me, the man was standing on nothing but empty whiteness. Something about him made me think he was Asian, though tanned skin and black hair could come from just about anywhere. I couldn’t see his eyes through the bizarre coloured glasses he was wearing, so maybe it was his lack of facial hair. His hair was black and came down to his shoulders. Some of it was braided - thin, tight braids that ran through the rest of his hair and were finished off with brightly coloured beads on the ends.

He was wearing a loose tie-dyed shirt and designer jeans. Fancy branded sneakers adorned his feet and he wore some kind of braided bracelets. His glasses… each lens was an oval, but they were of different size and proportions. One was filled with yellow glass and the other with green and their long axes were tilted at different odd angles.

He looked like a mess, in other words.

“You’re a god, aren’t you,” I said flatly. On the off-chance, I silently cast [Dispel Image]. Nothing happened. Not ‘the spell didn’t work’ but it was like I didn’t have the spell anymore.

He nodded. “Now that I’ve got your attention, why don’t we go someplace more comfortable.”

As he said the word, I found myself in an office much like - no, it was - my old bosses office. Complete with its fantastic view of Sydney.

“You know about my world then,” I said cautiously, looking around. He’d placed me behind my boss’s obsidian desk, leaving himself right next to the chairs the clients sat in. Interesting. I sat down behind the desk, feeling a little thrill despite myself. He waited for me to be seated and then sat down himself. I wanted to say that his designer hippie look was out of place, but some of our richer clients had been really eccentric.

“I know everything,” he said, with just a trace of smugness. “Well, perhaps not everything, but I do know everything that you know about your world. You and all the others. Every pop-culture reference, every fashion detail, every meal you ever ate. Even the details you’ve forgotten.”

Wow, that’s not creepy at all, I said to myself. Though, it seemed like the inside of my skull wasn’t as private as I’d thought. The man just continued smiling, his face unreadable. If he was reading my mind, he wasn’t going to tell me.

“So this is an illusion then?” I asked, “Taken from my memories?”

“Not exactly,” he replied. “This whole conversation is a memory. Instead of having a conversation, I’ve inserted the memory of it into your mind.”

My jaw dropped. “How? Why? You-”

“Let’s start with why,” he interrupted me. “Mainly, doing it this way takes no time, so we can’t be interrupted.”

“If our minds are just so much play-doh to you, what’s to stop another god from just changing - or erasing - this?”

“Ethics, for some,” he said. “Others… because it would be directly interfering with me - in a way that interrupting wouldn’t be.”

My eyes narrowed. “Is that some rule of the game you’re playing with us Earthers?”

“Actually this rule goes back much further. And before you ask about the ethics of me changing your memory, I’m not doing this with deceptive intent. You’ve been informed about the nature of the conversation.”

I glared at him, but it wasn’t if I could do anything about it. From what he said, this conversation had already happened and there was nothing I could do about it. Which sort of brought me back to…”

“How?” I asked. “How can this be a conversation if it’s already happened?”

“The short answer is, I’m a god,” he said idly. “An existence beyond what you can comprehend. More specifically… you’d best understand it as an ability to predict your future actions, for a little way into the future at least.”

“So you predict what I would say… and then make me remember saying it?”

I glared at him, but couldn’t find anything else to say. Someone who could do that - who could credibly claim to be doing that - was going to have answers to any obvious objections.

“Exactly correct!” he said brightly, answering either my thoughts or my words. “So let’s move on to my apology.”

“What?” I exclaimed, thrown off balance by the sudden shift.

“You were brought here without your consent, forced to take part in our… tournament. You’ve suffered privations and indignities and I am sorry for that. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t have a greater need.”

“Fuck off,” I growled. “You’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

“In considerably less time than that,” he agreed. “But I would regret the necessity. I don’t expect you to understand. Does the farmer explain his reasons to his sickle? To the wheat? To the insects he sprays against?”

He said that without changing his expression of polite friendliness, but my blood ran cold all the same.

“You know, for someone who wants me to be your agent, you’re doing a terrible job of getting me on-side.”

“Oh, I’m not your patron,” he said, smirking. He’d clearly been waiting to drop that revelation.

“But you said you were the one-”

“That brought you here. Yes. It will make more sense when I explain some of the rules.”

I sank back into my comfortable chair. “Go on.” I was a captive audience anyway.

He smiled broadly and steepled his fingers. “Long ago, my colleagues and I resolved to not directly interfere in this world. Even Ashmor agreed, once it was made clear that united, the rest of us could eliminate natural death and decay even against his opposition.”

He paused, seeming to know that I needed time to process that. Mortal lifespan was a bargaining chip for these people?

“The agreement was necessary, but no one liked it. Every god wanted more control over the world, so we came up with a new agreement. It’s often referred to as our Game, but the stakes are too high to warrant that title.”

“The stakes? You mean people’s lives.”

“Exactly,” he said with satisfaction. “The Game is not played for status or some kind of god-currency. Each god has their own vision of how things should be, and each round of the game has the chance to get them a little closer to that goal.

But not every god joined in the Game.”

“Fyskel and Ashmor,” I said. “The book said that there had never been a champion for either of those gods.”

“Ashmor never joined the agreement. He spoils things whenever he can, which isn’t often against our combined opposition.”

“And Fyskel?”

“Myself? I have a different role to play. I’m the umpire.”

I rolled my eyes. “The one god that everyone says can’t be trusted, and you’re the umpire?”

He laughed. “Humans, so shortsighted. You always have to fit things into sides. Whenever I help a nation they get this idea that I’m on their side, when… well. The other gods have a more enlightened understanding.”

“Right. Not that you have helped me, but if you do, I should get ready for the inevitable betrayal. Got it.”

“Very wise,” he said, still amused. “Now, as the umpire, I was the one who brought you over, to locations specified by your patrons.” He waved his hand airily. “There are a lot of complicated rules, but what it comes down to is that the players can’t do anything to you until you’re in play. Now there’s a dichotomy when it comes to managing Champions, a line between two positions that most gods stand on.”

“Is this to do with why I haven’t heard from my… handler?” I asked sourly.

“Actually, it's quite common not to bother until they reach level 5 or so, just to make sure they’ve got what it takes to go further… but yes. One position is to just tell your champion what you want them to do and do what you can to aid them.”

“That would be Kaito,” I said. “Naldyna talks to him all the time.”

“Mmn,” he agreed. “The problem with that is that every other god knows what you’re planning on doing and can act to thwart it. We’re not omniscient, but you’d better believe we keep track of companions.”

I felt a little sick at the thought that all nine gods were rummaging through my head whenever they felt like it, but it wasn’t going to do any good complaining to this guy. Seeing, or I guess knowing I wasn’t going to say anything, Fyskal continued.

“The other extreme is to tell them nothing. If you select your candidate right, you can choose one who will naturally act to change the thing you want changed, with only the occasional nudge from you.”

“Wait, would that even work? If all the gods can read our minds, can’t they work out what we’re likely to do?”

“It's more complicated than that,” Fyskal agreed. “Let’s just say the art of it is in the nudges. You can set up a lot of contradictory nudges over a period of time, and then ensure that only the ones you select get to the target. It becomes a game of subtlety and misdirection, something the gods do not have equal amounts of.”

“So being dumped in Oakway and being left in the dark is all part of some super-subtle strategy, sure. Why are you talking to me?”

“I’m cheating,” he said, grinning. “This game… it definitely suits my purpose to have the gods working together, but the drawback is that I don’t get to play.”

I took a deep breath. “You just said that the other gods are reading my mind - how are you going to keep the fact that you talked to me from them?”

“Oh, I’m not. This isn’t against the rules… you’re not my champion, and I can’t make you do anything. But if I give you a little help, a little nudge… it could be that you’ll do the thing that I want of your own accord.”

He’d as much as told me that he wasn’t going to tell me what that thing was, so there was no point in asking. Still…

“Why now, then?” I asked.

“Why indeed?” he replied. “You’ve done a few significant things… achieved Level Five, ended the griffin attack… taken a stand between Naldyna and Duit. You’re making the transition from pawn to player.”

“Still your pawn, apparently,” I said bitterly. He shrugged again.

“We’re gods, Kandis Hammond. You need to stop thinking of us as merely powerful humans.”

“Well if I can’t get any agency or independence, didn’t you say something about some help?”

“Did I? Did you need help with something?”

“Fuck off, Mr Almost-Omniscient. I need help with everything.”

“Hmmm…” he said, pretending to consider the question. “You seem to have your current tasks well in hand. You have some political battles ahead of you… but you’ve already noticed I’m not great at befriending humans.”

“I thought you were beyond human experience.”

“Well I suppose if it was necessary… but it isn’t. You have all the skills you need in that area. You still have numerous texts to consult, about magic and dungeon mastery, but they are all… around.” He waved a hand aimlessly.

“What’s the deal with dungeons, anyway?”

He raised an eyebrow at me, but I wasn’t going to pretend that he didn’t know exactly what I meant.

“The common legends have it the wrong way around,” he said. “We - all of the gods save Ashmor - made the first dungeon and tied it into the System, allowing them to be created… I suppose naturally is the best way to put it. Sometime later, we discovered that Ashmor had corrupted our design.”

“The good gods created them?” Good gods was a bit of a stretch. Few people had good words to say about the God of Storms, the God of Death or Fyskel here. Better them than the God of Destruction though. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Think it through: Dungeons are a self-sustaining construct, that can take care of their own expansion, create food and resources, and dispose of waste all under their own power. Does that remind you of anything?”

Those attributes weren’t what I thought about when I thought of Dungeons, but I had to admit they were there. Which sounded like…

“An arcology?” I exclaimed. “They were for living in?”

“Until they were corrupted, yes.” Fyskel had lost his amused look. “We had more than four billion sentients living in them when the… flaw became apparent.”

“That would be the monsters?”

“Not exactly. Every dungeon is tainted with an urge, a compulsion to kill. It was so small we didn’t notice it, and an ordinary sentient who’d taken the role of Dungeon Controller could resist it for years. But not forever.”

“So they just started slaughtering the inhabitants?” I asked with fascinated horror.

“The first one did, at which point we had to evacuate the others. The Controllers were pretty far gone by that point, but we managed to avoid another massacre. We lost even more though, once all those people had to try surviving outside.”

“And you couldn’t fix them? The Dungeons, I mean.”

“The template was in the System by then. You can add to the System, but even we can’t remove something once it’s in there. We could make a new dungeon template, but we never figured out how Ashmor corrupted the first one. It was a clear win for him.”

Fyskel paused. His mood seemed to have changed from smug to contemplative. “We’ll talk more later,” he said.