Tales of Slud: Prologue, Part 1 - How the Entire Universe of Slud was created. And how both a planet and a man also got that name

Tales of Slud, Prologue, Part 1 - "The D.M.'s Tale: The God of Gods Makes the First Mistake."

In the Beginning That Was No Beginning: Why All Things In Our Universe Are Lazy and Stupid

In the Beginning, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. You would not believe how empty the place was. Like, think of something. Anything you choose. An apple. A cute little puppy. The 3rd law of thermodynamics...That didn't exist. It wasn't there because there was nothing. Quite literally nothing.   

And then, the Universe came to Be, for much the same reason, many wise people throughout countless centuries have been driven to confess, perhaps somewhat ruefully, that any universe is created. That is to say,  a dry and very poignant boredom probably verging on ennui caused the creative forces to body forth somethingness into the vast, seemingly infinite nothingness. That, and also because there was a consciousness to perceive it, and more importantly because there was a will to perceive it and to make it as real as possible.

But mostly it was just the boredom...

By the use of that particular term, boredom, the author of this prologue intends to convey to its readers a general picture of the most dreadful tedium, as if that of a bad dream which never really seems to end until at one time, for one reason or another, it does. Such are the pressures of everyday, ordinary life for people, or even Gods if they exist, that consciousnesses are invariably driven to create things to take their thoughts off the dreariness of their everyday lives. It is a way for consciousnesses to cope with the sense of their own powerlessness against laws of circumstance they have no control over.

It is generally held to be true that the creative force brought our universe into being at the will of a being whom scientists consider to be the overall consciousness of the Cosmos, the same consciousness to whom the religious of the world assign anthropomorphic features to (for their sacred scriptures say that man looks like God, for humankind was fashioned in the His image), whom they sometimes call the God of Gods.

What follows throughout this prologue is intended to be history, not a treatise on theology, and so will not delve very deeply into the doctrines of the Muncian religion.  However, as the concept of God as creative force is one that is to some extent understood by the religious and the scientific people of the world, it is from that concept that we shall derive a beginning to this tale, although beginnings are a difficult thing to find in a universe that faces our particular problems, such as the Problem of Time, the significance and consequences of which will both be detailed at another point in the narrative.

For the moment, therefore, we shall begin the tale of the creation of our universe with the story of the God of Gods, whom some suspect had come here from some other universe entirely, where, conceivably, given the boredom which would have caused Him to create this one, we might infer that He was someone that in the universe of His birth quite less than a God, and maybe even not even the most prosperous of people either. From the universe-generating boredom with His life which caused Him to create our particular cosmos, it might even be suggested that He was Himself one of the lowly, downtrodden peasants of the society in which He probably lived, for it is among the people who inhabit the lowliest layers of a society that escapism and creation of fictional realities are most frequent.

What follows is an account of the creation of our Universe, for whichever cause that made it happen. And that event, once described, will begin the rest of the tales in this prologue, which, taken together, are hoped to pass for a somewhat comprehensible history of our universe, our world, and the people in it in all ages and eras and epochs.

Therefore, behold!

Upon one Thursday night in the world of a creator, there appeared a being known only as The D.M., at the first instance shapeless and formless, as small and yet as vast as a single thought which contained within it all thoughts which ever shall be thought, and for the first time, there was something in the area that would be our Universe, the D.M. Himself.  The D.M. had come forth from some other universe, and He came even to that which would be one day would be ours, and He came with a Will to create.

No longer was the emptiness empty and the nothingness completely nothing. The infinite Void had was made finite, the meaninglessness of nothingness was given meaning by something, and the uninhabited was made habitable, for it had then a population of One, and that One was He who had come forth to create. 

The Thought of The D.M. went forth from Him, and it called into being the Universe in all its potential, as it were a vision of what would come to be, but which had not yet been crafted by the will of men or Gods into something real, as the smith imagines a fine sword, and intends to make the sword but no sword yet exists in the shape he has imagined.

But within the vision of the Universe,  all things which should exist were brought into existence, and all things which should not exist were omitted from existence. Within the vision of the Universe, all relationships between all things and all other things were as they should be, and all functioned as they ought, so that in the vision of the Universe, all was in a state of perfect harmony and the purposes of all things were fullfilled unto the last and the smallest detail.

And The D.M. looked upon the boundaries of the Universe that He had created in His vision, and He thought that It was good...enough. So for a long span of time He did nothing to make any of his vision real, deciding instead to rest upon what little He had already done, for He was sort of an underachiever, was that D.M. which the humans of our world name the God of Gods.

But He took thought for what He had envisioned, and He was not satisfied that it should forever exist only as a vision of a universe which could be, for He wished to make it a universe which was.  Therefore He gathered His divine will, and created a hand for Himself so that He might stretch it forth before Him and signal the birth of His vision as a real thing.

But it has ever been the misfortune of all things in our world that The D.M., although in our dimension He is the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God of Gods who can do anything, is in his own dimension, in the world from whence He had come, Himself but a common human, who is bound to the same weaknesses which bind all humans. That is to say, The D.M., The God of Gods, is like all humans quite lazy and stupid.

It would be considered the darkest of blasphemies to describe in such a way the God of Gods, the creative, Solitary Being from whom ultimately all things in our world got their existence, were it not for the fact that to say the D.M. is lazy and stupid is a self-evident truth which is reflected in all of the things, great or small, which He has created in our universe, all of which are, having been created in His image, also lazy and stupid. 

There is not a human in all the world who is not to some extent both lazy and stupid.  There is not a beast of the field, nor a fowl of the air, nor an aquatic creature of the sea which is not to some extent lazy and stupid.  Even the inanimate things of the world, the rocks of the mountains, the vapors of the skies and the waters of the oceans do little and always seek if possible to remain at rest, for they are lazy, and they think no thoughts, particularly not any which are at all worthy of an intelligent thing, and therefore they also can be said to be stupid. So it is that, although God is acknowledged by the religious to be God, and the forces of the Cosmos are acknowledged by the scientific to be the forces of the Cosmos, it is a thing unchallenged by any but the completely insane that all things are both lazy and stupid, because whatever it was that created them, be it God or be it Cosmic forces, is lazy and stupid also.

It is from this fundamental understanding of the flaws intrinsic even to the supreme Being of the universe, whatever form has been assigned to it, that the entire history of our universe must be read. None of the things which the reader shall read in this volume or any others of the histories will make any reasonable sense unless they understand that even the Creator is lazy and stupid. If the reader looks in the proceeding pages of this history for an instance of someone or something not being lazy and/or not being stupid, they shall find that instance only in an act of chance, an accident that was not intended by the one who did it.

With that understanding, then, shall this tale, the first of tales, the tale of the creation of our universe and the first things in it, now continue.

The D.M. Creates Imperfect Existence From A Perfect Vision

As has been written, the beginning of the universe, that is to say, our universe, was no beginning of the universe at all. For at first, our universe existed only as a concept, not as a physical reality with actual particles in it and actual physical laws to determine them. And so long as the universe existed only as a vision in the mind of The D.M., it was, as such imaginings inevitably are, perfect. Or as perfect as any mind can come. All things functioned together in perfect harmony, all things imagined did the perfect things to achieve the desired result. All made sense, and nowhere in any of the vision of the universe did there occur even the possibility of anything going wrong or being wrong. 

It is a trap that creators great and small often blunder into, for the notion that everything can be perfect is a seductive one, and hard to ignore, even for and especially for someone like the D.M., the God of Gods Himself. Even if someone knows intellectually that nothing can ever truly be perfect, nor even close to perfect, nonetheless many choose to believe that finding the correct combination of circumstances can bring about an existence which is perfect to all and to each individual. And throughout all the centuries none have been able to make that happen for themselves or anyone else. Not humans, not sorcerers, not the richest and most powerful tyrant, not the poorest and most powerless peasant. Not the beasts of the forest nor the birds of the air nor the fish in the sea. No mountains or vapors or the ether between planets ever achieved a condition of perfection, in any universe anywhere, in any dimension.

But the allure of the idea of perfection as a goal for which to strive provided an impetus for evolution, and has driven the processes of evolution to the present day, as each generation builds upon the attempts of the others it encounters to try to bring the high mark closer to a condition of perfection, and it is because of the continued attempts to achieve perfect existence that history exists at all, or evolution, or any of our problems. That someone (in this case The D.M. Himself) kept trying to get the universe right, that is the ultimate reason why I exist, or anyone in our universe exists, and even that our entire universe even exists at all. Without the intention to create, nothing would have been created, and there had been no room for any more nothingness.

So, it could be said that the great work of making the actual universe began with an intention. That, therefore, shall be the "beginning" of our history, even though really, in our particular universe, beginnings are really sort of strange things, coming as they do in the middle.

So The D.M., the God of Gods to whom the people of the Muncian Church pray, had in His mind the intention to create, and so indeed He created. He said, 

"LET THERE BE A PLACE WITHIN THE NOTHINGNESS LIKE UNTO A WOMB, IN WHICH SHALL ALL THINGS EXIST WHICH SHALL EXIST, EVEN UNTO THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE I SHALL CREATE."

Behold, it came to be as He had said. For at His word there came into existence a boundary in the midst of the nothingness, an area of potential within which existence could be formed.

Top: The tale of creation symbolized by YHVH's relationship to Adam, allegedly the first human. Below: The Sluddish tale of creation symbolized...or perhaps epitomized...by The D.M.'s relationship to a blandred creature resembling an ape of some sort or something.But already had the God of Gods begun to lose perfection in the universe He sought to create. For He had intended to create the universe in much the same form his own universe had in its beginning...a tiny universe no larger than a child's ball that exploded into a vast universe billions of light years across at the very least over (deep) time and operated according to circumstances that were favorable for life to evolve, with all the things that one associates with the Cosmos, stars and planets and black holes and gravity and electromagnetism and all the other stuff.

Instead, The D.M. was fifty seven solar systems into creating our universe, and more than six hundred planets, when He realized He had already made a mistake. It occurred to Him that He was creating the universe as if it had already expanded to its full size, and to compound His mistake He was creating things out of the correct order. The example which first came to His notice was that he had created more than four stars fully made in the prime of their "lifetime" before He had even thought to create a nebula in which to generate stars.

It is here in the narrative that the term the First Mistake starts to be used, and the consequences of the First Mistake have been central to story of our universe, our world, and our human species since the beginning. As the term will be used again and again as the story of our world unfolds in this and the other Tales of Slud, the story of creation will be delayed but a short bit, while some sort of basic explanation is given to this event of almost unparalleled importance that has influenced pretty much everything that has ever happened in our universe.

Just what was the First Mistake, then? Simply put (though the reader will soon read for themselves how absurd it is to try to put the First Mistake simply when it has been the single most complicating force in the history of our species), the First Mistake was the error which happened when the D.M., God of Gods in this universe and ultimate creative wellspring of it too, was unaware of time coming into existence and failed to keep it from coming into existence the wrong way.

The author has already mentioned that the D.M. was fifty seven solar systems into creating our universe before He was aware that He was going about His creation in completely the wrong order, and the reason why it is seen as being in the wrong order is that the beginning starts in the middle, and past and future are pretty much made into the same thing, for they happen and are experienced simultaneously. In a normal universe time begins at a beginning, and progresses through a middle to an ending. Something happened epochs ago and subsequent events have built upon that past something until in the future it has evolved into something. In a normal world the future remembers specific presents and pasts, the present remembers the past but looks ahead to the future, and the past knows only the present and its own past, but looks ahead to the future. And this is because in a normal beginning to end universe, time-progression is a line, or a combination of lines, but essentially line-shaped.

In Slud (the Universe), though, it is different.  For time in our universe is an ever widening, ever expanding oval, comparable to the waves and ripples that flow outward when you throw a stone into a pond. In our universe, the past and the present and the future are not separated by impassable gulfs of uncrossable time. It is not an uncommon thing to visit a city and see, living together on the same day in the same year, in the same city and same street, even on the same city block, a man and his great great great great grandfather and his fourteenth cousin twice removed who will not be born for another two hundred and fifty years.

In any of the cities of present-day Slud (the Planet), it is possible for a person to go next door to borrow a cup of sugar from one's own ancestor who should have been dead of old age thousands of years ago. Except, the ancestor is from thousands of years ago, and sees things in a completely different way than those which are popular in the present, speaks a language so vastly separated by the morphology of centuries of social interactions from one's own dialect that they essentially speak completely different languages. And one might not even learn about the linguistic barriers between them and their ancestor, if their ancestor, quite reasonably according to the peculiar, relatively more superstitious notions of his own time, tries to burn them as a witch for being different than him.

To say that the possibility of getting lynched by one's own ancestors was a barrier to communication between people and their families would be to make a gross understatement. It was a disaster for humans, keeping them an endangered species with an absurdly high mortality rate for much of their 'early' existence.

Right now, as he writes this paragraph, the Author is aware of things that are happening simultaneously in two different time epochs which are supposedly separated by some one hundred and twenty six million years, and he sees it in his mind as if he is there, watching it happen. This is not the result of any sort of clairvoyance on the part of the Author. Pretty much everyone in the human species can reach such an awareness, if they choose to pay attention to their observations. Which they usually don't, because humans are just like their Creator, lazy and stupid.

It is just a part of the way things work in this universe of ours, that the past and the future and of course the middle between them do not happen sequentially, and therein lay the problem of problems for our species.

For when the D.M. eventually created life to live in Slud (the Universe), He did not take any thought for the fact that He was creating things based upon what they were in His own universe, that other  universe in which He Himself dwelt. He had taken no thought for the fact that things in his universe evolve based upon how and in which order events occur, and that creating those things in forms they had achieved only after billions of years of evolution without already having the things that caused them to evolve that way be in place and functioning as they should. So when He created copies of those things (like the aforementioned solar systems, for instance) in our universe, they worked in ways different than what He had intended them to, or sometimes didn't work at all.  To demonstrate that point, it is noted that fifty seventh star system He had been creating when He realized He had messed up happened also to be only the eighth star system He had created that did not immediately develop a black hole and get sucked into crushing oblivion. The reason for those black holes was time. Specifically, time that existed in a place where it should not, and therefore imploded all physical matter moving in it.

The First Mistake has the potential, to this very day, to wipe out our entire world, solar system, maybe even galaxy more completely than a trillion nuclear bombs all detonated at the same time could. And so, quite naturally, pretty much every human in the world not fatalistically surrendered to true stoicism or nihilism considers it to be a very, very important matter.

But it is one thing to say that the First Mistake destroyed solar systems the D.M. had tried to make, it is another to look at the implications and the consequences of it. So what did the First Mistake make happen that was so terrible, other than the black holes, of course?

A detailed explanation of the physical consequences of creating the universe in the wrong order can be left for professional cosmologists, of which the author of this history is not one. But to humans, the worst effects of the Great Mistake were to be seen in what Slud (the Universe's) middle-outward progression of time did the human species in our relationships with each other, for our species was created by the D.M. with sociability in our characters, both individual and collective. But the First Mistake perverted that sociability, corrupted it, turned the social links between people into mockeries of mutual contempt before they even were made. It appears that social relationships require the sense of continuity that comes from a linear timeline, and lacking that sense of continuity, good strong bonds of good feeling like loyalty or devotion or even something as prosaic as friendship rarely if ever even have a chance to develop between humans.

And that is a lethal thing to happen to humans. Being social creatures, humans are built individually quite powerless but as part of a big group of fellow humans quite powerful. We as a species are designed, it can hardly be denied, to accomplish but great and world-changing things when we work together with others of our kind and share expertise and achieve a common goal together, but to only accomplish small and insignificant things when we act alone. To be refused the opportunity to share experiences and form affinities with each other, human social development was, for much of its early existence, effectively hamstrung.

Of none of this, apparently, was The D.M. even aware, right up until He was in the middle of creating a star system with five exoplanets in it orbiting a remarkably Sun-like yellow dwarf, when suddenly He slapped His forehead with the palm of his hand and said,

"OH SHIT!  I FORGOT TO MAKE TIME!"

But it was too late. Time had already been made, and not in the form that The D.M. had intended.  It had come into existence on its own, piggybacking into the universe of existence on the existence of physical matter, and as a consequence of His creation of the stars before He should have, He had not made time a line, but a rippling oval wave, along the crests of which history is propelled outward, from middle to past and from middle to future at the same time.

The resulting Problem of Time caused the entire vision of the Sluddish universe to change. All that it had intended to be was replaced with what, instead, it would be. What we were supposed to be, if we humans were even supposed to exist at all, was replaced with what we have been, we are, and we will be. This would not to the casual observer signal an unmatched catastrophe. Humans being what we are, we are all quite used to the concept of one set of possibilities being overwritten by another set of possibilities, from which reality happens.

Yet the Problem of Time was a catastrophe for the humans of Slud (the Planet, and also, presumably, the universe too) for the reason that what we were supposed to have been was a harmonious species who worked together to solve problems, innovate technologies, prosper beyond any current definitions of the word, and achieve an intergalactic Type Four Civilization. The Problem of Time caused circumstances which prevent us from achieving that, making mutual predators out of all of us in the guise of concepts like economy, religion, and politics, and keeping pretty much the entire human species more or less willing slaves of hierarchy, both in concept and in practice of the word.

It is believed by many of the devout Muncians of the world that The D.M., the God of Gods, took thought eventually for what He had done, the mess that He had made of time, and He had developed a solution to the aforementioned Problem by placing some of His divine essence into the body and mind of a messiah. That messiah will not be named right now, but at another part of the narrative, probably the next installment, where the messiah will be written about in greater detail during his own tale. As for the tale of The D.M., no messiahs really figure all that much into it, so the story shall now return to that tale where it left off.

The D.M. Builds a Strange Cosmos

If the author recalls correctly, when last this story left the God of Gods, He had just said a naughty word and facepalmed Himself for His failure to bring time into existence in a more preferred form. The Problem of Time was already causing Him some consternation because, as has been mentioned, His stars kept exploding and causing black holes to form. The God of Gods had been making his fifty seventh star system, the eighth one that had thus far survived, when He had noticed the First Mistake.

That eighth system, the one with five exoplanets in it, was the same system in which our own world, Slud (the Planet), occupies the third orbit from the star. But The D.M. created far more than a few star systems.  After His initial dismay at the fact that He had forgotten to willfully create time in His universe, He had sort of shrugged, and He said,

"OH WELL. I CAN ADD TIME LATER OR SOMETHING. THE THING FOR RIGHT NOW IS TO CREATE ALL THE THINGS WITH MATTER AND MASS, ALL THE PLANETS AND ALL THE STARS, ALL THE QUASARS AND THE PULSARS, ALL THE NEBULAS THAT I SHOULD HAVE CREATED FIRST."

So with a shrug, He went and did that. So far as any of us humans know, He is still often out there somewhere, still creating worlds and stars and things that form stars and things also that eat stars (and worlds, of course), because a universe is a usually an incredibly large place that is bound to be filled with those sorts of things by whatever creative force is there.. As an important consequence though, our creative force, a lazy and stupid supreme creator God of Gods with a dumb name like "The D.M." is usually not focused upon our own world, to which He returns in person only extremely rarely. In fact, the history of our world such as it is known to any of us makes mention of only a handful of times that The D.M. has ever been seen here on Slud (the Planet), once He had created it.

As a consequence of God's long absence from our world, Slud (the Planet) floated for billions of years in its most latent, unworked form (that is to say a ball of fiery molten rock), unchanging in the darkness so total that not even the great ball of fire made any light that could be seen in space. Our planet was more a field of the potential for a planet, than an actual planet itself. There were as yet no mountains, no rivers, no oceans or continents, none of the features that we of the present day tend to associate with belonging to a planetary body. Our world was just an unchanging ball of fire floating around in space until eventually, the D.M. came back to get more work done on building our world.

The Fashionably Late Bombardment Period: The Surface of The World Becomes Covered in the Waters

It is said that the God of Gods, The D.M., created all the first things in our world in three days.  Scientists of course think this notion is rubbish and impossible to boot. But the Muncians, who because they are religious folk don't hold much with what the scientists are saying, insist that it was three days and that anyone who doesn't believe that is a heretic who ought to be burned. Muncians love to burn people. Unfortunately all the politicians and other ruling class elites of our human societies are devoted members of the Muncian Church, so that three days nonsense is what is taught in Sluddish schools.

He's got the whole world in His...oops! Messed it up already!However long it took Him to create the world in the form in which we know it today, The D.M. eventually cooled the ball of fire that was early Slud (the Planet), and as it cooled He sent forth His will and shaped the rock as it were clay, making mountains where He wanted mountains to be, and rivers where He wanted rivers to be, oceans to cover most of the world and continents to stick up out of them.

Or that's what He would have done, if He had been any other God.  But He was OUR God of Gods, and that meant that He was too lazy and stupid to any sort of labor-intensive work like that.  So instead He just summoned a few hundred billion meteorites from around the local sector of outer space to come and bombard the planet for a few hundred million years in an event that cosmologists of our world call the "Fashionably Late Bombardment Period" though nobody can figure out why they gave it such a dumb name.

Despite the stupid name, it appears that The D.M. had hit upon an ingenious strategy for creating water, shaping the planet, and creating the atmosphere He knew it would eventually need. For the meteorites, all several hundred billion of them, each contained minute amounts of water which were released into the world of hitherto cooling lava upon impact. They also carried from other areas of space proteins and carbohydrates. The extraterrestrial meteors also carried iron and other minerals created from interstellar supernovae, and also, even more important, the meteors of the Fashionably Late Bombardment Period had carried in them or on them nucleic acids, like RNA and DNA, which was to play such a crucial role in the organization of genetic information in all living cells.

Pre-proto-primordial Slud (the Planet), during the Fashionably Late Bombardment PeriodThe force of the impacts themselves, of course, cratered the surface of the world and caused depressions to develop in the previously more or less flat crust of our planet. As the waters released by the extraterrestrial meteor impacts began to gather first into pools and later into lakes and oceans, a water cycle developed which led to the world's first atmosphere...or rather, its only atmosphere but in the first years of its existence. Additionally, the gathering waters also began the processes of erosion and weathering which more than anything have caused the topography of the world to look as it does.

And The D.M. looked upon the world that was developing before Him, and He saw that it was good enough. For the time being. Sort of.

Having caused the repeated collisions of the Fashionably Late Bombardment Period to give a more suitable shape to the nascent Slud (the Planet), and having seen that the waters had been brought there to cover Her surface, The D.M. did not immediately do anything else. Because after all our God of Gods is quite a lazy being, He decided to take a break instead of staying here to create more things right away, and He left our universe and went back to that other universe in which He Himself dwells, where He ordered a pizza delivered to His door and got to work studying for an upcoming geology exam for school.

Clash of the Titans: The Collision of Slud (the Planet) and Hyper Ian (the Planetesimal) Causes the Creation of Two Moons

It is not known how much time passed in the God's country in which He dwells before His allegedly divine thoughts returned to our world, but in our world more than a billion years passed before the God of Gods once again returned His thoughts to this planet. While He was gone a local planetesimal, called Hyper Ian by cosmologists whose field of study covers the event, smacked into Slud (the Planet), temporarily knocking all the water back into the local portions of super-atmospheric space which surround our world and turning the planet once again into a big ball of fire and molten rock for a time.

And that was how The D.M. found our world when at last He returned to it. He saw a ball of fire orbitingCollision of early Slud (the Planet) with the somewhat smaller Hyper Ian (the Planetesimal) the star instead of the young but established planet that He had left, and surrounding the planet for hundreds of thousands of miles in any direction there was something that resembled a miniature oort cloud filled with chunks of debris from the collision with Hyper Ian and chunks of frozen ice that once had been oceans on the surface of our world.

It is not hard to imagine The D.M.'s chagrin when He saw what had become of Slud (the Planet). 

"SON OF A..." The D.M. began to mutter, His eyes widened in shock and disgust. What had happened to His planet? How had all the work of the Fashionably Late Bombardment Period been undone? Was He not the D.M.? Was He not the Author, the Painter, the Sculptor who alone in all our universe had the power to make anything like that happen?  And yet it had happened indeed while He had been away, and how could that have been?

As it turned out, one cannot create a number of great bodies in space without gravity coming into manifestation to exert an influence over their movements. Which, the cosmologists assure us, is exactly what happened. The planetesimal known as Hyper Ian, for whatever reason, had careened through space when it entered our star system and came too close to Slud (the Planet) for its velocity to carry it away from the gravity well in which the mass of our planet sits.

Irresistably caught in the gravity of Slud (the Planet), Hyper Ian hit the world with what, in terms of cosmic physics, amounted to a glancing blow, yet the collision of two roughly planet sized chunks of rock, even if it is a minor collision, is enough to cause so much friction that for a time the planetary crusts are liquified from the heat. And that was the condition in which The D.M. upon His return had found this world of ours.

One cannot find the planetesimal Hyper Ian by looking into the sky, especially not without a powerful telescope, for once Hyper Ian had struck its glancing blow against Slud (the Planet), the force of the impact was enough to repel the planetesimal away from our world, back out of the gravity well, where, retaining some of its initial velocity, it continued on its journey through space. For those who are curious about whether or not the Planetesimal Hyper Ian can be spotted on its journey through space and located with the aid of telescopes, yes and no is the answer. Due to the Problem of Time, the apparent location of Hyper Ian in outer space tends to jump around a lot, as do most the stars in our nightly sky, and it is very difficult to happen to be looking through the right portion of space at the right time to see it, but it has been spotted from time to time, and there's even photographs of it published in some academic journal somewhere.

At any rate, Hyper Ian was long gone, away from our system, by the time The D.M. returned. And The D.M., the God of Gods...was...PISSED!

His eyes glowing with baleful fire of their own, The D.M. threw one heck of a tantrum. Screaming and shouting in fury, He threw chunks of ice back down to the world and the chunks of other debris, cooled rock that had been molten by the collision and splattered into space by the impact, he threw at other chunks of debris, colliding them on purpose, venting his rage upon them as he screeched his outrage all the while. 

The collided debris, heated by the friction of the impacts, began to bond to each other, forming an object which grew the larger and larger the more that The D.M. continued to throw rocks at it. Eventually, as His tremendous anger began to dissipate, He noticed that He had actually created a couple moons. One was a quarter the size of the planet, and the other about half that size.

"HMM...VERY WELL THEN. THE WORLD SHALL HAVE A MOON, FOR I HAD INTENDED TO CREATE ONE ANYWAY, THAT THEREBY THE WORLD SHALL HAVE TIDES. AND THE SECOND MOON SHALL I ALSO KEEP FOR A TIME, FOR IT SHALL CAUSE THE WATERS TO BECOME GREATER STILL UPON THE WORLD. GREAT STORMS SHALL BE FORMED BECAUSE OF THE GRAVITY, WHICH SHALL COMPLETE THE PROCESSES OF EROSION WHICH I HAD INTENDED." said the God of Gods then. And by His will He set the two new moons of our planet into their orbits around it. And it came to pass even as He had said, for great storms arose in the replenished seas of the world, and the Oceans which had been, and then had been not, now once again covered the crust of the world, and once again made an atmosphere for it, and weather resulted from those factors.

The surface of Slud (the Planet) was eventually eroded again to the satisfaction of the God of Gods, and he saw that the world he had again shaped was...eh...pretty good.

Prematurely, The God of Gods Creates the First Life on Slud (the Planet)

The D.M., having got the planet back to some semblance of a form and function like He had intended from the beginning, decided to pursue what had been His goal all along. He intended to create life to live on our planet, for the sake of generating what He called "NPC's" for something He called His "P&P RPG campaign", whatever that means.

So here in Slud (the Universe), and particularly on Slud (the Planet), He created the first living organisms on the planet, and when He did it, He was to do it quite by accident.

What happened was this. The D.M. had been standing on the eastern shoreline of what is now called the Latzawator Ocean, where today can still be found embedded into the ground the actual footprints of God, the God of Gods, creator of our universe, left behind by Him as he stood there more than a billion years of futurepast ago.

That day so long ago, the God of Gods stood there, apparently skipping the rocks of the shore out along the surface of the waters as He thought. And thought. And thought some more. Because the God of Gods appears to have been a human, His thoughts, even as our own, are made of electricity, and the thinking of His thoughts made electricity surge through his brain, and throughout the rest of his body, and with each thought He had, his touch imbued the rocks He held in His hand with charges of electricity, which, after being thrown by him to skip along the roiling waters of the ocean, reacted with the water as they touched the surface again and again.

The D.M. did not notice what was happening, for His thought was occupied with answering for Himself the questions of how to create living creatures that will survive and thrive and move toward their destinies as He intended them to, and what to create once He knew how He would do it.

It is believed by the mainstream of evolutionary biologists throughout our world that it was at that time and that place, there off of the eastern shore of the Latzawator Ocean, where the first organic molecules in the world were generated into an existence that, with susequent evolutions, would eventually become life, including all the life on this planet today. Including the author, and presumably also the reader, and all the creatures they ate, all the plants they smoked, and all the ancient fossilized organisms that fuel our gas cars on the daily commute to the workplace.

While the D.M. was busy ruminating and certainly not intentionally creating the life He was creating unintentionally at the very moment He was trying to figure out what He intended to create, there spawned into existence where the electrically charged rocks had skipped along the surface the ultimate ancestor of all life in the world, in the form of molecules of amino acids, and lipids.

The waters, having eroded the land and dissolved the minerals, vitamins, proteins and carbohydrates, and other building blocks of life into the sea after the Fashionably Late Bombardment Period and then the later collision with Hyper Ian (the Planetesimal), had become a sort of chemical soup which had awaited only a sufficient electrical charge to react with it.

Coacervate droplets, the first "cells" to appear on Slud (the Planet) and therefore the ultimate ancestor of all life here. Early cells like these developed in the liquid ocean of primordial Slud (the Planet) as a result of a reaction between chemicals and nutrients dissolved into the water and electricity allegedly from the hand of The D.M. Himself. As it happened, the reactions between the lightning-infused skipping rocks and the primordial soup got organisms forming and metabolizing those nutrients as they grew into first coacervate droplets, which in time evolved membranes enclosing the chemicals in the first self-replicating cells, and then . Those cells which didn't replicate exact replicas of themselves instead mutated and replicated the mutation rather than the original, and from that point, the cells and all life that was to follow from them became subject to natural selection.

Thus, quite under the D.M.'s nose, life had begun in the ocean of Slud (the Planet), with the ability to reproduce itself and evolve into ever increasingly more complex forms with every mutation that resulted in continued survival. And all the while, He was unaware of it, for yet He stood there upon the shore, absentmindedly skipping electrically charged stones into the ocean while thinking, thinking of how He should create life, and what He should create.

"HMMMMMM...WHAT SHALL I CREATE. WHAT INDEED SHALL I CREATE? WHAAAAT SHALL I CREATE?  WHAT SHALL BE CREATED BY ME? CREATION SHALL TAKE THE FORM OF WHAT THING THAT I CHOOSE?  HI, THE D.M., WELCOME TO THE CAFE CREATION-OF-ALL-LIFE-ON-THE-PLANET. I'LL BE YOUR WAITER TODAY. MY NAME IS THAD. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO CREATE TODAY?" The D.M. said to Himself, of course, because there was nobody there that had yet evolved ears or a capacity for language enough to hear Him. But no answer came to Him. He just could not decide where to start with the creation of life. He wished he'd paid more attention to His biology homework.

Meanwhile, life evolved and spread throughout the ocean over the next few million years, growing more complex and more adapted to the hot, wet environment of the primordial world. And as life evolved, and The D.M. began to notice things were now living in His world that He had not intended to create, and He was most irritated that they had come into existence without His permission. Not that He hadn't intended to create them, but that was the point. HE had intended to create them, not stand by, an idle bystander, while they had created themselves. There was, He felt, quite a distinction there.

And then The D.M., the God of Gods noticed something else.  And that was the fact that He was not noticing anything about this new life. Artist's Rendition: "View of Slud (the Planet) from atop scenic Mount Sialotfrumhir"That is to say, He knew the life was there, knew the life had come into existence.  He just couldn't see it. As a matter of fact, He soon realized, He couldn't see anything.  And this fact brought suddenly to His mind an unwanted epiphany, that He had forgotten to create yet something else that really was sort of important to those like Himself engaged in the business of universe-creation.

He had forgotten to create Light. And He had forgotten to create Day. Infuriated at Himself, He stamped his feet in the dirt angrily, the entire region shaking in response to the force from it, and, quite coincidentally, thereby kicking into gear the planet's seismology, for the earthquake caused a supervolcano to sprout suddenly out of the surface of the waters some ways out to sea...

"SON OF A..."

Evolution or Extinction

The D.M. therefore had what seemed to Him a problematic mess on His hands, with all the unplanned life that was now evolving in our world, and He had to make a decision whether or not to let it continue existing.

The reader might well think that, since they are reading this history, they have good cause to think that whatever choice was made, some sort of life must have survived on Slud (the Planet), for how else, they might ask, would there have evolved anything even resembling a human being anywhere in this world?

So, did life survive here on Slud (the Planet)? If not, how did life return here, and evolve human beings after it had been made extinct? The answer is, yes, it did survive here, but only just barely. Why, then, was it so only just barely that Sluddish life survived to reproduce and evolve throughout millions of generations?

Well, as it turned out, the D.M. did decide to let life go on living here on our planet. Seeing as how the processes of Evolution had come to be, and were more or less doing what evolution is supposed to, He decided that it wouldn't be a terrible thing to let things take their course, and let evolution do its work. Because, of course, destroying the spreading life would have taken some work, and God is lazy.

The First Famine wiped out an estimated 97 percent of all living cells on Slud (the Planet) due to dwindling organic nutrients. Translation for the Stupid: "Basically, a bunch of single-celled hippies starved to death because they couldn't shop at the primordial ocean's version of Wholefoods'".In time, those simple cells adapted to their environment and evolved into increasingly complex cells capable of much longer chains of reactions. Though in time that process of ongoing evolution would lead to the First Famine, in which the cells living in the primordial oceans of our world began to run out of organic molecules in the so-called "chemical soup" upon which to "feed" and were forced to develop other means of getting nutrients necessary to their survival. It is estimated that something like eighty five percent of all living organisms on Slud (the Planet) died during the First Famine, which also is sometimes called the First Great Extinction. But the First Great Extinction will be detailed more in another section. For the time being, life not only survived in the oceans of our world, but thrived.

As living cells began more and more to develop relationships with each other and react to each other, more complex creatures started to emerge, some of which we even have fossils of. Sluddish planetary archaeologists (you know, as distinguished from space archaeologists), have dug out of the strata of the world fossil remains of procaryotes, specifically cyanobacteria (basically blue-green algae), which evolved into existence when cells had been forced to develop photosynthesis to convert light energy to chemical energy as a means of surviving the First Famine. The first cells complex enough that we start calling them "creatures" or "organisms" as opposed to just "cells" were the procaryotes.

But the procaryotes almost died out as soon as they evolved, for their continued existence depended upon photosynthesis, but there was in our world as yet no sunlight. This is because there was as yet no star shining its light here. The D.M., true to His lazy and stupid form, had created the star system in which our world orbits, but had not actually gotten around to creating the star itself.

Luckily for life on our world, The D.M. caught His mistake soon enough to blink the star into existence before the cyanobacteria had completely gone extinct. The crisis averted, the bacteria thrived and in time began to gather into colonies in shallow waters, called stromatolites, which created the oxygen that has come to form an important part of our planet's now breathable atmosphere and be necessary for the respiration of most the living things in the world of the present day.

Meanwhile other forms of life also began to evolve in the ocean. Sponges and worms, trilobytes and crinoids moved through the waters beside crustaceans and cephalopods and fish. Eventually, some creatures moved out of the seas and onto the emerging dry lands of the world, where they developed into saurians and mammals, insects and reptiles, trees and fungi, and many other species. And the processes of evolution continued uninterrupted until eventually, evolution had produced a super-species of saurians that became so successful at the game of adaptation that they ended up killing everything else on the planet (leading, of course, to the Second Great Extinction), while retaining no natural predators of their own. 

Even so, life continued to survive, and though the number of species was greatly reduced, those species themselves developed and diversified into the vacated evolutionary niches left behind. As a matter of fact, natural evolutionary processes were just about to the point of adapting a new species to challenge the dominance of the saurian superspecies when again, just about all life on the planet was wiped out.  What happened this time, to cause yet another Great Extinction event?

What happened was this. It will be remembered that, from the cloud of dust and debris surrounding Slud (the Planet), The D.M. had formed two moons. This had seemed like a good idea to Him at the time, for there were multiple moons around several of the planets in His own star system, and also, He had in His own world seen all sorts of science-fiction movies featuring planets with multiple moons orbiting around them. In one such movie, there was a whiny farm kid whose aunt and uncle had been killed by extraterrestrial imperialists, and He went on to become a radicalized, pseudoreligious terrorist bent on overthrowing the duly elected government of an entire galaxy so that he could start a religious order focused around lifting spaceships out of swamps or something.

At any rate, creating two moons to orbit our world did not turn out to be such a good idea after all.  For The D.M. had not reckoned with the effects that gravitational forces have upon such things as moons. The orbits of the two moons gradually brought them into a collision course with each other, and when that happened, debris from the resulting explosion rained down upon the surface of Slud (the Planet), once again killing just about everything.

And when The D.M. saw what had again happened to this poor, hapless planet, He was overcome with frustration. He had just been in the process of giving a name to the star He had created at the center of our star system, had just been writing it down in that notebook He carries with Him always, and then He noticed the fiery holocaust raining down upon Slud (the Planet) from the skies, and again He exclaimed,

"SON OF A..."

And at that point, The D.M. threw up His hands in disgust, decided to take a break from trying to create the world and everything in it because obviously it just kept going so terrible for Him, and He went off somewhere to make Himself a sandwich.

The D.M. Makes A Sandwich

The D.M., the God of Gods, called into existence some Bread, and some Lunchmeat, some Cheese and some Mustard, and made Himself a Sandwich. Not just a sandwich. THE Sandwich. The capital S Sandwich which sits somewhere in the realm of theoretical forms and is the objective Sandwich to which all subjective sandwiches are compared.  Or it would be, if it were actually there.  Which it is not, for the God of Gods ate that sandwich, objective as it was, because, really, what else is to be done with a sandwich?

And eating that Sandwich, He tasted that it was good.In the single most important moment of this entire tale, the God of Gods made a Sandwich... 

The Blandred

Why was it important to include in this history that The God of Gods, sort-of Creator of our entire world ate a sandwich? Well, probably it's not very important at all, but the author included that section because A) It is history, in that it happened. B) The D.M. Eating the Sandwich is an important concept to broad swaths of humans in our world. As we will see in their sections, both religious and political magnates would legitimize their positions in human society by the frequent ritual of sandwich-eating, and that ritual was born, of course, of The D.M. actually making the Sandwich and eating it.

At any rate, when God was done eating His objective Sandwich, He returned to Slud (the Universe), creating a few new nebulae along the way and supernova'ing a few stars at the proper times and places when and where they were supposed to do that so that they could send necessary gasses and minerals to many of the worlds of our galaxy. But God did not stay indefinitely out there in the incredibly distant reaches of our galaxy, the stupidly named Spilled Concession Stand Beer Road Galaxy. 

No, The D.M. returned to this world of ours, which apparently has been of special attention to Him that made it. Whatever had been in the Sandwich that The D.M. had eaten, He returned to the world with His energies and His will renewed, reinvigorated. He said,

"TWICE HAVE I TRIED TO CREATE LIFE HERE, THAT I MAY FINALLY RUN MY CAMPAIGN ON THIS PLANET. AND BEHOLD! IT HAS COME TO PASS THAT TWICE HAS LIFE BEEN ALL BUT DESTROYED HERE, DESPITE ALL THAT I HAVE INTENDED. AND MY LABORS HERE HAVE HITHERTO WROUGHT THINGS WHICH DID NOT SURVIVE. BUT I WILL A THIRD TIME STRETCH FORTH MY HAND AND CREATE THE LIVING OF THE WORLD, FOR AMONG THE LIVING SHALL ARISE THE ONE WHO SHALL SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF TIME, YES, EVEN OF THE HUMANS WHICH I SHALL BRING FORTH INTO EXISTENCE."

What then did He do, the God of Gods who had come personally to our world?  He stretched forth His hand and by His divine Will, He created plants and animals, insects. He created the fruits and vegetables of the stalk and the bush and the tree. He created the birds of the air, and the creatures of the sea, for all life had been wiped out by the crashing of the moons (which by the way were already beginning to fuse together and form one moon), all life had perished except for microbes and bacteria.

On the lands of the continents, The D.M. created beasts to live in field and forest, and those also that dig underneath the surface of the ground. Dimmunitive rodents He created, and great elephantine creatures also. Creatures of tusk and horn He created, and creatures of fang and tooth and claws He created also. He created creatures that specialized in running, creatures that specialized in hunting, creatures that in time would live out their purpose as domesticated herdbeasts. And by that, the author of this history is not referring yet to human beings, although the term "domesticated herdbeasts" does seem to apply rather far too much to humans.

But humans, The D.M. did not create yet. Instead, He created the...Blandred.

What are the Blandred? Anyone who asks such a question of any human anywhere in our world is likely Photorealistic painting: "The Whatever That Thing Was Called Hunt", allegedly painted by the unrenaissance-era painter Bobby Beginner. The picture depicts with photographic accuracy what two particular types of blandred creatures, the blahrg (right) and the wammot (left) look like.to get a mildly nauseous, militantly disinterested look from whomever they ask it to. Indeed, if there's ever a subject that humans of this world do not want to discuss...apart from a discussion of the rights they should have but don't (nobody ever wants to discuss that either)...it is the subject of the Blandred, quite the most uninteresting, sickeningly boring creatures to ever walk the surface of Slud (the Planet).

Even for the author of this history now writing about the blandred with, it must be admitted, a great deal of distaste, he is only writing about such creatures because his devotion to his craft demands it. Whether we like it or not, the blandred play a role in especially the early history of Sluddish humankind, for they have been feeding humans since humans have existed. The meat of blandred species is tasty enough with the proper preparation, and it certainly got early humans through from generation to generation.

But what are the blandred, the reader might persist in asking, being unfamiliar enough with them to actually be curious about them? (For assuredly, if one ever saw one of those unfortunate creatures, they would certainly cease to be so curious almost immediately.)

First, it must be understood that the term "blandred" does not refer to one particular creature, nor one particular species of creatures.  The term is more of a category or a classification, because it refers to an entire class of evolutionarily diverse species.

The blandred species' are sort of like mammalkind's uncool sibling. Both the blandred and the mammals belong to the same phylum (chordata), and share several traits which would be notable if the blandred were at all interesting to note, which they are not. Still, with a deep breath and a ragged sigh of regret, the author shall now endeavor to make such note.

Both blandred and mammals give birth (in almost all species) to live young. Both are roughly quadruped in body configuration, both usually nourish their young by lactation of mammary glands which both possess. Both both possess what is called the "mammalian jaw", and also the three ear bones that derived from the articular bone of their ancestors. Both evolved neocortices in their brains, although while the neocortex of mammals is well developed and able to promote intelligence in them, the neocortex of blandred species, on the other hand, is as it has always been, stunted, so that the blandred are incapable of any true intelligence. Still, in both classes, the neocortex is sufficient to promote the development of sophisticated motor skills, which is good news for the blandred, since it was certainly motor skills, and certainly not any sort of evolved intelligence, which has allowed blandred to not be completely hunted to extinction by humans.

A Calendrian male, apparent age twenty-two, who got ennui so severely from an encounter with a herd of boralo, vaguely bison-like blandred creatures, that he turned to stone.But one thing that blandred species all possess, which no mammal species possesses, is boringness as a racial trait, and that to the extent that it causes a sense of depressive ennui in intelligent creatures that come into contact with them. That causing this ennui-effect in intelligent creatures might have been precisely the result of an evolutionary adaptation as a defense-mechanism to preserve them from much predation from hunters is something that evolutionary biologists of the world would probably research in depth if that same effect did not, itself, prevent humans from being able to gather the willpower to do so. 

Seriously. Blandred are boring, boring creatures. So boring that it's almost impossible to even remember what they look like enough to describe them, beyond using a somewhat similarly built mammal as a basis of comparison.  I cannot describe to you, for instance, what a blahrg looks like without saying that it looks somewhat rhinocerous-ish, nor can I describe to you what a Wammot looks like without making reference to elephants. Even if I wanted to, which because they are blandred and very boring, I would never want to, I could not describe one of the blandred creatures to the reader based on its own features, nor could I even draw a picture of one as a visual aid without it basically being some sort of basic quadruped animal-like shape that lacks definition, much as a stick figure drawing does.

Boring as they may be, however, blandred species are survivors. The individual creatures in those species are not. Individual blandred creatures die in what would be alarming numbers, for they are still slaughtered and eaten to this very day by the vast majority of people in the world, if it were not for the fact that blandred creatures are about twelve to thirteen times more prolific at reproduction than mammals are.

Even if humans could care about the morality of killing and eating blandred meats, with the sheer number of blandred that exist in the world, humans would find it hard to care, for lessening the blandred populations is a necessary task. If no one killed blandred creatures, the world would be buried in them and few other species, if any, could continue to exist on this planet.

So humans kill blahrgs and wammots, whuteavers and fraunadons, hugivzafuchitheriums and horzi, and all other blandred creatures they encounter. And neither the humans and other hunters that hunt the blandred, nor the blandred themselves who are hunted seem to care much about it.

So if the more than five thousand, four hundred and fifty species of blandred were so boring, why did The D.M. even bother to create them in the first place?

There is some controversy about what exactly the answer to that question is.  Some researchers believe that the blandred were created by mistake, that they had intended to be other creatures entirely, perhaps mammals. But others believe that blandred came into existence quite as intended, that they were created the way they were and in the numbers they were for a reason, that reason being to literally be the dedicated food supply for the coming species of Humans, which The D.M. even then intended to get around to creating.

What is known about the various species of blandred is that they had already apparently come to The mighty wolf. There would have been a blandred creature that looked something like this, if that creature had not instead been created to be an utterly boring knockoff of a wolf instead. This is one of the recognized dangers of having a Creator who is both lazy and stupid. occupy just about every evolutionary niche normally occupied by mammals, by approximately thirty six million years in the futurepast. And that when humans finally did appear in the world approximately three million years in the futurepast, they arrived into a world where there was to be an abundant food supply for them that was relatively easy to obtain, and far less dangerous to obtain than they would have had in hunting mammalian species, who of course are much smarter, much more clever, and much more deadly adversaries than any blandred creature could ever be.

Early humans, when they finally did come into the world of Slud (the Planet), would thrive and multiply largely because of the presence of blandred in their vicinity, who could be hunted and slaughtered for important protein and other nutrients.

For that reason the species of human beings that live upon the surface of our planet owe our continued survival as a viable and evolving species to our relationship with those boring, utterly dreary creatures that nobody wants to talk about but nobody has a problem eating, except the vegetarians.

In the final analysis, one might well find that on Slud (the Planet), the purpose of blandred was to be food for predators, but that the role of mammals was to be predators.  That humans are themselves sprung from mammalian stock is known to evolutionary biologists of the present age (whenever this is), but it should not be forgotten that there are other predators among mammalkind who, until humans wipe them out as they inevitably will because that's what humans do to other species whether anyone likes it or not.

There are lions and tigers and bears, there are wolves and panthers and badgers. There are elephants and rhinocerouses and bison. There are jackals and hyenas and wild dogs, and there more than five thousand other species of mammals great and small, fierce and docile, who eat the flesh of other creatures and who eat only plant matter. Humans kill and eat them too, from time to time, but the vast majority of the human diet being blandred meat, there has never been as much of a drive for humans to view mammals as a staple food source of their diet, and thus, mammalian species have not so often been hunted to extinction on our world as they might have otherwise been if the blandred had not existed.

So it is that the relationship between humans and other mammalian species has been one where the drive to feed has been taken largely out of the equation, and what remains is two kinds of relationships. 

On the one hand, when humans came to domesticate some mammalian species around twenty thousand years in the futurepast, they developed a master/pet relationship with those species, which is distinguished from the other types of mammals with the words "wild" and "tame". On the other hand, the wild mammal species' had the numbers of individual members necessary to make their occasional attacks a genuine threat to human safety.

So humankind, despite whatever differences internally divide us as a species, nonetheless has maintained effectively a status of war against our fellow mammals for pretty much the entire existence of our species, and that state of war endures to this very day, though few think of it that way.  To the average human, mammalian attackers are seen as pests and vermin, and the ongoing struggle against them is not seen so much as a war in the sense of armies being fielded to fight against other armies, so much as it is seen as a part of "clearing the land", like the pulling of mere weeds out of a garden so that other more useful plants could be grown.

But war it is, and the war seems to suit the mammals as much as the humans, who under normal mammalian reproduction rates are quite a numerous class, for the mammalian predators keep attacking humans whenever they can, and even in the present age (whenever this is), we cannot travel through the wilderness from place A to place B without being set upon by wild beasts. And although the growth of human civilization has caused a taming effect on the animals located within the spheres of influence of human cities, still there is much of the world which remains very wild, and dangerous.

It was into just such a world that the human species was born, and the natural laziness and stupidity of humans, which our ancestors (and of course our descendants also) got from our Creator Himself, it caused early humans to defend against the lions and tigers and bears and wolves and all those mammals who attacked humans whenever convenient, but to focus the majority of their hunts against the much easier targets among the hugivzafuchitheriums and the wammots, the blahrgs and the boralo. And humankind, as a result of that choice, has more or less prospered as a whole, although only the highest echelons of society's hierarchy ever really get to enjoy the fruits of that prosperity.

So with all of this talk of humans, what about them? The reader will of course be aware that humans have not yet appeared as a species. Indeed, recall that The D.M. had made a conscious decision to create the blandred instead of humans, and one might well wonder where exactly the humans came from then.  I am here in the present age, a human writing a history book with a human hand holding a human-made pen, so how did people like me get here?

The next section will tell that story.

The D.M. Creates the First Humans, and Swiftly Regrets It

The story of our world thus far runs approximately like:

The D.M. got bored. The D.M decided to create a universe. So He hollowed out a space of potential like a womb within the hitherto infinite Void, and inside that hollow space He started creating cellestial objects like stars and planets. The D.M. got about fifty seven star systems made, eight of which (including our star system, which orbits around the star Sunova) survived and forty nine of which have returned to the dust from which they were formed, when He realized He had forgotten to create Time in the intended order. In that instant arrived the Problem of Time, which has stunted and twisted the intended destinies of all things, yet the effects of which remain the main motivator of Sluddish world history.

Having marred His creations by forgetting to get Time going correctly, The D.M. cussed a little bit, then left our planet that He had been in the process of making, still in its nascent ball of fiery molten rock form just sort of floating in space for an unknown span of time, and went elsewhere in the area of the universe to create some quasars or something.

The D.M. returned some time later, which according to the most accepted reckonings of our world's scholars was several billion years later, and found that the ball of fire and magma He had left shortly after The First Mistake billions of years beforafter was still a ball of fire and magma when He came back. Slud (the Planet) was not yet a planet at all, but had just floated in place, unchanged for billions of years. Because of the way He had created our world (completely out of all proper relationships with time), it had required His will to make it evolve, and could not evolve on its own according to physical forces of the cosmos because He had not created it to be able to do that. 

The D.M. then fixed that, for the most part, by creating physics and the forces of the cosmos to which He made our world subject, and He cooled the great floating ball of fire and magma into a ball of fire and magma that has a cooler, harder crust, and as the world cooled the creator shaped our planet, giving it topography and depth.

Then, during the Fashionably Late Bombardment Period around 3.8 billion years impendago, meteors and planetesimals crashed on our planet, reshaping it yet again and even more importantly, bringing with them what is understood by scientists to be one the crucial building blocks of life, namely water, minerals, and other necessary chemicals. The water from the bombarding chunks of celestial rock in time grew plentiful and grew into lakes and then oceans, which cover our world to this very day (whenever this is).

The Oceans having formed during the Fashionably Late Bombardment Period, they absorbed the vital chemicals and minerals and nutrients that had become a part of this world because the meteors that had carried them had crashed here, until the oceans had become a sort of Life soup.

The D.M. had been thinking about how to create life, and skipping electrically charged rocks along the surface of the ocean, when He accidentally created it without even being aware that He had created it. For organic molecules began to form, and He had caused some of them to bond together in abiogenesis, when his lightning had touched the surface of the waters. So about that time the first coacervates began to appear, as did proteinoid microspheres. And by an estimated 3.4 billion years impendago, living cells had developed in the warm oceans and even inland, in and around the mouths of geysers and hot springs. Life had arrived on Slud (the Planet) and it was not the life that The D.M. had intended to create. Or at least, it was not the life that He had intended to create at that place in time.

God decided to let life continue living and evolving, adopting a "wait-and-see" attitude toward it.

But that early life almost died out within a few million years, during the First Famine approximately 3.26 years impendago and the First Great Extinction that resulted from it, when the cellular life in the oceans of Slud (the Planet) began finally to run out of nutrients and began to die out in vast numbers.

But some organisms, notably cyanobacteria, developed alternate methods of supplying their needs, such as photosynthesis, which converted light energy into chemical energy,

Eventually a species of saurians evolved intelligence and came to dominate the world and the other species in it, to an extent that began to alarm The D.M., for He had not intended that it should be the saurians that grew so intelligent and powerful.

Rather, it was His will that it should be we humans who did it. Or so the Muncian theocrats in their church state tell us and because they own our publishers we more or less have to print it.

So The D.M. began to tamper with the natural evolutionary processes, attempting to bring about another dominant species, and one capable of contending with the saurians and overcoming all their evolutionary edges.

But the matter was rendered moot when death rained down from the skies upon the living creatures of the world in the form of fiery debris from the collision of our planet's two moons, approximately 3.6 billion years impendago, and almost all life on the planet was destroyed.

But The D.M. didn't give up.  He recreated life, or rather he created new life to live on our world. Some few species did survive, and from them evolution was to play a crucial role in making the new life from which everything in the world now derives.

Among the survivors were species of extremophiles which thrived in the hellish conditions the debris from the collision of the moons was imposing upon our world. And among those extremophiles were the cyanobacteria, still oxygenating the atmosphere almost as if nothing had happened.

There was enough life left even after all the disasters that had befallen our planet in those far removed years that through normal evolutionary processes it could once have spread and diversified across the planet as it had done before, even creating intelligent species like those who had been lost along the way. But The D.M. had grown impatient and He would not wait for another billion years to pass while He made no progress at all on His grand design for our world. Our God of Gods may be lazy but He is not quite that lazy.

So He recreated many of the species that had been lost, although He left those troublesome saurian species extinct. He re-created fish, and amphibians, reptiles and crocodilians, insects, the birds of the air and the mammals of both land and sea, bacteria, plankton, crustaceans and arachnids, and millions of species. Only after He had created each species evolved to a somewhat advanced level would He allow evolution to take its course.

Here, in the recreation of the life of Slud (the Planet), The D.M. showed a duality of nature.  For, on the one hand, He is as all men say (and some have witnessed firsthand, supposedly) quite a lazy and stupid God.

Yet on the other hand when He is creating, The D.M. is prolific in the number of things He can create at once, and His drive to create them seems inexhaustible for the most part. When He is focused upon creation, He throws His entire attention upon it. At least until His natural laziness causes Him to get bored and go find something else to do.

After He had remade most of the creatures which had perished in the literal fallout from the collision of the two moons, The D.M. made the aforementioned various species of blandred creatures. Almost as many species of them as there was non-blandred species in all the world.  This, it should be noted, did not really cause much undue stress to any ecosystems, since the blandred literally seem to exist to be food for other creatures (not just humans), and because of their vast birth rates therefore are pretty much a self-replicating food supply without facing any severe reduction in their numbers.

The D.M. even made some species of blandred plants He called "WEEDS", powered by photosynthesis, which vast numbers of blandred happened to find quite tasty, and blandred weeds which would have caused an overpopulation problem if left unchecked were, instead, checked by blandred creatures who would have been a problem for the same reason, but because the one was to eat the other and the other to be fertilized by the droppings of the one, the two problems more or less canceled each other, locking together into a symbiotic relationship.

Yet after creating all this life on our world, The D.M. had as yet still not created Humans.  He said,

"BEHOLD, I HAVE CREATED ALL THINGS TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD, EXCEPT ONE. FOR THE COMING SPECIES OF HUMANKIND SHALL BE THE MOST IMPORTANT. THROUGH THE DEEDS OF HUMANS SHALL BE CHANGED THE WORLD, AND THEREBY THE DESTINIES OF ALL CREATURES IN THE WORLD SHALL BE CAUSED TO TAKE THEIR FORMS BY THE WORKS OF HUMAN MINDS AND HUMAN HANDS. WHEREFORE I SAY, LET THERE BE MADE HUMANS, MALE AND FEMALE, TO LIVE IN THE WORLD."

The first attempt of The D.M., the God of Gods, to make humans ended up disastrously. In His haste to get humans created, He had created them as they are in His own world, talking in the languages of his world, dressing like the people of his world, thinking like the people of his world. 

Almost immediately after being created, the humans The D.M. had created invented nuclear technologies and built bombs which wiped each other out completely within a few years, and rendered sections of the landmasses of the world irradiated and left unfit to sustain human life for thousands of years. 

"THIS MUST NOT BE! THE HUMANS SHOULD NOT WIPE EACH OTHER OUT!" exclaimed God then. And He created more humans, this time commanding them not to hurt each other. But that didn't work, for the next humankind that He created, they invented exploitation, and exploited each other into conditions of poverty and slavery and stratified class divisions based on wealth. When they invented capitalism, The D.M. became very angry, and He smote that second human species into particles with His lightning, and once again our world was without humans. And at that point God screamed in rage.

"SON OF A..."

Angry at how His attempts to create humans had turned out, God decided to leave our universe and go back to His own world and focus on other things that He called "Video Games" for a while.

A while happened this time to be a very long time, more than 3 billion years, and then some. For it was only about 3 million years impendago that the human species of Slud reappeared for the third time. The D.M. came back to Slud (the Planet) and He said,

Al the First Man (sort of) telling the first lie about penis size to Evelyn, the first Woman. "AGAIN I SHALL CREATE HUMANS, AND BEHOLD! THIS TIME THEY WILL SURVIVE."

And The D.M. created a third human species. This time, He only created three of them, thinking that such severely reduced numbers would keep these humans occupied with the challenges of everyday life and not allow them to make any of the sort of mischief their predecessors had wrought in the world.

There were two males and one female. The D.M. wrote their names and statistics and drew little pictures of them which became bodied forth as three human bodies in front of Him. The female was named Evelyn and the males were Al and John.

But God had already blundered yet again.  To say nothing of the foolishness of only creating one female and two males, there was also the fact that any species that arises from only two people would have had to involve incestuous unions in it. Which of course is why He should have created multiple lineages of humans instead. But being lazy and stupid, of course, He didn't. Or at least, He hadn't so far.

Luckily this apparently occurred eventually to The D.M., for He went somewhere else, far to the east, there to create other bloodlines. But while He was gone, already there was within the paradise of the Garden of Jrinkin a force of wickedness which wasted little time in taking full advantage of His absence to wreak a fatal mischief among the humans of His creation. That force of wickedness had a name, and its name was Bossy.

Bossy was a bull, one of the approximate two dozen cattle which lived in the Garden of Jrinkin where dwelt also the humans Al and Evelyn and John. Bossy did not like the humans at all, because the humans had been made by The D.M., and Bossy for reasons of his own had always hated The D.M. and all that He had created.

Bossy the Bull hated the humans. In particular Bossy hated the human males, Al and John, for Bossy was an aggressive, fiercely territorial creature and in the men The D.M. had created, he saw both threats to his dominance, and prey for him to kill.  Yet as he hated The D.M., he also feared the God of Gods, and dared not kill the men himself. So he had taken thought of how to turn the men against each other, that instead one might kill the other or perhaps he would be lucky and they both would kill each other.

The wicked design of the vicious bull was accomplished when he went to each, and first to John, to And so,, through subtle words which no bull should have spoken, Bossy led John the Second Man astray, poisoning him with jealousy against his fellow Man.whom he said "Look there at thy fellow man, yea, look ye even at Al, he that was first of thy species. See how he presumes upon the accident of his being made first, before you. See the priveleges he enjoys that you cannot!"

And the words of that fell creature awakened in the heart of John a new and terrible emotion, jealousy.

"See ye, O John, how Al the Man degrades thee. Yes, it is Al who gets everything. Not thee. And even now He woos the attentions of the woman Evelyn, whom has found fairness in your eyes. And should he be allowed to live ever thus flouting your every desire? For indeed shall he thwart thee for so long as he is on life. Thou shalt have no share in the history of your species, for it is he that will mate, and will grow his seed into new and multitudinous generations. Art thou not ashamed, O John the unfortunate, John the Issueless, John the first and last of his lineage, that your rival is winning and thou shalt lose?"

And John was filled with a rage of hatred and bitterness against Al, his fellow man. He picked up a large stone from the ground and strode purposefully back toward the place where the humans dwelt in the Garden.

And the bull laughed contemptuously, watching the foolish John stomp forth, intent on murder, for now his design was half completed.

But Bossy the Bull sped back to the dwelling of the humans, and he said to Al the First Man,

"Fly! Fly from this place if thou wouldst save your life, O Al of the Humans, for thy fellow man comes even to do thee harm!"

"Whatever is the matter, Bossy?" Al asked in a sudden alarm as the Bull frantically seemed to try to hurry him away from the place.

"Thy fellow man, John, is jealous of thee, for thou art first of men, and he is second. So hath he taken thought for a way to harm thee unto thy death, O Al." Bossy replied urgently.

"He is my brother! Why would he do such a terrible thing?" Al asked, now becoming very angry himself. "We two are the first of men. Does he mean to be the first of traitors?" And just as John had done, he also picked up a rather large stone that lay nearby, and he too walked purposefully forth, intent upon a terrible violence.

And the heart of Bossy the Bull was glad for the mischief he had wrought, as now the men of the humans sought each other that they may do death upon each other. And as he watched in satisfaction, the two Men, Al and John, encountered one another in the Garden of Jrinkin which had known no sin, and there they did violence upon each other. And although John began the attack, it was Al who proved the stronger, and he overcame his attacker. And so doing, Al smashed in the skull of his fellow Man with a stone, to his death. And knowing for the first time in the history of his species the evil that a man had done, Al the First Man felt the first stirrings of remorse in his breast, and he left the body of his slain fellow laying in the grasses of the clearing where it had fallen, that now spilled out its lifeblood upon the ground, and he went forth from that place in bitterness and shame. And ever afterfore, the honor and dignity of the human species of Slud (the Planet) was to be stained with the sin that had been done.
Al and John, doing to each other what Humans do to each other. But for the first time. (Sort of.) Pictured also is a hatchet which was not there because, you know, artistic license and stuff...

Paradise Lost

When God returned to the Garden of Jrinkin, the paradise He had created in which to generate all the species which would dwell there, He discovered that the newly created humans (which in another blunder He had created fully grown with fully functional...equipment...) had themselves discovered the process of human reproduction quite on their own. The first murder (of this batch of humans anyway) had been done by man against his fellow, and Al the First Man was first of Kinslayers, his fell deed had caused the first of human Tragedies...murder.

Tragically indeed, Al and John had invented hormonal angst and jealousy, that God had intentionally left out of their character when He had created them, or so He had thought. And that angst and jealous had within a mere week of their creation led to Al killing John in a fight over the attentions of the woman Evelyn, whom both men coveted without any regard to her own feelings in the matter.

When The D.M. returned to the Garden of Jrinkin, where He had created the first humans, males and female, therein to dwell in harmony, He discovered the sin that Al had committed against His fellow man John, and mighty was His wrath.

"WHAT IS THIS THING THAT YOU HAVE DONE, O AL OF THE HUMANS? WHERE IS THEY KIN, THE MAN JOHN?"

And the heart of Al the First Man was afraid, for he knew the evil that he had done. This was back in the day when humans still had the ability to know the evil that they had done. Not like now, where they just do evil because they're told to and they always do what they're told to do.

"YOU HAVE DONE DARK MURDER, AL, AND WOE BE TO YOU AND ALL OF YOUR ISSUE AND A CURSE UPON YOUR LINEAGE! BECAUSE YOU HAVE DONE TERRIBLE SIN, O SLAYER OF KINDRED, YOU SHALL KNOW GRIEF AND SORROW IN YOUR LIFE. AND SO SHALL IT BE FOR ALL OF YOUR GENERATIONS. YOU SHALL GO FORTH EVEN FROM THIS PLACE WHERE YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO DWELL IN INNOCENCE AND WHERE YOUR INNOCENCE WAS LOST, NEVER TO RETURN IN ALL THE DAYS OF YOUR LINEAGE! A WANDERER YOU SHALL BE, THE SHAME OF YOUR SPECIES SHALL BE UPON YOU, AND HARD WILL BE YOUR YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS! GO NOW FROM THIS GARDEN OF YOUR BIRTH, AND NEVER RETURN IN YOUR LIFETIME!"

These words did The D.M. say to Al, who cowered in fear of the wrathful God of Gods, behind the leaves of a fig tree. The heart of Al was filled with terror, and he feared the anger of God, so that he fled immediately from that place and departed the Garden soon after, never again to return to that place in all the days of his life.

Then, softening and speaking in quiet, reassuring tones, God went forth to appear to the woman Evelyn. She too cowered naked behind a fig tree...a different fig tree though, because she did not want to cower behind the same fig tree as Al had cowered under because Al frightened her. But God spoke gently to her, and comforted her so that her fear left her. And He said.

"To you is not given my anger, O Evelyn, for you I hold blameless of the sin which the men committed. Therefore I give you choice. If you will, you may remain here in the Garden of Jrinkin, and I will erase the awareness of what has been done from your mind, that you may dwell here in bliss as had been intended. Yet here you will be alone, bereft of all ability to satisfy a need which has been built into all humans, the need for association with humans. For none others of your kind will I suffer to enter this place ever again,

Your kind has been created to be social, so in time the loneliness will multiply in you until it is difficult to bear.

Therefore, if you will instead accompany Al whither he shall go that you should mate with him and produce offspring, fool and kinslayer though he be, you shall have to share many of the same sacrifices as he, but you will not be alone, and the association of human male and human female shall bring into your experience the full range of human emotions so that, though your life shall wane for a time ere your end, you will have lived the life most fulfilled. That life of fulfillment you shall not have if you stay here."

"Is the choice mine to make however I will, O God of Gods?" Evelyn asked Him.

"It is. For good or for ill, the choice is given entirely to you." The D.M. told her.

"Then my choice is easy. Obviously I choose to stay here." Evelyn decided with a shrug of her shoulders.

"What?  Just like that, you have decided?  No great deliberation?  No deep reflection to inform your choice?  You just choose to stay here?" The D.M. asked in surprise, obviously having not really anticipated this matter being resolved so quickly in this way.

"Yes."

"But don't you want to have children?" The D.M. asked her.

"Not really. I have seen the beasts of this place giving birth and it looks rather painful." she replied.

"But...but...what about love? Don't you want to be loved by others of your kind?" The D.M. stammered.

"Ah, I already have been loved by others of my kind, and they literally killed each other over me.  That is the sort of thing to taint love and make it not worth anything, wouldn't you say, O God?" Evelyn said, a trifle acidly.

"Okay, I suppose you have a point there." The D.M. conceded. "But...but...but what about...what about..." He struggled to come up with another objection. But Evelyn, emboldened now, merely cut Him off.

"Look, God, you gave me the choice, didn't you? And I made it.  Are you trying to tell me you are not going to let me stay here in this beautiful garden, forever after untroubled by the brutality and wickedness of man?" Evelyn asked pointedly.

The D.M. sighed then, knowing that he would now have to change all his previously made plans concerning humans, and He was suddenly thankful that He had possessed the forethought to create other humans in other parts of the world. And He said.

"I have given you the choice and the choice has been made. Therefore, do as you will, and dwell here in this paradise of your inheritance." The D.M. told her, feeling He had left Himself no honorable choice otherwise.  And He went yet again forth from that place, the Garden of Jrinkin, to do His work elsewhere in the world, leaving behind Him in the Garden a very satisfied woman, who would never again have to deal with a man's crap.

So it was that Evelyn, the First of Women, who had been intended to be the mother of Humankind, instead stepped onto the path of another destiny entirely, one without men and without motherhood and without a career in advertising or as the CEO of a Fortune 666 Company; that is to say, without all the things which all other humans, man and woman alike, know that women do.

And what afterfore became of Evelyn the First of Women, and indeed the very Garden of Jrinkin in which she dwelt, is unknown to humans of the present and therefore to histories like this one, written by the ephemeral pens of humankind. For the tale of our species moved on from that place and, like Al who was punished to wander, has never returned. Nor can it return, for in times afterfore, either the rest of the world vanished from around the Garden of Jrinkin, or the Garden of Jrinkin vanished from the rest of the world, and has never yet ever been relocated, though humankind has since covered the world and all the places in it. The Garden of Jrinkin, the lost paradise that was first home to Humankind's ultimate ancestors Al and Evelyn and John, is now to all other human eyes and minds a place which does not exist anymore, though the hearts of all humans have ever yearned to return to it.

The tale of the creatures of the Garden is lost to human history, save one creature only. For the story of Bossy the Bull was far from completed, and indeed was inexorably tied to the story of humankind, for Bossy had willed that he should destroy all men. He had compassed the death of John, yet still Al survived, and Bossy in time left the Garden that he may destroy all the lineages of Al the First Man if he could.

But that tale is to come afterfore in our story, presented as it is in as close an approximation of chronological order as the author of this history dares to write it. And so it shall be told in a different section. I, the author, thank the readers for their forebearance.

Evalucia's Choice

It has been said that Al the First Man had been driven away from the Garden of Jrinkin, the paradise in which he had previously dwelt, and that he was to spend the rest of his life wandering in the wilderness. And this certainly appears to have been true.

The readers might very well wonder, though, how it is that, if the woman he had intended to be the mother of his children, Evelyn the First Woman, had rejected him as indeed she had, Al was to ever become a father. The historians of the present day, the author of this document included among them, know Al the First Man, of course, as the sire of a multitude, who in time, also of course, were to become the people known to history as the Calendrians. The very same group which now numbers in the hundreds of millions and represents something like one fifth of the world's total population.

If Evelyn was not the woman with whom Al mated, then whom was it that helped him beget the offspring history is pretty clear were eventually born to them?

Her name was Evalucia. And the traits inherited from her have bred true, if obscured, in the Calendrians that came after.

How did Evalucia come into existence? It was actually not The D.M., the God of Gods, who had created her, even though usually the creation of people was sort of what He did. Indeed, Evalucia first came into her existence as a creation of Al the First Man, the man who eventually would become her mate.

The story goes thus. When Al the First Man had been condemned by God, for his crime of murder against John the Second Man, he had fled in disgrace from the Garden of Jrinkin, compelled then by an irresistable urge to travel away into the vast wildernesses of the more or less pristine continents, which he did. Never did John stay in the same place for more than a month, but a frenzy of panic would come upon him, and with it was his mind filled with the thought of the vengeance of God upon him if he should tarry too long. So he was ever on the move, living sometimes in the open wild, sometimes in caves, sometimes living upon the branches of the great trees, yet never content to stay where he was for long.

Life in the wilderness was harsh, for in those days, the primordial wilderness was truly a savage place for a human to be. There were many predators among the non-blandred species like mammals and reptiles and the insects too were large enough to present a very lethal threat to a human as well. The forests were thickly grown with bushes and brushes, vines and creepers, thick with the monstrous beasts of yore.

Al had known nothing of surviving in such a merciless world when he had lost his innocence and fled in shame the Garden of Jrinkin. But he had to learn, learn quickly, and learn he did indeed. For despite the fact that he had committed a terrible sin, Al yet possessed the virtue of humankind, that he could adapt to his environment and to his situation, and find ways to solve problems far more easily than other creatures could. With such an ability had all humans been created, and it was that ability which saved Al from meeting a premature death at the hands of some sabertoothed jungle cat or a sinking bog of quicksand.

So Al managed to survive, eking out whatever existence he could by learning to live as the beasts do...to hunt, to kill, and to eat the kill, as he saw wolves and cats, bears and apes do. His existence was primal and bestial, and whatever destiny it was that The D.M. had held in mind when creating him, Al the First Man was but another beast of the wilderness, and spark of humanity that was in him was hidden by his primitive methods of survival. He could at that time hardly have even been truthfully called a human in anything but name and technicality.

For a time did Al the First Man forget even his own name, and having nobody of his species to speak human words to, he forgot also how to speak human words so that even the prehistoric cavemen which were to come after him, but whom are to those of us in the present day the stereotype of primitive early humans, were much more obviously human than he.

But some small bit of the humanity which had been created in him when he had come to life in the Garden of Jrinkin remained in him, though even he could not be said to have been aware of it.  He remembered the feeling of love, tainted as it had been by his sin, that he had first felt when he had looked upon the beauty of Evelyn the First Woman, whose name he no longer even remembered, and whom was recalled in his memory only as occasional flashes of remembered images...

He remembered the way the light had caused her hair to shine like the sun in the sky, he remembered the shape of her eyes, he remembered the smoothness of her arms, the slenderness of them. He remembered the way her back curved, and the way her smile, so filled with wonder at her newfound existence, had made him feel as if he had never wanted the moment to end.

And the heart of Al was lonely, for he was alone of his species in that land. There were no others like him to share in his life. The wolf has the pack, the lion has the pride, the stag has the herd, but the human had not the band of humans which the human social impulse requires. He was alone in his exile, and his exile was all the more terrible for his loneliness. He fled in shame, from place to place, from the God of his creation, and God was not with him in the wilderness.

Ever the thoughts of the First Man returned in his loneliness to the memory of woman, whom he had loved and lost (though she, Evelyn the First Woman, would most probably have said that he had never had her and therefore could never have lost her). His feelings ever yearned for woman, and the vast, crushing sense of his loneliness in time did what it has done to many humans throughout time...it made him somewhat crazy.

Perhaps it was craziness upon him, then, which caused him to try to fill the void in his life where he wished a woman would be but was not, by attempting to create a woman himself. This resulted pretty much how many readers might expect it did. The woman he created did not turn out at all like he had intended her to turn out.  Indeed, "she" turned out to not really be a she at all. For the thing about building a woman out of sticks and mud is that whatever the form in which it is made, even if that form resembles the body of a woman, it is still but a doll made of sticks and mud. Whatever animus it is which makes a woman a woman, the thoughts, the soul, the life of a woman, was not in that figure that Al made. It was not alive, it could not speak, it could not love Al, no matter how much of his own love he gave it.

And so the heart of Al the First Man was clouded beneath the shadow of sadness yet again. And truly he knew that he was cursed by God for the evil he had done. Sorrowful were the tidings of his life, and how pathetic a creature he had become! Gone from the countenance of his creator, a wandering ape of the wilderness, a lone creature with no pack, unloved and with the curse of the outcast upon him, it seemed that he had lost the humanity which was to be the heritage of his species.

But something happened that was to change that.

For although the clay model that Al had made to look (more or less) like a woman was no living creature, yet did he treat it as if it were alive, as if it were indeed a living woman. Often haltingly, for he had mostly forgotten the language of his human origin, he spoke to the idol of sunbaked clay. And when the compulsion was again upon him to flee from where he dwelt and wander yet again through the wilderness, Al stopped to pay homage to the clay image that he had made, and with tears in his bestial eyes, he told it goodbye as if he were parting with a dear friend.

Then, turning away, the creature that had been the First Man disappeared between the trees into the gloomy distance, and was gone from that place.

But the heart of The D.M., the God of Gods, was moved to pity by the display of humanity in Al's tears, and the sorrowful goodbye that he gave to that graven image, and He took thought for the problem He had, that in his solitude no humans would issue from Al.

Therefore did The D.M. will that the rude mud doll on its frame of sticks that was roughly the shape of a woman should bend and curve so that the shape of it became much more like the shape of a woman than before. And He caused the sticks and twigs within the image to become as bones, and the sunbaked mud that had been slathered upon the outside He bade become as the skin of a human woman, supple and soft. The pair of small black volcanic stones, polished by millions of years of weathering, that Al had attached to the "head" became the shiny membrane of real human eyes, the stones positioned lower on the head became as the teeth and the jaw, and upraised between eye and teeth there was a delicate, ever slightly upturned nose complete with the graceful bridge completing its shape in the strikingly beautiful brow ridges of a woman, the Second Woman (in that part of the world, anyway).

And then, transformed fully into a human woman in the first years of adulthood, the Second Woman stood alive and human indeed before her Creator, and He said.

"BEHOLD! NOW ARE YOU MADE. YOU LIVE. THE BREATH OF LIFE IS IN YOUR LUNGS. YOUR MIND THINKS. SEE, I HAVE GIVEN YOU ALL THE THINGS WHICH ARE THE INHERITANCE OF HUMANKIND. YET NEVER FORGET YOU THAT IT IS FROM MUD THAT YOU HAVE BEEN BROUGHT FORTH, AND TO RETURN TO MUD YOU SHALL AFTER THE YEARS OF YOUR LIFE ARE ACHIEVED. THEREFORE SEEK NOT TO AVERT YOUR FATE, FOR YOU CANNOT. BUT FILL THE YEARS GIVEN TO YOU FOR YOUR LIFE WITH CURIOSITY AND WITH WISDOM, THAT OTHERS WHO SHALL FOLLOW YOU IN LIFE SHALL LEARN FROM YOURS."

And having been awakened to the comprehension of her own existence, the mind of this new woman was filled with wonder, and she was awed that she had been made to live who had never before lived, who had been but the sticks of the branch and the mud of the ground.

But a shadow was over the heart of the woman. And she feared God at the mention of her mortality, that she should return even to the mud from which she had been formed. And she said.

"Oh God of Gods, terrible and supreme, must it be so?" she wailed. "And having given me very life, how may I live this life if it must be ended? What can be done so that I live to learn and to think and to do things, that my death should not come upon me ere I have accomplished that which is your will I should do?"

But God was not without compassion, for indeed He loved this creation of His, as a sculptor loves the statue that He has brought forth from a block of stone, as the painter loves the subject that He has painted, as a musician loves the song He has sung when there is nobody around to criticize His composition. And He took thought for the well being of this woman, saying.

"BE NOT FEARFUL, WOMAN. FOR ALTHOUGH YOUR DESTINY WILL TAKE YOU A LIFETIME TO ACHIEVE, YET IT IS A LOFTY DESTINY INDEED.  FOR YOU SHALL BE MOTHER OF THE MULTITUDES. CHILDBIRTH MAY NOT ALWAYS BE THE ULTIMATE DESTINY OF ALL WOMEN THAT EVER SHALL LIVE IN THIS WORLD, BUT IT IS YOUR DESTINY NONETHELESS. AND ALTHOUGH LIFE AS A HUMAN IN THE WORLD WILL BE DIFFICULT, YOU SHALL FIND GREAT SOLACE IN THE PROSPERITY OF YOUR LINEAGES. ALL MEN AND ALL WOMEN IN THIS PART OF THE WORLD SHALL CALL YOU MOTHER OF MOTHERS, THE FIRST WELLSPRING FROM WHOM ALL THEIR ANCESTORS HAVE COME FORTH. AND IN THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, YOU AND ALL OF YOUR DAUGHTERS SHALL EVER FIND IT THE EASIER TO ATTAIN, WHILE THE LIVES OF MEN WHOM YOU SHALL KNOW SHALL EVER BE FRUSTRATING AND HARD."

"Yet, Oh Lord, is it not with those frustrated and hardened men that You would have me dwell?" the woman asked. "How may I avert the doom for myself which is given to unhappy mankind? For since You have given me memory, Oh God of Gods, I remember the man who was recently here. Though I lived not yet, the sticks and the mud from which You have made me were here, and there was before me a beast who walked on two legs, who placed dead flowers and pieces of animal carcass at my feet before they were feet. Is that brute the man to whom you would send your unfortunate daughter?"

And then The D.M., the God of Gods, sighed.  And He lowered the intensity of His voice to a quiet and somber tone. He told the woman.

"He is.  And he is far worse than you know, for he has killed his kindred. I created him even as I created you, from the dirt of the ground. And because he did such an evil deed I had to banish him from a paradise, and banish that paradise out of the world so that no human can ever again reach that place. And to that man, though man he looks not, having become a creature of the wilderness, is given the doom that he should ever wander all the days of his life. That is why he left this place, and why he came to the clay doll today with tears in his eyes and words of sorrowful goodbye on his lips. For he loved you, and did not wish to leave you, although my curse has forced him to go."

"Oh The D.M., why must I be given to his company if he is a beast and a slayer of kindred. Surely such a one as he is damned and without hope." the woman wept now tears of her own.

"Because you shall be hope, not only to one man but to all the species of humankind. You shall be the bringer of life to humans as I have brought you forth into life. And it is while humans are alive that they have the choice at any time to redeem themselves for the sins of their Father.  Man is accursed while yet he is unchanged, but you shall cause the change which shall save Mankind from destruction. For through you and the daughters which shall come from you shall humans grow beyond the beasts. You shall teach the first of all lessons to Mankind. You shall teach love, and man will be improved by his association with you. Therefore, Oh Daughter of mud and twig, I shall give you a name.  You shall be named Evalucia, which is 'Woman of Change'."

"Wait a minute. That's it?" Evalucia asked unenthusiastically. "That is the great destiny you have worked out for me, God? The reason for my existence is to provide hope to a bunch of strangers, at least one of which is a murderer who could not even wait a whole week after he had been born before he killed his brother?"

"Uh...well...yeah. That pretty much covers it." The D.M. admitted rather lamely. "Is that a problem?"

Evalucia spent at least a good five minutes making sounds of disgust and outrage, and the words "male chauvinist pig" escaped her lips more than once, a remarkable fact since male chauvinism technically had not been invented yet, since there were only in the entire world at that time only a handful of human males scattered about, and none of them having yet had any ability to meet with each other and share any of their ignorant ideas with each other, it could not be said they had as yet had started a Bronze Age, and therefore, could not have yet developed any such thing as a clearly Bronze Age-type policy motivator such as male chauvinism.

"Is this a punishment for a past misdeed?  But it cannot be, for you literally just called me forth into existence just a few short moments ago, God. Why do I have to spend my entire life giving to others I care nothing about? What about me, God? What about me living my life for me? What about accomplishing things as me, for myself? Is that not the destiny you have given to Al the Kinslayer? Free will?" Evalucia asked.

"You have free will, Evalucia." The D.M. pointed out mildly. "If you did not, we would not be having this conversation. I would have just made you do it without even talking to you."

"If I have free will, then why should I not choose to refuse to participate in any of that foolishness?" Evalucia asked, and it did not sound very much like a question.

"There are reasons." The D.M. answered simply.

"What? What reasons are there?"

"I do not have to tell you that and I will not. You will have to discover them for yourself if you do it, because if I or anyone else just told you what they are, you would not value them as if you had discovered them on your own."

"Why should I even bother then?" Evalucia repeated. But the question she had asked, she asked as much to herself as to God. Why should she bother? Because human beings are curious creatures, the question had set afire her native curiosity. This was known to the God of Gods, who winked at her slyly.

"I mean, you could refuse but if you did, you would never know what would have happened. Doesn't the thought of not knowing bother you even a little bit, Evalucia?"

"No!" the woman lied, for it did indeed bother her far more than she was willing to admit. "And even if it did, if I refuse I will also not be required to be the companion of a kinslayer, and that seems like a fair enough bargain."

"Why are you being so difficult, Evalucia?" The D.M. began to sigh, raising His arms melodramatically to the sky, only to realize that He was God here and so He turned His arms inward to indicate Himself. "Why, Me? Why is this woman so stubborn?"

"So I'm stubborn, is it, God?  We are talking about something which will impact and probably destroy my happiness and make me curse my life, and you think I'm just being stubborn?" Evalucia retorted.

It began to seem to The D.M., The God of Gods, that this idea of His had gone south. This was now the second woman who was refusing to do what Human existence as a species required of her. First Evelyn the First Woman, now Evalucia the Second Woman. The D.M. began to wonder if maybe giving humans free will really had been a terrible idea after all. But He then decided to try a different tact with Evalucia.

"You're right, Evalucia. Choose whatever you will choose. I gave you free will so I will not thwart it when you use it." God said to her, all the while calling into existence in his hand a bit of prepared food. Some sort of mixture of meat and cheese and vegetables and sauces wrapped up in some sort of thinly pressed flatbread. Evalucia thought it smelled delicious, and her mouth began to water, as she felt for the first time in her short existence a hunger for food. The D.M. took a bite of the thing, His divine face registering a look of pleasurable enjoyment.

"Mmmmm. This is really good. What about you, Evalucia? Are you hungry?" He asked the woman. She nodded, and in her own hands appeared just a similar sort of wrap as the one God was eating.  She tore into the thing ravenously, and it was the best thing she had ever tasted, even if it was the only thing she had ever tasted.

"This is really, really delicious! Thank you, O God of Gods, for this food you have given me." Evalucia said then.

"You like it, don't you?  It's called a taco.  At least that's what they call it in my world. The Olmecs invented it, I think, thousands of years ago." The D.M. took another bite, savoring the combination of different flavors in each bite. "You know, it's a shame. "You'll have to enjoy that taco while you still can, Evalucia, because you will probably not be tasting one again. They're fairly easy to make but nobody in the world will exist to invent them here if you decide not to go start a human race with Al the First Man, like I asked you to."

A half hour later, the last echoes of The D.M.'s laughter faded through the endless landscape of trees and Evalucia was already on her way through the forest, in search of a man named Al, with whom she now was determined to live the rest of the days of her life.

Against All Odds: Al and Evalucia Beget the Species Homo Sapiens Sluddicus

Before long, Evalucia the Second Woman, the Woman of Change, found Al the First Man in his wandering, for he had not been long gone from the place of her genesis ere The D.M. had convinced her to join with him.

She found the existence of the bestial man a pathetic one. Cursed as he was for his Kinslaying to wander the wilderness in shame and disgrace, he had forgotten the language which is the birthright of humans, and had forgotten the gentle ways of the Garden of Jrinkin and the peace of God that had been in that place. And when Evalucia came upon him amidst the innumerable trees of the old northeast, she found him hunched over the carcass of a recently killed stag, ripping the flesh of its chest with his teeth with blood dripping down his chin.

Almost she found the gory sight too distressful to continue with what she had intended to do.  Only she remembered the name she had been given, that is that she was the Woman of Change, and she remembered the words of her God, that through her would this bestial man be changed, evolved into a man more seemly and pleasing to her. So with a deep breath and that steely resolve which is so common among womankind in whichever world they should dwell, she stepped forward through the trees and went to him.

Al was momentarily stunned to see Evalucia approach him, from the misty primeval forest around him and seemingly also from beyond all hope. He greeted her with two outstretched arms, the hands at the end of which held clumps of hastily torn-off-the-carcass venison, clumsily dripping blood all over her bare feet.

Disgusted by this, Evalucia's eyes narrowed in anger and for a moment she was tempted to commit the world's second murder. Seething with revulsion, she pushed his hands away from her and then quickly darted to a nearby wild rhubarb plant to wipe her hands on its broad, thick leaves. Muttering to herself, she stepped off to the right and picked some berries off of a bush, eating them in between withering scoldings directed at the brute of a man who stood nearby, looking more and more injured by her attitude.

And that encounter was to pretty much set the tone for future relations between human males and human females. Men, often well meaning but very foolish, would often do the things that they thought the women wanted, hoping thereby to earn lo, but did it so ineptly, so cluelessly that more often than not, they ended up only making the women despise them, and seek only the companionship of other women. There are always exceptions to every rule, of course, but in general, men tend to adore women to the point where whatever good sense they might otherwise have had leaves them in their desperation to impress them, and women tend to often be disgusted by the ways that men go about doing that.

At any rate, in returning here to the narrative, it should be noted that eventually, Al and Evalucia did end up settling a lot of their issues with each other, at least well enough to beget offspring with each other. And it should also be noted that they did so on quite a prolific basis. It has been written in various scriptures for thousands of years that they had brought into life more than a hundred people, daughters and sons. At least, that was the number of known progeny. There may possibly have been more, but seventy four lineages are known by geneticists to have been generated during the same period around a hundred thousand years impendago, and both tradition and science currently identify those lineages as the eldest of the lineages which survive in the lands of the northeast.

From those northeastern lineages have sprung various peoples who inhabit in the present age, such as the Arrogantians of the vast steppelands of Arroganse, the Bellicosians of the domains of Bellicost, the Hubrysines of the Empire of Hubrys, the peaceful Hippylonian people of the pleasant hills of Hippylonia, the Pryderic people of the Theocracy of Prydea where is located the heartland of the Muncian religion. Additionally the nomadic Nahtmad tribes who range the desert ithsmuses of the world, the Grede peoples of the island nations in the Gredier League, and the peoples of the Alligned City States of Qaestion such as the Hu, the Whuttu, the Wherians, the Whenny, the Whaihuluddi, and the Haoh populations, all of these are peoples believed to have been sired by Al the First Man and Evalucia the Second Woman, the Woman of Change.