The set was clean. Professionally lit. The kind of lighting that made everything look slightly more important than it was, two warm spotlights angled down onto a curved desk where two figures sat with the practiced ease of people who did this often. Microphones. Earpieces. A backdrop that shifted colors slowly, deep blue bleeding into violet bleeding into something that had no name in any human language but looked expensive regardless.
It could have been any sports broadcast. Any pre-game panel. The desk, the lights, the casual back and forth of two commentators warming up before the main event. Perfectly ordinary. Almost.
"Orion." The one on the left leaned back in her chair, crossing one leg over the other. She was strikingly tall even sitting down, her hair a deep silver that caught the light like it was trying to keep it. "Your eastern continent is a mess again."
The one on the right, Orion, didn't look up from the small glowing tablet in his hand. "It's character building."
"Three famines and a civil war in one century is not character building. That's negligence."
"That's culture."
She stared at him for a moment. Then turned away with the quiet dignity of someone who had been having this argument for several thousand years and had made peace with never winning it.
Behind them, the green room was louder. A broad open space where others milled about with the loose energy of people waiting for something to start. They were not looking at the same world. They were each looking at their own. Floating above each of them, shifting and alive, were maps that didn't resemble any single place. Continents dissolving into other continents. A desert giving way to three moons hanging over a violet sea. A sprawling mechanical city with no sky at all. Worlds worn comfortably, the way someone wears a coat they have owned for a long time.
Each of them had built something entirely their own. Different rules. Different skies. Different definitions of what it meant to live and die.
"My northern tribes finally developed written language," said a broad shouldered figure near the window, sounding quietly pleased with himself. "Took them forty thousand years but they got there."
"Mine skipped written language entirely," said the woman beside him without looking up from her own floating map. "Went straight to telepathic encoding. Much cleaner."
"Soulless though."
"Efficient."
"Same thing."
Nearby, two others stood with the loose posture of old rivals who had done this enough times that the hostility had long since mellowed into something almost fond.
"You want to go again?" the taller one asked, swirling something luminous in a goblet. "Proper war this time. Full scale."
"Depends," the other said. "Which side are you taking?"
"I was thinking I'd lend you one of my continents. The northern one. Good terrain for a prolonged campaign."
"Last time you lent me a continent it had three active volcanoes and a plague I didn't know about."
"The plague was a bonus."
"My entire eastern flank collapsed in six months."
"Character building."
The taller one finally looked over. "I'll be the demon lord this time."
A pause.
"You were the demon lord last time."
"I was the demon lord the time before last. You were the demon lord last time and you spent the first two centuries just building infrastructure. It wasn't interesting."
"Infrastructure wins wars."
"Infrastructure does not make good television."
The other considered this seriously, the way someone considers a genuinely fair point. Then, reluctantly, "Fine. You can be the demon lord. But I want the northern fortress."
"Done."
"And I'm not taking the swamp provinces."
"You're always taking the swamp provinces."
"Not this time."
Nobody questioned it. Nobody found it strange. These were the conversations of people for whom time moved differently, for whom a century was an inconvenience and a civilization was a hobby and a war between worlds was something you scheduled around your other commitments.
Then the two at the desk straightened.
The silver haired woman picked up her microphone. Orion set down his tablet. The light above the backdrop shifted from standby amber to a clean, sharp white.
She leaned forward and tapped the microphone once.
The sound that came out of it did not travel through air the way sound normally does. It arrived. Everywhere at once. In the bones of every person in the room, in the space between thoughts, in whatever passed for eardrums among beings who had not needed them for longer than most stars had existed.
The room went quiet.
Every single one of them, the ones arguing over fortress provinces and demon lord rotations, turned toward the desk with the focused, ancient attention of creatures who had been waiting for this for a very long time.
"We're live in five," she said.
The backdrop shifted one final time.
And the broadcast began.