As if to reply to her self-proclaimed statement of a grand new adventure, Ada heard a very loud hiss. With her standing vantage point close to the center of her cloud, she couldn't see anything in the perimeter of where she landed. Warily, she walked over to the edge of the cloud and saw what was making the sound. It was a giant bug that was producing hissing squeaks through rubbing its abdomen and wing covers together. With its three giant horns land a hard green carapace, it looked eerily like a gigantic rhinoceros beetle. With her photographic memory, Ada recalled that rhinoceros beetles such as the Atlas Beetle found in southeast Asia were the largest of beetles and could reach more than 6 inches in length. This giant bug was significantly larger than any beetle or really any bug she had ever seen. It was at least five feet in length and two feet in width with its abdomen at a height of a foot above the ground. Thankfully, she was standing at least a dozen feet above the ground and she didn't see any way a bug this size could climb up the cloud.

She could easily deduce that the bug was extremely upset and the source of that distress was clear as well when she looked at what was around the big beetle. There were at least three bugs similar to the one making the sound that have been irrevocably crushed underneath the cloud.

"Well, not to sound too callous, but at least I finally managed to debug a few bugs. If this was my homework, I would have totally aced it," she said.

Ada did felt a twinge of sadness that she has crushed what might have been the beetle's family but she didn't feel terrible since she did not like insects in general. As if the creature could read her thought, she saw it stop its hissing and instead it started using its giant horns to try to lift the cloud. If this creature was anything like the rhinoceros beetle, this creature would be able to lift over 850 times its weight. However, most creatures have a smaller strength to weight ratio as the creature becomes larger. In other words, this creature which was about the same size as a small adult human might only be able to lift at most a few hundred pounds.

A moment later, she realized there was little point in speculating on the creature's strength since the bug didn't have any luck in its endeavor of revenge. As soon as a horn entered the cloud, the cloud separated to give the horn space. The cloud was not a liquid but it behaved similar to one. This was akin to putting a hand in water that was in a bathtub and then expecting the bathtub to move by moving the hand.

"That must be extremely frustrating," Ada observed. "I don't think I have ever liked bugs much so my sympathy can go only so far. I wonder if the Goddess of Life or the God of Urth would feel differently."

Ada decided to ignore the poor creature who was still engaged in the futile task of moving the cloud. She walked around the perimeter of the cloud. Unlike her palace, the cloud was not a recognizable geometric shape and had a rather jagged outline. She decided to give her particular cloud the name of Cloud Ada to distinguish it from other more ordinary clouds or possibly other gods' clouds assuming that their palaces were on clouds as well. Although her cloud had some unique properties, it was still a fractal similar to the clouds on Earth. Cirrus clouds have fractal dimensions of approximately 1.37 while cumulonimbus clouds have ones of approximately 1.18. By its outer appearance, Cloud Ada resembled a cumulonimbus cloud. Through this, she thought that she could approximate the area of the cloud by finding the perimeter but this was with the supposition that the fractal dimension of 1.37 was correct. There were easier ways to compute the surface area of Cloud Ada and she would do that another day.

She didn't run but instead calmly sauntered around the edge of her cloud. This lasted a little more than an hour where she observed her surroundings while she walked. The landscape was almost devoid of trees where most of the vegetation were grasses or low shrubs. The trees that she saw were short and clumped together in groups of about half a dozen. The plants looked similar to those on Earth. They were shades of green as expected of organisms which use photosynthesis and hence had chlorophyll to absorb light energy. What was different was the trunks of the trees. Some had green glowing patches on it while others had many small spikes like the back of a hedgehog.

In terms of creatures, she saw a few dozen more giant rhino bugs and a large herd of hundreds of antelope-like creatures in the distance. The antelope creatures had massive spiral horns about three times the size of their heads. They must be hollow for she couldn't see how they could carry such a weight. Many of these creatures were calmly eating the grass while others were hiding in the shade of the few trees that dotted the plain.

There was a slight breeze and the temperature was moderately hot. If this was like Earth, she guessed the season here to be early fall. Oddly, she felt that she would be comfortable regardless of what the temperature was. A trivial perk of being a goddess but definitely much appreciated, she thought.

After finishing her walk, Ada noticed that the bug had given up and had wandered away. She hoped that it would lead a wonderful life after recovering from the loss of its family being debugged. More importantly, Ada concluded that her surroundings was like the Urth equivalent of the Great Plains or the Serengeti. She felt both relief and a disappointment. The relief came from seeing no human city or encampment around to invade her privacy before she has gathered some knowledge of this world. The disappointment came from seeing no human at all which she could actually talk to. Ada didn't feel that she was the most extroverted person out there but she knew she enjoyed having at least a few friends she could talk to regularly. Since arriving at this world, her only interaction has been with a not-so-intelligent computer program. She could try communicating with the other gods if she didn't care about revealing herself but she did care and so that wasn't an option.

"Everywhere looks exactly the same. Should I just pick a random direction and head towards it?

Or maybe the systemhelper can be of some help? As a goddess, there must be a map right? I mean that would be incredibly lame if I have to just stumble around until I find civilization. Since this world is not as nearly developed as that of Earth, the population is probably both smaller and more dispersed. Also, this planet seemed to be a little larger than Earth when I saw it from space.

I suppose I could calculate the probability of which location would most likely harbor a settlement of some sort but for that I would need to at least have some geographical survey. Let's just try talking to my favorite buddy again.

unpause systemhelper

create map"

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Ada sighed.

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She rolled her eyes in exasperation.

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After a moment, Ada thought:

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After a moment, Ada thought:

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Not one to give up so easily, Ada thought some more and decided to give it one more shot:

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Suddenly, a flood of text hit her brain. Similar to when she asked to see her own processes, the information here was displayed in a visual form in her head as 2,100,480 rows of information. It listed every single coordinate on the world in latitude and longitude in increments of half a degree with detailed information for each position. If Ada didn't have eidetic and photographic memory, she would have gone completely insane from the sudden information dump.

...

"Pause systemhelper. Now I just need to put on my detective's hat and figure out where I am in relation to this textual database."