Jaguars like to swim, but an eternity spent treading water was making even Tezcatlipoca weary. The deity's imprisonment also left him plenty of time to think about topics he'd far rather forget. Such as the way he'd become trapped in this world so completely devoid of all potential worshipers.
My old buddy Q was involved in that chicanery, Tez thought, and not for the first time. Despite his efforts to ignore old memories, the betrayal still stung.
He's just jealous, the god thought to himself. I've always been the more enticing deity. No wonder poor old Quetzalcoatl felt threatened by my awesomeness.
And yet, two millennia after being trapped in this empty world, Tez knew that he would no longer win out over his brother god in a beauty pageant. No, Tez's charisma had drained away over time, falling like a rock to the bottom of this new world's endless sea until he could barely remember being dropped two-legged into the salt water.
Yes, he could barely remember ceremonial robes and feathers buoying him up. He could barely remember being a feared and prayed-to god. Slowly but surely, bit by bit, every hint of the trapped deity's powers had faded into the oblivion of darkness until even the memories of his power were disintegrating.
It hadn't taken long for Tezcatlipoca to regress into his core essence—a jaguar with one obsidian foot. Make that a lonely, grumpy, wet jaguar, who continued to tread water even though he knew that no rescue was eminent.
So when the first voice emerged out of thin air and drifted into his mind, Tez could almost feel his powers expanding. They're praying to me at last! Somehow, a lowly human being had made his way into Tezcatlipoca's domain and was speaking to his god, albeit in a language completely foreign to the jaguar deity's experience.
But when Tez continued to lack the power necessary to shift forms, he was forced to admit that the voice didn't have anything to do with him after all. Still, it was intriguing to have someone to listen to within his watery domain. So the jaguar god focused all of his prodigious brain power on deciphering the code of this strange tongue.
By the time the air was filled with what Tezcatlipoca now knew were radio and television waves—and, more recently, with cell phone signals—Tez had become fluent in English and had settled into a daily routine. In the morning, the god took in the news, catching up on the happenings around the world and doing his best to exercise his brain. Later, he drifted on a wave of day-time soap operas and afternoon cartoons, then he whiled away the rest of his hours with late-night TV.
I've become a couch potato, Tez thought, amused by his own modernity. And that was the day when the signals began to subtly shift.
At first, the god thought the new voices were simply another form of long-distance communication used by the humans so near his world and yet so far away. But the speech didn't seem to tell any story at all. Instead, the experience resembled the way Tez used to feel when eavesdropping into the thoughts of other gods' followers.
Then, as now, the humans' words didn't increase Tezcatlipoca's power the way prayers of his own worshipers did. And yet, the words seemed real. Not canned entertainment, but living humans walking around somewhere up above his world's darkened sky.
"...room together next summer," one human was saying. "And he told me that.... Oh!"
"What is it?" The other voice seemed bored at first, but then delight filled the male human's tone as he spoke again. "Whoa! Professor!"
Soon a medley of voices, male and female, young and not-so-very-young, rose up, bouncing around within Tez's watery cavern. For the first time in thousands of years, Tezcatlipoca could see! And what he saw was walls encircling his watery abode, a vista that wasn't a world at all but a prison.
Even though the view should have made Tez's hopes sink into his heels, it instead filled him with exultation. Because if his cell came complete with walls, then that meant there was something outside those walls. The god of hurricanes, temptation, and discord should have no problem breaking out into that external world.
And when I do, Quetzlcoatl...and everyone else...will feel my wrath. They'll be sorry they ever tried to capture the Enemy of Both Sides...