"Hello, hello, one and all! I'm your host for this program—me, the god Lunga."
"And I am his co-host. The goddess Aithel, if it please thee."
"This one here's an ancient-loli granny, so do be kind to her, folks."
"Granny? Granny, he says! Why, I've not yet seen a thousand years, you cheeky whelp."
"Well—fair enough. Comparatively young."
"Hee hee. Young."
Me, Lunga—I'm a god who's lived a fair few ages. Graduated from the beginner-god ranks long ago.
Aithel is the goddess who governs love and space-time. To put it in terms you'd appreciate, she was a peerless beauty of a girl.
So then. Let's go ahead and create a world.
Time to start developing a planet.
The base model is the world of Earth.
The end goal is the flourishing of humankind—but with one difference.
Namely, I'm making it a world of swords-and-sorcery adventure.
A fantasy world, in a word. That's what I want to build.
"First, let's think of a name. We'll take a spin on 'Earth' and call it Eishir."
"Eishir, is it? Passable, I suppose."
"You don't mind?"
"'Tis your world, so of course not."
"Then Eishir it is."
I fashion space and create a star.
A planet. For the moons, something suitably fantastical: one great yellow moon, one small red one.
And of course a fixed star—a sun—in a position modeled on Earth's.
"I rented the galaxy and the surrounding space, so I'm borrowing that part—but the planetary system's homemade."
"Hmm. Quite the craftsman, aren't you."
"Nah—if you're going to make a world, this is about the size of it."
"Aye, I suppose so."
The planet Eishir, still barren, hangs before us.
There was a process to getting even this far, of course.
Countless motes of dust and gas and sand spiral together under gravity.
At the center, a sun forms.
The dust and gas whirling around it gather too, becoming asteroids, which gather further still to shape a planet.
After colliding again and again, it became an Earth-sized ball of rock: the planet Eishir.
For now it was still molten, a searing sludge of lava, wrapped in gases—nitrogen chief among them.
Over long ages, it too cooled and hardened.
The cooling gases held a great deal of water, and it rained, and rained.
In time that rain formed the seas.
The low places in the lumpy, lava-cast terrain sank beneath the water; the rest became land.
Crustal movements came, too.
Volcano after volcano erupted, the land spread, and continents took shape.
The sea, once hot enough to boil, cooled until Eishir became a planet within the habitable zone—the temperature band where life can arise.
"Well, this is about as good as it gets at first."
"'Tis a dead planet still, with not a single living thing upon it."
"Guess so. Though—come to think of it, nobody really calls Mars or Venus 'dead planets,' do they."
"Is that so. Hmm. A planet of nothing, then, one might say."
"Something like that."
The land, the sea, the atmosphere—the basics were already complete.
But there's one fundamental difference from present-day Earth.
There's no oxygen.
Nitrogen made up most of it, with carbon dioxide besides.
The sea, warmed by the sun's heat, evaporates and forms clouds.
The clouds become rain in due course, and fresh water runs across the land.
Some of that water comes into contact with lava.
And hydrothermal vents formed on the seafloor as well.
"Oi, look at that—we've got protists!"
"Ooh, marvelous. So this is the first living thing."
The protists gradually evolved and became bacteria.
"Bacteria! Bacteria! Bacteria!"
"Hee hee. Lunga, are you truly that thrilled?"
"You bet. We've graduated from dead-planet status."
So then. What to do next.
"I want to keep things moving, but..."
"What's the matter?"
"Time's stopped advancing."
"Ahh—with the birth of life, it's switched to real-time mode, hasn't it."
"Right you are."
Now we'd have to wait hundreds of millions of years.
"Which is where this comes in—the Hundred-Million-Year Button. Skips a hundred million years of evolution in one press. Cost me a thousand gold."
"A paid item, is it. Hmph."
"So, without further ado. Click-click. Click, click, click-click."
I keep pushing time forward.
A hundred million years, two hundred million, three hundred million...
"The bacteria are spreading across the whole world!"
"The Great Age of Bacteria, 'tis."
That said, they're creatures under a millimeter across, so you can't really see them to begin with.
A pond where bacteria have bred might turn green, or red—that sort of thing.
"Well? Bacteria—amazing, aren't they?"
"Passable, I suppose. Hurry up and bring me some humans."
"Now, now. All in good time."
"Is that so, is that so."
"Anyhow, that's enough. Let's call it a day."
"Hmm. The rest tomorrow, then."
The two of them set the world aside, ate their dinner, and went to sleep.
To be continued.