Thief of Time

Chapter 675: Introducing a game to a god



"We're really just hanging around here and doing nothing," Claud remarked, speechless.

"You're only saying that now, after five days?" Lily asked, before picking up the little meeplings that were playing 'Nudge the mysterious sleeping black cube' with each other. "And don't disturb Lesser Half. He's busy."

"Meep!" Crown made a sad noise, and Claud frowned, before looking at Lily.

"Hmm. So…I guess that's fine, right?" Lily asked, before letting the little guys scurry out of her palm. A moment later, they piled onto the unmoving black cube happily, and then started to sleep.

"I wonder if lying down on Lesser Half is better than a bed," Claud wondered out loud. "Makes me wanna try it too."

He rubbed his tummy. His hunger had been satiated by a bout of barbequed food, which he'd only managed to make today. Claud had wanted to make a chimney of sorts for their underground surveillance base of this gigantic battlefield, but he'd only succeeded in creating a stealthy chimney earlier this morning.

"You're still hungry?" Lily asked.

"Oh, you know, working hard…" Claud rubbed his stomach. "Best not to eat that much, though."

The two of them looked at each other, before Lily suggested that they play some Moon Phase. There was some humour there that Claud could vaguely appreciate, although he couldn't quite give it a name. Was it irony? Or was it some other weird literary term that he didn't know? At any rate, though, playing Moon Phase in front of the sleeping, shrunken form of Lesser Half felt a bit funny to Claud, so the two of them promptly got down to business.

"It's so…well, not peaceful, I suppose." Claud flipped over his first piece. "Do you still remember how to play?"

"Of course."

"Okay, but I'm going to explain it anyway."

"You want to teach Lesser Half how to play a game modelled after his opponent?" Lily looked at him oddly. "Wow. I'm not too sure what to say about all this, but maybe you're quite daring. What, you're trying to provoke him into awakening?"

"Yeap."

Claud grinned at Lily, and then reached into the depths of his memory.

Despite so many different things going on, he hadn't forgotten the rules of Moon Phase. Set on a gameboard eight spaces wide and four pieces long, the game made use of a total of fifteen pieces per player, with each piece representing every phase of the Moons. Players would choose their own colour, and then scramble their pieces, before placing their pieces down on the board. They would take turns to place four pieces in any open space, all the way until the last three pieces were placed down.

From there, the game would begin. A player could choose one of three moves every turn — flip a hidden piece, move a revealed piece of their own colour, or capture a revealed opposing piece with an appropriate piece. Capture was simple — full moons could capture everything except for new moons and their full moon counterpart, and moons that were more complete could capture moons that were less complete. The only exception was the new moon, which was simultaneously the weakest and strongest piece; they were the only pieces that could capture the full moon.

The win condition was thus to capture the opponent's full moon with a crescent moon, or failing that, to capture every single of the opponent's new moons first.

"…You really just explained the whole game again," Lily commented. "Now can we get down to it?"

"Don't I sound cool when I'm teaching people how to play?" Claud asked.

"Yes, but that's beside the point!" Lily paused. "Also, I'm reasonably certain Lesser Half knows how to play this game too."

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Claud touched his parched throat, and then made a face. "Bummer. All that hard work for nothing."

"It's not my fault if you launched into an explanation right now," Lily replied. "That said, the little meeplings seem quite interested in the game, so maybe those words weren't wasted after all?"

"You guys are interested?" Claud asked, looking at the meeplings. All of them were lying on each other, with their combined weight pressing down on the mysterious black cube that was Lesser Half.

"Meep!" Crown jerked once, and the neat little tower of stacked sentient shapes collapsed. The others protested with little meeps of their own, before bumping Crown in what seemed like their little tantrum.

"So adorable."

"Right?"

Claud watched them for a while, and then got up. "I'll go check on the battlefield."

Lily looked at him once, a certain look in her eyes, and Claud winked at her. There was no helping it. Of course he knew the chances of Tot actually making a move in this battlefield was zero. However, since Lesser Half was with them, and Lesser Half had a good grasp of their personalities, Claud knew that he had to put up a stunningly good act.

Their little underground bunker wasn't really little, if one looked at it objectively. There was an abundance of living space, and the walls of their bedroom was held up by a spherical barrier artefact, thus doing away with the risk of a cave-in while they were asleep. The living room was nice and big too, with lots of space for random activities that Claud couldn't quite conceive of yet.

The most important bits were the fireplace, which was linked to a chimney that disseminated smoke in such a huge volume that no one would notice the little wisps escaping from the surface, and the little surveillance platform that Claud had created. It was where he could send out the RECON beads…or the drones, according to the manual that came with them, and then receive information about their local area.

Fiddling with the weird, boxy artefact, Claud pressed a button to send out the little metallic beads, and then looked at the visual image that the little things were sending back. For obvious reasons, he wasn't going to send them to hover above the actual battlefield; the omnipresent shockwaves of battle between the Dark and the Moons would destroy them utterly.

"Hmm?"

Claud frowned, and then swiftly punched out an order to retract the little beads. He could sense an incredible energy gathering in the battlefield, and—

"Is that Tot?" A black cube shot towards him.

"I don't know," Claud replied. "I don't even dare to send this out now. What happened to that spiritual structure you were building?"

"It's only half-complete," Lesser Half replied.

"Okay, but surely you recognise this energy, right?" Claud asked.

Lily ran over a moment later, the meeplings on her head. "Claud, that power…"

"I don't know. Might be the Thief of Time, I suppose," Claud replied. "Might be someone else. But unless we poke our heads out and take a look for ourselves, we'll never know."

There was no way that person would be Tot, though.

"So, are you two going?" Lesser Half asked.

"Uh. Nope." Lily blinked. "Why would we? It's not like we can survive the battlefield, and you're a little black cube that the meeplings sleep on routinely."

For some reason, Claud had a feeling that the divinity took some mental damage from Lily's innocent reply, but even if Lesser Half did take some damage…

So what?

Claud was still a little peeved at how the divinity wanted to drag them around. If not for the fact that they couldn't find the others, the rewards that Lesser Half promised, as well as their current aimlessness, the two of them would have rejected his offer…

After all, part of their acceptance could be attributed to an implicit element of coercion. While Lesser Half definitely had no intention to threaten the two of them into helping — and neither did he know he was doing that — Claud had felt a little insecure about rejecting the divinity.

It was a classic case of feeling angry at someone who didn't know what he did, so Claud couldn't really blame Lesser Half for this absurd set of circumstances. Still, being able to play the role of catching a thief as the thief himself was quite…handy.

Lesser Half, who was obviously unaware of the deep thoughts flowing in Claud's head, sighed. "Very reasonable. Well, if he came once…he's going to come again, right? Let's just head back first. I'll continue constructing that damn thing."

"You're quite reasonable…"

"I've always been reasonable, though?" The cube tilted to one side, and then shook itself. "What, did I seem unreasonable to you guys at some point or what?"

"No, not really." Claud frowned. "But I didn't really expect the divinities and the gods to be reasonable to begin with. I mean, what they say goes, so why would they even need to learn the notion of compromise? It's not like mortals generally push you guys into a situation where you need to compromise, right?"

"True, but there's a thing called 'Not being a jerk', just so you know," Lesser Half replied.

"So…you guys aren't tyrants?" Lily asked.

"Not me, anyway. I think I'm the cool, friendly type of divinity. Now, my sister, on the other hand…" The black cube paused. "Oh dear."

"Oh dear?"

"Speak of the Moons, and they come, I suppose…"


Tip: You can use left, right, A and D keyboard keys to browse between chapters.