Balthazar stared at his new surroundings. He stood by a fence that read "Deific Visuo-Generator Safety zone- all unauthorised personnel kindly bugger off". He had been booted from Gabriel's side, just when he might be able to rescue him.
"Well, shit." He sighed. The harsh, blinding sun of the Hellsphere beat down on him, making it hard to move. But then, it wasn't as if he'd got anywhere to go to. He wished he hadn't given Dean his copy of the Guide; he could at least check for directions off planet. Not that anyone in their right minds would go anywhere near the Hellsphere.
Sighing again (because he really had nothing else to do), he dropped down against the metal fence and closed his eyes. It had been a long day.
Before long, he was vaguely aware of a continued clanking, that seemed quieted by distance.
It was getting louder.
That meant it was heading towards him.
Little is known for definite about the Hellsphere, but Balthazar could figure out that anything approaching you was probably not good. His eyes snapped open and he tumbled to his feet, reaching into his satchel and producing something which he hoped he could use as a weapon.
"Stay back! I have a… um…"
"An open bottle of Craxivegelan mineral water." The dirty, dust-covered figure supplied. The silhouette looked oddly familiar, although with the blinding sun behind him, Balthazar couldn't make out any details.
"Yes…" Balthazar said, thinking fast. "I'll throw it at your head."
"Will that hurt?"
"No, but I've got a really bad aim so it'll probably hit somewhere further south!"
"Yes." The figure said, his shoulders slumping. "It wouldn't hurt though. Nothing but my pride, which let's face it, is eroded to a point of near non-existence anyway so I don't know why I bothered to say it. Well, come on then."
The figure turned and slowly clanked away. Balthazar cautiously dropped his defensive stance, lowering his hands. As the figure put some distance between them, he found he could focus better, not being so blinded by glare.
"Wait…" He said, his brain requesting further confirmation on the basis that his eyes had been wrong before, while his eyes continued to stick with their story. "How in the photon are you here?"
(-*-)
The act of changing perspectives at such an important moment in one characters storyline (namely, the introduction of Gabriel Angeles to his near certain doom in the Deific Visuo-Generator) was done purposefully, to heighten suspense. Of course, the intelligent reader will know that somehow, something that looks, acts and talks like Gabriel Angeles has to survive the Deific Visuo-Generator in order to return to prehistoric Earth and rescue Dean and Castiel, which we know to going-to-will-have happened (see article "Time Travel, Grammar and the you that you are now but weren't when you started reading and won't be when you've finished", pages 17 through 200). As the outcome is predetermined, suspense may only be drawn from prolonging the revelation of how the outcome was reached.
As such, it seems a relevant and fitting time to explain exactly how the Deific Visuo-Generator works, aside from "horrifically, with intent to petrify".
The Deific Visuo-Generator derives its picture of the entirety of the universe through extrapolation and deduction. If, philosophically, one can deduce oneself and others with the phrase "I think, therefore I am", then we know that any item which does not think cannot be proved to exist. However, this leads to one of two conclusions; either the universe is the product of a severely warped collective unconscious which chose to create such unpleasant non-thinking and therefore non-existent things as war, taxes and teenage pop sensations, or (the more widely agreed upon conclusion), everything that exists must also think.
This means that any one thing comprised of myriad other elements (say, an apple pie made with apple fruits from the plural Z Alpha quadrant, pastry made with ingredients from plural K Gamma through to singular L Beta and syrup from any other triangulated quadrant [for details on how to triangulate a quadrant, see pages: 317-400, 500-530 and 600]) must comprise of memories, not only of their places of origin, but of the space they have covered. Add in concepts of genetic memory and, if one were to use a simple Psycho-evaluative quantum generator to extrapolate the memories of, say, a particularly well-travelled slice of apple pie, one could deduce not only the apple pie's knowledge of the present universe, but all the symbolic importance of every other apple pie throughout history.
This is, obviously, science so soft it would make all laundry detergent manufacturers weep, but that doesn't stop it from being responsible for nine thousand, seven hundred and eighteen individuals, all of whom were put into the generator, and all of whom now remain in a prison on the planet Hellsphere, babbling, broken and utterly without hope. They are only kept from ending their pointless existences out of the sheer cruelty of their Daemon captors.
It is thus that the reader should now understand how utterly boned Gabriel really is.
(-*-)
It was a day of firsts for Balthazar.
He had never been to the Hellsphere before.
He had never been telepathically transported before.
And, he thought, as he stumbled after the clanking metallic figure, he'd certainly never been glad to see such a manically depressed hunk of metal before.
"Sam?" He managed, when he finally caught up.
"Yeah." Sam heaved a sigh, in a practiced manner. "Please, don't rush to say you're happy to see me or anything, because I know you're not."
It was definitely Sam.
"How are you still alive? We… when the Impala exploded…"
"It didn't explode." Sam sniped, his sarcasm coding reactivating as though he'd never been out of circulation. "When the escape pods jettisoned, they only caught the tail end of the Leap of Faith drive. Apparently, it was so vastly improbable that I'd survive that the entire ship was able to warp and crash here. I've spent the last twenty years repairing the damage."
"Twenty years?" Balthazar suddenly felt very rude. "Oh… I see why you're so upset. Sorry I didn't make a bigger deal about it; Gabriel and I leapt to two, maybe three days ago."
"Yes, I'd gathered that from the fact that you look exactly the same." Sam scowled, his face-plates creaking slightly with rust as they reconfigured. "That and the fact that I can carbon-date your body."
"Sam, where is the ship? Can it still run?"
"Where is the ship?" Sam repeated, stopping dead. "Where do you think I'm taking you? A scenic stroll, perhaps? Across the beautiful vista of this withered, lifeless planet to go and have a picnic in the middle of the Daemon weapon testing ground? Go to the intergalactic zoo, perhaps…"
"Will you shut up?" Balthazar barked, the rose tinted glasses he had donned when Sam was presumed dead apparently broken underfoot. "Gabriel is about to be thrown into the Deific Visuo-Generator. We need to save him."
"Why?" Sam sniffed, resuming his weary clanking. "I've been left here for twenty years, almost completely on my own. Not one of you tried to find me, or the ship…"
"Gabriel and I were only out three days, Sam! And Dean and Cas… well, I have no idea where they are, but Dean's a human with no off-planet experience, and Cas is… well, he's Cas. But this is Gabriel we're talking about. He'd at least want to know you're alive."
"I'm just an expendable to him. A robot, a tool, a toy."
"When I asked him if he was ok, he changed the subject instantly. Didn't even try to milk the sympathy angle."
"Really?" Sam looked at him, the LED eyes narrowing.
"Truthfully. He insulted me and changed the topic. And you know Gabriel. If he doesn't want to draw attention to something, it means he really feels strongly about it."
Sam stared at Balthazar for a moment, running his speech through lie detectors, pitch analysers and subtext detectors. After a while, he nodded.
"We should hurry."
(-*-)
Meanwhile, in the high security prison reserved for victims of the Deific Visuo-Generator, a low-class Daemon was under orders to prepare a cell for the imminent arrival of "the shallow husk of a conscious being that had once identified as Gabriel Angeles".
When she opened the three inches thick, utterly impenetrable cell door, however, she found herself staring into the eyes of someone who should not be there. She knew it was someone who should not be there, because no one was supposed to be there.
"Who are…" She began, before the man smiled nervously at her, fumbled with an old-fashioned Stun-o-Matic ray gun, and hit her squarely in the chest. She fell against the far wall, paralyzed. Quietly, with a great swishing of white robes, the man scarpered down the corridor.
(-*-)
Yellow Eyes stood in front of the Deific Visuo-Generator, and would have narrowed his eyes in glee if he'd had eyelids. He'd made sure Angeles was inducted into the Generator. Crowley might get a bonus for catching him, but he'd get the pay-off for making sure the bastard was dead. As per company policy, Yellow Eyes had no idea what Gabriel had done to procure such an insistent bounty, but he honestly didn't care. It wasn't his job to care, and if he ever felt the need to, he would need to fill out several allocation forms and then shoot himself.
The door to the generator hummed open, and Yellow Eyes waited for the usual heavy slump of petrified muscle as the body fell out.
It didn't happen.
What did happen, was that Gabriel stepped out of the generator, looking confused, relieved, cocky, and ultimately unscathed.
"What?" Yellow Eyes managed.
"Hey. Now we're done with that, is there anywhere I can grab something to eat? I'm starving."
"But… you went into the generator?"
"Yeah."
"And you saw all of the universe, stretching out before you?"
"Yeah."
"And you saw yourself in relationship to it?"
A dull roar came from somewhere overhead, muffled slightly by the layers of concrete in the building.
"What?" Gabriel called back, over the increasing noise.
"I said, 'did you see yourself in relation to it?"
"Oh!" Gabriel yelled, the noise now louder than ever and accompanied by loud crunching noises. "No, was I supposed to?"
"Of course you were! What did you see?"
"I saw… what is that?" Gabriel turned, looking at the source of the noise. The ceiling behind him crumbled and turned to dust, rubble falling onto the generator and crushing it as the roaring noise grew louder. Gabriel flung up his arms to defend himself, laughing with surprise and joy as the body of the Impala crashed through the roof and landed on top of the generator.
"Gabriel!" Balthazar yelled down, as the bay doors opened. "You won't believe who I found!"
"Well… see you around. Or, preferably, not." Gabriel grinned at Yellow Eyes, before running up the ramp, clapping Balthazar on the arm and hugging Sam tight. Quietly, without any fuss or sound, the white-robed man used a sub-ether signal to pry open the auxiliary bay doors and sneak inside.
By the time Yellow Eyes had called for back-up, Gabriel, Balthazar, Sam and the white robed man had gone, leaving the generator crushed and the building with a new, Impala-shaped skylight.
Yellow Eyes decided he'd be damned if he was doing all that again, and told everyone that Gabriel had been immolated. He shot anyone who questioned him. That was how you got promoted.
(-*-)
On the bridge of the Impala, Gabriel sipped quietly at the drink he'd been making himself for the duration of recapping what had happened. Cas and Dean stared at him.
"And?"
"And?" Gabriel looked up, his hangover fading back into the darkness and leaving him more his usual self.
"And what happened after that?" Castiel barked, frustration getting the better of him. He'd been on herbal highs with only Dean for company for roughly twenty months; Gabriel was perhaps not the best person to reintroduce him to civilisation with.
"Yeah, if Balthazar was on the Impala before, how can you not know where he is now?" Dean rested a hand on Castiel's shoulder that was intended in equal parts to calm and to restrain.
"Right. Ok. That." Gabriel scraped a glob of something from his eye and wiped it on the console, earning a growl from Bobby as the ship rumbled into take off sequence. "You sure I can't get you a drink or anything?"
"Gabriel."
"Alright, fine. Sam!" Gabriel called, answered by a resounding clank. When Sam finally made it to the bridge, he took one look at Castiel and Dean and switched over to "happy" mode with a distinct hum.
"Dean! Cas! You're alive!" He closed the distance in three loping, hydraulics-aided strides, before pulling Dean into a hug that was a little too tight to be comfortable.
"Yeah…" Dean managed, crumpling as Sam let him go.
"Yeah, they're here. Sam, bring up our security footage, would you?"
"Why do you need me to do that?"
"Because I just realised I've been wearing the same clothes for a month. Need to go wash the drunk off me."
"You haven't been wearing those clothes for a month. Most of the time you spent naked…"
"And now I'm leaving out of awkwardness." Gabriel flashed his usual cocky grin at Dean, punched Cas in the arm and wandered happily off of the bridge. Sam plugged himself into the control panel and accessed the security feed. Dean nudged Cas.
"You ok?" He kept his voice low as Sam busied himself. "Glad to be back?"
"Yeah. It's just… a little bewildering."
"So… how does this affect our situation?"
"No one on the ship will care if you bunk together." Sam said, his head snapping smartly around to look at the two of them. "Objectophilia outweighs homosexuality in terms of defying sexual convention. And didn't anyone ever tell you whispering is rude?"
Dean floundered for a moment, before glaring at Sam. Damn robot senses.
Castiel snickered to himself, his hand slipping into Dean's as Sam bought up fuzzy, low-quality security footage onto the visiscreen.