Pretty much every time I switched over to my deific body, my "Avatar" or whatever, it was kind of a miserable experience. He was wet, cramped, alone, and couldn't easily change any of those things without wasting godly power in one way or another.

"He" was still me, of course. I could kind of feel the discontentment growing while I was busy with other things. If I ignored it long enough, well, it might lead to the two of me drifting apart, and that seemed like the worst possible idea. So even though I should probably be saving flame or making miracles with it, I needed to spend some on this awful living situation.

As my living body went down to bed, finally I was able to let my godly body move, for the first time in a few days. Last time, when I'd made the cave in the first place, I had just kind of... disappeared some rock to make room, but now that I'd had some time to think about it, that was probably a waste. With little more than a wave and a thought, a large section of stone was mostly large, spherical gravel, and much of it slid out of the cave without resistance. The rest... for the sake of saving time, I did magic it out of the cave, but if I had more time later, it would be better to move it by hand. Not because it used a lot of flame, but because... that is way too mundane a task to spend godly power on.

As it was, this might all be a horrific waste of flame. The storm god had warned me not to use any, that it was that precious, and I could understand how that might be true. But I didn't exactly have a mage I could call on the phone to help with the renovations. So, bit by bit, I hollowed out a chamber, using the bare minimum amount of soulflame... or so I hoped.

In the end, using godly power to hollow out a room tall enough to stand and stretch in, and long and wide enough to comfortably pace in, didn't take more than a few percent of my soulflame, which was good. I cleaned up the entrance, then used some of the gravel to make a door, one that would seal cleanly in place and look like the natural back wall of the cavern when it was closed. For circulation, I added a couple airholes out to the side of the cliff, two high and two low. I also made certain to reinforce the ceiling, since it wasn't exactly bedrock, and put a little effort into making the floor even and compact.

Then, because I was curious, I settled down with a small pile of the gravel and studied it with my magical and godly senses. The difference between those was informative; magical senses could not tell me anything I didn't know myself, while my godly senses could at least tell me that I could refine stone into some base materials--a lot of different materials in small quantities, because it was rock and not ore. There was, regrettably, also a language barrier; not that I understood many elements on the periodic table, but it would have been nice to know which generic shiny white metal was aluminum, for example. My godly power could link english words to local words if I understood the material well enough, but aluminum was not an ore they had extracted into a metal as of yet, and many of the other things I could extract I would recognize the name of, but know nothing about... so those didn't translate at all, either.

I ended up taking a bunch of gravel and splitting it up into atomic piles--something that, fortunately enough, the godly powers understood without having to have it explained. This led, immediately and to my undue surprise, to me discovering which of those elements reacted badly to the presence of water, which I had not entirely cleaned out of the cave after making my door to hold back the waterfall. I would need a chemist to say exactly which chemical reaction bothered my eyes the most, but after not very long, I ended up throwing anything that smoked, bubbled, or seemed otherwise unstable out.

Of the samples that remained, I actually figured out which was aluminum pretty quickly. The only thing I really knew about the metal (aside from the fact that it was supposed to be very strong for its weight, and some precious gems were made of it) was that it reacted very quickly with air to form a protective coating, one you could scratch off with a fingernail (as I had done while flattening candy wrappers as a kid); with that clue, and knowing it was strong for its weight, I could pick it out of the other samples easily.

There were other materials that were easy to identify, mostly by godly power: silicon, iron, carbon, gold, silver, tin, zinc, copper, lead, mercury, and so on. Either the material was obvious to me or I could connect it to a metal I did know; I didn't know tin or zinc, for example, but they were connected to bronze and brass, which were different enough that they translated for me automatically. I'd have to be an idiot not to recognize pure carbon, copper, silver, lead, or gold (of these, silver was the hardest to distinguish, since a lot of metals are shiny white, but it was famous enough that my godly power had no trouble), and silicon was something that I seemed to recognize by instinct rather than intellect. It was connected, I knew, to quartz, which was perhaps the most common gem on Earth, and also to glass and sand; it wasn't hard, again, for soulflame to figure these things out.

I really wanted to just play with the materials, but my deific half gave me a subtle rebuke about wasting power. That could have been creepy--again, a part of me I didn't specifically remember controlling had acted--but in the end, I really did want to stop myself from wasting time and power on useless things. Why get mad at a part of myself that's doing what I want? If anything, the instinct to play is just me being selfish.

I did, however, collect and solidify some more gravel into a table, chair, and simple slab bed. Now that things were not nearly so moist and dank (let's not forget slimy, because waterfall water, even when it drains out, encourages algae or something to grow on everything), perhaps I would be able to start my own collection of books, if I could purchase or magically copy some that Alanna had. I also made a glass window large enough to look out of, but hopefully too small and deep in the cliff to reflect light back at anyone and give away my position.

The most important thing, and the whole reason that it was worth it, was being able to move and stretch. My avatar self--and me, when I jumped into him--was really grouchy about not being able to move for that long period of time. Now, I could explicitly give it permission to stand and move around if I was busy for a long period of time and couldn't do it myself.

God-problems are weird.

This all only took a couple hours. After that, I tried using my deific body to do some of the magic exercises I had read about in the books on elemental magic; suffice it to say, it went a lot better for that body than my normal one. When I "breathed in" red fire essence, every scrap of water in the cave turned to ice, and all the moisture in the air settled down on every available surface as frost. Doing the same for sky essence stilled the air in the room, making it clammy and uncomfortable, which was... weird in its own way. When I reached out to absorb silver light essence, it quickly became so pitch black that even my godly eyes could see nothing--but then, I had been in very close to pitch black ever since I closed the door, and it was only my godly eyes that let me see anything at all. Some other time, I would need to add a skylight, or a window, something. I hadn't used so much power that I couldn't do more; identifying elements actually seemed to be the most flame-intensive part, probably because it had to reach far and wide for knowledge I didn't have, and that wasn't even my domain--but until I had a plan for making a skylight that wouldn't give away my position or cause other trouble, it wasn't a good idea.

Absorbing other elemental essences was... strange, but my godly body seemed to know what it was doing. I pulled amber earth essence out of what little gravel I had left, which weakened it and changed it somehow, but didn't reduce it to dust or anything. Deep sea essence I could take out of the water even in its frozen form, but... when I pulled the essence out of the water, the water that was left felt wrong. I could tell if I drank it, I'd regret it, but I wasn't sure why or what it meant. And the last essence... there wasn't much around, but more importantly, my body practically screamed at me that it was not the kind of essence that was to be extracted from the world. So, with a little sitting and meditating, green essence just sort of... appeared. Which was weird, but after watching air and water get stale and creepy, I figured there were rules to this stuff that I just didn't know.

I needed to learn, though. The sooner I could use regular magic and not soulflame to do things, the better.

After a couple hours of this, I decided that it would be best to get some real rest--I didn't want to trust, right now, that my "real body" was getting sleep if my mind wasn't. Maybe it was, but being in the army was a bad time to experiment. In a sense, I was a little sad I hadn't been more bold in practicing before the army left, but there was a lot of oversight, and... I just generally didn't feel safe. Maybe someone more bold could have chiseled out time in the middle of the night or something when nobody would be watching, but I got used to the cycle and the rhythm of a structured life.

That, I suppose, was a major downfall of coming here from Earth. My last life, even as it fell apart, was all a part of a large, almost mechanical society. Some time belonged to the Company, some belonged to me. With no wife or kids, ...and I guess no late-night drinking buddies or other weird friends, I ended up settling into a routine that I didn't exactly like... but it was my life. By the time I got sick enough that I couldn't work anymore, I had long since given in to the rhythm. The hospital trips, the running around back and forth, the waking up at all hours to get to the bathroom and vomit or piss, that all shook me loose a little, but...

But even here, in the army of this world, I was coming to realize just how loose everything was. There were no clocks, the calendars were rough... I mean the fact that so many people couldn't do good math said as much as anything about their ability to schedule and regulate things. I still clung to the hope that if I stuck to the schedule, stuck to the plan, things would work out. But now, wasn't I the one who was supposed to have a plan? It was hard to wrap my head around.

With that thought in my head, I slept only restlessly, and was up before I needed to be. I checked the supplies, watched the sunrise, and stared east, looking at the slow approach of one of the forward companies as it returned from chasing down the remnants of the enemy army.

Where did I belong? What should I do?

The last time I had these thoughts, Xenma and the god from Earth had interrupted my musing. That, by itself, had seemed a little odd, but I felt something in my chest now that I couldn't deny, something that had probably been lying in wait back then. An urge to break away, not just from orderly sleep schedules, but from all laws. With the power lying in my soulflame jar...

In my mind's eye, I could see it plain as day. If I rose up, I could smite this army as though it were nothing. Not the goddess-general, mind you; she would kill me. Any god that got dispatched to kill me probably could. But mortals? My body was itching, telling me that I could construct a magic circle large enough to swallow the whole army.

It itched like an infection, like a fever, like a parasite. Why was I thinking like this?

After a little while, the itching fell back. But this time, the memory was there, much more clearly that when Xenma had been bullying me before. Gods aren't supposed to be bound, it said. You aren't mortal anymore. Stop bowing down to humanity and take your place above them.

I didn't believe it, and I didn't like it. It felt like something was trying to corrupt me, but I didn't understand it. And with the day underway, I had too much to do to just sit and contemplate. Why was this feeling getting under my skin so much?