“You open the door, and it leads to a small, dark room with stone walls.”

“I umm… what do you call it? I roll for a perception check.”  A twenty-sided clear crystal dice rolls across the table, landing with the number 17 facing upward.

“Hel, you notice a gold ring on the floor in the center of the room.”

“Really, Loki?  Just like that?  A gold ring out of nowhere?”

Loki rolled his eyes at her.  “Don’t blame me.  This is a human game.  I didn’t make the rules.  Though I like the possibilities generated by the random dice rolls.”

“You mean you like being able to control the dice rolls and thus the direction of the game.” Hel glared at him, scooping up the dice. “There’s nothing random about this game with you.”

Loki chuckled.  “Fair enough.  Let us take a break and check in on these humans.”

A wave of his hand brought up a three-dimensional hologram of the planet currently labeled UCP 382 hovering above the gaming table.  The planet spun slowly, showing the observers each of the continents and oceans as it turned.   Loki moved his hand toward the display and tapped the continent known as North America.   The view zoomed in so that the continent filled the display, except for a stream of information scrolling along the right side.

“The extermination of the humans seems to be going well.  The focused attacks on the major cities has eliminated fifty-five percent of the population in this first week. The ones in charge of this continent actually did some of our work for us, detonating nuclear blasts in hopes of containing the spread of the void titans and drakes we set to spawn there.”

Hel zoomed in on the area that had once been New York City.  It was now a blasted wasteland with only some steel skeletons of broken buildings to suggest it had once been a city of millions. “We’ll need to seed some of the slimes and silicoid fungus to absorb the radiation and return these areas to habitable status.

“Already done.” Loki pointed to a section of the info feed which stopped scrolling.  “Still, it will take more than the solar year Stabilization period for the land to be viable again.  Maybe as much as two years.  There are several similar spots where their primitive nuclear power plants have malfunctioned and contaminated large tracts of land.”

“These human creatures seem to have no concern for their planet.  Short-sighted of them, really.  It’s good that we claimed their world when we did.  Another century or two and they might have destroyed it.”