On measuring systems:

I think that the metric system has kind of been ruined for me because of how much practice I got with it, sadly. I'm always going to associate it with chemistry and physics, with exact and clinical weights, measures and amounts. 'A few liters' just feels wrong to me, and it just doesn't sit right to have a character that's dealing with… non-scientific issues 'suddenly' start using scientific measurements instead of 'normal' ones, even if in a future earth she probably would have grown up using the metric system and that's what would be normal.

My apologies for the small worldbuilding… laziness/deliberate oversight that is the use of the old Imperial/current American system.

Although that's nothing compared to what TriAce got up to, so it's rather perfectionist of me to even mention it…

Oh, Thursday (Thor's Day)… I'm dedicating this chapter to Narukami-kun, ahem, Narugami-kun of Matantei Loki Ragnarok, because seriously.

This is Blaire's chapter (And Azazel's, to a degree). You'll notice that she's not present in a lot of it. This is because her area is studying the Eternal Sphere, and the part she's not there for contains stuff relevant to her interests. Narugami-kun is also the god of part-time jobs (a running joke) and losing them. I do a bit with Azazel in here, and there's also some sisterly smiting.

The fact that the fic is an alternate character interpretation doesn't mean I get to ignore the way Luther acted in the game, it means I need to show that my version would act that way for the reasons I give. It would be OOC for Luther not to be, well…

In any case, when Blaire finds out about all this she is going to be so, so incredibly furious with him. While yes, she is practical enough (and a skilled enough Jobhunter, in this universe) to get why he kept everything a secret, and yes, saving the lives of her nieces and nephews is important, she had nieces and nephews and he didn't tell her. She will have missed Sophia & Fayt growing up. She will have missed those Sunday brunches, opportunities to get Fayt to follow in her footsteps, silly childhood games and the teapot song. I don't know why I like the idea of Blaire liking that song as a little kid. She just seems like the kind of person who had a lot of energy to burn off as a kid, and also generally upbeat and not caring about the opinions of others too much. She cares about Luther, but she'll still go against him in a heartbeat, especially when it's to keep him from becoming a murderer.

In the game, Fayt's the scholar, really. Sophia cares about people, Maria cares about causes and Fayt wants to know the whys and so on. He's definitely going into research, theory mixed with field work, if he has his way. Fayt's also generally even-tempered, just don't be his problem and refuse to listen to reason or he'll have to do something about you. If I ever write a verse where Blaire was in on this from the beginning, she'd have dibs on Fayt/be saying that he takes after her despite the complete absence of a genetic relationship.

There was a very old children's book, that he had read when he was a child because it was old and had historical and philosophical significance for various reasons and would help in understanding history, called The Water Babies.

Most of it didn't stand out very much.

Not compared to one single line, anyway, that had stuck in his mind for years, even though he'd been raised to believe that (aside from facts and passing exams) gods and the possibility of them had about as much relevance to the lives of sensible people as giant purple teapots orbiting Pluto. Did they exist? Probably not. Did they have any impact on his life? No. Did he care whether they existed or not? While it might have been an interesting curiosity if one did, he hadn't.

Of course, there was no way for any reasonable person to anticipate that they'd eventually turn into such a teapot, so he could forgive himself for his lack of foresight.

…If Sophia didn't know the little teapot song, he was not teaching it to her. He had his dignity. She was too old for that now, anyway.

…He could probably have gotten Blair to do it, though.

Anyway, the important line, the one that had ended up his personal unofficial design motto, was that gods didn't make things. Gods made things make themselves.

Normally, when he added a galaxy (or a spiral arm, in the old days), he fed all the information in that astronomers had and let the system he'd created it extrapolate from there, backwards and forwards, to stars blooming and dying, scattering heavy elements like confetti , sparks from a firework (and they were his fireworks). Planets forming and shattering, seas freezing and atmospheres boiling away.

It was a matter of getting the physics/symbology right and a whole lot of computing power: fairly simple once he'd perfected it. He was always the one to do it himself, and watch from his Workspace, just in case, though.

It was providing what existence needed in order to exist, guidance and materials and memory space to be in, and then letting it unfold.

Then, it was a matter of adding what was missing from his own universe. He could have tweaked the initial calculations to favor habitable worlds, but he did insist that those be made by someone, especially once he'd known that sentient life really could, and would, evolve on its own. At least so far it had only done so among the races he'd meant to be sentient, and he meant to keep it that way. He couldn't stand the thought of some race gaining sentience but not the ability to speak or understand others, getting used as beasts of burden without anyone knowing or evolving short, wretched lifespans and not getting entered into the reincarnation lottery… Making sure there weren't any sad cases like that meant going over every life-bearing world himself, at least with a few search functions no one else knew existed because they didn't know what Luther was looking for existed, but it had to be done.

He wanted all the races to be able to understand each other, too. No incomprehensible intelligences but people that could live in peace, if they worked at it.

The deck would never be stacked against any of them, if he had anything to say about it, and this was his universe.

And the ratio of intelligent life to habitable worlds had to be high enough to be interesting, but low enough that there would always be more planets. People would always have somewhere to go, and without having to push out or oppress people already living there. More frontiers, hopes and dreams to reach for if their world grew stale or repressive.

Adding an expansion pack galaxy was always a massive undertaking that involved lots and lots of manhours, but that was why his staff loved them. They'd actually been working on this one for awhile, and he'd mostly left them to it, with appropriate oversight.

But the thing was, a lot of it was remodeling planets. And life would generally take care of itself, so it was just a matter of nudging it into something vaguely compatible. An amazing amount of the work here, or the stuff he left to his flunkies anyway, was like pruning, or the way you tied vines to get them to grow certain ways and cover your fence. Training?

Encouraging, sheparding?

Almost all his employees (all those with souls, at least) had a few planets that they loved. This was an artistic endeavor, no cookie-cutter work here, not from those chosen for the position, lucky enough to be hired. It was a good thing Strata was on the required reading list, though, because before he'd made it orientation material people had kept doing the same fourth-wall breaking things and thinking that they were being clever and original, coming up with something that actually, everyone else had too.

While boots in coal seams and so on were just juvenile, the debugging tools aside, one thing he did encourage was homages. Part of what he'd wanted to do was recreate that old sense of wonder. Middle Earth, Barsoom, Pern… They had to get his approval first, though, and be fairly senior staff. He didn't want twenty amateur knock-offs of Oz (that certainly wouldn't have had its surrounding nations).

Although he had bowed to popular demand and let someone copy the terrain in Wicked.

They all had to obey his ground rules & use his magic system, though. His universe, his rules. And laws of physics and symbology.

Today, though, he was taking a break from proper godly behavior, being hands off, all of that. He'd modeled one single solar system in his workspace, completely self-contained, so he didn't have to worry about prying eyes.

He'd designed countless programs and worlds, but today?

He was going to try out a shiny new toy.

He'd been manipulating the symbology programming language of the Eternal Sphere since its beginning. No one knew it a fraction as well as he did, not even Dr. Leingod (the fact he was scarily good at doing scary things with certain aspects of it aside). Creation was what he did, it came so naturally to him that he'd been doing it automatically before he realized he needed to make a distinction between thinking and doing in the same way there was a distinction between thinking about moving one's arm and actually moving it.

He really should be angry as hell with Maria over this, but from what she'd known it had actually been a pretty bright idea (and more merciful than he'd expect from her), and this was going to be awesome.

He was going to have to conceal that he had this ability…

Who was he kidding.

If he cared about the practical ramifications of his creations, he would have destroyed the Eternal Sphere as soon as he figured out the danger of AI overrunning his planet (or just blowing it up) instead of thinking that a girl appearing out of a computer in real life was the coolest thing ever.

Now it was the second coolest thing.

He could do magic now.

Not just programming inside the Eternal Sphere, but magic. That could affect things that hadn't been designed by someone considerate enough to give his creations the power to affect them.

Make rabbits appear in hats… Oh, sure, he wouldn't be able to turn people into newts, that was Maria, or read minds like Sophia, or blow stuff up without making some TNT or something to do it for him, but that was ok.

Anyone could destroy stuff, it was easy. And you didn't need to change things if you'd made them right in the first place. He could materialize fireballs, weapons out of nowhere: He couldn't wait to start playing around with this, even if for safety's sake he was going to have to practice in the Eternal Sphere.

"Drop this avatar's command level down to user for the next hour. Deactivate PC and NPC symbology recognition system in the testing area." That prevented him from programming or using symbology that didn't hack the system. The way Dr. Leingod's did. So well that it could even hack his universe's system.

On the one hand, he couldn't wait to get started. On the other, he couldn't seem to actually get started because this moment? He wanted to savor it for ever and ever.

This was just the best day of his life.

It even topped the day he'd gotten his first job here and the day he'd officially opened the Eternal Sphere.

He was going to have to do something really nice for Maria.

He'd already decided what he was going to make first.

A symbol of everything he'd worked for, everything he'd intended. The thing that he had been creating all along.

As he envisioned it, he realized that he hadn't just felt like his body was vibrating with excitement, bursting with energy, because of how long he'd dreamed of this. The thing he was about to make, the word he was about to speak, had been on the tip of his tongue the entire time.

It felt like wings unfurling when the symbols in his mind, his veins, his very genes formed and flowed around him, summoning their power from this universe, summoning his power. His.

This wasn't something that the Eternal Sphere was just doing at his command, this wasn't something that had happened because he had spent hours writing code: this was something that he was doing, here and now, and the result would appear before his very eyes.

Like magic.

He could feel the wish, the spell, grow ready, feel the perfect moment to call it forth approaching. To let the wings that had formed around him take flight. "Be," he said, and let go.

White clouds, blue seas, land of all colors: what a… beautiful…

…world.

"Perfect," he murmured, more to it than himself, as he closed his eyes.

And fell.

At 10:30 hours, Blair Lansfeld mysteriously managed to enter Luther Lansfeld's private Workspace despite the fact that he'd left orders that he should not be disturbed.

(Azazel was prepared to apologize profusely for this oversight, blame it on Blair's superior skills and technical ability, and hope that Luther never figured out that he'd looked the other way because Blair was going in there to make sure that Luther was keeping his promise to remember to eat. He hadn't left or had any food brought in for ten hours, and according to Blair's tally, his late-night emergency food supplies were running low.)

At 10:32 hours, Blair Lansfeld exited, looking long-suffering.

At 10:33 hours, Blair reached her own suite on the executive level, smiled nicely at the research assistant manning the waiting room so the poor woman didn't think Blair's rare ire was directed at her, went into the break room and picked up one of the spare drums of water they used for the water cooler.

At 10:34 hours, Blair entered Luther's domain again, still carrying the container of cold water.

(Obviously, security didn't monitor the inside of Luther's private domain, but it was fairly easy to guess what happened next.)

Dumping a few gallons of cold water onto Luther to wake him up was much more satisfying than it should have been, Blair thought as he sputtered awake, mouth set in a grim line. He hadn't woken up when she said his name or disconnected him from the Eternal Sphere: she'd been getting worried, dammit. If this hadn't worked, she would have had to page the medical staff.

He blinked up at her, clearly trying to wake up and figure out why she was suddenly there and he was wet.

The question wasn't, 'How could he do this to himself?' She knew Luther. When he was working on a project, he focused so intensely that he genuinely wouldn't feel thirst, hunger, or tiredness. Not until they hit him like a ton of bricks, anyway. He'd get caught up in his zone, and the next thing he knew it would be fourteen hours later, and he'd only know that because she would have asked him what time it was and corrected him when he guessed that it was only two or so hours later.

"My notes!"

Yes, Luther was fine. Or he would be as soon as she forced him to eat something. "You were passed out. Again. I know you've been busy because of the upcoming expansion," he'd ordered Azazel to make sure that no one disturbed him today because he'd gotten behind fixing a few graphics issues, "but who's going to run everything if you're in the hospital?"

"Why couldn't you have just shook me or splashed me or something? I need my notes!" The water was slowly spreading over more and more of the floor, soaking up the infernal pieces of paper he spread out everywhere. It wasn't that she didn't understand the creative process, but she wished he'd keep in mind that other people worked late too and might not have the awareness to keep an eye out for the things.

It was hard to feel guilty about his poor, drowned papers when she kept tripping on them. "You need to eat," she told him.

"I need to try and salvage my notes and get back to work."

"Luther…" She winced, feeling a headache coming on. "Are you trying to give your rivals ammunition to work with?"

"I have job security." Those words would have been said in more of a gloating tone if he weren't so distracted. They deserved it. "They can't run the Eternal Sphere without me."

"Yes, that's true. But there's a difference between running the Eternal Sphere and running the company." Carefully avoiding the papers, she headed over to the cupboard she'd put in here when he moved in. "Poor Luther, the stress of running a company is finally getting to him. You know those high-strung creative types. He can't even take care of himself, much less a company. Why, what would happen if he had a nervous breakdown? Can you imagine how the voters would react if the Eternal Sphere went offline? We need to make sure he doesn't lose it and deprive the world of the Sphere. Let's have him transferred to a position he's better suited for, oh, art director or head programmer. And order him to give root access to the new boss, so someone else has it just in case something terrible happens. We could make it a temporary measure, just until he recovers," she said in a sing-song tone.

"…I need to eat," he admitted.

Damn right he did. Opening the cupboard, she said, "I'll tell Azazel to start bringing up regular meals again, and this time you won't tell the door not to let him in or order him to stop bothering you. I'd take you down to the cafeteria to make an appearance if you were presentable. You need to eat, sleep, shower and make a public appearance. Honestly, have you forgotten everything you needed to get this position except the programming skills? No one's job is this secure, Luther. You need to think about these things. I feel like a jerk when I nag you like this."

"I'll start setting alarms again." To jar him awake when he was deep in thought.

Blair sighed with relief, even though it was obvious that he'd eaten barely any of the snacks in here. At last! He'd finally realized that this was a real problem, not just her being worried about his health. He was perfectly capable of handling it now that she'd managed to get him to remember that job security was a myth, like unicorns and FTL travel.

Both of which existed in the Eternal Sphere, but they lived in the real world. Luther had to keep in mind that if he didn't keep at least one foot in the real world, he wouldn't be able to keep control over the Sphere.

Meanwhile, Luther was mentally kicking himself. Both for making an entire planet in one go, which might be no effort at all when he was using the Eternal Sphere's powers but was clearly a very stupid thing to start with when he was trying to gain control over a dangerous, unstable power that dwelt within and drew at least partially on his own body, and for forgetting the reason that he was keeping all of this secret from Blair in the first place.

If they didn't think that he was competent to run the Sphere, they could take his creation (his baby) away from him, just as they would if they realized that he wouldn't destroy his creations when the time came.

This was twice now in two days that everything had almost fallen apart.

He needed to stop thinking about what he could do and remember what he couldn't.

Because even magic couldn't solve a problem like the Board of Directors. Showing off dangerous, inhuman abilities would just make it worse.

He could resume the conversation with Sophia he'd logged out in the middle of and go back to testing this out once he'd called a press conference to announce some impressive fruit of his labors and made doubly sure he'd done sufficient damage control.

Well, work was work, and at least no one could say he wasn't earning his outrageous salary. Or his phenomenal cosmic powers.