Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You’d think that being ruler of the underworld would at least have its perks. Sure, most other gods fear you and mortals create the weirdest of religions to try and harness your power but hey, you are at least the ruler of some place.

Yeah no, that’s not what it’s like.

Ever since D died, Shiraori had to pick up the slack. Meido decided to drag her out of all the evil god’s progeny down to pick up the pieces. Seriously, why her?!

Being god of the underworld was boring as shit. It was just an empty void of pure nothingness you could gaze into for hours until someone finally made their way down there. Once that happened, most people were too confused or scared to make meaningful conversation and after a short amount of time she had to find them a new place in the universe, making sure to mind the ‘cosmic balance’, whatever that was.

And the worst part, there was no rest. She had to stay awake 24/7 waiting for new souls to fall down there with nothing else to do. No wonder D constantly tried to get out of work, her job was terrible.

At least Meido trusted Shiraori enough to let her have a little time away from the underworld, usually she just returned to Earth and played video games to quell her anxious mind. Sometimes she laid in the hospital bed D died in when her soul finally fell apart so she could have a proper nap, it’s not like she had time to clean up the place anyways…

But hey, at least she got D’s powers…

No use for them at this point…

Today was once again one of those times when she got a break to let her mind rest. Well, not exactly. She was actually away to check on some of her experiments to regrow D’s soul so they could revive her, since the universe would eventually fall apart if she stayed dead. Shiraori teleported onto her balcony and looked up to see the chaotic carnival-like architecture of the city. It had been centuries since her birth and a lot had happened on Earth since then, but a lot had also stayed the same like oppression, violence, and cruelty.

Well, maybe not exactly.

There was this weird phenomenon that happened if a god died on a planet, the life there would evolve to resemble them. The stronger the god the more influence they had over everything and dear lord were the effects of D’s death catastrophic.

It was unnoticeable at first, nothing seemed wrong until the end of the 21st century when certain populations of humans became far more… D-like. They stopped aging outwardly and experienced less emotions with each passing generation until they were practically a different species. After a certain point they took over the world and began tormenting their predecessors, now known as paleo-humans, like D did with everything that crossed her path.

Shiraori wasn’t a fan of neo-humanity, but they were big fans of her and every one of D’s progeny gods. Had she explained that? No? Well, let’s take it from the top!

She wasn’t the first god to be created from D’s soul, no she was one of the last. At some point her creator got bored and decided that splitting her soul apart and mixing it with various different entities was a good idea. She continued until she died with Shiraori being entrusted with the last pieces of her soul so they could re-stabalize their universe and undo D’s stupidity by reviving her.

Most of the gods D created weren’t the most… stable of people, go figures. Some were even downright cursed, but that was pretty rare from what she could tell.

Shiraori walked back into her apartment, pleased that the neo-humans decided to leave her alone this time and not make another paleo-human grovel below her feet for forgiveness again.  

Either way, they would go back to harassing her again sometime but she ignored that for now and walked over to the jelly-like thing at the back of the room. This creature was what she used to store shards of D’s soul when she wasn’t using them, apparently he’d once been a human named Ted at some point but her brother AM had done some horrific shit to him. Shiraori sighed, she’d let him die once D was brought back like he’d begged her to do in one of his few moments of sanity.

She pulled a fragment out of his gelatinous body before patting his head and walking away. So far she’d experimented with two fragments, one which used human faith to regrow and the other she placed inside the soul of a hero from another world. Meido requested that personally as she wanted D to be less of an ass when she came back, they were both hoping that his morality would be at least a bit imprinted onto her.

As for this fragment, well, she had no idea what to do with it yet. Which is also why she was here, to create another experiment and see if it worked. Maybe she could improve its growth rate if she placed it inside a neo-human, they didn’t seem to care about each other so nobody would really mind, right?

Shiraori teleported outside her house and floated over the city… or at least a part of it. While the neo-humans were carrying out their day their city had been carved up and fused with what looked like several other worlds, two of which she recognized.

What. The. Fuck. Happened?!

She was only gone for like, well… She wasn’t entirely sure but it wasn’t that long! Did the humans mess up or was somebody pranking her?! Well, whatever it was, this wasn’t funny! Everything was a mess now and who knows what could happen! The safety of D’s fragments could easily be compromised!

As she was caught staring out into the chaos like she did into the underworld’s abyss, a voice nearly shouted at her from behind.

“Well Shiraori! It’s nice to see you again after you kicked me off the Earth like what, 300 years ago? No hard feelings by the way,” She turned to see, of all the gods D had created the most hyperactive of them all, Caine.

“What are you doing here?” Her voice came out almost entirely as an irritated whisper, even after so much time she wasn’t used to speaking with people like him.

“I was just passing through when the world got all jumbled up and now I can’t seem to find anything! Then I saw you, my dear sister, staring out at the world just as confused as I was-” She wondered if he would go on forever.

Shiraori tuned out his monologue and sighed, this was going to cut some time out of her day. Maybe it was her fault for making him a proper god in the first place so he didn’t go insane like AM did? Or maybe this really was just some cosmic prank…

Yeah, D reviving an old abandoned video game just to trap curious urban explorers and unfortunate souls who pissed her off was totally a prank… And she had to step in to make sure the resident AI system didn’t go mad. And even then he just continued to make those bad adventures but in reality this time which forced her to remove him before he destroyed the world.

“-And I’m sure you have a good idea what’s going on,” Caine concluded, she only noticed just now.

“No, I don’t,” Caine almost bluescreened at her response.

“Well now, I’m sure we can figure that out… I promise not to make a mess of things again…” He put his hand on her shoulder and she flicked it off, hard pass.

“No, I have a job to do,” She brought D’s soul fragment up for him to view in hope that it would convince him to leave her alone.

“Oh you’re still working on that… But don’t worry Shiro, I have the perfect idea!” He snapped his fingers and suddenly they were over a complex of wires and monitors not unlike the reality she’d seen on AM’s world.

“In the hundreds of years since we last met, I’ve gotten… Better at making adventures, so good in fact that the humans can’t stop playing them!” She looked down at what she assumed were humans, fat and balding people with empty looks in their eyes, all they did was laze about and plug themselves into machines she assumed to be video game consoles. Not one of them looked healthy, they all seemed addicted.

“They look addicted…” Shiraori muttered.

“Of course they are! Addicted to fun I must say!” She nearly glared at him as he celebrated, this was just a common problem with him. D built him to be dysfunctional and not understand humans properly so that’s how he was, thinking that this was okay.

She snapped her fingers and brought them back to the neo-human city, not wanting to deal with him but knowing that he wouldn't leave her alone.

“You can accompany me, but behave yourself,” Shiraori opened her eyes and gave him a grave stare, one that went completely over his head.

“Oh really? Thank you so much Shiro!” He grabbed her hand and shook it as hard as he could, the shockwaves pulling throughout her body and dizzying her.

She pulled her hand away and began to float to a nearby mountain. Maybe she could get some useful info out of Caine after all, but he was still too much for her.

This would be a long visit…

Chapter Text

To D’s progeny, her death was a shot heard around the world.

Everywhere from the planet which would come to be known as Extremia to the outer-multiversal void of the doodlesphere, they could feel her death like any other time her soul fragmented. It was the same kind of feeling, just far more meaningful and strong.

Death had died.

To those who knew, it was the most horrifying thing. Shiraori assisted the incubators in working overtime to make sure the illusion of death persisted, and even then her power would eventually fade. Such a collapse in the fabric of reality would inevitably pull the rest or reality down with it into a state of pandemonium and destruction.

Humanity called it Vacuum Decay and only thought it to be hypothetical, maybe caused by quantum tunneling or some other wayward cosmic process. To the gods who knew of it however it was a frightening concept, their universe was fundamentally unstable and could collapse if anything went slightly wrong.

The humans weren’t wrong about how it could happen either, simply… closed-off from its true range of causes. In fact, parts of the universe had already been consumed by spheres of death which expanded at the speed of light. Much like black holes anything that enters will never be seen again, even the gods couldn’t do anything but contain these monstrosities.

And this was the horror Phos thought of every waking moment. 

When the sun expanded and destroyed their planet and everything on it, they thought that they would finally die. Unfortunately, that’s not how gods worked as they spent years trapped inside its boiling plasma until Shiraori pulled them out.

D had apparently sensed their pain but allowed them to suffer until she got tired of it and sent Shiraori to save them and explain everything as part of her training. They were one of the first fragments she made while the universe was still young, or at least a fragment of a fragment. D had placed part of her soul into this planet’s crust just to see what would happen and the rock lifeforms were the result.

It wasn’t enough to manifest in the organic life on their planet, sparing humanity from her influence, but it naturally splintered off every time a new rock gained sapience. At least until the main shard was no bigger than any other splinter and embedded itself in some phosphophytolite, eventually rising up as the gem of the same name.

The story nearly sent them into another spiral of insanity. All their worries about their remaining humanity infecting the rocks was all for nothing since they weren’t even connected to them at all. They were closer to their new friends than the rest of the gems and it was too late to chase them no matter how much Phos wanted to.

In spite of this, D encouraged them to try.

And try.

And try…

Again and again until she died.

They took the initiative alongside Shiraori after that, donating some of their power to the incubators to offset the initial damage and working with them ever since. It wasn’t an easy job… Not as bad as Shiraori’s, but more heartbreaking than sanity-breaking.

With their power to control human souls, they would revert extra witches back into the human girls they started as and wipe their memories as the cycle all over again. It was a necessary evil, as the original magical girl system wasn’t designed to handle such an imminent threat and without their power wouldn’t be able to provide the necessary energy.

“Thank you for assisting us today,” An incubator named Kokoro said from below. Phos looked down at him before squatting down to his level.

“It’s nothing, we would all be dead now without you,” They pet Kokoro’s head lightly, his facial expressions didn’t change.

“...The search for your friends has yet to bear any results,” Phos stopped and just stared at him before sighing.

“I expected that… It’ll take a long time to find them even with your technology…” It was a deal they made soon after D’s death, Phos would help the incubators collect energy and they would help search for Phos’s lost friends, both of which would take a long time to complete.

Before they could say anything more, Phos felt a distinct aura appear beside them. It was the endpoint of a teleportation spell and quite a distinctive one as well, so they weren’t surprised by who appeared when it finished.

Shiraori appeared carrying a strange jelly blob of a creature that strangely contained the last remaining fragments of their creator’s soul. Phos was fairly confused by this, their sister rarely had any time away from the underworld anymore and usually used it to rest so why would she teleport to them just to show off some strange slug creature she found?

Kokoro, on the other hand, just facepalmed.

“Why would you take him with you? Not even we are willing to mess with AM…” Somehow he sounded irritated, which shouldn’t have been possible for an incubator.

“My brother is bound to his planet… He is a failed god and cannot follow me,” This just made their confusion worse, Phos knew of AM and kept their distance but what this jelly-like creature had to do with him was lost on them.

“Yes, but you’ve just given him every reason to change that,” Phos could sense Kokoro sending out signals to other incubators, almost a top-level report about Shiraori’s supposedly foolish actions and an order for someone to monitor AM’s planet. She could undoubtedly sense them as well which would explain her expression of annoyance.

“I doubt that… most of the universe fears him and he is not capable of reaching space on his own,” She rebutted him.

“What are you guys talking about?” Phos asked, finally voicing their confusion to the others.

“The slug creature is Ted, a human AM had captured for the sake of torture. There used to be four others but he killed the rest and was turned into that thing as punishment,” Kokoro explained, predictably given how bad their sister was at explaining herself.

“I didn’t know that… I just thought that AM wiped out all the humans in his world…”

“He did, but left a few behind so that he wouldn’t be left with nothing to do for eternity, it was quite troublesome as we had to evacuate quickly before he could learn of our existence…” Kokoro continued his explanation, though there was one question he couldn’t answer.

“Oh… Then why did you take Ted from him?” Phos asked Shiraori, who let the slug creature float in the vacuum of space so she could pull out the shards of D’s soul.

“His body is good at storing things, it keeps them from breaking any further and his mind is too damaged to absorb them…” She placed the shards back into their safe space before saving Ted from floating off.

“So you’re using him as soul storage… Do you really think it’s worth the risk though? You could have just asked us for help,” His offer didn’t seem to please her.

“You are busy with the magical girl system… And it would have taken your kind too long to design an effective container,” Kokoro took a minute to think before responding.

“You’re probably right, It would take us a while to design a container for a god’s soul instead of a human like we already do… But I think it would be best to avoid giving AM a reason to become a threat to all of us,” He objected calmly.

“You could always drop someone off to distract him…” She suggested, the idea gave Phos shivers.

“That sounds… disturbing. But you can’t just be here to tell us about this, is there anything you need?” They tried to change the topic to hopefully avoid the logical consequence of their sister’s suggestion…

“I do actually, I’ve finally figured out a way to revive D…” Shiraori said calmly, looking up to Phos.

“Her soul can regrow with an external energy source, which could be… Another being’s soul. I heard that your power expands beyond the dead and can affect the living, if that is true I will need you to remove the excess when the time is right,” She explained her plan clearly for once.

“Does it have to be another soul?” Phos asked.

“That is the most stable configuration I’ve found… All others seem to deteriorate with time,” Shiraori shook her head, showing them tiny fragments of clearly damaged shards. A clear sign of experimentation gone wrong.

“If it’s the only way, then I’ll help you…” Phos sighed, rubbing the back of their head. Shiro just looked at them and nodded before teleporting away. Typical, she wasn’t a good communicator in any case.

“That was abrupt…” Kokoro noticed, sending out more communication signals. The incubators almost all listened to them and began to write down Shiraori’s plan, at least from what they could tell.

“Yes, she was never good at talking to people…” Phos reminisced on when they first met Shiraori, whose explanation remained confusing until D stepped in to clarify for her. From then on she mostly relied on D to explain her desires and thoughts to them even when the evil god began to twist them.

Since their job was done here, they melted back into a puddle of white plasma and kept an eye out on the incubators and Shiraori, waiting for whoever would need them next.