After hours of calculation, he had rubbed the fabric of reality between his fingers and thumb till it wore thin and in that space he easily tore open a temporary portal in the doorway of his sanctuary.
Now, beneath a strange, daylight moon, he sat on a large, flat, pre-Paleolithic rock at the epicenter of a primeval rainforest that just barely existed outside of time. Flanked on all sides by trees wider than roads whose foliage grazed the overcast sky he calmed his glory and closed his eyes.
Fat, silvery dew drops hung in the air like stars caught in cosmic spider webs. The black earth beneath the rock pulsed and the ancient, ageless trees breathed in. Jakuta exhaled slowly and let them know him, controlling his urgency.
It was unfortunate that he had more questions than time.
It hadn't taken him up to 24 hours to realize what his biggest problem was going to be since his unscheduled arrival at Ikole Aiye.
It was not the environment or the bad food which he'd taken care of with a simple summons.
Not the fact that he couldn't leave. That was no 3 on the list of big problems.
Not the incomprehensible creature that had brought him there and then had the singular audacity to abandon him to his own devices for the whole day.
That one was number 2.
His number 1 problem - far away from the pleasures of his palace, the arms of goddesses, the festive hunts and the endless celebration of the daily Bata drum bacchanals -
...was boredom.
Boredom was something else he'd forgotten... especially how much he hated it. In fact, it was probably fair to say that half the legendary troubles and exploits he'd earned as a young and impossibly sought after Prince of the Oyo empire were almost entirely gathered as a result of one bid or another to escape the stifling grasp of boredom.
As a mortal he could raze Empires and lower Deities but as an Orisa, he was entirely defeated by the phenomenon of having nothing to do and no way to distract himself.
And he had really tried. In less than 48 hours he'd renovated the building he was in, created and mobilized a hospitality staff, updated and reorganized his entire cult of worship, judged and meted justice on a few in house cases, generated funds from a classified treasury that had existed since the 1800s and incorporated a holding firm that was already well on it's way to opening up an impressive investment portfolio in his name.
He'd even shopped and populated the new temperature controlled, cedar wood small Luxury Store of a walk-in closet he'd built into his new chambers. He did it all from said chambers because he'd already discovered to his chagrin that if he ventured past a certain distance from the place he'd appeared in Ikole Aiye, one more step just brought him right back to that awful cell that the creature had called her bedroom.
The insult of it all was almost unbearable and it was sheer stubbornness that kept him from crying out for help. That and his annoying sense of keeping things fair.
It niggled at him that as scrawny and clearly powerless as the creature was, she was at least strong enough to summon him like a common djinn or daemon and hold him fast. The niggle was only amplified by his boredom.
He had nothing to do except wonder how she did it and that was why he'd waited for her in the living room after the builders and his staff left the flat.
When she finally slunk out of her room, hunched and swathed in aggravating dreary colors - more wraith than person - he found himself doubting again. There was no way she could have done this on her own. A mistake. A - what was that nice term from their binary processing systems... a glitch.
When they spoke, her voice was low and tired but her eyes - minus the heavy looking and unflattering glasses she'd been wearing when they first met - were insolent, staring straight at him and once or twice at his person. Also, even in that state, she still continued to answer him back.
Saucily.
It had thrown him off his initial objective of figuring her out. Instead he'd found himself Inclined to set up boundaries and underline her place within them for her.
He just couldn't remember the last time he'd encountered her level of simple audacity - he'd already explained to her who he was which was demeaning enough for him - he was failing to wrap his mind around how she could still stand before him and act like they were mates? He genuinely wondered if she was quite alright in the head.
But...despite everything- the strangest thing about it all was just how angry he WASN'T at all the disrespect.