This is the chapter that introduces us into the actual story! Yay! Very pleased to meet you, too! Anyway, if you haven't reviewed the last chapter, would you please review this one? It would be nice to see what you all thought! We have a lot of fun making this, don't we Jin Ah? … Jin Ah? Well, it seems that Jin Ah's off somewhere else at the moment, so let's again stop my incoherent blithering and get on with the story! (Don't worry, I'll make sure she makes some kind of comment for the next chapter.)
Chapter Two
"Excuse me, could you tell us how we could get to the antique bookshop that's around here?"
Crowley turned around, and found that he was looking at two young teenage girls who were looking expectantly back at him.
"Uh, yeah, I was actually going there myself."
"Oh, what good luck," said the shorter of the two. "Can you give us a ride?"
"No!" the other one hissed. "You don't get rides from strangers! For all we know he could be some sort of ... satanist who's going to kidnap us and sacrifice us to the devil!"
Crowley made a kind of strangled noise which was a laugh trying very very hard not to happen. The two girls looked at him, puzzled, and slowly started to edge away.
"Oh don't be silly, Jin Ah, he's just a man wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses on an overcast day."
"Normal people don't wear sunglasses when it's overcast! Those are for creepy psychos that want to look cool!"
Crowley glanced at his watch. Already, nearly a minute had gone by since he had gotten Aziraphale's panicked message (footnote: The two were, in a manner of speaking, telepathically linked. It wasn't nearly as romantic as most stories made it out to be; rather, it was a lot like telephones - they would use it if they really needed to, but neither of them really liked using it, and of course there were the times when the other person didn't pick up (ostensibly because they were busy, but more likely because they didn't feel like it) and he was sure the angel needed him there, right now. Well, for a given value of needed - Aziraphale was an angel, after all, and as such had considerably more resources than most people - but still. Aziraphale was a friend, of sorts, and he and Crowley had taken to helping each other out over the eons.), and now these two girls were holding him up.
As a demon, it would have been perfectly within Crowley's rights to rush to his car and drive away (footnote: Crowley's car knew him well enough to start driving as soon as he got in, regardless of whether Crowley had turned on the ignition, or even if he had the keys in his hand at all.), blowing exhaust fumes into the two's faces as an added bonus. But his friendship with Aziraphale had caused him to absorb some of the angel's horrible empathetic qualities, and so, he said, "Look, I'm not a satanist - they're rather … odd, people, actually, but not too bad once you get to know them - and I'm not going to kill you, or do anything else that might be considered illegal or even slightly psychotic. And I need to leave, now, so if you want a ride, speak now or forever hold your peace."
The two girls looked at each other. "Well, I suppose we could drive with the door slightly open," the taller one said doubtfully, "and if he tries anything funny, we could jump out and scream for help."
The one in yellow rolled her eyes. "Yes, Jin Ah, I think we'll be fine." She turned to Crowley and smiled politely. "Thank you very much, sir!"
Crowley sighed. Children. He walked over to his Bentley, which had unlocked itself, and got in.
"'Scuse me," said the girl with glasses, the one who had accused him of being a satanist, "but I didn't see you unlocking your car. Do you have one of the new things? Where you can just open it from far away so you don't have to fumble with a key?"
Crowley thought for a second, and said, "Yes," which was technically true.
"This is a pretty awesome car," said the shorter girl. "But it looks ancient! How do you keep it running?"
He ignored the question and started the started the car. Since this was Crowley, it meant that he thought of the way to Aziraphale's bookstore, and the car started driving to it.
"Sir," said the girl in yellow, "Excuse, me but your car is driving itself! Shouldn't you, er, keep an eye on the road?"
"No," said Crowley offhandedly. Why had Aziraphale asked him? He had tried calling him over the telepath, but the angel wasn't picking up. The nature of the telepathic link meant that he could feel a bit of what Aziraphale was feeling at any given time (unless the angel specifically blocked it) and he felt … busy. And stressed. That was odd - it was nearly Christmas, and what with brotherly love and kindness and all that and the little children being extra-good to coerce their parents into buying them all sorts of ridiculous things, Aziraphale's workload was usually rather light around now. (footnote: to be fair, so was Crowley's. Snow meant traffic jams and skating accidents, and Crowley was sure that there was no small-scale evil as malignant as hail. He hated hail.) In the back, the girls were arguing cheerfully about how wise the decision they had made was. He wondered why in the world they wanted to go to that bookstore, anyway.
"I think we're here, sir," said one of the girls.
"Are we really?" Crowley hadn't been paying attention. Ah, so they were. "Well, get out, then."
"Thank you very much," they said politely, before jumping out of the car. Crowley noted that yes, the one with glasses had been holding the door slightly open the entire time. He had contemplated driving them into some alley somewhere and threatening them with one of the medieval torture weapons he had in his trunk, just for the fun of it, but he had decided against it. They would probably scream and cause a great deal of fuss, his Bentley might get scratched, it could attract the attention of some policemen, and besides, Aziraphale would be so disappointed if he ever found out.
Speaking of Aziraphale, what was wrong with him? Crowley had expected the angel to be on the pavement, waiting for him, but he couldn't see anything.
The girls, though, apparently could. They were standing with their noses pressed against the dusty glass of the bookstore's front window.
Crowley snuck up behind them, as only Crowley could sneak. "What's going on, then?"
The words had hardly left his mouth before he saw it, too. There was a … commotion going on inside the bookstore.
Said commotion was Aziraphale, with a large ax, trying to whack several gray hooded … things out of the air. It would have been silly and funny if there weren't something … sinister … about the gray shapes.
The one with glasses backed away and pulled at her friend's sleeve. "Uh … Charlotte, maybe we should come back again another day."
So the one in yellow's name was Charlotte. What was the other's name again? He couldn't remember.
"We should call for help!" said Charlotte, looking horrified. "He could - he could get hurt!"
"Which one?"
"All of them!" she shrieked. She looked appealingly to Crowley. "Do you have a phone?"
Crowley did have a phone, but he didn't think Aziraphale would appreciate human police barging in on … whatever he was doing. "I've got a better idea," he said brightly. "Why don't we go inside and ask what's going on?"
"I don't -" the girl who wasn't Charlotte started to say, but he snapped his fingers and they jerked obediently to attention. Ah, well, if they had gotten here and seen all that, they might as well be useful. "Come along, my little minions," he said. (footnote: Crowley had always wanted to say that, but until now, a suitable occasion had never come up.)
Inside, Aziraphale saw the faces staring in at him. Blasted humans! And - Crowley? What was he doing, just standing there? Why wasn't he coming in?
Aziraphale almost paid for his moment of distraction with half his head. As it was, he managed to duck the Auditor's axe (invisible to most) quite neatly and swung his own axe towards where the Auditors knee would be, if he had knees. Of course, by the time it got there, the Auditor and his possibly-existent knees (footnote: It is quite possible that the Auditor's knees were like Schrodinger's cat: until Aziraphale looked, the knees would be both there and not there at the same time. To Aziraphale, this meant that the knees were somewhat ghostly, and maybe only looked like they were there, or perhaps he needed to study his metaphysics a little longer.) were on the other side of him.
"Resistance is useless!" the Auditor barked.
Aziraphale groaned inwardly. Already, they had only been in the bookstore for - what, a minute? - and they had started picking up cheesy one-liners.
"Exterminate!" the other one yelled.
"Look," said Aziraphale, sighing, "that's not right, that's for Daleks. You lot are Auditors, shouldn't you be saying something like, 'Delete!'' or 'Audit!' or - I don't know, you're not making any sense!"
"'Delete''s Cybermen," came a sudden voice from the doorway.
Aziraphale turned and breathed a sigh of relief. "Crowley!" he said delightedly.
"Yes, yes, I'm very glad to see you, too, and all that, but, Aziraphale, I really think that while you're fighting men with axes you should - WATCH OUT FOR THAT AXE!"
"Well, of course, but lower your voice, Crowley, I don't see why -"
Aziraphale had a very good reason for cutting himself off in mid-sentence; namely, his head had just been chopped off.
Crowley sighed and shook his own head. "Really, you should pay more attention when I tell you to."
The gray figures looked immensely satisfied, despite their lack of features. "We have exterminated him," one said (Crowley would have sworn it said "exterminate" with a kind of invisible smirk) "and now, we will exterminate YOU!"
"You know," said Crowley, "if you're going to take over the earth, or, for now, try and kill me, you really need to work on your threats." He shifted his weight, and now, he was holding a machine gun - a great, big, hulking one. He smiled. "Aziraphale might have preferred an axe, like you, but I fancy myself firmly in the twenty-first century." And he pulled the trigger, sending a round of bullets through where the figure's heart would be, if it had a heart.
In theory, what should have happened was that the gray shape would have collapsed, possibly bleeding. In reality, the bullets passed neatly through it and into the row of antique Superman comics directly behind him.
"Watch out!" helped Aziraphale. "Those are expensive!"
Crowley looked down. "Oh, sorry, didn't see you there." He turned to see the two girls still staring at him blankly. "You, there, be useful. Pick up his head and make sure it doesn't get stepped on."
They both immediately bent down to obey his orders, bumping into each other in the process. Crowley mentally banged his head into a wall. The mind-controlled could be so mentally incompetent.
"Bullets won't work," said Aziraphale helpfully.
"No, really, I had figured that out for myself," Crowley shot back.
"Try food," Aziraphale suggested.
"What?"
"Food! They're not used to sensory stimulation! Shoot food at them."
Crowley shrugged. It was worth a shot. What could he - oh, yes.
Smiling evilly, Crowley mentally loaded a round of … different bullets in to his gun and lowered it at one of the figures.
"Fool," it sneered. "Your little metal balls are useless against us!"
Crowley ignored it and opened fire.
"Ha!" it laughed. "Ha ha ha - oh."
It exploded.
Not stopping to gloat, Crowley swiftly put an end to the other one as well.
"That was fast," noted Aziraphale. "What was it?"
"That, angel, is blue cheese."
"Ah. Well, that makes sense."
The enigmatic Auditors had been reduced to a small cloud of black smoke, swirling around on the floor with the effect of dry ice or liquid nitrogen, and it was steadily seeping towards the shop door.
"We will return..." they whispered to them menacingly. "We will come back for the one who defies us... There is no escape for you..."
And, before they had realized it, they had left, leaving an icy chill to hover about them.
"What was that all about?" asked Crowley to the general public.
"Search me," Aziraphale answered, embittered. He'd never liked the Auditors. They were necessary, of course, but there was something about them that had always made him very uneasy. Especially now, when they had just cut off his head with an ax. "Who are these two, and what are they doing here?" he asked Crowley, who was holding his head a tad gingerly in both hands.
"Oh, er, well, I just happened to bump into them on the way here, and..." Crowley trailed off, and picked up somewhere else. "They said that they were heading here as well and asked for a ride."
"You mean they wanted to come here? And they asked you for a ride?"
"I was just as surprised as you."
"Huh. Why are they just standing there with blank faces? ...You've got them under mind control, haven't you?"
"Well..."
"Alright, release them, then, you know I don't stand for that sort of thing."
Crowley snapped his fingers and both immediately came out of it. Their heads turned toward Crowley, then toward the head in his hands, took a moment to take this in, and started screaming like banshees.
"Oh, come now, come now," said Aziraphale, still in a bad mood. "You don't have to completely freak out like that. I'm just a head. Crowley, turn me round so that I can look at them properly." He did.
The girls stopped, but were still looking with horror at the disembodied talking head.
"That is..."
"Weird," Charlotte finished.
"Let's introduce ourselves, shall we?" started Aziraphale coolly. "My name is Aziraphale, and I'm an angel, and that's Crowley and he's a demon. Delighted to make your acquaintance, now who are you?"
After both girls seemed to have finally come to grips with themselves (which, admirably, wasn't too long), they politely introduced themselves.
"I'm Charlotte Elizabeth Poe," said the girl in yellow. Her shirt was yellow, her sweater was red and unevenly buttoned, her skirt was blue, and she was wearing yellow galoshes, apparently for walking in the snow in. "You can call me Charlotte." Her name sounded very Classically English.
"I'm Jin Ah Kim," said the girl with glasses. She wore a purple sweater and gray sweatpants, with black galoshes. She was wearing black glasses. Her clothing would normally have screamed "sensible," if not for the fact that she was wearing her sweater backwards. So, sensible with a good dose of absent-mindedness. "Pleased to meet you." Her name sounded very Korean.
"How did you... take your head off?" asked Charlotte tentatively.
"One of those nasty Auditors did it," said Aziraphale, still bitter.
"I tried to warn you," scolded Crowley.
"Well, you didn't have to shout, I could have heard you just as fine with your voice lowered."
Crowley was getting a bit annoyed and was about to retort when Jin Ah cut in, "Yes, but how are you still... er..."
"Alive?" helped Aziraphale. "I'm an angel. I can't very easily die, can I?"
"You're an angel?" asked Charlotte, wide-eyed.
"Why yes, dear girl. I held the flaming sword, but I - er - gave it away..."
"That was probably a mistake," said Crowley.
"Yes, but I told you, the wolves were coming, and it turned out all right in the end, didn't it?"
"Just saying."
"Oh," said Charlotte. She hadn't heard of him (footnote: She hadn't really read that much of the Bible. Being a Mormon, she had read through the Book of Mormon twice before she was nine, but had only attempted getting through Genesis once, and it had been pretty tough going. She had heard something about a flaming sword, but wasn't that sure. JinAh, on the other hand, had read Genesis, but she didn't remember anything about a flaming sword).
"Er," said Jin Ah, who seemed to have been thinking about something, "When you said that you were a demon … do you mean … as in the biblical sense?"
"Yes," said Crowley.
"So you are a satanist?"
"No," said Crowley. "Certainly not. I suppose I serve him, in a technical sort of sense, but eh … the celestial bureaucracy is worse than ever nowadays, and mostly I don't report to him as much as I do a couple demons in Forward Planning." He paused and reconsidered his previous statement. "Well, a couple of demons from Forward Planning that are demons in more than the metaphorical sense. Satanists are very … different. You'd know if you'd met them."
"He's a little touchy about that," Aziraphale interjected. "Bad history there, you see. With satanists, I mean. Now put my head back on, Crowley, this starts feeling very strange after a while."
Obediently, Crowley went over to the angel's body and neatly reattached the head, the muscle, bone, and tissue knitting neatly back together.
The angel coughed, picked himself back off the floor, dusted off his jacket sleeves and straightened his coat.
"Sorry, about that."
Just then, there was the creak of a door opening from behind them, and a worried head poked out.
"Hello?" said Ridley.
"Mr. McCoy!" exclaimed Jin Ah. "What are you doing here?"
Ridley McCoy just stared at them. What were they doing there? They had less business there than he did.
"Who's that?" Crowley asked, interested. "He looks like me."
"Not really," said Aziraphale. "He's rather taller."
"Just have to put me down at every opportunity," Crowley grumbled.
"And he has light hair," said Charlotte.
"And he has freckles," pointed out Jin Ah.
"And his glasses aren't tinted black," said Charlotte.
"So all in all, not really," said Jin Ah.
"Well, yes," said Crowley, who really didn't know when he was beaten, "but you have to admit that we do look rather alike, apart from all that."
The angel, the two girls, and the man who could fly all turned, looked at each other, and shook their heads.
"Well, what are you doing here, Mr. McCoy?" asked Charlotte, feeling curious.
"I'm not really sure myself," said Ridley with a shy smile. "I got a letter this morning, you see, telling me to come here, so I decided to find out what it was all about. What are you two girls doing here? Shouldn't you be enjoying winter vacation?"
"We are!" said Charlotte. "We came over here to check out old books."
"We heard it was a really good store for them," Jin Ah explained.
"Who told you that?" said Aziraphale quickly. Goodness, if this trend continued, he'd end up having customers in the store. He shivered at the thought.
Jin Ah looked at Charlotte. "It was Anathema, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, I think so." She turned to the others. "She's a really awesome lady that lives in Tadfield, uh, we know her because she comes here a lot to drop off the Them for our Saturday camps. My sister's their same age, so she organized it. She's good at things like that."
"The Them?" "Anathema Device?" Aziraphale and Crowley asked at the same time.
"Mhm, I think so," said JinAh. "And the Them are Adam Young, Brian, Pepper, and Wensleydale - well, Wensleydale's real name is -" she frowned. "Actually, I don't know Wensley's real name, but I assume it's not Wensleydale."
"How do you know?" asked Charlotte, smiling.
"Wensleydale? Can you imagine it? His parents would have to be insane!"
Charlotte shrugged. "Think of poor Pepper."
Jin Ah had to concede, but she couldn't go down without a final argument: "Yes, but Wensleydale's father works in a newspaper office, doesn't he? His parents aren't hippies. Plus I think they call him Youngster sometimes."
"Wait, wait, wait," said Aziraphale, who had been watching the two's discussion with a certain degree of interest. "Back up. How do you know Anathema? And Adam? And his … posse? Sure, you go to the same club, but they live in Tadfield! That must be, what, an hour -"
"Half an hour," said Charlotte. She smiled. "It's amazing, what they can do with technology these days."
"Yes, yes, but how do you know them?"
Charlotte left it to Jin Ah to explain. She was better at that than she was.
"You see," said Jin Ah, taking a deep breath, "Adam'smother'soldersister worksatthe sameplaceas Charlotte'sdad and theythoughtthat Genevievewho'sCharlotte'ssister mightbefriends - I think she thought Genevievemightbe a gentlinginfluenceonAdam - and so and then wemetthemandwe gotalongfinetoosoweall -" she had to gasp for breath here; Crowley was impressed she had gone on for so long -
" Newtdoesit and that'showweknoweachother and CharlotteandI ." She took a final breath.
Charlotte gestured her practiced jazz hands towards Jin Ah. "Tada!"
Crowley and Aziraphale were staring at them. "Er," said Aziraphale, "are most children like this nowadays?"
"No," said Ridley, sighing, "they're much worse."
"How do you three know each other?" asked Crowley, who at that last remark had found his suspicions.
"He's our English teacher," chirped Charlotte, lightly patting Jin Ah's back as she gulped for air. "What was he doing in that back room?"
Ridley shrugged his shoulders and looked towards Aziraphale.
"Hiding from the Auditors," he explained. "It was too dangerous for any mortal to be there at that moment."
"Who are the Auditors?" asked Jin Ah, now recovered.
"That would take much too long to explain here," said Aziraphale, who still hoped that they might be able to simply … rearrange … the girls' memories and send them out of his bookstore before they damaged anything (footnote: as an angel, Aziraphale was by definition a friend to all children but had found that most of them didn't like him very much and had learned to regard them as miniature forces of destruction.).
"We've got all day," said Jin Ah cheerfully.
Her friend nudged her. "Um, Jin Ah, I think maybe we should leave, he looks like he's having a hard day -"
"Yes, Charlotte, and we just saw a man - well, not a man, clearly, but an angel, which is even weirder - get his head chopped off by a bunch of gray things that are immune to bullets but can be defeated with cheese! I think we deserve some answers more than they deserve some rest!"
Charlotte thought about this, nodded and decided to agree with her friend. She was right, there was no missing out on something as exciting as this.
There was another tinkling sound, and they all turned to see Anathema Device standing in the doorway, panting. She looked like someone who had been running very, very quickly.
"Oh, good, you're all here," she said. "Did I miss anything important?"