"Maybe I'll adopt the spare baby."

" - will you really?"

"Yeah! Having a kid is the one big human thing I never got to do. We can watch Star Wars and go out for ice cream and I can teach her Latin and Greek and Hebrew and astrophysics--"

"We could read books to her, and sing songs, and hang her little crayon drawings in the shop, and take her to the beach and the zoo - "

"And replicate all of Piaget's experiments--"

"The developmental psychology guy? Fine. - at least the ones you can do before eleven. Which is, you know, probably most of them."

"Yeah. It's too bad we can't delay the apocalypse until she's eighteen."

"Yeah."

"...I just had an idea."

"What?"

"What if we raised the Antichrist?"

"What would - I mean, the antichrist would still end up destroying the world at the age of eleven, right, that doesn't buy us any more time - "

"No, the Antichrist is a person, right? Like, Christ was a person. He had free will, that's why He could be tempted and stuff."

"Yeah, I guess so."

"So, in theory, Christ could have given into temptation, right? Boom. No Cross, no salvation, derailment of the Divine Plan. That's why we bothered with tempting him at all."

"- yeah. But - He wasn't going to, He would never have actually made that decision, just because of who He was as a person - "

"Right. Exactly! But He wouldn't have been the person that He was if He were raised by totally random parents, right? His mother and father were saintly and they provided a good environment for him. Warmth, firmness, responsiveness, an excellent religious education--"

"God did specifically seek out pretty much the holiest parents in existence. So we could, what, try to influence the antichrist to be - not evil? And, and therefore not want to declare war against heaven and destroy the world in the process?"

"Well, if we get her to be too not evil, she'll just defect to Heaven and destroy the world the other way. But if you have an angel and a demon working together to raise a person-- maybe she won't come out good or evil after all. Maybe she'll come out true neutral."

She paces.

"I suppose that's - an improvement, strictly speaking. And - well if we were wrong and the plan happened the way it was expected to no matter what, it's not like we'd actually be any worse off for having tried, right, everything would just default to happening however it would have happened if we hadn't interfered - "

"Right. You're trying to avert the Apocalypse and save the soul of the Antichrist herself. That's a very good thing to do. I mean, that's what Christ would do, wouldn't it? He was always going around trying to save sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors."

"Trying to influence the evil to do good is in fact a core part of my job description. You could get in trouble. But I suppose if it doesn't work you're probably in trouble anyway - "

"Nope, I'm thwarting you! I found out about your plot to raise the Antichrist as your own and cunningly impersonated a human and caused you to trust me. Imagine if the Antichrist had defected to Heaven! It might have happened without my efforts. Amazing undercover work. Probably I'll get a commendation."

"I do suppose you couldn't have just left me to my - whatever the opposite of nefarious schemes are. 

"Do you think it'll work? Trying to make her come out average?"

"Uh, well, my other options involve being tortured for eternity, so."