TYRANNIUS

As a god, Tyrannius had a lot more problems than most would generally expect. People always assume that gods have it easy, that they are just living it up on Mount Olympus or wherever it is they live. Drinking, Fornicating with mortals, partying, that’s the life of a god right? Wrong. Or at least, that’s not the life of all gods. Some gods, like Hercules and Tyrannius, were once mortals.
	They were made immortal on specific conditions, in Tyrannius’ case, those conditions sucked. As a mortal he was an author, a poet, a wordsmith. The gods loved his work so much, they decided to make him immortal so that they can enjoy his work for years to come. The only condition of his immortality is that he must entertain the gods with a new play or book every year. That may sound easy enough until you do it for 5000 years.
	And so this is the situation we find Tyrannius in, struggling to make ends meet on his latest novel about a serial rapist aboard a Grathian starship, “The Rapes of Grath.”
	“Hmmmmmm, no, that won’t work. The main character can’t be a rapist, it might hit a bit too close to home for Zeus.” Tyrannius muttered to himself as he erased all of the words on the sheafs of paper he had been using for all of October.
	“Crap, it’s almost November. I have to finish by November, otherwise there won’t be any time to copy it enough for every single god and goddess in this dump.” Tyrannius had begun talking to himself a few thousand years ago. For the first thousand years of his godship it had only taken him two months to write his novel, and he had plenty of time to live the life of a god, party all night, party all day.
	In the second thousand years it had taken him six months to finish. He still had plenty of time to socialize then, one month of nonstop partying followed by one month of nonstop writing, rinse and repeat. Since then, he had had to spend all of his time writing in his increasingly cramped study. He could have easily spent an hour or two magically remodeling, but he felt that he had to spend every moment writing. And so, Tyrannius was left with only himself to talk to, and that was a lonely existence to be sure.
	He had to write about something, he just had to figure out what. He couldn’t do a romance again, his last five had been romances. He couldn’t do science fiction, the majority of the gods didn’t care for science, which explained away all the hard work they did as natural phenomena. Mystery was out of the question, it took far too long to plan out all of the foreshadowing required to write a good mystery.
 	“What you need, is a good, basic, fantasy adventure. Something nice and bloody, but not too complicated.”
Tyrannius whirled about, not used to being disturbed in his room, locked within the twists and turns of his rather complex and convoluted mansion. It was only Bartimaeus, the god of Chance and Hard Decisions.
“I could help you, if you want. I got an idea that would let you write your little novel and keep immortality for another year.” Bartimaeus offered.
“Look, Barty, not to be rude but shut the fuck up. You are the god of Chance, so I am not going to take a chance with even letting you tell me your idea. If the others found out you helped me then I’d be out for sure.”
Barty looked vaguely hurt, as if he had feelings. Tyrannius scoffed at the very idea. Everyone knew that little Barty wasn’t exactly the most popular or the smartest of the gods. He made too many gambles, and too many bad decisions. Despite himself, Tyrannius decided that he had better throw Barty a bone, to prevent him from going to the others with some obnoxious bullshit lie. It’s not like there is any way that Bart’s idea would be any use.
“Ugh okay fine, but make it quick. I’m very busy you know.”
“Oh thank you Tyrannius! You won’t regret it.”
After a long pause Tyrannius nearly shouts, “Fucking get on with it!”
“Oh yeah, sorry. So you don’t have any ideas left for things to write, right? What if you just wrote something down that actually happens, that is super interesting.”
“Bart, where am I going to find something super interesting to write down, that the others won’t know about so that I can pass it off as my own work?” Tyrannius sighed. Barts idea was useless, just as expected.
“Well, you can do basically anything as long as it is related to creative endeavors, right? What if you just...I don’t know made a world and let a bunch of mortals fight with magical powers and shit.”
“Bart, where am I going to get a bunch of mortals, not even to mention the assloads of power it would take to literally make a world.”
“I don’t know, you’re supposed to be the creative one. Just make some? Or bring some back from the dead, or just steal some from other worlds.” Bartimaeus seemed to be getting desperate now, his eyes wide with fear. Tyrannius knew some of the other gods tended to yell and scream at him.
Tyrannius turned back and once again hunched over his desk“Oh don’t look at me like that. I’m not going to scream at you. I just wish you had thought about how dumb that idea was before coming and bothering me with it. Go back to whatever it is you do, and leave me to write.”
Bartimaeus was dismissed with a wave of a hand and not another word from Tyrannius. “Time to get back to my shitty ideas,” he thought.
“Hey Tyr.”
Disgusted and thoroughly annoyed, Tyrannius turned to face Bartimaeus“Bart, haven’t you left yet?”
“Yeah yeah just a second. I just thought you might want to know, I can get you the power you need to make that world, even enough to slow down time enough for you to be able to write it in peace. Just think about it.” And with not another word from his mouth, Bart blew out of the room the same way he entered, perfectly silent.