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]

"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."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"No, I'm still looking over what could be extrapolated from you personally. I probably should read your holy book with--I'm not personally offended, but it's generally considered incorrect to refer to power directly from God as magic." She places one hand on the book, mostly for show, and says, "I'm still not convinced that's a good idea. Some kind of noticeable penalty, sure, but the entire planet? Surely a bunch of squabbling factions would be superior to everyone dead." She looks deeply disturbed.

[jovahs_heiress]

"How can you derive from me, without reading my mind, that the thunderbolts will fall if we do not hold a Gloria?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Because any object contains in itself an imprint of the world. You were formed by thousands of millions of billions of trillions of tiny coincidences and chances and decisions and actions and if any one of those things had been different you would not stand before me in the precise form you do today. I can tell from the shape of your skull what evolutionary pressures produced your ancientest ancestors, and I can tell from the precise tears in the keratin how you cut your hair and nails. When I look closer--at the position of microscopic dust particles on your clothes--I can tell the wind patterns that deposited them there. I do not read this information automatically from everyone because even my mind couldn't hold it all. What I did when I looked at you was that my God within me took in all that you are and gave me the information about how you became that way relevant to what I was looking for. The information is less perfectly complete than it could be because we weren't looking at anything in your brain proper, but that doesn't change the fact that it's possible to tell things like what you had for lunch when you were five by the composition of a tiny piece of the material in your leg bone."

[jovahs_heiress]

"You were not complete about the nature of this scan even after it was clear I value my privacy and I want you to stop at once."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"It only happened once, it's not an ongoing process. And 'it's possible to tell' isn't the same as 'we checked.' I have no idea what you had for lunch when you were five. I don't know anything about you at all, really, beside what you've chosen to tell me and what I can guess from what I've seen of your culture. I apologize if I misrepresented my capabilities to you. It wasn't my intention, but I sometimes forget what other people don't know or understand."

[jovahs_heiress]

"If there is ever a time to be particularly cautious about what others understand it is probably in an interdimensional bar. What did you even check to determine the bit about the Gloria, if you're determining it from what's rubbed off on my skin and the flecks of color in my eyes, what other information did you learn and not happen to find conversationally interesting?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Basic history of your world, mostly. The amount of time between when you are in your world and when we are in ours. How much of what kind of light your sun puts out. The salinity of your oceans. Most of what I got to determine the Gloria bit came from the precise location of various particles in your inner ear.
But you know what, I was a terrible choice to come talk to people in an interdimensional bar."
"I'm sorry--"
"This is not your fault, Anna. I should have realized the moment the door closed that I needed to swap out immediately for one of my siblings one of whose most defining traits isn't makes poor life choices because they didn't think things through."

[jovahs_heiress]

Isabella grits her teeth and doesn't comment, just holds her wings close to herself and looks away.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I don't know anything about you you haven't chosen to share," Heylel says quietly. "And I'm not picking anything up now. But--yes, I've massively screwed up, and if I had done so just a bit more massively it would have been an immense invasion of privacy. I'm sorry. I'll go now."

[jovahs_heiress]

"I apologize for my outburst," murmurs Isabella.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"It was entirely understandable. I'm sorry for prompting it." And she turns and walks out the door.
"...I swear I had no idea any of that would happen when I invited her in," Anna says after a stunned pause.

[jovahs_heiress]

"I believe you."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Are you okay?"

[jovahs_heiress]

"As far as I know."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"If she says she doesn't know anything about you besides what you told her then she almost certainly doesn't. If she had violated your privacy she might have dodged the issue to make you feel better but I can think of too many half-truths she might have used for it to be likely that she outright lied."

[jovahs_heiress]

"As you say. And of course if I were harmed the only responsible thing to do would be to sit here rather than dare open the door and make it worse, so."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Are you saying you're planning on camping out here forever? ...Or just until there's no one else here, I don't need space-folding bar time seriously and it would be rude to make you wait after what just happened."

[jovahs_heiress]

"Well, I was planning to stay here a while, at least, especially if the bar can accept my credit -"

I can.

"- which she can, and longer if I'm worried about letting something I shouldn't into my world."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Okay. I guess I'll probably finish my delicious blue thing and then go, I guess."