The wooden stairs groaned as Natalia set her weight on them, the dragoness's powerful legs carrying her large frame down into the basement. At the bottom, she flipped a switch and brought light into the world. Yawning, she shuffled over to her work desk, where a Petri dish awaited observation under her microscope's lens. Ignoring the groans as her office chair received her body, she took a sip from her coffee mug before setting it aside and grabbing her notebook and pen. “Okay,” she exhaled. “Let's see what you have to show me today.”Her slitted pupil peering right into the eyepiece, she carefully adjusted the sample's elevation until it came into focus and she saw a familiar conglomeration of shacks and fields. What was she seeing? In short, a village—a microscopic one, built and populated by a species of largely-hairless, bipedal creatures so primitive they hadn't even invented metallurgy yet. “Humans,” she'd heard others call them.
These humans were going about their day as they normally did—or at least, as they'd done over the past few days. When she'd first brought them over a week ago, they would all hide in their huts whenever she looked at their habitat, but of late they'd grown used to her presence and their lives had fallen back into what she could only assume were their usual routines. After jotting down her observations in the notebook, Natalia moved the stage until the next village came into view. Again she made her observations and wrote them down before moving on to the next one.
As yet there was nothing of interest, and especially nothing to do with the object of her investigation: the funeral rites of primitive societies. Of course, she had known from the first that such an investigation would probably take years of careful observation to properly carry out, but she was still disappointed that no one have died yet. Not for the first time, the thought of taking matters into her own hands crossed her mind, but she dismissed it for the same reasons she always did:With how small the humans were, doing so risked the destruction of the entire village, in which case there would be no one left to hold the funeral. It risked a total annihilation of the victim in question, in which case there would be no body to hold a funeral with. Most importantly, her intervention could cause them to adopt different rites.
No, she would have to wait for death to take its natural course. Fortunately, there was one village where she expected to see some deaths soon. Beset by a famine brought on by a drought, they had no food to speak of and all looked deathly thin and weak. Speaking of which, that was the next village on her list.
She brought that village into view and looked on, hoping to see some signs of death. There were none, but she did see something unexpected. Instead of sitting around lethargically, the humans were all standing around and waving their arms up at the sky—up at her. They were gathered around a structure which she was sure hadn't been there yesterday.
Switching to an objective with stronger magnification, Natalia brought the image into focus and saw that the new structure was a big statue. She had to spend some time staring at it to figure out what it was a statue of, but in the end she concluded that it must have been a statue of... her.
Of course, it was a bit off. Her head didn't have quite those angles, and her hips weren't nearly as wide as they were portrayed in the statue, nor her breasts as large, but still, she doubted there was anything else it could be.
This was... It was... What could she say about it? It was obviously supposed to be flattering; presumably an attempt at offering worship to her as a “goddess,” born out of their desperation as their food ran out. A call for her divine intervention. Indeed, after a while, she saw all the humans fall to their knees, their hands clasped at their chests, looking up at the sky—at her lens. They were literally begging for her help.
Natalia bit her lip. She wasn't normally one to get sentimental over other people's suffering, but she couldn't help but feel pity for these primitive beings. She considered dropping a breadcrumb for them to eat, but shooed that thought away. Doing that would ruin this sample forever. Her interference would doubtless cause monumental changes in every village, causing them all to take her as a new Goddess. Worship of her would replace their native religions, and then who knew what effect that would have on her funeral rites. No, she had to preserve the purity of the sample, and doing so meant she had to establish, here and now, that she wouldn't interfere in the human's affairs.
Still, it took her some effort to turn the knob which made the pleading villagers slide out of view.
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Come the following day, the villagers had once again fallen back into lethargy, waiting around for death to take them. The only changed in their moods came as Suli passed by. All shot her hostile glares as she walked out of the village.
The girl had committed the worst of sins: giving them false hope with her promises that the dragoness would help them out if they only built a statue for her to see. So certain had she been about her idea that everyone had gotten swept up in her enthusiasm and all had worked together to get the statue finished in under a day. Now, their illusions shattered, they wanted nothing to do with her.
But Suli didn't blame them, nor had she lost hope—she knew, from the look on the dragoness's face yesterday that their plea had had an effect on her, and though she seemed conflicted, it was only a matter of time before she decided to help them. Who knew, it might even happen today.
Suli sat at the edge of the village, where she would have a good vantage point to look at the massive dragoness when she came to see them.
When Natalia went down to her basement that day, she came bearing a slice of bread and a glass of water. Sitting at her desk, she grabbed a pair of tweezers and used them to grab a tiny breadcrumb, barely any bigger than a speck of dust. This she carefully let fall just outside the village. Then, using a micropipette, she took a tiny drop of water and let it fall on the opposite end of the village, where all their fields were.
Natalia sighed in relief as she saw the water stop flowing just before it reached the village. Had she let it fall any closer, it might well have leveled their huts and washed all the people away.
Looking through the microscope, she saw the village rejoicing, with everyone gathered around the breadcrumb. Only a lone little girl paid her any attention, waving at her with a big smile on her face. After a while, some villagers approached the girl. She directed them up at her and they made signs of thanks. Natalia watched them for a minute before moving the view away. She had to know how the other villages would react to her intervention. Who knew; maybe not all of them would start worshipping her.
But before that, she lingered a while on the statue of her. In days to come it would no doubt become the center of a whole new range of religious ceremonies as they villagers made her into their new goddess. Of course, that was all superstitious nonsense, but... hadn't she taken on the role of goddess today?