An Angel Or Something Like It

[maggie_of_the_owls]

It's with a small sigh of relief that Anna leaves the house. She loves her mother, really she does, but she can get so overprotective sometimes.
...This is not the front yard of her childhood home. Nor any kind of outdoors. Instead, it seems to be some kind of bar, although one with no television displaying a sport over the bar. Nor a bartender. And is that window over there displaying exploding stars? Ooookay. Giant high-def television playing exploding stars rather than sports. Or, more likely, some kind of prank by one of her mother's siblings.
"Uncle James? Aunt Ariel?" she calls. "Come on, I've had a rough day. Now is really not the time."
Silence.
Well, it's a bar. Maybe she's meant to go up to the bar.
She goes up to the bar. There don't seem to be any bottles behind it.
Probably not James or Ariel, then. They'd make a bar that looked more like an actual bar, if they were doing something like this.
"...Hello?" she calls again.

Comments

[jovahs_heiress]

"...As opposed to what? I can't imagine it would be comfortable to put them under a cloak or something."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"My kind of angels aren't inherently corporeal. They can dematerialize their wings at will."

[jovahs_heiress]

"I wouldn't want to do that any more than I'd care to be rid of my arms. They're attached. I've had my wings my whole life."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Like I said, they're not inherently corporeal. They haven't had their any body part their whole lives. Remember how I said dead humans go to Heaven? Angels are from there."

[jovahs_heiress]

"Even if I could become - incorporeal - at will, I would expect to want to do it all at once. But then I'm accustomed to corporeality and may be missing something."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"...Angels are older than the human race. What form they take on, when they do, is largely arbitrary. You and I, we have the head, torso, limbs model hard-coded into our identities. They don't. They look like humans because it's convenient, not because they have some particular attachment."

[jovahs_heiress]

"Then why bother with wings at all? Why not just - expand incorporeally towards wherever they wish to be and then contract into a convenient form there?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I'm not completely sure I understand you're question, but an angel's noncorporeal form isn't mist or just not being there, it's way too much energy for the landscape to handle."

[jovahs_heiress]

"I don't understand, but perhaps it's not readily described. ...So why are we here?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Because of the arbitrary whims of that door over there, apparently. Unless you meant that more philosophically."

[jovahs_heiress]

"No, I meant here in this room with this bar."

I do not control the door and cannot contact whoever does. If you go out and let it close, the door you were originally expecting will resume normal operation; in the meantime, your first drink is free.

"I see."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"She gave me this thing," Anna says, gesturing to her drink. "Which I haven't tried yet. I should do that." sip

[jovahs_heiress]

It's delicious and sweet. "What is it?" the angel asks.

It's blue fruit punch.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Very delicious blue fruit punch," Anna commented. "Odd, I usually don't like fruit punch very much." sip "You do good work, bar."

[alicornucopia]

Thank you ever so.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"So what's it like, being your kind of angel? I imagine it must be very similar to being human."

[jovahs_heiress]

"Well, there are differences - even besides the appendages - but compared to being a hazardous field of energy I suppose it's a lot like being a human indeed. We live in angel holds, we sing a lot, the leader of our country is always an angel - co-ruling with a mortal spouse, though."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"...So their kids are hybrids or something? Is interbreeding common?"

[jovahs_heiress]

"Oh, all angels - with a very, very tiny handful of exceptions, long ago - have one angel and one mortal parent. If two angels try to have children the results are horribly deformed. Sometimes even angels' children are mortal, though."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"That's odd. When my kind of angel has kids with a human it has strange effects on the child. Not bad effects, necessarily, but it was starting to cause problems so it was forbidden."

[jovahs_heiress]

"It's forbidden absent special dispensation for two angels to try, on my world. What happens when yours - hybridize?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"This all happened millenia ago, and I haven't really asked about it in a while, but they sometimes ended up with mild angelic powers paired with, mm, mental health issues. Most of them were okay, I think, but it was apparently Really Not Fun to be one of the unlucky ones and Not Entirely Safe to be in their vicinity.
...My kind of angel don't biologically reproduce with each other, it occurs to me that that might be non-obvious."

[jovahs_heiress]

"It wasn't. What do they do instead?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Well, they don't die, so they don't really need to make more of them, but if for some reason God decides there should be more angels he makes them. It's also theoretically possible for a human to become an angel, but I think that's happened a grand total of three times in human history, and one of them was one of the 'hybrids'--an unlucky one, who had enough self-possession to make sure she didn't hurt anyone but herself. Most of the unlucky ones would have been really really inconvenient to give full angelic powers, but she could be helped. The other two were just really devout mortals."

[jovahs_heiress]

"How odd. ...Our sort of angels do die, not even later than mortals. Calling them 'mortals' is just convention."