"He's not as important as Jesus Christ, but very up there. Alright, I can finish a circle and watch you negotiate."

Circle on giant paper on her floor. He offers her a pen.

She finishes the circle and stands back, her best neutral smile on her face.

"This might not work right away if she's busy," Cam warns. "I don't have to sleep, though, don't feel you need to stay up if it's hours."

"I'll consider going to sleep when it's been hours, then. In the meantime might I have a copy of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein?"

"Sure - actually, you know what, I'm curious if mine and yours are different -" Are they, the diff checking software on his computer wants to know.

There are some fairly inconsequential differences, mostly in the exact technobabble used to justify Dr. Frankenstein's reanimating abilities. The tone of the doctor's moralizing when pondering his creation leans slightly more towards worrying about what a nonhuman mind might be thinking.

Interesting! "Do you want an exotic version or the local, they're mostly the same."

"Ooh, an exotic version! I've read ours once before."

He tosses her a paperback. Reads some news while they wait for the angel.

Verona reads the Frankenstein paperback quietly. At one point she gets up and paces in another room for a bit.

The angel appears after about an hour and a half.

"Hi!" says Cam. "Please don't be racist, this is important."

"- what is important?" says the angel.

"I'm Cam, that's Verona, this is an alternate universe Earth, and an asteroid clonked into it and is causing global cooling."

"- the heck?" says the angel.

(She jumps, then schools herself. She gives a little wave and doesn't say anything.)

"Hello, Verona, I'm Chisan," says the angel, peering at her circle.

"Yes, it's very weird," says Cam. "I got your name from Sarauba?"

"Uh-huh."

"Since the situation's so irregular, I wanted to suggest that Verona send you back, and you ask around back in Heaven for anyone who wants to help fix the impact site up a bit, and I can conjure correspondence."

"...how many angels does this asteroid need?"

"It's yea big on a model of South America yea big."

"Oof."

"Climate's already in a bad way, but I'm hoping if ground zero is cleared it will stop getting worse, the ash can settle..."

Chisan nods. "I can ask around."

"-Ash? Come to think of it, there was also a huge volcanic eruption, it was heard all the way in Australia and French Indochina. The scientific community just wasn't sure that could cause the Earth to cool this much. They thought it'd be a degree or two. I'm not a scientist, but with two major sources of ash perhaps it makes more sense?"

"Oh, perhaps!" says Cam. "Though if you have anything else to say you should, like, wave me into the next room instead of saying it in front of Chisan."

"I'm not hoping to turn her into jello," says Chisan.

"I understand, but still."

"Anyway, I can ask, and write - what's your label -"

"Letter to Cam."

"Letter to Cam, got it."

"Verona, can you concentrate on wanting to send Chisan home now?"

She's a little irritated. It's not like she was agreeing to anything. -Not helpful. Nod. She concentrates.

After about a minute Chisan pops out of existence like she was never there. "That went well!" says Cam.

"Yes. It wasn't a fluke of some sort. I'm quite sure someone would have tried the same thing before I, so why did you arrive now? But it's a mystery I'm not really equipped to make progress on. Though... I would rather not continue to be considered incompetent to speak for myself, if possible. That's rather what suffrage was about. Perhaps you have something more - systematic - than folk stories about not accepting food from fairies?"

"Yes, there are entire university courses, and I'm even qualified to teach them, but they're time-consuming."

"I suppose they would be. What now? Time to go while we wait for her to spread the word?"

"Yeah, we can save her some travel time if we head to the impact site - do you know where the volcano is?"

"Some place called Krakatoa, in that huge island chain north of Australia."

"Practically the other side of the world. Awful coincidence. Or possibly meteor strikes cause enough tectonic nonsense to set off volcanoes sometimes, I'm not sure." He makes a little globe to try to figure out which is putting out more atmospheric junk.

Krakatoa seems to have stopped spewing ash. The Amazon is still burning.