Sutta, who is the aphorism, the string, the wisdom, second living god of the world, strode on. Particularly, he strolled into one of the miscellaneous bar areas of the Wheel Turning King casino. The casino as a whole was where the Asiatic Intro Tourney's Japan segment was held. Much of its infrastructure was by and for the cult, but much of the visible building was a more conventional front business. Back here, this tended to blend business, pleasure, and fucking people over. High rollers, high floors, and high-ranking cultists awaited. Lots of wheel-of-fortune tarot iconography, in all its ups and downs: a temple market moreso than a temple, but nonetheless the Turner of Wheels was lightly omnipresent. By contrast, Sutta in his human guise was centrally intimidating. In the way an unexpectedly impressive man was, with his statuesque build and gilded wealth. To those who did not see truth, he only merited the head-turning of noticing an unusual tourist. To those that did, he was power that matched the high priests and the mighty among dreaming-dead gods.
Sutta did not need the sight of divinity to judge measurements back. Crow had patched Sutta into the Turner of Wheels' network, and given him pretty high access position in his hierarchy to boot. It was trivial for Sutta to read profiles and corroborate who had a 'job' here to who had a job here. It was mostly Jackal's subordinates running the place. Waiters, eye candy, maintenance, guards, 'bodyguards', the human works. He had little reason to view the security feeds beyond double-checking his spiritual senses aligned with what people thought was there. But he had died once to overwhelming power, not being unprepared. No need to waste a second chance screwing that up.
A few words in the right places, flashing his company ID in lieu of debit card, got him a martini. And a few pointers to where the 'Jackal Club' hangouts were for plausible deniability of his cover identity, conveniently enough. The Jackal Club portion of Wheel Turning King was harder to see from outside, but still with a nice view. More lounging room, and a bit of conference-scale presentation space too. Sutta drank, and watched mortals do mortal things.
There were higher cultists here, too. The middle grades of initiation and secret society had assimilated and replaced nobility, murkily. The fumbling between bourgeoisie and aristocracy was iffy on how much was plutocratic and how much was ideology. Certainly some of Jackal's wealthier proxies had money to burn between drinks and debates. Sutta watched them throw away as pittances more than some people's life savings. To them, this was a minor discretionary entertainment. Their gambling budgets would be middle manager salaries
Well, some of that cash and favor-trading went to the initiates. Not a trickle, it was more of a scheme. A few of Crow's people were doing system work, particularly onboarding the guards and prostitutes to Distortion Wars and updating digital records accordingly. There were some of Wolf's people socializing, mostly as liaisons between divisions and to get in on the upcoming tournaments. Almost nobody under Alligator 'cept to save sessions on Crow teaching: probably they'd pick up the whole 'supernatural monster' deal and go back to causing problems on purpose. Some subsidiaries of the other priest-animals, some subsidiaries of nobody in particular. Some people who weren't 'in on it' yet, too. To Sutta it looked like they were rolled in by Distortion Wars and misreading more red flags than known to vexillology, but he didn't quite rule out spies his divine senses were not tuned to detect. A modernized cult, but Sutta certainly recognized things that cycled among the changed.
Also usefully, Sutta had an obnoxious amount of money. Crow had used the cryptocurrency bubble to splash a few assets into the kind of wealth Jackal's subordinate directors threw around, and tossed in one of those accounts as a signing bonus. Sutta could probably go all Mansa Musa and crash an economy if he wished. Between supernatural business acumen, starting capital, and the cult's document infrastructure... Well, maybe later. It would probably be useful once he had some proxies. Turner said he could start a new priesthood, and Crow had handled the details, so.
Finishing his drink, Sutta set out his laptop in order to look busy. He reviewed the public plan for Distortion Wars, and how he'd slot in. The cabal had made a revolution of 'reality-building technology', codifying various historically anomalous phenomena and what was thought to be magic. Hacked-together initiations, research papers about things the cult had known ages ago. A media blitz to simply lie certain expectations into being, of course. Bend the existing policing and war-hawks to pursue very specific research. Backed by the hedonism of the wealthy, the opportunism of the desperate, and several of humanity's own patterns to rationalize... The rumbling dreams of dead gods excused here, the direct manipulative power of living ones there... The magical revolution would seemingly emerge from managing to technologically influence previously. Like many conspiracies, it would take godly power to do a bunch of erratic things inefficiently. But that was part of the fun.
Crow had already done a lot of initial distribution work. Sutta would be doing followup: lower-level arrangements, sponsoring the equivalents to card shops and custom card designers. The Turner of Wheels seeded collapse, but wanted this entertainment to last for a while. The embodiment of teachings-to-be-passed-down would suffice to keep legacy progressing rather than calcifying. Gods, unlike some men, could keep business meetings to a minimum. Even more so when they had powers of mind to skip the unpleasant intermediaries.
Sutta made his alternate accounts. He spun off the little-avatars, transient humanity and monsters in far-flung places. He disbursed what Turner bade him send out: capability, understanding, incentive. He followed up what Crow had laid out, communicating with and through piles of mail and email. The nation-building powers of gods encompassed their ability to guide events and raise administrations, more than just crowning kings. Heavenly mandate was very, very numinous sometimes. And yet, prosaic paperwork was still filed. Instructions to instructions to instructions.
Priesthood to Sutta had been impressive in that way, and might be again. Most religions had their words-of-their-lord and more sutras than you could chant in a reasonable span of time. Few of them had their individual priests the power to get others' act together at supernatural levels ab initio. Out of context weapons had type advantage, but the Turner of Wheels had ground them down through the vagaries of fate and cruelties of the undefended. They used different touches to shape society, but each recognized when it was cost-effectiveness to make the other do it. Good enough alliance: the presence of Turner of Wheels coiled and curled, the temple-dweller's attention towards its visitor. Sutta accepted its kissy noises without complaint but sighed when it went to headpats. Well, not the worst working environment.
-
Time passed. The gap between Jackal's Asiatic Intro and Wolf's Occidental Intro would be spent formalizing certain things. Translational efforts from the initial team had readied for expansion into other markets: China, Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and so on. Mongolia was catching up with Sri Lanka and Singapore. Several Southeast Asian countries would be on it. The Russian market was complicated already... Sutta bothered to show up for the planning meetings directly, but almost everything else he split off proxies and used clone techniques to excess. Even a god's multitasking capacity preferred to focus, sometimes. 'Few' did not mean 'none', in many cases and many senses. Exceptions happened, funny ideas happened, it was a whole mess of montage sequences.
The days ticked on as Occidental Intro approached. Vague plans survived the turning of wheels and delegations of an email job. Crow would probably run Turtle Giant Intro in the Americas, then Alligator the Black Land Intro in an as-of-yet-to-be-decided intro (possibly some form of worldwide contest, or maybe just wherever hadn't yet had a good chance centered around Africa or somewhere in the Middle East). After that, it'd be a lot of smaller regional things as various releases played out and adjusted norms proliferated. Ritually channeling divine power was more of an art than a science when you were doing this much unprecedented magic to reality.
Sutta's relationship with his priests would probably be impersonally personal. One consulted the accumulated teachings as an advisor or superior, who contemplated their work but let one's own direction advance. The dao that can be spoken is not the true dao, but nevertheless the tools accumulate. One begins to see why so many took the bodhisattva path to flee the Turner of Wheels, this was hard to do well and easy to do worse. Not that the Turner of Wheels particularly minded making things worse, honestly.
The way things were shaping up, most of the supernatural cartoon card game things concentrated together. Certain settlements and factions of interest would have designated priests of Sutta, and some free-roaming cardmakers. They'd help proliferate the common transformations: animals, humanly plausible traits, the generic versions of supernatural beings. Gear for versatility, to handle the basics all those RPG-style worlds had. A few more bits and pieces to fit genre archetypes, and...go. The gods established their schemes, the new norm was entering.
Perhaps a different voice would play out Sutta's aims.