Page 70 of Tidal Creatures

“Erin, you want to field this one?”

“He’s not,” says Erin. “Any god more powerful than the strongest Lunars would take more belief than we have on the whole planet, and they’d be inherently limited by the shape they took. If you want omnipotence, you need the City. If any of the big-G gods currently has a physical form, that’s where they’ll be. Sitting in the control room of reality, keeping everything vaguely operational.”

“Oh. Good.”

“But little gods, like our Lunars here, gods that are closely tied to specific natural phenomenon or things, they personified a long time ago. And the universe is a creature of habit, just as much as the people who live inside of it are. Once it starts doing something, it needs a good reason to stop. So they keep incarnating, over and over again, probably forever. I would be willing to wager actual money that the gods we don’t see anymore, the ones people have forgotten about, who don’t have any believers to remind the universe about them, still incarnate. They just don’t manifest.”

“Because that’s the difference,” says Roger, stepping in and smoothly taking over. “An incarnation is someone who’s been born who might manifest one day, who might become a living personification of a universal concept. Dodger and I were incarnate from the moment we were born. It took us a long time to realize we needed to become something more, and manifest. That was when we fully claimed the Doctrine of Ethos and became it, for all intents and purposes. As long as we’re alive, we’ll be the living manifestations of the personification of the Doctrine. Nothing gets to change that now.”

“I met a girl upstairs,” says Kelpie. “She had green hair, and she said she and her brother were almost the Doctrine. What is she?”

“Kim,” says Dodger, with a flicker of regret. “She’s an incarnation, like we were. She was made by the same alchemists, using the same material, and I guess on a purely merit-based level, she and her brother would have been better candidates for manifestation. We just got there first, and while a lot of incarnations can choose not to manifest if they don’t want to, you can’t really de-manifest. We couldn’t give the Doctrine back if we wanted to.”

“And we don’t want to,” says Roger. “We fought and bled and sacrificed a lot to be standing here, two manifest halves of a force without which the universe would collapse, watching you look at us like we’re zoo exhibits. I’m sorry Kim didn’t get what she was made to want. I’m not sorry my sister did.”

Dodger bumps him with her shoulder, focusing on Isabella. “That’s your answer, in the broadest terms possible. A personification is something that shouldn’t be a person, but is. An incarnation is a person with the potential to represent that something, and a manifestation is someone who does represent it.”

“Do we really need three separate words for that?” asks Isabella.

“Yes,” says every incarnation currently in the kitchen, which is almost every other person there. Roger follows up with “We need thirty, for the gradations and subtle differences, and so people don’t waste time asking what you meant. We need more words, not fewer of them, and these three are the ones that have managed to hang on for centuries, which means they’re the best words available, even if they’re still more limited than I would like them to be.”

“So the moment we became incarnate is when this body”—Chang’e gestures to herself—“was born, and the moment we became manifest is when we agreed that we were willing to be gods. For me, there was a sixteen-year gap between those two events. If my window is still where it was when I was born, it’s nowhere near here. But I’ve always walked the same distance through the everything, and I can’t say for sure, but I feel like there are so many stars above the City that they could absolutely move around if they wanted to. Lunars who shine from the same spot in the sky should have windows near each other.”

“So it’s settled,” says Artemis. “She follows each of us into the everything so she can start charting out the location of our windows, and then either she swings over to the right window, or I do it. I’m probably a lot more athletic than she is. No offense.”

“None taken. I’m a math nerd who manages to avoid spending eight hours at the gym every week solely because I’m also an immutable force of the universe.”

“Not to point out the elephant in the room, but what are we going to do about the alchemists who lost her?” Erin hooks her thumb at Kelpie. “Alchemists aren’t great about letting other people take their toys, and they’re likely to be looking for this one.”

“My apartment is warded,” says Isabella. “My family is safe.”

Roger starts shaking his head, and she blinks at him, bewildered. “No, that won’t do,” he says. “Dodge, how far are we going in adopting these people?”

“Erin likes them; I think we’re keeping them.”

“How do you know she likes us?” asks Kelpie.

“She hasn’t murdered either one of you,” says Smita, and Erin sticks her tongue out at her. Smita snickers.

“Okay, great. Dodge, start watching the listings.”

“On it.”

Isabella frowns. “I’m sorry, what’s going on?”

“The kind of wards you can manage on an apartment are good, but they’re going to erode fast as people come and go,” explains Roger. “They’ll collapse, and if you’re not already in the process of setting whatever comes next, they’ll leave your family exposed. Maybe only for a few seconds, but a few seconds is all these assholes need. You need a border that’s entirely yours.”

“So we’re going to find you a house,” says Dodger, like that’s a perfectly reasonable thing for someone to say to somebody they’ve just met.

Isabella gapes at the two of them. “What?”

“House,” says Roger. “That’s what you need. Hey, moon people. When can we access this everything you keep talking about?”

“I feel like you can probably access it any time you want to,” says Chang’e. “But more realistically, as soon as the moon shows up in the sky, we can open up the gate. It moves around every night, but the local version’s been circling the clocktower, so we should probably check there first.”

“Of course it is,” says Dodger. “Guess we’re going to campus at moonrise. Now if you’ll all excuse me, this is about as much togetherness as I can handle before midnight, and I’m not going to get that much alone time. I’ll be in my room when you’re ready to go. Roger? Call me.”

And she’s gone, striding out of the kitchen like she’s just remembered some incredibly vital appointment she needs to attend to right now.