[The cover shows Odin hanging from Yggdrasil to gain the
knowledge of runes, but it is otherwise made out to look
like an inverted Tarot card of The Fool with Ratatoskr
taking the place of the puppy.]

____________________________________________________________________________
.|, COHERENT An ASH One-Shot
--+-------------------------------------------------------------------------
'|` COMICS PRESENTS One-Shot - "Wise Guy"
copyright 2023 by Dave Van Domelen
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[July 2, 2023 - Chicago, Illinois Sector]

The end of week meeting was breaking up, and Solar Max felt a tentative
wave of relief. Things had been pretty quiet lately, just little stuff that
either the Marshals had well in hand or was "worrisome but outside our
jurisdiction" like the recent activity in Manhattan.
"Peregryn, could you 'stay behind' a few minutes?" he addressed the
magicked tablet computer on its stand in place of one of the chairs at the
ASH meeting table. "Everyone else, have a good weekend."
Much less creepy than the painting Peregryn had used for instantaneous
communication from Venus for a while, the tablet was mostly non-magical save
for a dongle plugged into one of its ports. The dongle contained elements of
the mage's physical form in the same way the painting had, but nicely sealed
away from view. He was constantly refining his means for staying in touch
despite his exile from Earth, and was learning to program so that perhaps the
next version wouldn't need any hardware modifications at all.
"Certainly, this meeting was significantly shorter than the time I had
alloted," Peregryn nodded.
Once the room was clear, Solar Max doublechecked the security filters.
"Okay, no one should be listening in on this end. Yours?"
"Clear. I presume this is a matter of some secrecy...but I don't sense
any particular urgency."
"Right. This is just about something I've been digging into during my
spare time, but it involves security clearances not a lot of people have,
even on the team. Technically, you might not have all the clearances anymore
either, but I really doubt that's going to matter a whole lot. To get to the
point...wasn't Odin supposed to be a god of wisdom? Because what he did
twenty-nine years ago next week looks pretty fucking stupid."
Peregryn snorted in amusement. "Wisdom means many things in many
cultures. It might be more accurate to say Odin is a god of Knowing, of
Kenning to use a term he might prefer. He knows a great many things that are
otherwise deep secrets or forbidden knowledge. Does that make him wise? In
many of the stories we have, he moves against Loki in full knowledge that
this will hasten Ragnarok."
"Well, yes, but we both know that most of the myths we have about any of
the gods are full of propaganda, both their own and that of their rivals.
Plus plenty of stuff that was just plain made up."
Peregryn nodded in acknowledgement. "But yes, he is generally
considered to have more foresight than most gods, for what that's worth in an
entity who exists outside of causal time flow."
"And yet, he couldn't wait a few more months to call his followers home
and stuff the Twin Trade Towers with corpses," Solar Max ran his fingers
through his hair in frustration. Helmets were for the field, not the meeting
room.
"Perhaps he felt he had made as much progress as he could, and it was
time to 'cash in his chips?'" Peregryn suggested.
Solar Max shook his head. "I know that's the accepted theory, but like
I said, I've been digging. There's a lot of missing data regarding 1998
because of all the chaos before and after July 6, but members of the Church
of the Holy Spreadsheet kept doing their jobs."
Peregryn chuckled. The sort of bland bureaucrats who had been left
behind when the rich and powerful vanished along with the poor and desperate
could be said to have worshipped their data, something that had been a bit of
a running joke at the Academy. Back then, he would've kept a straight face,
but fatherhood was mellowing him.
"And what did the Sacred Data reveal unto thee?" Peregryn quirked an
eyebrow.
"As near as the data munchers could tell, support for the Aesir was
still rising fairly noticeably, with a projected plateau not happening for
three to nine months...no, they weren't happy with that wide of a spread, but
I'm glad they had the data they could get. Plus, more broadly for all the
gods in the Godmarket, support for the traditional monotheistic faiths was
starting to crumble. A few more months of miracles...and of the threat of an
increasing supernormal population...and there might not have been enough
holdouts to rebuild society after the culling. So why didn't Odin give it at
least a couple more months? I can't find any evidence that any of his major
rivals was in a position to significantly overtake the Aesir in the next
quarter."
Peregryn pondered this, as he usually did when presented with
information he didn't already have. Then, "It does seem rash for the
All-Father, especially given how much of a show he made of the event. I've
long suspected that after he called his faithful to the slaughterhouse, he
used at least some of the power he had gained to try to block his rivals from
repeating the event, which is why there was even a slight delay between that
and the general reiving. But...what if he wasn't the first? He was the
first anyone still alive and mortal knows about, true. But there were many
powers who never gained much by the Godmarket, only winning a few converts
here and there, or maybe having the devotion of an isolated village deep in
the developing world. If one of those powers decided to abandon the
Godmarket and take their meager winnings with them, would we even know that
this one small community vanished before the rest? But Odin, upon his
Midgardian version of the all-seeing throne, would have seen it. In that
case, he would have suspected a general 'run on the bank' was in the offing,
so the wise and prudent thing to do would be..."
"Beat everyone else to the vault," Solar Max nodded. "I suppose that
makes sense, but it still seems fairly unwise."
Peregryn snorted. "Indeed, but you may be missing a much worse
violation of common sense committed by the gods."
"Oh?"
"Consider the timing of the Godmarket. They used then-modern
advertising techniques and global telecommunications to snare as many
worshippers as they could in a short time, with minimal outlay of divine
power. But there were still so many isolated communities that could only be
tempted in the old way, but individually granting visions and powers to
people. Certainly, the developed world was quite vulnerable to these
techniques even as early as the 1960s as television gained in popularity.
But what might have happened had they waited, say, fifteen years to start
things in earnest? There's every indication that mobile telephone technology
would have blanketed the world by then, with even the poorest desert or
jungle village having at least some access to the global network."
"Damn, you're right. The groundwork for the Godmarket was really laid
almost a decade earlier, with the prominent 'avatar' heroes like Set or
Stormcloud...heck, Valkyrie was one of the earliest of those, so Odin was
laying his plans out when the internet barely existed outside of universities
and a handful of hardcore nerds." Solar Max sighed. "I guess we're lucky
they didn't wait longer to start the active phase, but why did even Odin get
a start on things before the world was fully interconnected?"
Peregryn's head bobbed in a way that suggested he had shrugged.
"Remember, this was a competition. A hundred Prisoner's Dilemmas every
moment, in which the fractious gods had to bide their time and not get an
early jump on the others. We know a few were putting out feelers even in the
First Heroic Age, like Nyx, although she ultimately seems to have sat out the
main Godmarket. No matter how many gods of 'wisdom' argued for waiting, by
the mid-90s the world must have looked connected enough for the remainder,
and the most unwise thing for Odin to do in that case would have been to sit
by on the sidelines while his rasher allies and enemies dove in."
"Yeah, someone's always jumping the gun," Solar Max nodded. "Although,
now that I'm talking about this with someone else..."
"Yes?"
"Do you suppose Odin realized that waiting longer would effectively let
them devour all life on the planet in one fell swoop? And he actually
orchestrated the too-early moves precisely to save some of humanity, if only
for later?"
"That *would* seem...wise."