Touring the Gallery
They say the flutter of a single tiny butterfly's wing can brew a typhoon on the other side of the world. If that is true, then what is the fastest way to hear that a butterfly flapped its wings on the far side of the planet?
Do you stand up an elite covert intelligence unit good enough to pry the seven families' most closely guarded secrets out of the dark? Or do you pay a trustworthy broker a ruinous sum for information that has already been verified?
There were, surprisingly, a great many ways to get word from the other side of the world in a hurry. The method I chose was one anybody could try, and its accuracy sat, all things considered, on the higher end.
Anything new on the gallery?
It was a gallery any Incarnation living on the Demon Continent could join—and, for that matter, one you could join even if you were not an Incarnation at all. The whole point of founding it, after all, had been to talk about Incarnations. If I just skimmed a few of the posts that had clawed their way onto the best list...
You don't know a damn thing, you won't even bother to search, and you still run your mouth with whatever's sloshing around in that noodle brain of yours. I'll kill you.
You never shut up about your friends on other continents, so why has every last one of you suddenly had your mouth wired shut?
While Laplace is on his way over, did he kill all your friends so you can't get ahold of them?
New posts were going up at twice the gallery's usual rate. The God of Omniscience, Laplace—one enormous log thrown on the fire—had the whole place burning fast.
But Laplace is coming to meet the Demon God?
On the gallery, it was basically treated as settled fact that Laplace was coming to see the Demon God. Honestly, I had my doubts.
Is he actually coming to meet the Demon God?
As it happened, the very being this god—currently the talk of the world as he made for the Demon Continent—supposedly wanted to meet was lying right beside me. The Demon God had claimed my entire sofa the way she always did, sprawled out and staring at her phone.
Should I just ask her?
It was not as if Laplace had invited the Demon God to the South American Continent. He was coming to the Demon Continent himself. Surely he would have told her ahead of time. And if you set the God of Omniscience beside the Demon God, Laplace was hardly the more exalted of the two. If either of them stood above the other, it was the Demon God. It was certainly not Laplace.
And last of all: would a Demon God with a temperament that prickly really let it slide if some god turned up on the continent she governed without so much as a word to her?
Absolutely not.
She would make it extremely plain how offended she was—how dare they ignore her—and commit every petty atrocity in the book.
But what if I ask and she decides I'm being insolent too, and the atrocities land on me?
When there is something you want done, but doing it yourself feels as if it would end in disaster, people look for someone else to do it in their place. I looked over the candidates who might ask the Demon God about Laplace for me. The first to catch my eye was Machina, lying right there beside me.
Unlike me, if Machina asked about Laplace, the future was perfectly clear. The Demon God would pat her head a few times and then simply tell her.
But dumping something I'm curious about onto Machina is a bit...
The only reason I wanted to foist the question on someone else was that I was curious about Laplace and the Demon God, and too afraid of the aftermath to ask her myself. And I would use "Machina would be fine" as an excuse to make a child ask my question for me? A pang went through my chest all on its own.
If I'd actually gone through with it, I think even Satan would have shaken his head.
At any rate, once conscience knocked Machina out of the running, Sugar naturally became the sole candidate and won by walkover.
Still, Sugar isn't the type to just do as she's told. Maybe I should show her the posts I was reading.
If she retraced my tour of the gallery in the same order, maybe the same curiosity would bloom in her, too.
"Hey. Get over here."
I was looking straight at Sugar when I said it, so why was I watching her glance around, check left and right, then widen her eyes and point at herself?
"Yes, you. The only one on Earth with wings. You."
"M-me? I'm busy, though..."
Sugar looked up at me with eyes the size of marbles, brimming wet, but I knew the truth behind those red irises packed full of lies.
"You were watching YouTube a second ago. You wanna get hit? For real?"
"Hnnngh..."
Her voice was still doing the pitiful act, but those tear-filled red eyes had already gone cold, throwing off a chilly crimson light as they glared at me.
Oh? This bitch? Glaring at me?
A few days ago I had put a wound in her gut, and apparently it had healed completely—and the memory of getting beaten by me must have healed right along with it. Otherwise Sugar would never have dared to glare.
I put on a murderous smile and started toward her. Machina, who had been watching our little routine, hurried to stop me.
"Ragna, go easy on her."
"Fine. But if you don't train a slave, the scolding lands on the master, so I'll just educate her. Within reason."
"Okay! Got it."
The moment Machina gave permission, I took Sugar by the hair, quietly opened my door, and stepped outside.
"Hey. Follow me up to the roof."
"E-eh? This house has a rooftop too?"
"Of course it does. What, does the Demon Continent's ruling family look like a joke to you?"
"Ooooh!!"
Hmm. The kid was from another stratum of society, so maybe she had no idea what "follow me up to the roof" meant. No. The Earth I had lived on and this Earth shared the same foundation, which meant that by now the only beings who would still remember that old gag were the gods who had been terminally online back then.
It's 2224, after all.
A full two centuries separated this world from the one I had lived in. Maybe that was why—because the me who had been living in 2024 had been dropped without warning into 2224—I found it so hard to understand whatever the kids were into these days.
There's got to be a reason they're out here doing that tang-tang, hulu-hulu nonsense.
"Haaah. You've got a real talent for killing the mood. I didn't call you over to straighten you out in the first place, so I'll just tell you what I actually wanted."
"Yes! Yes!"
"Then look at this, for starters."
I handed over the phone, still open to the gallery I had been browsing, to a Sugar who may or may not have realized that she had just climbed from the bottom of hell to heaven at a speed that would make even Lucifer shake his head.
"Wh-what is this?"
"A gallery. Kind of a gathering of friends who are nice, but also idiots."
"Oooh."
Sugar took the phone and began her gallery tour in earnest. It must have suited her better than expected. A dopey little smile crept onto her lips as she scrolled, and before long she set the phone down, looked at me, and asked.
"So is the god called Laplace coming to meet the Demon God?"
"I don't know either. But I think I'm about to."
"Then what's the reason?!"
"If you ask the Demon God and then tell me, I think I'll know too."
"P-pardon?"
"Don't 'pardon' me. Hurry up, go ask, and get back here. Actually, no—we're going together. I want to hear it from the side."
"P-pardooooon?!"
It was spring.