The 23 Days Cult: Discussion

If you haven't read The 23 Days Cult yet, you might want to do that before reading further.

A few notes on specific parts of the story:

• The narrator voice uses gender-neutral pronouns because it's a neutral narrator that doesn't care to make any specific statement about the characters' genders. I also use those pronouns for Light's thoughts, because my version of Light thinks other things are much more important than gender. Also, zir thoughts mostly aren't in English or Japanese to begin with, so I can translate them however I want.
• I changed the wording of the first rule in the Death Note, so that it's not weird for Light to assume that it can be used multiple times.
• If Light thought there was a one-in-a-billion chance of magic being real, ze technically should have assigned a much smaller chance to this particular magic being real. I glossed over some details like this because even though I could have written thousands of words about Light analyzing whether magic was real, that isn't what I wanted the story to focus on.
• Most of the rules about lifespans are ambiguous, and never become relevant in the original story. I tried to create a system that was consistent, while being as true to the original story as possible.
• In particular, there's an obscure rule from Death Note 13: How to Read that says: “The use of the Death Note in the human world sometimes affects other humans' lives or shortens their original life span, even though their names are not actually written in the Death Note itself. In these cases, no matter the cause, the god of death sees only the original lifespan and not the shortened lifespan.” This might imply that you also can't see extended lifespans, but Rem specifically states that ze can see Misa's extended lifespan. I've chosen to ignore this rule in Light's case. I suppose I could excuse this by pointing out that the rule doesn't necessarily restrict humans who have made the eyes deal, only the Gods of Death themselves.
• Another tricky rule was “Whether the cause of the individual's death is either a suicide or accident, if the death leads to the death of more than the intended, the person will simply die of a heart attack. This is to ensure that other lives are not influenced.” There's a lot of leeway in how you interpret “leads to the death”. You could take this to apply to any case where at least one other person's life span is shortened by any amount – but of course, that's contradicted by the previous rule I mentioned. I've chosen a fairly limited interpretation of this rule, which made it never end up taking effect in my story.
• Light's list of “three main limitations” on the Death Note's control is incomplete, in that it omits the above rule. Light didn't discover this because ze never saw a reason to kill people except where the Death Note specifically required it.
• The “no referring to magical things” rule isn't explicitly written in the original story, but I included it because the characters seem to obey it anyway. For instance, when Light causes a hijacking, to fish for Raye Penber's name, ze conspicuously writes “sees a horrific phantom” instead of “sees a God of Death”.
• The original story doesn't actually say whether Gods of Death can know their own lifespans, but I decided it makes sense for them to see their own lifespans in their reflections, the same way humans who make the eyes deal can see their own names in their reflections.
• I was deliberately vague about the results of Light's experiments with laws, because giving the details would require me to actually know which laws were the best, which I don't.
• On a similar note, the story ends shortly after the cult is formed because there's no way my real-life ingenuity can match that of 23 people with magical information sources working together under the influence of magical encouragement.