If I told you that the next few days were hell, it would be an understatement. But then, any summary would be an understatement. Living it was awful, but to speak of it... could be done in a few words.

And isn't that life, sometimes?

My Little God's Room was a painting on the inside of a broken vase. I suppose I could go back to the aluminum can analogy, if aluminum cans shattered like clay... but we'll have to stick with this one. There are a lot of analogies when it comes to living with magic, and you just kind of have to roll with them, because otherwise you can't fit your mind around the problem.

So I stood inside a clay jar, a jar that was supposed to contain all of myself and Me, and the Flames, and the Room. They all needed to be separate, and were all equally important. Right now those flames were outside the jar trying to get in. I needed that power to repair everything, but if I didn't get it inside, it might all bleed away, or... possibly something else bad. If I did let it in, and that flame got into me or Me or the Room, it would all get messed up.

I decided after spending half a moment thining about it that the best idea was probably just for all of me to tackle the problem together. The Room needed repairs. I needed to oversee it, and Me needed to provide his expertise in knowing how to handle it all. In the end, all of it--all of me--was still me. They were just muscles I had never used, and the most recent renovation of my brain had actually made it a lot easier to use muscles I had never used before.

It also made it easier to mentally juggle having one pronoun mean at least two different things. Lowercase-me and capital-Me were just intuitive concepts, even though it would boggle most people's minds. More importantly, separating the words and the concepts didn't separate... me.

Okay, not perfectly intuitive. But I know what I mean. As for you, well, good luck.

I ended up floating in a metaphorical space provided by Me, trying to focus on keeping track of the incoming gold flames while I waited for the Flame-jar to heal. Mostly, I envisioned this as letting the giant incoming tidal wave of flame circle around me in a slow inbound spiral. The first flames got in very quickly, so I lengthened the spiral, made it wider, with a narrower stream of flame circling around more times.

Since the whole point of my reworking myself was to make it easier to multitask--although I had envisioned using it for senses only--I was able to monitor this whole process while also keeping an eye on the repairs. That was good, I think, because I was also doing those repairs, and while to some degree, something unconscious would probably have done an okay job without me being aware of it, keeping an eye on it both made it go faster, and also made me aware of mistakes as they were happening.

Which mostly, but not completely, let me fix them.

When the flame jar was mostly together, it became clear it was leaky. Not "holes"-leaky, more... "cracks"-leaky. I was tempted to just say "screw it" and funnel the flame in... but the holding pattern I had was working, and "leaky" is a bad way to describe any important part of your body. So I was patient, pointed out one crack, then another, then another, then another. When it seemed okay, I put a little in, then deliberately stopped and did another check. Two more cracks got fixed. A little more, and another check.

When it was okay, I put in about as much flame as I thought it could hold. That was a lot, but when it started straining I had to stop. A quick exam showed it was slowly expanding, but I didn't want to wait for it, and I didn't want to try to force it. Even using godly powers, that seemed like it was just an invitation for more things to go wrong, and I had already rebuilt the whole thing twice in the last couple days. So I used the flames to repair the Room, first roughly, then finding the small flaws and repairing them. As I used flames, I let more in, until I was only holding on to an oversized inflatable pool ring of flame, instead of trying to hula-hoop a one-third scale, five-car passenger train.

Apparently I had really, really impressed the gods in attendance. At least, I hoped it was that I impressed them, and not that I'd beaten the power out of them somehow.

With all of that done, I recalled Alanna saying something about making my "form"--I assumed she meant a godly body, like she and her father had shown up with in town. At least, I assumed that they were not resizing their actual bodies, and were instead just summoning something they did earlier. I'm sure magic can do a lot of things, maybe even resize bodies, but... it seemed like a better idea to not constantly undo and redo a transformation like that. So I pushed my power to do exactly that... and it did. It consumed a lot of flame, enough that I wasn't holding any extra and the pressure was taken off the flame vessel, but aside from that... I wasn't entirely sure what had happened.

As it worked, though, I realized something. Alanna and Xenma had both made it clear that Gold flames were very important, and that soulflame in general was very powerful. Despite that, I had used up a phenomenal amount of the stuff just healing my shattered Key--far more than it had taken to do surgery on my own mind. Was the Key itself that complex, that powerful? Or was I just wasting power somehow, making requests that were too small, something like that? I had no idea, but if it was that much of a powerful, complex thing, I couldn't imagine just how much flame had gone into making it--only for it to be given to me. Why? Were Xenma and that faceless god really behind it? Considering they had come out of the woodwork to mock me at literally the first opportunity, I couldn't fathom a reason.

One way or another, I wouldn't find the answers locked up inside myself. So, after making sure things were stable one last time, I kicked myself out of my patched-up Little Gods' Room and headed back to see what had become of me.

Waking up in the real world didn't end my nightmare, for a couple reasons. First, my brand new deific body had apparently been physically created not far from me. Luckily, by that point I had been placed back in the basement of Alanna's temple, and not at the docks, in the middle of town, or at a healer's... but that Body had memories of seeing Lucile, Nency... and Felli, who had all come to check on me, or perhaps responded to the sense that something was happening. And there was also a shadow in the hallway that might have been Mel, or possibly Cortnee. Or someone else! I didn't see, literally or metaphorically. It was honestly kind of surprising that the new body had any memories of that time at all.

Also this new second body of mine was naked. Probably less important than the fact that it was seen in the first place, I assume in the middle of being pieced together. I just had to hope that Lucile could come up with an explanation that wouldn't point too many fingers at me. I had ...more than a little faith in her ability to make things less awkward, even if this was a fairly bad situation. Fortunately, the body was only human-sized... maybe just a bit bigger. On reflection, I had no idea how tall I was relative to my old body, just how tall I was relative to others I met--and that was average. My godly body was a bit taller than me, but we both had about the same proportions. Needless to say, he was ripped, smooth skinned, and handsome enough to... well, bring to mind activities that I do not want fanart of, thank you. Activities that I had no real interest in... but I suddenly saw the appeal.

For the time being, though, I had no idea what to do with Myself. I quickly discovered that I couldn't just poof Me out of existence, and although I felt that I could send Me somewhere else, there wasn't a somewhere else to send Me. I considered putting Myself back at the waterfall cliff, the one Xenma had originally taken me, which was now the stage for my Little Gods' Room, but I had no idea if that place was safe, or if it was anywhere near as remote as I had felt at the time. Maybe traders or hunters went through there and I just didn't see any of the signs.

So I locked Myself in the room and went out into the Temple to find that absolutely everyone was mad at me. Lucile was mad at me, both as a priestess and as a goddess; Felli was upset mostly because she was confused by everything and I seemed to be a part of it for unclear reasons. Nency... was never not upset at me? I honestly didn't expect anything else from her, really. And generally, the rest of the refugees kind of went along with the hostile vibes even if they had no idea what was going on.

Lucile's first act was to tell me that I needed to leave the temple as soon as possible. I knew the real reason--she had given me explicit rules and I had broken them, and also I had probably kind of assaulted her and maybe taken a bunch of her soulflame--but Lucile was also clear that I had been "visited" by a different god within Alanna's temple, and apparently the two gods had gotten into an argument, which must have been Lucile's explanation for the whole "way too bright light" thing. She implied that the argument was resolved, and so she wouldn't throw me out, but I was not welcome to stay. What with the whole us not being alone thing, we didn't get a chance to talk about what really happened, or her own feelings... but I got the impression that she was not particularly happy.

So I went and sought out Mel... who was also mad at me, because I had been away from work too long with no fore-warning and no really good explanation. She had given me a job mostly on the assumption that I was a normal person and could be counted on to do it, and, well, my record wasn't great so far. After I was hauled away, apparently some thieves had snuck onto the ship... or been on it to start with and fled, it was hard to know. With nobody keeping watch, it was difficult to say how much of the ship crew's story was tilted in their favor, even with Lucile doing some kind of lie-detecting magic. She would let me keep the job for now, but if I couldn't stay at my post, she was just going to get someone else to do it.

Of course, I also had to ask her about finding a home, since I was not welcome in the temple. I hoped that Manne's old home might be available, and it was... but it was also a fair bit nicer than I deserved. Under the circumstances, Mel gave me permission, but let me know it was temporary, and it would come with rent paid to the town--a substantial fraction of my income, actually. And now I wasn't going to get cheap meals at the Temple anymore, either...

Still, I accepted the price without quibbling, looking as solemn as I felt. I knew a lot of things had fallen apart in the time I was asleep--two full days, by the way, which was more than it felt like by far--and I wasn't about to bitch and say I deserved better. If I did a decent job, things would improve later. I hadn't earned a house, or forgiveness on Mel's or Alanna's part. Not yet.

As soon as I had Manne's dwelling to myself--it was a small but three-room building with a small attic, a bit far from port, reasonably clean but with no sign of a feminine touch, and no real furniture beyond the most simple things--I found an empty space in the attic to store my deific body. Teleporting it was trivial; apparently that whole "appearing out of shadow" thing that the others did was a common thing for gods; now that I had a godly form of my own, I could just push my shadow out, and the other body just "fell" up out of it.

Mel had begrudgingly given me the rest of the afternoon, since there were no ships in port at the moment and I was still looking a bit haggard, so I had some time alone. The first thing, naturally, was to experiment with this new second body. First of all, forming clothes was, not terribly surprising, trivial. Deciding how I should look was not. I ended up with something I thought might be what a noble would be wearing if he were exiled for years--reasonably fine clothes, but worn thin and very frayed around the edges. On a whim, I gave myself a thin scarf, although it ended up as more of a cravat; I had half envisioned something flapping in the breeze, but I guess that was not appropriate for this climate, or culture. If my godly instincts, or maybe the instincts from this body, told me it was inappropriate, well, I decided I would trust that over my Earthling instincts.

All the back and forth of wrapping him in various clothes until I felt more comfortable left me with a few impressions of this new body. Mostly, I could tell that my deific body had very memorable eyes. After the show I put on for the others, and after naming myself God of Eyes, I guess I could have just expected that, but it wasn't something I put deliberate effort into. I discovered could also, with no effort at all, change my eyes, summoning what seemed like entirely different pairs depending on my mood. There were many kinds of powerful impressions they could give you on a moment-to-moment basis: Eyes of the sun's fury, eyes of Mars' frozen dust, eyes that could condemn an ancient god, eyes that could tease truth from the depths of your heart, eyes that always and only looked to the horizon, and... eyes that had seen so many good and complicated things, and could barely restrain themselves from showing and telling everything they knew. I suspected as I came up with different things to convey, I would end up with a whole supply of them.

I discovered quickly, though, that the eyes all had very real effects. They were... mostly just the same effects I had pushed at the gods, except instead of being illusion or metaphor, they were frighteningly material. Although I didn't let myself go too overboard, I did still reduce a couple items in the attic to sand, and probably came really close to setting the house on fire before reluctantly admitting that I was playing and needed to stop. These special powers seemed mostly centered on condemning others--probably because that's what I did to get all that soulflame--but I also had a power to see the world from afar, and another to see the connections between people as threads. I got the feeling I could also push information to someone else... maybe a little bit more safely than when I was pushing stuff at Felli. And that, more than anything, felt right to me.

Giving people Eyes to See. As I regarded my deific body, I settled that thought deep inside myself. What I realy wanted was that ability, not the power to turn people to sand or break them mentally for their sins. I knew... realistically, that violence would find me eventually, and I'd need to be able to kill. Even Alanna had needed that. But that wasn't--shouldn't be--what it means to be a god, much less the God of Eyes.

As I mused, my Deific Form turned its head to look at me. I ended up having to stop, and looked Myself in the eyes. It could have been creepy, and perhaps it should have been; I hadn't chosen to move my head, wasn't really in control of the other part of me at that moment. But my Eyes saw something very simple: the person I was looking at was me. It would be one thing if he wasn't, if he was some kind of foreign influence. He did it because I would have. And when I looked back, it was the same instinct: to try to read what the other Me was thinking.

After a moment, we both grinned. That body and I would only be different if I drove a wedge in between the two parts. I had to disconnect from it during my day to day life, in order to hide my true nature... but now, I could relax that control and be one with Myself, only split into two bodies. Most likely, while I was alone, I could continue being me, and keep the two halves synchronized. It's just that... probably... throughout the rest of my day, where people could see me, I should refrain from all that. With my multitasking mind, it was easier than it probably was for others, but I had no idea if godly aura or something leaked out of me while I went about my business. For that matter, I'd probably have to find a way to conceal any aura that might be leaking out of this body...

...which would be easier if Alanna was willing to talk to me. Almost certainly, her real body was hidden away in that hidden chamber that I had sensed was full of soulflame. If she did anything to hide her body, it would be associated with that room, or maybe the temple in general. For now, I didn't want to press my luck, so I went to sleep and hoped the next day would be better.