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

[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."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I had guessed that, seeing as how you're all inherently biological and stuff. Why do you call them mortals, anyway?"

[jovahs_heiress]

"I'm not sure. It's just what they're called, misnomer though it is."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"That's strange. I wonder if your world does have my kind of angel in it...or the idea of my kind of angel anyway, and your kind of angel got lumped in with them? Only no, you said your God talks a lot more freely...you know what, I just left my mom's house, I bet she could shed a lot more light on this situation than I could. Bar, is it feasible for me to fetch my mother?"

[alicornucopia]

If she can be contacted while you hold the door, and reach the door before you tire of holding it or fail to continue doing so, yes.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I was just leaving her house, so that shouldn't be a problem."
She gets up from the bar and opens the door. "Mom!"
"What is it? Did you forget something?" pause. "What is that?"
"It's a bar that claims to traverse dimensions--and I mean like actual sci-fi alternate universes. Come see!"
Anna steps away from the door, and a tall blonde woman walks in.
"...How odd," she says, and visibly flinches when Anna lets the door close.

[jovahs_heiress]

"Hello. I'm Isabella," says Isabella.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Hello," she says, recovering from whatever it was that happened when the door closed. "I'm...well, I usually go by Victoria amongst mortals, but since you're obviously from one of the other universes my daughter mentioned, I might as well tell you my name is Heylel."

[jovahs_heiress]

"Why do you usually go by a different name?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I told her the basics of how angels work," Anna interjects.
"Well, I'm guessing from that statement she told you I am one...several of my siblings' names, like Michael or Gabriel or Ariel, made it into the common usage as a name amongst humans, but mine didn't. And...I made mistakes, when I was younger, that...got into Scripture. But my amends didn't. So avoiding incidental notoriety is a bonus, although most people are more likely to recognize the Latin translation of my name."

[jovahs_heiress]

"I confess the way your sort of angels works seems... excessively complicated," remarks Isabella. "Particularly if abridged versions of your life stories qualify as scripture."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Less that our life stories qualify as Scripture, and more that they intersect with it. We are side characters, not protagonists."