Prompt of the Week - Week 162

Someone’s head was going to roll for this.

Never before in the Accounting Division had there been this much chaos over such a small blunder; indeed, never before in the Accounting Division had there been such a blunder, their spotless record having been maintained over such a prolonged period of time that not a single deity working in there had any recollection of there being a mistake made at all… only for the first time to rear its ugly head to be something so stupid, yet so damaging.

On its face, the alteration was relatively minor, at least on its face: measurements made in inches were now made in feet, and measurements made in feet were now made in inches. An inferior form of measurement, to be certain, but for some of the sub-departments of the AD it was as critical as air was for mortals to breathe, owing to their cultural proclivities and the people they were in charge of. Indeed, it wasn’t even the first time they had a measurement “flip”, with the somewhat controversial “Foot-To-Mile Threshold” ruling of the last decade still being an open wound for many.

The difference being that, on prior flips and changes, whenever the alteration was made, the actual records of the dimensions themselves were altered alongside it: thus, if something was measured as being ten feet high, the records should have been changed to make it so that they now measured one hundred and twenty inches high instead.

This was not done.

No one knew where the order had come, who signed it, who permitted it, who stamped it, or indeed anyone that was involved in the approval process, which was itself something of a panic-inducing problem given how this wide-sweeping change to their protocol was apparently just… manifested from thin air, introduced into their system, and then put into place without anyone being the wiser. But the fact was, it was stamped, and though no one recognised the signature, it was signed, and the lingo and technical terms were perfectly accurate for the latest edition of the Accounting Division’s Internal Reference Dictionary. And it said so right there:

“All measurements in feet are now to be made in inches, and vice-versa.”

No provisions for changing the numbers themselves, no concern about dates or when the system was supposed to put this into place, or anything really: the order came in, it was approved, it went into the system, and the reality engine at the centre of the Division promptly altered the universal constants needed to ensure this order was followed through. And just like that, everything flipped on its head and nothing made any sense any more.

It was everyone’s luck that the order came indexed with a very specific subset of the Biology Section, that being measurements applied to the living bodies of currently extant, worshipping mortals registered with the pantheon. More to the point, it was indexed to only affect certain values which immediately alerted those responsible to the likely culprit of this little incident.

Unfortunately, getting anyone from the Lust Department to come anywhere other than, well, everywhere, was a problem no one had been quite able to solve. It was actually one of the main reasons why there was an initial wave of scepticism as to their involvement in the misfiling: no one in living memory could recall a point where anyone who worked in Lust had done anything other than just be a mindless arousal engine, as befitting their entire raison d’être; there were records of a couple of requests made in aeons past, when the Department system was still being set up, regarding a draining system being installed for Lust, but that came from Janitorial, not from Lust itself. In fact, there was nothing in the system that ever came from Lust at all, because they were too busy being horny to file paperwork, or fill out forms, or do anything that Accounting needed them to do.

So to imagine that anyone from there would be capable of such high-order deceit was… a hard sell, to put it mildly. Given that it would take days at the very minimum before an injunction could even be drawn up, however, this plan was rapidly discarded as being unfeasible, at least as long as the crisis was still ongoing. Besides, even if they did get someone, there was next to zero chance they’d get anything usable out of them in any reasonable amount of time.

It had their damned signature all over it though. Really, who else would index an order like this and then make sure it applied very specifically to the measurements of one’s body parts? Who else but Lust would want to induce some kind of ludicrous shortstackification of every worshipper they had on file?! It had to be them, of that most of Accounting was certain, and it was only plausible deniability and prior history that stopped them from seeking further action.

That, and they needed to fix this as quickly as possible.

The immediate effects were the mass reduction in height of just about most people on the planets the pantheon governed; there were a handful of non-believers and those who eschewed active worship who weren’t affected, not being on the rolls, and those were still split between the ones enjoying the sights, the ones baffled that the gods were, in fact, completely real, and those entering a panic as they believed their world was coming to an end.

Thankfully, that was work for the Theological Normalcy Division, not Accounting; they only had to make sure everything went back to normal, and deal with any discrepancies in the numbers after the fact.

Which, granted, would’ve been a lot easier if this sudden wave of transformative accounting hadn’t set off a secondary chain reaction of trillions upon trillions of souls suddenly flooding every available channel with their prayer; bafflingly, most of it wasn’t even directed at Lust, being more so an endless mass of confused mortals wanting to know why they were all suddenly inches tall with tits and cocks large enough to smash a horse carriage without even noticing.

Mobility became an immediate issue, seeing as the flip order didn’t account for that either: most individuals who worshipped the pantheon suddenly found themselves stuck in place as their minute bodies were incapable of moving assets far too large for even their regular-sized selves! Transportation collapsed across the board, movement in traffic stopped being a possibility, and there were so many incidents of people’s assets smushing into one another that the Lust Division suffered an almost immediate triple overload: cum, milk, and enough paperwork to literally outflood the previous two.

This was, unfortunately, Accounting’s problem, because they now had to deal with a gargantuan influx of filings that had to be processed, or else the reality backlog would start interfering with timeline stability, and then bad shit was going to happen. They had to prioritise filing the prayers, requests, and general supplications, forcing them into a position where the problem they could fix to address this secondary issue itself became secondary to its own consequences; soon enough, the AD was buried up to its collective neck in so much sudden and unnecessary paperwork that they had to summon several thousand spirits just to assist them in carrying the damned paper to its proper place.

Probably should have digitised when the Tech and Innovation Division suggested they did. Damn the naysayers!

Absent any means of avoiding the hard work, the Accounting Division hunkered down and did the best they could to go through all the necessary paperwork, leaving a relatively insignificant skeleton crew to try and fix the mess by undoing the original flip order and instituting an Amnesiac Injunction so everyone involved in that mess down below in the mortal planes would just forget it ever happened. These were rarely given out, but Admin was… likely to see the necessity, given the circumstances.

Oddly enough, there was one group that actively benefitted from all this: there were a handful of species that, due to their naturally small size, were already filed as being measured in inches, both in terms of general size and all their body parts. The good news was that they maintained their proportionality; the bad news is that these naturally small species no longer existed, having been replaced with towering giants waving around endowments so enormous that they could barely heft them without collapsing, either from the weight or all the horny energy produced by their mere presence.

Those were the ones mainly clogging up the Lust Division. No one in Accounting dared take a look at the reports coming in from that side of the pantheon; they were afraid of what eldritch invocations might be within the prayers, preferring instead to give them up to the summoned spirits, who were thankfully numb to such things by way of not having emotions to begin with.

Even then, some of them requested to be banished.

The influx of prayers didn’t get any better as the problem at hand steadfastly refused to be solved; no matter what the troubleshooters attempted, nothing they did seemed to dislodge the general order from the system! This wasn’t just catastrophic, it was practically unheard of: admin-level privilege should have been enough to revoke the flip order, seeing as there wasn’t any higher level authorisation present in the system: quite literally, admin-level credentials were, by necessity, the only ones that could do whatever they wanted to the automatic filing system with effectively no oversight apart from later review.

And yet, any attempt to backtrack on the transformations returned the same result: nothing.

Not even an error message in the scrying screen, not even an elemental popping up from nothing to remind them to change their access password once every six ages or so: just nothing. Spells did nothing, reality rewrites accomplished jack shit, and no matter how many petitions they made to the Self-Elucidating Anthropic Listmaker, they were left with a deafening silence and a mounting pile of prayer-related paperwork that no one really wanted to touch with a ten-mile pole.

Worse yet, the one time they attempted to change the parameters, thinking to themselves that, if they couldn’t get rid of it, the least they could do was try and change the underlying alterations, they instead (somehow!) managed to change the indexing so that it affected all worshippers: not just mortal ones. While this wasn’t necessarily a big problem in the mortal plane (even if they did receive a handful of very concerned prayers from a few powerful liches and wizards), this unfortunately meant that every soul in every respective afterlife was suddenly affected by the flip order.

They all felt it before the paperwork started coming in. While most of the direct communication between the post-deceased and the pantheon was handled by the Post-Mortem Theological Relations Division rather than Accounting, the latter still received a portion of the incoming bulk of filings, purely for registry and bookkeeping purposes, a decision that Accounting had been happy to handle given the relatively low volume of prayers that came from those in their afterlives. After all, they were already dead; if they wanted to talk to their gods, they could just wait for the required amount of time for them to come around personally during their scheduled visits, and even then, vanishingly few of these souls had anything to complain about.

It was their chosen afterlife, after all.

Now, however, they were all suddenly beset by an inexplicable change to their physiologies, one that couldn’t really be explained by the bounds and terms of their post-life existence… except for those under the purview of Lust, who all collectively assumed it was part of the bargain and enthusiastically embraced the changes without a second thought. Less work overall, thankfully enough.

Everyone else though, everyone else had a question to ask, and that question was “Why?” or “How?” or “How come?” or “What the fuck, [insert deity here]?”. For those who had attained their personal paradise through ascetic practices and self-restraint, the alterations were utterly disastrous; while the flip order hadn’t mandated any changes to anyone’s endocrine system, one didn’t simply grow tits the size of cars and not start feeling differently about them, to say nothing of those unfortunate ones who happened to have endowments just on the cusp of being measured in feet, suddenly being immobilised by gigantic… well, the less said about those, the better.

The more anyone looked into the flip order, the more none of it made sense. The method used to inject it into the system betrayed either an immense familiarity with it, or a level of administrative privilege beyond what anyone in the Accounting Division had access to, either of which were entirely at odds with how shoddily written it was… assuming of course it was written badly.

An hypothesis began to form a few hours into the crisis, with the deities assembled to fix the flip order postulating that, perhaps, the order itself wasn’t written “badly”, in the sense that there was an intended effect that was being missed through poor wording. Perhaps, they began thinking, it was intended specifically to do what it was doing: flip the measurements in order to provoke a simultaneous growthpocalypse and shrinkmageddon. But this would once again point towards the Lust Division, and no one there had either the technical know-how to inject the order nor the administrative privilege needed to do so in the way that it was.

The obvious answer was right there in front of them, but none dared to think it, let alone speak it aloud: there was always Admin, capital-A, the central administrative nucleus of the entire pantheon, the core from which all power and authority flowed… and the one place in the entirety of the divine realms that might, might, have someone with higher-order access to the Accounting system than anyone else in Accounting proper.

But then, the problem was that no one would dare raise this concern with Admin, as that would be tantamount to accusing them of interfering with the affairs of one of their Divisions, not only a grave ethical breach, but an outright violation of ordinance, as per the Independence and Interdependence Affairs Treaty of Aeon 19: in exchange for serving as the “spoke” of the Great Wheel, Admin would allow each Division to police their own affairs, provided they too followed the rules of regulations set forth by the Treaty. Accusing Admin of inserting a random flip order into AD’s systems would require extraordinary evidence… evidence which, frankly, did not exist.

But it had to be them. No one else would have the level of access needed to bypass most of the checks and balances of Accounting’s systems. No one else would be able to issue an order that a Division could not override, as that was one of the powers set forth by the I&I Treaty. And, most importantly, no one else would have the technical know-how to do such a thing without leaving a trace: Admin only hired the best of the best among the pantheon, filling their ranks with the most experienced and talented operatives that godkind could offer.

Under regular circumstances, this would’ve been a decision taken after hours or days, maybe even weeks of deliberation, but these weren’t regular circumstances: they couldn’t afford to sit around twiddling their thumbs up their collective ass arguing over pros and cons when there was an active crisis undergoing and they needed to stop it, immediately, right the fuck now. Calling Admin was risky, perhaps even to the point where they would trigger a nasty confrontation, but they had to do it.

They still agonised over how to write the inquiry, but that was standard fare: talking to Admin in general was stressful even under optimal conditions, especially since no one really knew who would receive the message or who would process it. In the absence of this critical information, they best they could hope for was to write the damned thing as politely as possible, then start hoping (not praying; that got logged) that it would work. So, after a horrifyingly long hour, the following message was sent out:

“Greetings from Accounting. Our system recently received an administrative-plus-level order which inserted a set of instructions into our system that has caused some trouble with filing. We have been unable to remove, revoke, or alter this order, despite our best efforts, and containment and resolution are becoming increasingly untenable as we speak. Would Admin know anything about any authorised orders that the Accounting Division would not be aware of?”

Simple and to the point; too simple, considering the type of essays that were normally mailed over, but it would have to do for the time being.

Without anything else to do, the team sat down and waited for a reply. There wasn’t much else they could realistically do: any attempt to alter the order in some way ended either in failure or disaster, so touching it at all wasn’t worth their time, and seeing as they were mandated to work exclusively on fixing the flip order, the only thing they could do was wait for Admin to reply.

Which they did. In a manner which they all felt before they saw.

Well, at least they received confirmation that it was, indeed, Admin who was responsible for all of this fuckery. In the brief few moments before they were overtaken by their own assets, they all know that the ones responsible for this crisis were the very people who were supposed to be making sure everything ran properly. And while this was, if nothing else, vindication, it hardly compensated for the new order that came in, this time with a little note attached letting them know they had Creator-level access privilege:

“The previous order applies to all living beings. Any attempt to countermand this order will magnify sizes by an order of ten.”