All right, which one of you utter, utter bastards sent another frigging plot bunny? ? ? ! ! ! Just when I think I might get a weeny leetle respite from the damned things, this one jumped out of a failed experiment. (A very large company sent me some dud reagent; I are NOT happy pineapple). It wasn't in the experiment when I started it; it jumped out when it had finished. I can only conclude that somebody stuffed the damned thing into the spectrophotometer when I wasn't looking. STOP IT! STOP IT! THAT'S AN EXPENSIVE INSTRUMENT! If the tray carriage gets gunked up with plot bunny fur, I will have much explaining to do... Anyway, it would not SHUT UP until I wrote this down. It doesn't have anything resembling a plot yet, but we'll see if it comes up with anything.
Disclaimer: Not mine, or I'd chain them up in a cage and charge admission (and the depraved Denizens of the Jimiverse would pay to look at them...) You could pay extra to pat them.
Working Title: In A Flap
Rating: I'll make it T, because Dean Winchester is bound to open his mouth at some point.
Summary: A lot of religions include prayers to petition the deity of choice to assist the dear departed to attain Eternal Contentment. It makes the people praying for them feel better, but there's just one small glitch: has anybody ever checked with the dear departed to ask if they actually want that assistance?
Blame: This protp-story is entirely the fault of whoever shoved that bunny into the plate reader. It could be anybody. It could be Leahelisabeth: Sam-In-A-Box, Bunny-In-A-Spectrophotomete - coincidence? You decide...
Chapter One
She made her way through the fading light, darkness coming early at the coldest time of the year. A hint of snow hung in the clinging, grey chill; she pulled her shawl tighter around her thin shoulders, and stepped into the church.
Her feet carried her into the sooty gloom, where she genuflected a little awkwardly because of her expanding belly. She determinedly ignored the glares of opprobrium she received. Oh, she knew what they called her: fallen woman (if they were feeling polite), whore or slut or strumpet (if they were not). She glanced to the stained glass window, the image barely visible in the dim of approaching evening, of Jesus standing over the woman who had been accused of adultery.
Qui sine peccato est vestrum primus in illam lapidem mittat
Whoever among you is without sin, let him be first to cast a stone at her.
It worked both ways, of course, she reminded herself sternly, she was herself a sinner, and would practise contrition and charity by avoiding thinking unkind thoughts about her detractors. She set herself to her task: carefully removing the small candle from her apron, she headed to the transept, lit it, and knelt to pray. For her child, for her family, and of course, for him.
He had promised her the world. She had fallen madly in love with him, and he with her, or so she thought. He spoke of devotion, and love, and forever, so that when he acted in love, she had given him her virtue freely and without condition. He had left to tell his parents the good news, he had told her, and to fetch a modest ring for her to wear. But that had been months ago. She worried at first that he had met with foul play, a common enough occurrence, but the Widow Douglas, who had eyes and ears everywhere and made it her business to know everybody's business in the whole town and the several others nearest, swore that he'd been spotted not a week later, attending a most attractive lass with red hair and an adoring gaze...
The details weren't important. She was to be an unwed mother. All children are from God, she repeated to herself, she had learned that early and believed it fervently, all children are from God, and if God didn't want her to have a child, then this would never have happened.
When her condition had become obvious, her mam had cried and cried and called her a lovesick fool, her da had beaten her and called her much worse, his temper made hotter by the drink, and he had thrown her out to spread her legs in the gutter, so he yelled after her, but she refused to despair. She had found employment with a sympathetic seamstress – she had a fine, delicate hand with embroidery and smocking, and wasn't that piece of extraordinary luck proof that God had not abandoned her, even if her family had? She had a roof over her head, and a means to keep herself, more than most girls who found themselves in her situation had.
She would not despair. She thanked God for His mercy, for sending her good fortune, and for her child.
And she prayed for... him.
He was a careless young man, she told the Almighty, a careless young man who was as immature and impulsive and reckless as young men were, because weren't young men just big babies until they found the right woman to look after them? She commended him unto their Maker, and asked His help and consideration for her beloved, to bring him back to virtue and goodness, and she was confident that God would hear her petition, because if she could forgive him, surely their Redeemer would...
The child was born in Spring, a healthy, bonny girl, with dark eyes and dark hair. She grew up knowing her circumstances, but thanks to her mother, without bitterness or anger; when she thought of her father, her thoughts were of gratitude, for if he hadn't known her mother, she wouldn't even exist, and what more precious gift could he have given her but life? They prayed for her father every Sunday, and the child often prayed quietly, privately, for the man she'd never met, yet somehow felt she loved.
Growing into a talented needleworker like her mother, she grew up illiterate but diligent, modest and devout, and even the owner of the dingy workshop where she sat by her mother for long hours could not hold a grudge when she caught the eye of his son. She was a devoted wife and a loving mother, who raised gentle daughters and well-mannered sons, and she taught her children to pray for Granda McLeod, so that they grew up loving him gratefully as she had done. By the survival statistics of the day, she felt herself blessed: all but two of them survived to adulthood, and even when they had families of their own, every Sunday as the priest called on them to pray for all the dear departed, they kept a small special place in their devotions for the ancestor who probably never even knew or cared that he had left a family behind, and as his descendants left to start lives of their own, his name was always inscribed carefully in the family Bibles.
...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo...
Cause and effect, action and reaction, act and consequence – even the most devout and simple devotee of any deity has to acknowledge at some point that prayers don't work like that. And it's probably just as well.
If it did, one the one hand the world would have no hunger, no poverty, no war, no pollution, no obesity, no disease, no dubstep, no mosquitoes, and plenty of beer geysers and doughnut trees across all continents. On the other hand, there would also presumably be no Jewish people, no Muslim people, no Christian people, no Hindu people, no Sikh people, and definitely no followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, no black people, no white people, no yellow people, no gay people, no atheists, no Republicans, no Democrats, no Tories, no Whigs, no fans of heavy metal, and an enormous drop in the diversity of insects and therefore other animals that prey on them because mosquitoes were a major and important link in the food chain. So, it would be happier, but a lot quieter, because there would only be a couple of dozen people left who by twist of happenstance didn't belong to at least one group the obliteration of which had been prayed for by another group. But at least they won't be bothered by mosquitoes.
A sociologist studying the matter might suggest that, as funeral rituals benefit of the living at least as much as the dead, so praying may confer benefit on the pray-er as least as much as the pray-ee. A thoughtful believer might believe that their god is just behaving like a responsible parent in not giving the selfish children every damned thing they ask for, leaving them to work it out for themselves like the adults they are supposed to be. And yet, the ritual of praying for the Redemption of the dead persists in many faiths. Maybe it's because it makes so many of the living feel better to think that they may be helping a loved one, or maybe just another fellow traveller in a particular faith, onwards to Eternal Contentment.
There is, of course, no way to tell whether the dead receive any benefit from this entreaty on their behalf.
The coda to that is that there's no way to tell whether the dead actually want this entreaty on their behalf.
A man in a natty hat once observed that words have power. Another man who lived about 1900 years earlier (history does not record whether he had a hat of any sort) noted that the mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine. Many people have interpreted that to mean that a god's attention to divine justice is slow, but inevitable. Some less philosophical and more cynical people have suggested that it describes perfectly the administrative processes at play in their workplace: every single word, every piece of information and data, no matter how apparently small or worthless or obscure it may be, is sucked into the groaning, ponderous vortex of administrivia, to be stamped and filed and forwarded and archived and in many cases never heard of ever again. Well, not in their lifetime, anyway.
It rarely occurs to anyone that it might be describing both things at once.
It didn't occur to Crowley in exactly those terms, as he drooped visibly whilst perusing the stack of files on his large mahogany desk, although he was pondering on the peculiar nature of information: the way it had a tendency to accumulate, and once it had accumulated, it underwent some sort of transmogrification so that the final amount of paperwork that had to be dealt with was greater than the sum of its parts. It was as if there was some cosmic bank, paying out compound interest on administrative embuggerance: the more you tried to deal with, the more there was to deal with. It wasn't just because he was in Hell; it was the Universal Administrative Experience. Which had led to his latest Infernal innovation.
He was used to labouring fruitlessly, without reward or appreciation, to drag Hell out of the Time Before Time and into the 21st century, but he was starting to think that trying to shift all of Hell's Archive to electronic format might've been just a step too evil, even for him. He was starting to think that perhaps he understood how Viktor Frankenstein might've felt, or the campaign group pushing Sarah Palin's candidature, or Simon Cowell constructing One Direction: that horrible moment of realising that a monster had been created, and it's escaping control.
He reminded himself that it was his job to promote torment and suffering, and an ever-increasing administrative workload, replete with new software, was an important tool in his arsenal, so he squared his shoulders, and turned his attention back to the monitor as Orgle, his indispensable Fiend Friday, tapped rapidly at the computer keyboard.
"This is great, Mr Crowley!" enthused Orgle, "This will revolutionise our document management! We can say goodbye to all those dusty old files! It will speed things up!"
Crowley smiled to himself – the Hierarchy, Hell's senior demonic nobility, was screaming blue murder about everything going electronic, but anybody under 300 years old was taking to the system like a Hellhound to a damned soul. "I think you'll find, Orgle, that this will not speed us up at all – that's not the point of the new system."
"DAMNATION," commented Orgle.
"Well, that's what Hell is all about," Crowley clapped the fiend on one of his massive shoulders, "It's supposed to be a place of exasperation and frustration and eternal unhappiness..."
"No, no, not damnation, DAMNATION," clarified Orgle. "D.A.M.N.A.T.I.O.N. Diabolical Archival Management, Notation And Technical Infernal Office Network. The system is called DAMNATION. Or we call it Dannie, for short."
"We? We?" queried Crowley, "Who's 'we'?"
"IDIOT", replied Orgle.
"Now, just a minute, there," bristled Crowley, "I am King of Hell, and your boss, and whilst you are a talented individual, there is no need for name calling..."
"In-house DAMNATION Installers, Operators & Technicians," Orgle said, "We're the group who go around setting it up for everybody so they can just plug and play."
"A good idea," nodded Crowley, "You are most definitely one of Hell's up and coming... individuals." He frowned at the screen. "Er, I thought this was all a networked system? I thought the whole point was that you don't have to plug in any extra hardware..."
"Hardware, no," Orgle explained by holding up a plug by way of demonstration.
Crowley felt his eyes and his legs crossing involuntarily. "Oh. Oh. That sort of plug. Goodness me."
"This is Hell, after all," shrugged Orgle. "You don't need one because you're staff, of course."
"Well, that's a relief," Crowley relaxed slightly, "Because otherwise I was going to need a bigger cushion..."
"Although the imps from the Pit of Lewd Lechers report that there's been a user uptake of more than seventy percent, and some account holders are already calling for bigger ram," Orgle reported.
"Aha, I know that one!" beamed Crowley triumphantly, "RAM, that's Random Access Memory, the data storage where the operating system is installed..."
"Er, no, boss," Orgle interrupted a little sheepishly, "Just... bigger ram."
"Oh. Oh. Um... yes, well," stuttered Crowley. "Well, um, we should, you know, act to stop them enjoying it. They're not supposed to enjoy it."
"Kyoo in R&D did come up with some that could be electrified," Orgle informed him.
"Aha! That's more like it! Have they been tested in the field?"
"There was a riot when they were given out, and there weren't enough for everybody," said Orgle regretfully. "Kyoo got a couple of his arms broken."
"Oh. Oh. Er." Crowley's gaze fell on the teetering pile of bound paper on his desk. "So, we can get rid of all this then," he chortled.
"Oh, no," smiled Orgle, "That's the user manual. I printed out a copy for you, because I know you don't like to read on the screen."
"The... user manual?" gulped Crowley.
"Just the quick-start version, to get you up and running right away!" Orgle beamed again. "So, you're good to go, Mr Crowley. I've left you a little sticker with the number of the Help Desk; if you get stuck and I'm not here, just call that to talk to an IDIOT..."
"I shall bear that in mind, Orgle," Crowley smiled weakly, "But right now I feel a liverache coming on, caused by lack of alcohol, so I shall be in my office, ignoring anybody who wants to talk to me and dreaming up amusing ways to disembowel those who piss me off."
He left Orgle cheerfully doing... well, he actually had no idea what Orgle was doing, but it meant that there was a hard-working fiend between him and anyone who came barging in to see him (because they never used the email system to book meetings, even though it was now a standing order), so he made his way into his inner office, poured himself a stiff drink, then sank into a comfortable chair. Gedda the Hellpoodle wagged her tail, and jumped into his lap, eyes whirling a happy glowing red.
"Hello, my darling," he crooned to the infernal teacup poodle, "I'm afraid that Daddy's had a very long day, and he's tired. Why don't you let him rest and have a drink, and then maybe we'll go walkies and have a nice game of Tear Pieces Off The Damned Soul, what do you think?" The dog whuffed in agreement, content to do whatever her dog-daddy did, and curled up on his lap.
He sighed and sipped his drink. He hadn't been kidding, he really did have a liverache. Or maybe it was a kidneyache – it was in his back. No, it was too far up for a kidneyache. Liverache after all. No, it was higher still, and on both sides of his spine. Was it possible to have scapula-ache?
A sudden pain shot through his shoulder blades, making him gasp and drop his drink. Another blast of pain sent him off the chair and to his knees on the expensive carpet. Gedda leaped from his lap, and crouched, growling at him, whilst he gasped for breath, which was really strange, since he didn't actually have to breathe...
...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo... ...oooooOOOOOooooo...
The noises that Orgle heard coming from Mr Crowley alerted him that something was not right. Granted, those noises sometimes came from Mr Crowley's office when Mr Crowley was engaging somebody in the Performance Feedback Assessment & Development Scheme, usually giving feedback by pulling their lungs out through their noses or something, but the point was, it usually wasn't Mr Crowley making the noises. Well, except for small exclamations of disgust when he got blood on another tie, maybe.
Orgle knocked on the door to the inner office. "Is everything all right, Mr Crowley?" he called tentatively. He heard another strangled yelp, and decided to take matters into his own claws.
Pushing the door inwards, all his mouths fell open as he took in the sight before him.
Crowley sat in the middle of the rug, wearing the expression of utterly shell-shocked bewilderment more usually seen on tone-deaf and talentless talent quest contestants who have just been told that a basket of mutant two-tongued cats from Fukushima having their tails pulled would sound more musical. And within a second or so, Orgle was wearing that expression too.
Because scattered around Crowley was a pile of pale silver-grey feathers.
And sprouting from his back was a pair of large, fully fledged wings.
A pale, glowing halo sat atop his head; in his lap, Gedda the Hellpoodle was chewing on a small harp.
"Um, Mr Crowley," began Orgle uncertainly, wringing some of his claws together in uncertainly, "Um, when did you start turning into an angel?"
I blame the people who wanted a wingfic a la Lampito. Like I said, no real plot yet, but let's see where the bunny goes. (If that's 'back into the plate reader', I will use a pair of needle-nose pliers to pull it out and damn the injection ports.) Feed it reviews! (Not test tubes.)