“Hey little brother, thanks for coming!”
Kairos perched on the cloud, watching over the strange society below him. Arkadin awkwardly floated in mid air next to him.
“Uh, you’re welcome… What do you need?”
“Some advice!” Kairos glanced at Arkadin. He didn’t seem right. Then again, the Lord of Death never seemed right. “But before I ask that, I have to ask you whether you’re well or not. You look sad.”
Arkadin grunted, his eyes focused on the little species below them. He knew exactly why Kairos had suddenly taken a liking to these mortals. They looked just like Kairos. Except they were mortal.
“It’s nothing.”
“Why do you lie?”
“Because it’s not something you can understand. It’s between me and Kinisis.”
“She hit you.”
Arkadin snarled. “Please, just drop it and tell me what you want here.”
Kairos shrugged, then pointed at the mortals. “You see them, right?”
“Yes…”
“I call them Kairic Thraki. Because they look like me. They don’t call themselves anything really. Just the word ‘vok’, the generic term for any being.”
“So?”
“They don’t have any culture or anything. They literally only eat, drink, sleep, reproduce and die.”
“So?” Arkadin rubbed his eyes. He didn’t really care about any of this. He was still angry and bruised from the other day. Kairos could sense this but since Arkadin didn’t want to talk about it, he moved on.
“Sooooooo! This lot are completely miserable and sad and I want to make them happy. I want to give them culture and proper, happy lives. But I don’t really know how to.”
“They really have no culture? But they have technology…”
“They’re an uplifted species, their technology given to them by other races. In this case, they use old Temthan technology. So basically their whole lives are all set. But they’ve got nothing to live for.”
“Not even, like, romance or anything?” Arkadin was curious now.
“Pre-arranged marriages.”
“They don’t even… try to woo each other?”
“Nope. Nothing like that.”
Arkadin blinked. He was amazed that this species was even still around. “None of that makes sense though. Most species tend to strive towards something or try and create something or… I don’t know, do something! This is… so improbable.”
“I’d say impossible but…”
Kairos and Arkadin glanced at each other.
“Is Yisini doing this?”
“What do you mean?”
The Death Lord shrugged. “This doesn’t seem natural. Even mechanical life starts to do… something creative. These beings have almost no creativity. So maybe Yisini is doing something to them to strip them of any sort of cultural change?” He pointed at a tower in the middle of their society. “Something like that?”
Kairos looked at where Arkadin was pointing then grunted. “I hadn’t considered that. But even then, they’d need something to boost their creativity. They need something to achieve.”
“Or how about something to explore?”
The Whenvern shrugged. “That could work. Give them some mysteries and stuff to deal with. Things that force creativity. To get the juices flowing…” Kairos paused, smiling.
“You have an idea, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Out with it then.”
Kairos pointed at the rather boring, empty fields that surrounded the main Thraki cities. “Okay, so each one has an anti-creativity tower that’s making these Thraki be boring. But they’re also surrounded by boring fields. We destroy the towers in a storm or an earthquake. Then we give it a day. After that, we get massive, beautiful but somewhat scary forests to suddenly appear around the cities. We get someone to tell them that the way to get rid of them requires creativity and love and friendship. The forests are tied to statues just like the ones in the cities that we broke. These towers start to make them boring and creation-less again, so they start to want to destroy them. And in the biggest forest with the biggest tower, we put a super sexy, super attractive Thraki, that they need to woo over before they can destroy the tower. Then they’ll realise that creativity and culture are amazing and they’ll at least be more curious for a bit.”
Arkadin blinked. “That’s your idea?”
“Yes.”
“And where do you suppose we find a super attractive Thraki? Because between you and I, we could make a forest. Out of clay or stone or something maybe. But I ain’t capable of making living things.”
“You could be the super attractive Thraki.”
Again, Arkadin blinked. “What?”
Kairos changed the subject. “We’ll find some other prize. But otherwise, what do you think?”
“Eh, I don’t have any better ideas…”
“So let’s do it!”
“Yeah, alright then…” Arkadin shrugged. “Not like I’ve got anything better to do anyway…”