John had been nodding along politely for a solid two minutes while Zero or 0, or Null, or whatever the glowing void-flavored deity wanted to be called monologued about the nature of divine succession, the administrative burden of running a multiverse, and something about a loyalty rewards program for lesser gods. John had not absorbed a single word of it. His brain was still loading the earlier sentence like a dial-up modem trying to open a YouTube video.
I'm gonna make you god.
Those five words were playing on a loop in his skull, each repetition accompanied by a mental highlight reel of every fantasy novel he'd read, every isekai he'd watched, every power fantasy he'd constructed in the dark of his room while his father slept three walls away.
Then, like a record scratch ripping through a symphony, a different thought surfaced.
John's eye twitched.
He floated there for a moment, surrounded by nebulas the size of solar systems and galaxies spinning slow as sleeping tops, and he thought about the goblin cave. He thought about the chains. He thought about the adventurers who'd shown up and died dramatically and hadn't done a single thing to free him. He thought about the troll chief and the club and the way his skull had felt for exactly zero point three seconds before it became someone else's ceiling decoration.
He thought about every single humiliating, excruciating, painful, degrading, miserable moment since he'd first opened his eyes in this world. the slavers, the auction block, the cramped cell, the entire arc of suffering that a normal author would have called "character development" but which John, now floating in the cosmic waiting room of an absentee god, was calling something entirely different.
His eye twitched again.
"Hey," John said, his voice cutting cleanly across Zero's continued explanation of how the divine paperwork system worked. "Hey. Hey, hey, hey."
Zero paused. His featureless face oriented toward John with the patient expression of a man who had literally watched galaxies form and therefore did not find interruptions particularly alarming.
"Did you," John started, his voice very calm, very measured, the kind of calm that sits right on top of a volcano, "make all of that happen to me?"
Zero tilted his luminous head. "Define 'all of that.'"
"The cave," John said. "The chains. The goblins. The getting clubbed in the skull hard enough that my head apparently became a decorative splatter on the floor of a dungeon."
A beat of cosmic silence. Somewhere behind John, a star went supanova in a distant galaxy, its light blooming across the void in a slow-motion crown of gold and white, briefly making the whole scene look like a screensaver made by God himself for God himself, which, in this case, was technically accurate.
"...Yes," Zero said.
John stared at him.
Zero's glow pulsed, just slightly.
John opened his mouth.
What came out of it was not a sentence. It was not a word. It was not even a coherent sound so much as a pressurized release of every profanity John had ever learned across four years of living in Japan, two years of doomscrolling English internet forums, eighteen years of being alive and occasionally wronged by the universe, and one very traumatic recent experience involving a cave troll and the structural integrity of his skull.
He cussed Zero out with the fury of a man who had nothing left to lose because he had already lost everything including, very recently, his own head. He called him things that don't translate well between languages but which conveyed, with crystalline clarity, that John was unhappy. He questioned Zero's divine judgment, his design philosophy, his timeline, his hobbies, the fleshlight in the suitcase (which Zero took personal offense to, briefly, before deciding to let it go), and at some point he slipped into Japanese and German simultaneously, which Zero — who had invented all languages — understood perfectly and found deeply creative.
Zero stood there. He did not flinch. He did not glow more aggressively. He did not smite John, which John had considered a genuine possibility approximately forty-five seconds into the tirade.
He just waited.
And then John stopped.
Not because he ran out of profanity he had more. He stopped because mid-breath, mid-expletive, mid-gesture at Zero's featureless face with both hands, he actually looked at where he was. The nebulas. The galaxies. The swirling, impossible, breathtaking architecture of creation spread out in every direction like someone had taken every beautiful thing that had ever existed and scattered it across a canvas that never ended.
He lowered his hands slowly.
"...How big is the planet?" John asked. His voice had shifted. The volcano was still there, but something else had moved in on top of it. Something nerdy and dangerous.
Zero blinked, or did the glowing equivalent of blinking. The question had clearly not been what he was expecting. "The planet you'll be governing?"
"Yeah. That one."
Zero straightened up, and his voice took on a slightly different quality — the tone of a craftsman being asked about his greatest work. "One hundred and fifty-two trillion square kilometers."
John went very still.
His mouth opened.
No words came out.
One hundred and fifty-two trillion square kilometers. He did the math in his head, poorly, and then did it again, and the answer he kept arriving at was a lot with a subheading of an incomprehensible amount and a footnote that read John might be experiencing a medical event. Earth was five hundred and ten million square kilometers. This planet was not five hundred and ten million square kilometers. This planet was a number that made five hundred and ten million look like a rounding error.
A sound escaped him. It was involuntary. It started somewhere in his chest and made its way out through his nose in a long, shaking exhale while his eyes did something that eyes shouldn't really do in a vacuum, which is to say they glistened with the tears of a man being shown, for the first time in his life, something bigger than his imagination.
The worldbuilding. The worldbuilding. The sheer, staggering, beautiful, obscene scale of the canvas he was apparently being handed. His knees would have buckled if there had been any gravity around to make that a meaningful gesture, so instead his whole body sort of sagged emotionally while he floated there, arms drifting to his sides, jaw slightly ajar, the nebulas spinning lazily behind him like they were framing the moment.
He pulled himself together. Mostly.
He stood up straighter again, metaphorically, gravity still being absent — pushed an invisible pair of taped glasses up his nose out of pure muscle memory, and cleared his throat.
"I have three questions," John said. "Just three. Very important. Mission-critical, actually."
Zero gestured for him to proceed with the dignified patience of a deity who had heard every question imaginable and expected nothing new under any sun he had ever ignited.
"Question one," John said, making deliberate eye contact with the featureless glow. "Are there cowgirls? Like, specifically big." He paused for emphasis. "Titty cowgirls."
The void hummed. Zero was quiet for exactly three seconds. Then, with the gravitas of a man delivering scripture: "Yes."
John closed his eyes briefly. Opened them. "Question two. And I need you to be precise here. I need a unit of measurement, I need a ballpark, I need something. How big are we actually talking?"
Zero did not hesitate. "Massive."
The word landed like a gong struck inside a cathedral. Massive. Not large. Not considerable. Massive. John held the word in his head and turned it over like a gemstone under a jeweler's loupe.
"Last question," John said. His voice had dropped. This was the question. This was the one that separated the architects of fantasy from the truly enlightened. He breathed in slowly through his nose. He looked Zero dead in his glowing non-face. "Do they lactate. When they. You know."
A pause that lasted approximately the length of a star's childhood.
"Yes," said Zero.
And that is how two beings one a cosmic deity of unimaginable power who had sculpted reality from nothingness, and one a greasy eighteen-year-old half-Japanese kid from Sacramento who had once cried at a Miku concert discovered they were the same.
What followed was not dignified. It was not brief. It was a solid stretch of time that no historian would record and no philosopher would cite, during which John and Zero went back and forth with the manic energy of two people who had found, against all odds, a fellow traveler in the dark.
Zero — it turned out — had not just included cowgirls as an afterthought. He had put thought into this. Architectural thought. The kind of thought that John recognized because he had applied it himself, alone, to notebooks he kept hidden under his mattress, to worldbuilding documents seven hundred pages long that no one would ever read.
Zero had constructed fifty-two main races. John made him list all fifty-two and ranked them on a personal tier list in his head while Zero elaborated on each one with the enthusiasm of a game developer presenting at a convention to a crowd that actually showed up. Then Zero mentioned the subraces seven hundred thousand of them and John short-circuited briefly before recovering and demanding elaborations on at least forty of the most interesting ones, because if you're going to be handed a planet, you should know what's on it. There were aquatic variants with bioluminescent fins and matriarchal deep-sea civilizations. There were highland subraces with ram horns curved like parentheses around faces that could make strong men weep. There were void-touched lineages that existed partially in this dimension and partially in the one behind it, which Zero described in enough detail that John asked six follow-up questions in rapid succession. There were small ones, there were massive ones, there were ones that were entirely too much and ones that Zero admitted were accidents he'd kept because they turned out interesting anyway.
And then there were the hybrids.
John did not recover from the hybrids quickly. He needed a moment. He got one, courtesy of a nearby galaxy completing a full rotation which Zero had apparently synced to serve as a sort of cosmic deep breath for occasions like this.
The two of them went on. And on. Zero produced descriptions of mating customs and biological mechanics with the clinical enthusiasm of someone who had designed all of it from scratch and was delighted someone finally wanted to hear about it.
John received all of this information like a man standing in a rainstorm with his mouth open, taking in every drop. (Pause)
They agreed on several key design principles. They argued, briefly, about one subrace that John felt had been underserved by the lore, and Zero actually conceded the point and promised to add two more cultural layers before he left. At one point Zero pulled out the deck of cards from his suitcase and they played one hand of something that wasn't quite poker while discussing the agricultural implications of a species that produced a particular kind of milk with properties that John described as "incredibly plot relevant" and Zero described as "one of my better ideas, honestly."
The nebulas shifted around them, patient and indifferent, universes breathing slow as sleeping giants while two gooners held court in the space between creation and vacation.
Eventually, it wound down the way good conversations do not abruptly, but gradually, like a fire that's given everything it has and settles into warm coals.
John was floating there with the expression of a man who has just eaten the best meal of his life and is sitting back in the afterglow. Zero was packing his suitcase again, his glow warm, the Hawaii shirt tucked back into place with the fleshlight nested beside the cigars.
He snapped the latches shut. He stood up straight. His featureless face oriented toward John with something that if you had to name it, if you were pressed, felt like genuine warmth.
Zero reached out a glowing hand.
John looked at it for a second. Then he reached out and shook it.
Zero's grip was firm. His light pulsed once, gentle, like a heartbeat.
"You know," Zero said, his voice resonating through the whole spectacular, impossible, star-scattered everything around them, "I've met humans. Trillions of them, across more timelines than you have words for. Kings and scientists and murderers and poets and the occasional guy who figured out something no one else did." He paused, the suitcase in his free hand, the deck of cards tucked in somewhere, the cigar smell drifting through dimensions.
He looked at John really looked, the way only something infinite can
and his glow brightened just slightly.
"You're the coolest fucking human I've ever met."