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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.
"Sounds more active than mine, then. He only directly answers prayers through manipulation of natural phenomena, and he hasn't had a prophet in well over a thousand years.
I am going to assume that you and I are using different definitions of angel."
I am going to assume that you and I are using different definitions of angel."
"You look like someone who wants to look like an angel. Real angels don't walk around with their wings out all the time."
jovahs_heiress
"...As opposed to what? I can't imagine it would be comfortable to put them under a cloak or something."
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."
"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."
"...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?"
"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."
"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."
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."
"She gave me this thing," Anna says, gesturing to her drink. "Which I haven't tried yet. I should do that." sip
"Very delicious blue fruit punch," Anna commented. "Odd, I usually don't like fruit punch very much." sip "You do good work, bar."
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."
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."
"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?"
"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."
...My kind of angel don't biologically reproduce with each other, it occurs to me that that might be non-obvious."