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]

"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?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"The original people who came to live on Samaria were humans. They created the angel gene--genes are what they call the blood thing."

[jovahs_heiress]

"It is generally understood that Jovah created angels."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"And he couldn't have done it by telling the humans to make an angel gene?"

[jovahs_heiress]

"It is not quite specific, but it is - I don't have the passage memorized. If there were a Librera -"

I can loan you a Librera.

"Oh, thank you."

Isabella flips through the provided volume. "...The language is unclear on the exact method but does not leave room to assume that Jovah performed the office indirectly through mortals."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Hm. Maybe I'm getting interference and misinterpreting things."
Heylel does not believe this one bit, but manages to keep this out of her tone.
"At any rate,even if the humans didn't create the angel gene, then they definitely had plenty of warning for the first angel babies. You were...expected is the best word I can think of."

[jovahs_heiress]

"Oh, yes, we were not intended to be a surprise."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"And--"
She makes a face.
"Who thinks it's a good idea to destroy a planet as a result of not putting on a concert?"

[jovahs_heiress]

Isabella winces delicately. "You're reading the Librera with magic or something, aren't you? The answer's in it. Our ancestors came from a place of desperate violence and watched their neighbors fail at lesser compromises with similar stakes and did not want the same to happen to their descendants. If we cannot even put on a concert, we have failed, is the idea. There are warning shots. One year one of them was invoked deliberately."