Complaining imps

It was obviously not all magic or miracles all the way down. The imps wished everyone knew it better. When you pray for a God for a thousand years, and when they come down to ask for a boon, and you cannot ask for immortality, why is it that no one wondered where that rule arose from? There was no curiosity from anyone on how the Universe implemented the boons, or Godly powers etcetera. How was it that Agni dev had only fire powers and nothing else. What if he tried doing something with water, that no one wondered. Or why is it that whenever Demons asked for watertight almost-immortal boons, the granter always worded the grant-wish a particular way so as to leave an opening for later. No one cared who came up with those wordings, who researched their way through the loopholes, and made sure the celestial Universe ran as it was supposed to.

Take those vats made of gold in the palace of heaven that oozed out clouds constantly. There had never, ever been a single celestial being who had wondered where all that cloud came from. They truly believe it was all 'magic', and anything they, or someone wished would just happen, by itself, without someone making sure things were good to go behind the scenes. If only the gods showed the tiniest flick of interest in the machinations of those cloudmachines. Oh the horrors! No, the Gods seemed to have little curiosity about the world, all the wanted was it to work just like that, and would get mad when it failed to do so. There were a few Gods who were legitimately interested in the workings of the Universe and experimenting with new forms of mystical powers, but their interest was also curiously circumferential. They did not seem to care about the fundamental blocks and their workings at all, but only higher levels of abstractions. And how they could leverage those interactions to create new weapons, defense mechanisms, elixirs of life, etcetera. There curiosity was not really about understanding the world around them, it was about leveraging it. So when sometimes things broke, as they invariably do, they would often abandon the entire thread of research rather than dig deep to understand what was happening at a more fundamental level. They considered themselves above the fundamentals, the imps assumed.

Of course when something broke, they were the ones to face the ire of the Gods. They would come in, impatient and angry, not eager to wait for their turn, and then go on longwinded stories about their conquests and greatness. Only towards the end would they come to the point, which would almost invariably be something simple that they could have fixed themselves, or figured it out, if only they had bothered understanding of the workings. If your bolt is too hot and keeps glowing, it would be logical to think, the imps considered, that perhaps it was overused at needed to be given some rest. The gods thought it to be ridiculous that inanimate objects such as their celestial weapons needed rest and being taken care of like mortal weapons. It wasn't that the gods never used the mortal weapons that needed maintenance and regular checking -- they did, but they just had a different level of expectation from celestial objects. The imps had learned from thousands of years of experience that the best way to approach was to show complete servility and subservience, and assure them that everything was fine, and would be fixed immediately, and hand the object of concern to someone else, while listening to the patron's tall tales. They were so repetitive and predictable, the imps found it quite annoying, but there was no escape.