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[Writing Prompt] You awaken to a bright room with 12 mysterious figures who tell you to roll 2 dice. The outcome decides your faith. You roll snake eyes.
🕑 Added 2020-06-29 12:11:32 +0000 UTCI think the poster meant "fate"?
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The voice boomed, dire and eternal, vibrating the very stone of the chamber. "Mortal. You are hereby sentenced by the whims of fate to servitude to one of the Twelve. By the cast die, you are Bound eternal to..."
"Wait. Stop. Hang on." I held up a hand, staring at the plinth that I'd just rolled double ones onto.
The hooded figure, towering twenty feet tall and with four elegant arms arrayed before it in a prayer stance, faltered. I don't think they were used to being interrupted. Around the circular chamber, the other eleven also made small motions as they refocused on the idiot human breaking their solemn tradition.
"You dare interrupt?" The voice cracked the tile under my feet, and rattled my bones in a way that, had I not already died, I would be worried about.
"Yeah, I have a question." I stated. Politely! But firmly. My mom taught me a lot of things in my life, and how to be polite even when you were insisting on getting your way was a big one.
The immortal god-thing looked honestly kind of astonished under its hood. "A question? You ask a question?"
"Don't mind if I do, thank you." I smiled up at it. Politely! "So, there are twelve of you?" I asked.
"That is a statement of eternal, indelible fact!" It bellowed. "Twelve, always! Twelve to weave the strands, twelve to hold the line! This mortal realm suffers to exist because we suffer to safeguard all that is Real!" The thing arched itself forward to stare down at me from just a bit closer. "And when mortals of some use abandon their bodies, their souls are collected here, where they are bound to the eternal, enviable, perfected task..."
"Right, I got that part." I cut it off again, wincing to myself. "Sorry, that was rude. I just didn't want you to repeat yourself. Eternal servitude to one of the Twelve, perfect harmony of soul and purpose, etc. It sounds nice. I just..." I cleared my throat, trying to think of how to phrase this.
"You just?" It laughed. Its laugh was not friendly. "You just what? You are a speck of nothingness before us. What reservations do you have about your place in the grand order?"
"Oh, it's not that." I said. "I'm all for eternal life fighting extradimensional monsters." This was not a lie. I learned a lot of stuff from my mom. "It's just... well, there's twelve of you. Cause you're the Twelve."
"Yes"
"You gave me 2d6." I stated, pointing at the perfect nightmare white and equally perfect pure black cubes on the surface in front of me.
"Yes?" It seemed confused. "So fate itself may allocate your soul..."
"Right. But..." I turned, and counted around the room. The one speaking was number Seven, the strongest of them all, holder of the most souls. So I tracked backward from him until I pointed to a single robed elder god thing six spaces back. "How many souls do you have?" I asked. "If it's not too rude of a question."
"Mortal!" Seven tried to interrupt me. "Our system is the most fair possible! Random chance, an equal set of odds for..."
"None." The whisper of flutes drifted through the air.
Seven stumbled over its words, probably for the first time in millennia. "None?" It screamed in a voice that could rend planets bare. "Sister, how?" It called, in panic.
"I can answer that." I said, calmly holding up the dice displaying a three and a four respectively; the most common result possible, for the strongest god with the most souls. "Dice are always fair, but my mom taught me to play craps. And even an old con like me knows that you're never gonna roll a one with a pair of bones."
Comments
Could also be the rainbow serpent of the South Pacific
Jeff Gault
I agree, but I like faith better. Just can't decide whether snake eyes would be satanism, or Quetzalcoatl.
