Ready or Not

Epilogue

Kurma knew that it was the bringer of change, luck, healing, and protection. And like any tortoise that is worth its salt, was steadfast and patient. Kurma has watched and carefully guided the two souls, a woman and a man, that should be together. However, free will of humans being what it was, the two stubbornly ignored Kurma's divine match-making efforts. The wise tortoise couldn't tell you why it chose this specific woman and this specific man to be together. However, what it would tell you is, "It just felt right. The thought of these two people being together made me feel good." And for someone who was once responsible for holding up the world on its' back for a time and churned the worlds ocean to give rise to many precious and important things, the tortoise knew that if something made it feel good, it needed to exist in the world. So, even before the birth of the man and his sweet Buttercup, Kurma had chosen the two to be together.

The ancient tortoise devoted every spare minute it had to arranging certain circumstances just so that the two lovers would take another step closer to each other. Finally, after years and years of orchestrating these two to meet, Kurma finally nudged and coaxed the two together to the same city and the same school, at the same time. For a while, this almost didn't happen. The woman was hell bent on going her own way into a career path that was going to bring her farther away from her protector, healer, and lover. So, the old tortoise decided to do something that it had never done before. It had decided to intervene directly and implanted the idea in the woman's mind about choosing a career that would help the masses, instead of one individual at a time.

This was the first time the tortoise god directly intervened in joining of these two souls. Well, that's not entirely true. Around the same time the tortoise directly influenced the woman's future by planting an idea, it had also done something quite similar with the man. The stubborn boy was also hell bent on going into work that his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather did. However, if he had chosen the path of his elders, his path would have never crossed hers, which meant that the two would never meet and the world would lose out on the love and happiness that these two would generate together. So, the shrewd tortoise helped the man see his work/passion from a slightly different angle. When he came to his new decision, Kurma told itself, "That's it. No more interfering directly." Kurma didn't want to force the two together, as if they were destined to be a pair. No, Kurma didn't want fates to be involved in this arrangement at all. What Kurma wanted to do was to give a little prod here and a little nudge there, to coax the pair to come together on their own.

After years and years of waiting, the two souls were finally in the same place at the same time, but day after day, nothing would happen. The steadfast and patient tortoise found itself becoming slightly vexed at the lack of progression in these two people meeting and falling in love. So, the wise old tortoise god decided that it would literally and figuratively intervene in the meeting of these two aggressively clueless humans. And in Kurma's final attempt at influencing the two people to meet, the tortoise manifested itself on that bike path as a drastically smaller version of itself and started to cross the road as quickly as its' tiny legs would carry him, thinking, "Ready or not, you are going to meet your mate, today!"