The elevator had no buttons.
Just a scroll.
A literal papyrus scroll hanging inside the elevator shaft like someone stapled a Dead Sea manuscript to the wall and said "This is good UI."
I stared at it.
It stared back.
"Is it—uh—is it voice activated?" I asked, not because I cared but because I was already tired of not understanding the physics of this place.
Tamori cleared his throat. "Technically, yes. But only in Old Godic."
"Of course."
I waited.
He waited.
The scroll shimmered faintly.
Tamori said, with exaggerated clarity:""
It sounded like someone gargling upside-down while choking on a printer.
Looked like it too. Honestly, it resembled one of those cursed fonts you'd accidentally open in WordPad in 2003 and then never trust your computer again.
We did not move—but the space around us did. It folded, unscrolled, and softly inverted like a page being turned in five dimensions. The next thing I knew, we were standing inside what I can only describe as a temple-shaped server farm.
Rows and rows of glowing totems. Oversized parchment reels spinning like printer drums. Incense smoke rising from digital braziers next to what looked like stone fax machines.
There were gods.
All kinds.
Some walked. Some floated. One was just a pair of radiant hands typing on thin air. I swear I saw one made entirely of crabs and spiritual debt.
They didn't look powerful. They looked stressed.
"Welcome to Central Processing," Tamori said, adjusting his robe. "Divine Registry. Layer 3. Faith Intake and Conversion Compliance."
I followed him past an altar where a goat-headed figure was arguing with a glowing fox about line priority.
The goat's voice was nasal, bureaucratic, and dangerously close to bleating. "I submitted my prayer batch forty-seven mortal seconds ago. That gives me temporal seniority."
The fox's tail flickered like bad signal. "Yeah, but your prayers are mostly duplicates. Cousin asks for same miracle twice? That's recursion, not faith."
"Then it should go to audit!"
"You're an audit case!"
They both turned briefly toward me as we passed, and the fox mouthed "Help me" without sound.
Across the hall, a gelatinous mass in a velvet crown was melting through a bench made of light.
It looked like pudding that had lost the will to gel.
A clerk nearby sighed. "Lord Plarxx is experiencing a temporal feedback loop. He's currently being worshipped out of sequence."
"What does that mean?" I asked before I could stop myself.
"It means his past self remembers prayers from the future. He's currently trying to retroactively fulfill a miracle that hasn't been requested yet."
The blob wept softly. Its crown began to vibrate.
"That'll cause a paradox, right?"
"Only if it works."
We walked through a corridor of whispering scrolls. They unrolled as we passed, revealing miracle receipts, user complaints, shrine license numbers. It was part temple, part accounting firm, part data center for cosmic nonsense.
Tamori led me into a small chamber labeled "Faith Economy Overview (Mortal Adapted)."
There was a table. There was tea. There was a whiteboard already scrawled with terms I immediately hated.
Tamori grabbed a marker and began drawing what looked like a food chain made of belief.
"At the bottom," he said, "you have mortals. They generate worship. Not always on purpose. Sometimes it's ambient. Like background radiation."
He drew little human stick figures with hearts over their heads.
"They go to shrines, offer prayers, do rituals. That produces Worship Points, which are picked up by licensed gods through official miracle channels."
He connected arrows to a smiling blob labeled "Tezukiri."
"Now, gods use WPs to fuel their domains—miracles, blessings, interventions, the usual. They also pay taxes to the Celestial Authority, who then redistributes WPs to support retired gods, minor spirits, and maintenance costs like time flow and cause-effect chains."
I blinked.
Tamori kept going, pointing to terms like "Faith Burn Rate,""Miracle ROI," and "Spiritual Congestion Penalty."
"I hate this," I said.
"It's actually quite elegant," he replied.
"No, it's elegant the way a tax loophole is elegant. I'm talking about it on a moral level."
He shrugged. "It's better than the old system. Back then gods just beat each other with sacred hammers until someone died of metaphor."
He tossed me a small card.
It was blank on one side. On the other, it had a floating glyph that glowed when I held it.
"Worship Credit Access Token," he said. "You'll need that to process miracles and file audit reports. It has a divine balance of three thousand base WPs."
"Is that good?"
"It's enough to get ripped off once or twice."
I sat down. The tea was warm. Somehow that offended me.
"So," I said. "Let's summarize. You summoned me here by mistake, can't send me back until I do your job for you, and gave me god money that expires when I stop believing in it?"
Tamori nodded, pleased. "You're adapting quickly!"
I stared into my tea.
There were bubbles in the shape of a question mark.
I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be reassuring or ominous.
"Why does any of this matter?" I asked quietly. "Aren't gods supposed to be… above this? Faith, numbers, quotas?"
Tamori hesitated.
Then smiled, but not like he meant it.
"Faith doesn't just keep them strong," he said. "It keeps them real."