How the world ends in two hours on one page, by Dima

As challenged by Aleksei.

Don’t go seeking out new gods if you don’t know what you want them for.

Gods always have their own plans and their own designs and their own ideas of ‘ultimate purpose’, and they don’t often think too much about explaining any of it to anyone before they’ve already started down their path because, hey, who would really understand anyway?

I’d like to lay the blame at the feet of the Cutting Edge Theosophical Society.  Once they determined that, yes, gods were substantial, corporeal beings, and, as intellectually fascinating as it was to think otherwise, they really did exist in normal space and time, the buffoons decided, in the name of advancement and science and discovery, to entice them to make an appearance here.  They had no idea what they’d do once the appearance was made, but furthering human knowledge, they said, was a worthy goal in and of itself.

Jake Winchester had scarcely finished setting the last stick of incense on the obsidian altar when they appeared.  It was a bit more than the Society members had bargained for – a pantheon of 20 previously unknown deities materialized in a blinding flash.

MaryJo Wetthers-Penting had just enough time to gasp, and then the whole group was consumed and turned to ash in the radiant godly glory.  So, too, was the entire building.  And the whole of Bristol, for that matter.

The gods never bothered to make any sort of announcement – they never do – before they rose up into the sky to survey this new world.  It became immediately apparent that whatever god had been in charge previously had had everything backwards.  No, this would not do at all for their purposes.  Everything must be reversed.

So, within minutes, they put mountains where once laid vast stretches of ocean.  And the land masses were promptly replaces by seas; that took care of humanity, and thank goodness we don’t have to hear anymore about them.  The lava that eventually formed the new mountains managed to boil away most of the water on the planet, and the whole process put out enough to toxic gas to poison the whole atmosphere.  So, of course, that had to be vented, and in a moment of combined divine will, the gases encircling the planet were whisked away to engulf some other satellite.  But that’s another story.

It was anything glorious, and it certainly didn’t involve any splendor of nature, but it was a re-creation.  Almost all life, of course, withered and crumbled under the newly intense rays of the sun, or, in the case of what few organisms had been able to maintain a spot under the seas, melted and stuck in clumps to the crust of the earth.  Not all old was replaced with new.  The ghee mites, pulled upward by the venting of the heavens and no longer oppressed in their growth by that pesky atmospheric pressure, swelled an hundredfold and encircled the earth, there to orbit for a thousand years.

The gods were pleased.  Their holy rock – a whole planet of an altar – would lay sanctified and undefiled and protected by the mites for the rest of time.  Here, at last, was a creation that would not require intervention.