...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.
...Although I certainly hope you have a Heaven, by some other name."
"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."
...My kind of angel don't biologically reproduce with each other, it occurs to me that that might be non-obvious."
"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."
"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?"
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.
"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."
"It doesn't really say anything about who we are, just 'and then Gabriel told Miriam that she was to bear a son' and 'Michael showed up and looked impressive because that was useful apparently' and 'Lucifer royally screwed up,'" she gestures to herself, "Lucifer being the Latin translation of my name."
"They are from what she's told me."
"Then why are they even a thing? It doesn't make sense. Anna had plenty of problems when she was a baby and no one said boo when I fixed them, and that's in a world where people are encouraged to take it on faith that my Father even exists.
Hmm. Bar, is there any way--a room, perhaps, that you could vouch that I couldn't get to the door from there before Isabella noticed and shut the door to her world?"
"I admit I don't know why," says Isabella. "They only happen when two angels have a child, which is quite forbidden, so it isn't as though Jovah wants them to occur."
...Excuse me." She goes back to the door, opens it for a long moment, closes it again, and returns to the bar.
"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."
"...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?"
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."
"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."
"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."
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."
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."
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."
"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.
"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."
"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."
"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?"
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."
"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."