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]

"Oh. We don't have anything quite like that."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"You don't seem to, no."

[jovahs_heiress]

"You believe you could tell even if mine worked completely differently from yours?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I think I would probably feel something from you, even if I had no idea what it meant. I could be mistaken, but since you don't believe you have such a thing either," shrug "it seems simplest to believe I don't perceive anything because there's nothing there. In that case, anyway. Honestly--to my senses you don't seem to be different from a human at all. Aside from the obvious biological differences, of course."

[jovahs_heiress]

Isabella waggles a wing. "They are generally considered sufficiently obvious to make identification trivial."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Right. But I'm not sensing anything from you on the metaphysical level aside from a bogstandard human soul."

[jovahs_heiress]

"The metaphysical specialness of angels is often exaggerated at home, but anyone can tell it doesn't do very much if it exists at all."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"...My God isn't cut off from this place when I have the door open. It...is my strong impression, via I-am-a-living-conduit-of-his-will, that he wouldn't...interact with you, without your consent. If looking at your world isn't possible due to entirely reasonable practical concerns, could He get a look at you?"

[jovahs_heiress]

"Has he not already, when you opened the door?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Mm, there's a difference between observing you as you exist and trying to derive things from that...to be blunt, yes, but he won't do anything with it unless you say yes. Basically I'm asking permission to try to figure things out about your world from you."

[jovahs_heiress]

"I don't mind that, assuming that's all you do. No reading my mind."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

A slight--humming is the wrong word, but everything else is more wrong--fills the bar. For a moment, it seems completely ridiculous to mistake Heylel for a human, although what she would be instead is...non-obvious.
And then it is over, and she is merely a tall woman.
"Well," she says. "I know what's going wrong with your kids, anyway. Not that I'm sure how to explain it to someone who probably doesn't have a grasp on Mendelian inheritance. Um...angels have a thing in their bloodlines, and mortals don't, and if you're an angel you can pass on the thing to your kids or not, and a Lucifer has the thing from both parents, and that's too much."

[jovahs_heiress]

"That makes sense. Although once two angels were given dispensation to marry. They had mostly angel children, all healthy, and one mortal."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"If someone with a Lucifer's blood were somehow rendered healthy without changing their blood, and they grew up and had children with a mortal, they would have naturally healthy children all of whom were angels," she adds. "Not that that's particularly relevant, but just as an addendum on how that sort of thing works. I suppose in the instance you refer too...if I had to guess, there would be something about the angel woman's body that would make her miscarry a lucifer before it was old enough for the pregnancy to be noticed."

[jovahs_heiress]

"I wouldn't know. It was generations ago. But that seems like a reasonable guess."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"And...I think I have an idea of why your world has some of the terms it does. It looks like the people who first came to your world were the descendants of people who had lived on an Earth much like ours, and much of your culture based on our mythologies. 'Lucifer' as 'bad angel'...makes sense in that context."

[jovahs_heiress]

"There is a folktale about the origin of the word, but it's unclear how true it may be."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Well, that's what I'm getting. Oh, and interestingly enough, your kind of angel doesn't seem to be a different species from humanity, as our world's scientists would reckon it."

[jovahs_heiress]

Isabella shrugs. "How do you reckon it?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"They use, oh, interfertility and such. You literally cannot maintain a population of only angels and no humans naturally. A species is...a population that freely and fertilely interbreeds, I think. At least the most recent time it was defined, scientists sometimes redefine things."

[jovahs_heiress]

"Then yes, of course under that definition we qualify - except that you can maintain a population of all mortals and no angels perfectly well, but perhaps that doesn't matter?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"No, that part was just for emphasis, not part of the definition. You could maintain populations of only people who had brown eyes or blue eyes perfectly well but that doesn't make them separate species."

[jovahs_heiress]

"I see."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Still, that answers a lot of my questions. And it looks like the bloodwork was directly done by other humans, which would explain why the design is imperfect like that."

[jovahs_heiress]

"...Excuse me?"