Chương 49: A Brave New World

Realizing what I'd done, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Finally, once I was ready, I opened my eyes once again. Floating in the center of the room, about three feet off the ground, was a sphere. Well, look at that. There it is. My glorious achievement, I thought sadly. Not sure what else to do, I looked at the notification. MINIATURE PLANET CREATED. Located in the Liminal Land Name needed to continue planetary evolution. Warning: Planet is in the formation stage and will need mana. MESSAGE FROM GAIA.

Aww, a grandbaby! I blinked and then reread the notification before looking at the miniature planet again. To me, it looked like I'd created a three-foot-wide ball of hot, glowing garbage. And I wasn't being sarcastic when I said garbage. Every bit of trash and junk had been swallowed up to create the ball of whatever it was. I'd been expecting a beautiful idyllic nature scene. A part of me had thought I could expand it each day until I turned into a real world. I definitely hadn't expected to see what I did.

Instead, I was staring at a floating, oversized charcoal briquette that'd been left on the grill too long. It hovered there in the middle of my divine domain, wobbling on its axis like a drunkard trying to find his house keys. The 'world,'and I used that term very loosely, was a sphere of liquid rock. It was radiating heat like a furnace. It was a mottled, ugly mess of black tectonic plates bordered by orange. Every few seconds, one of those plates sank back into the magma beneath.

To top it all off, there was a pathetic ring of dust orbiting the equator. It wasn't like Saturn's rings.

"No, no, no," I muttered, struggling to my feet.

"That's not... I didn't mean... I wanted the realm to be a new world, not… this." The miniature planet continued rotating, completely indifferent to my distress. I'd used what felt like a massive amount of divine energy to create a model globe. A really impressive, genuinely alive model globe, and now it was going to keep on costing me mana for the foreseeable future.

"Fantastic," I said to no one.

"Just fantastic. My grand divine creation is a snow globe without the snow." While I was trying to come to terms with what had happened, a ghostly opossum hand phased into existence near Mort's pile of collected items. It hovered for a moment, then deposited an apple before starting to withdraw. Mort's storage pouch! An idea struck me. A terrible, impulsive, absolutely perfect idea. I'd wanted to let them enter anyway.

I sent a mental command to the divine domain to allow Tala, Mort, and Bambi to enter the Liminal Land. I lunged forward and grabbed his hand. And then I pulled. Mort appeared in the center of the room with a startled squeak, materializing about two feet off the ground. Mort, predictably, promptly fainted. Suddenly, I received a message from Tala. Mort disappeared. She actually sounded panicked, which made me feel a little guilty. Apologetically, I replied. Sorry, that was me. I pulled him into the land.

Just step in a shadow and join us, I said, actually hoping that it would be that easy. A few seconds later, Tala appeared, her fur bristling. She took in the scene in an instant, me standing near Mort, looking guilty, and the beach-ball-sized planet floating between us. Her expression went from worried to confused to disgusted in about three seconds. Apparently, she had figured everything out with just a glance.

"So," she said, her whiskers twitching with barely suppressed amusement.

"Are you that tired of being the smallest person in the room?" Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Tala, I can explain…" I started to say.

"Don't worry," she continued, her eyes sparkling with mischief. She walked around the miniature world, examining it from all angles.

"I like you, no matter how small…" she emphasized the word with a wink, "you are. I don't care at all about your… size."

"It's not supposed to be small!" I protested, ignoring her 'size' comments. We both knew what she meant.

"I was trying to make the realm bigger! I wanted it to be a whole new world!"

"Well, you certainly made a new world," Tala agreed, examining the new planet.

"It's just... very compact." I wanted to tell her, "Shut up! I have a planet-sized headache and a headache-sized planet," but I still had some self-preservation instinct despite my exhaustion. Tala's expression softened slightly, though the amusement never quite left her eyes.

"How much energy did you use?"

"All of it? Most of it? I don't know, I'm new at this!" I gestured helplessly at the floating world.

"I just wanted to make something useful. A safe space. A real domain. Instead, I made a cosmic hot potato."

"What's happening?" Mort asked, groggily regaining consciousness before looking around.

"Sorry about that," I muttered.

"I got carried away and pulled you in the Liminal Lands."

"The what?" Mort asked. He seemed confused. Tala sighed but then explained.

"The Liminal Land is Abe's divine domain. It's where you've been storing your stuff." Then she turned to me and said, "And speaking of which, where is all of his stuff?" Mort looked frantically around the room as if looking for a lost child. Then he turned to me and whined, "My stuff. Where are they?" I hesitated a moment, then said, "Uh, about that. I sort of used them to create my planet. I'm sorry about that too." Mort looked at the rotating ball of lava and rock and dropped to his knees, "No!

Please tell me you're joking." He then crawled toward me with paws outstretched, begging me to deny it. A wave of guilt swept over me.

"I didn't mean it." I was about to say something more, but then Tala smacked me in the back of my head.

"Only you would make a new world out of stolen trash. By the great tree, you really are living up to the name, The Great Trash Panda." She looked at me, seemingly stunned by my actions. However, it distracted Mort immediately.

"Wait, what? You made a world out of my trash. So, my trash is what fueled the creation of a planet? So, I'm sort of like a daddy who has given his gift and you have taken that and made it into a baby world?" I just stood there, my brain short-circuiting as it tried to process what Mort had just said.

"Mort. Buddy. No. That's not... we're not... there's no parental relationship between trash and planets."

"But you used my gift to create life!" Mort protested.

"STOP CALLING IT A GIFT!" After that, I just stood there, stunned, unsure where to even begin unpacking everything that had happened. Tala didn't have that problem, though. She nudged me and asked, "Do you need to tell me something, hubby? Is there something between you and Mort? Do I need to be worried?" Instead of answering, I just glared at her. Then I switched to glaring at Mort for having made such a comparison. There was no way that Tala wasn't going to be bringing it up in the future. Probably repeatedly.

As for Mort, he was staring at the glowing ball of former garbage like a supermodel looks at cake, with fascination and longing. He kind of reminded me of a moth. I was a little worried he would go toward the light. Still, even he wasn't that foolish. Still, I'd created it. Because of that, I would take responsibility for it. I could always try infusing it with more mana. I could also try adding more material to make it bigger. It might take an eternity, but why not?

She's still my baby, I thought, looking at my little ball of joy. Now I just need to think of a good name for her. I was about to ask Tala for a suggestion when a name came to me out of the blue. It clearly didn't sound like something I would choose, but for some reason, it sounded right. Part of me knew the suggestion was coming from somewhere else, someone else, but I went with it anyway.

"Lifna. Yeah, that sounds like a good name," I muttered out loud. Mort turned only long enough to look at me once before turning back toward the molten sphere. As for Tala, she glanced at me, clearly surprised for some reason. Then hesitantly, as if she wasn't sure she should ask, she said, "You do realize that Lifna is Old Norse for 'to live or to remain.' Right? It's based on Líf, the last female survivor after Ragnarök."

"Hmm, interesting," I said. And it actually was. It also made me wonder who had put the thought into my mind. Odin? Some other god? Maybe Gaia. After all, she was apparently pleased about what had happened. Once I got to thinking about it though, it did make me start to worry again. The name had too much meaning. I was starting to wonder if my reincarnation might have more to it than meets the eye. Am I supposed to turn this little world into a refuge for my world?

After all, my world is sort of turning into a post-apocalyptic world, I thought. It's only a matter of time. I shivered but quickly suppressed such thoughts. There wasn't a lot I could do about it at the moment, so there was no need to waste energy on things that I couldn't change. Apparently, I was going to need all the energy I could get, anyway. Sighing, I finally said with what little dignity I could muster, "I name thee Lifna." I wasn't really expecting much to happen. I was just following the notification.

Then there was a pulse of emotion released by the miniature planet. Lifna sent me a telepathic message, "Thank you, father."

"Fudge me," I whispered. Mort didn't even seem to notice, but Tala certainly did. She screamed into my mind, "What did you do now?!"