The Oracles and the Slayer mythology are property of Joss, David and 
Fox. The text is mine.

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SOMEWHERE IN OR NEAR ANCIENT GREECE

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They had it.

The key.

What every human being had been looking for since the first caveman
hit another over the head with a big rock and declared himself
Supreme Ruler of the Known World (then a couple of valleys, but the
thought was there).

The two of them had it.

Absolute power.

Omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and quite a lot of other
words beginning with omni.

The first meant they could crush any and all gods which came their
way. The second meant they could go to the gods rather than waiting
for them to come. The third meant they knew there were never any to
crush in the first place.

Needless to say, the first thing they did was storm into the nearest
heaven and demand to see the manager. A god's just a demon with
better publicity and a larger-than-normal ego, and therefore easy to
defeat and no fun for the pair. Heaven and hell are just names for a
few spare dimensions left over from what's variously known as the
Big Bang, the Beginning, and the Prelude to the Existence of several
dozen self-appointed holy men. There's quite a lot of them, mostly
remote empty ones ideal for the first time omnipotent. After
creatively informing a few convenient all-powerful thunder gods that
maybe they weren't so powerful after all, they settled into one.

After decorating their new dimension, borrowing heavily from the
Golden Rectangle and pillars designs in favour at the time, the
newlygods (after all, they reasoned, we're a hell of a lot more
powerful than what those idiot mortals worship, and if any of those
deluded demonic bastards want to complain, what are they going to
do, bash us to death with the sacrificial altar?) decided to go and
check out the local night life.

Or lack thereof. Zeus (actually a thirty-centimetre troll demon
with a stomach ailment, whose rumbling had given him the whole
thunder god idea) had banned all the decent entertainment after the
great fiasco otherwise known as the Trojan War. So they went home,
where they built what resembled a theatre, and made it a window to
the entire history of the world, starting with the
rapidly-condensing disc of dust and gas that would become the Solar
System. Whenever it got boring, they threw peanuts at the "stage".
What, you thought all those mass extinctions were caused by
asteroids?

Just as it was getting to a really interesting bit involving the
Colossus of Rhodes, a few drunk philosophers and a bottle of spray
charcoal, one of them noticed a ritual apparently aimed at that
minor thunder "god" (who had about ten worshippers left alive) which
they had impaled on a lightning rod, who happened to go by the name
of Pahwa-da'bi. They answered the ritual at home, gratefully
accepted the gift (a dozen bottles of finest-vintage red -- nothing
that they couldn't have made themselves, but they were already
getting lazy) and asked the bloke what he wanted.

It was then that they decided to oversee the power of virtue in its
all-encompassing, everlasting battle against, well, evilness. It
wasn't that the man was any great warrior of the good, since what he
was asking for was essentially some cosmic grandfather to buy it
with his name at the top of the will. To put it another way, he owed
Aphalos of Delphi seven thousand drachma at intelligent interest
(i.e. whatever amount Aphalos thought he could get) after a bad day
at the wrestling.

They shrugged their shoulders and gave him the cash, not out of any
moral obligation -- they *did* have morals, but they were so far
removed from the average that they rarely became an issue. No, they
gave it to him because Aphalos, after a bad day at the pentagram,
happened to be possessed by a rather conservative demon.

Like all conservatives, this demon was a firm believer in the rights
of the individual to exploit utterly any and all individuals in his
or her (but usually his) power, and the easiest way for a demon to
do that was to bring about some form of Armageddon... after all,
what fun's a party if you don't have any mates there? Besides, the
demon's natural form had no obvious orifices to put a lightning rod
through. This rather annoyed our couple, so naturally they decided
to put a slow and painful end to his activities -- quite without
noticing that they had saved the life of not only the local Slayer
but no small number of whatever the Ancient Greeks called White Hats
in the process.

As the days went by, they discussed the infinity of reality and how
bloody boring it all was, answered the rituals, and eventually
realized that they rather enjoyed helping these White Hats. It
wasn't as if they had consciences to placate, but the good guys
tended to be less selfish, thereby giving better gifts, and, as a
bonus, didn't turn up smelling of goat's blood. Well, not very
often, anyway. Meanwhile, their reputation among the virtuous grew
for reliability, trustworthiness, efficiency and wisdom (read: the
ability to convey what is common knowledge or meaningless in such a
way that the average person never fully understands it, and
therefore assumes the conveyor is far more intelligent than s/he
is), and in any case the not-so-virtuous usually preferred to go to
demons, and such problems were easily... well... fixed.

So, for thousands of years, they went on, never redecorating their
dimension however bad the situation looked for the culture they
copied it off, and kept on answering the rituals. When the couple
got more bored than usual, they'd find some young demon, brainwash
it, and send it down into the world "to even the score between good
and evil". And they never changed the name, regardless of the
dominant language, reasoning that it couldn't be any worse than its
original meaning of Thundering Lunatic -- and rather liking the
resemblance to the English words "Powers That Be" (actually the name
of a small group of demonic "freedom fighters" they had never quite
managed to stamp out).

One day, the pair had a couple of Sekhar demons over for drinks and
began discussing the funniest things they had been asked for. There
were that dead American guy asking for a little bit to be taken off
the chin of some sculpture of him, and that teenage girl who
apparently wanted a temporal fold so she could get her necklace
back. They gave her a thousand dollars and a jewellery catalogue,
wondering why she'd want a necklace that boring so badly in the first
place. Honestly, high school kids. And just last week there was
that ensouled vampire (poor bastard) who got his humanity back and
asked if he could give it up. Something about not wanting his
girlfriend to worry... they spent the rest of the night arguing over
what kind of ugly bitch the girl must be. Sure, they could have
looked, but where's the fun in that?

Omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, but unfortunately not omnicompetent.

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END

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Questions? Comments? Threats of a slow and painful death?
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