"Hello, Anaphiel," says the deity, carrying...something. "I apologize for interrupting you, and apologize further for how long the interruption is likely to take."

"...My Lord! What a surprise! Is this a social kind of thing, and if not do I want to know why you're not going through Anael like usual?"

"This is a matter to be handled personally. Other creations besides my own exist. As do places between them. I discovered one just now, and one of the things contained therein was a...dispenser, if you will, of certain kinds-of-person-to-be. And a certain kind of person was noted for their ability to fix worlds. A certain calendar date was recommended. There is not enough time to arrange her existence in the usual--for her--manner. So I'm arranging it in the unusual--for myself--manner."

"...So soon? Are you sure that's wise?"

"...It shan't incur any permanent damage. And people are suffering now, and this could fix it. In the millennia since humanity has come into being I've only found stopgaps. It's worth the risk."

"...Yeah, okay, more power to ya, I'm sure it's not going to be pleasant."

"Not more unpleasant than what it has the power to prevent."

"I wouldn't know. Okay, so what do you want me to do about it? Making announcements like this is Gabriel's job."

"The 'template' in question has a certain other pair of templates as requisite biological parents. Unless she has no contact with her biological parents from earliest infancy."

"So you need someone to hire a surrogate, I guess, and..." she trails off. "Am I completely overreaching myself or are you asking me to be the adoptive parent of the second Christ?"

"You are," she says dryly, "not overreaching yourself."

"Holy crap. Uh, no offense."

"Since it's necessary to send anyone at all, I'll be putting together a group to handle various orthogonal tasks in the interim. I expect this to take several weeks. How much time you actually have to find a surrogate will depend on precisely how long it takes, but the date the child is to be born is five years, three months and four days from now."

"Okay. So, um, I guess I'll find someone to take over my duties for the interim, and talk to some of my human friends who've been mothers--can I get Ezra to take over for me? I'm sure he'd be thrilled."

"That should be fine. Someone will let you know when the time for the dimensional transfer has been settled on."

Her own thing, it would seem, would be to be a rather precocious but not headline-making little human being who falls over a lot.

That's fine. Anaphiel has a stable job in a quiet town (called "Forks;" apparently this was also important for some reason) and the resources to raise a human child. She feeds her and clothes her and mends her scrapes with hints of angelic power when this is discreetly possible and takes her to church sometimes and murmurs to her too low for the priest to hear which parts of the readings and sermon are true and important and which ones are meaningless or false. When she gets old enough to need schooling she signs up to homeschool her.

"...She has visual omniscience but she usually doesn't look at private things. If it's important that she not be able to you might want to invent a cipher. She doesn't know what you're thinking except for deliberate prayer."

"Jesus preferred a more low-key approach most of the time. I don't know exactly what you'll get or when; there aren't enough data points. Even if I knew for sure you were going to develop at exactly the same rate as him it's hard to know what that is considering that he didn't really push; he used what he felt he needed to in a given situation rather than experimenting and practicing."

"But that's silly. Does God know? Will she tell me if I ask? Hey, how come you adopted me and know all this stuff, anyway, how'd that happen, Jesus got raised by his birth mother."

"Oh, it turns out there's more universes than just this one. God found a room between the universes for beings like her, and there was some kind of dispensary for, well, kinds of person. The kind of person you are gets its best results when born on a certain date, and there wasn't enough time to set up your template's usual biological parents, and the options for your template are either 'these biological parents' or 'no significant contact with biological parents past infancy.' I don't know if God knows; that might fall under the purview of mind-reading, which she doesn't do."

"How are they divine powers if she isn't divining them for me? And that still doesn't explain how you know all the stuff."

"Oh. What else can you do?"

"Not as much as I'd like. I can increase my physical strength and speed fairly cheaply, and heal very minor injuries; if I do too much at once it damages my ability to do things in the longer term until I recover. I can exude an angelic presence, manifest a set of wings...I can teleport, which is useful, but that one's a little borderline. I can do it every now and then but if I did it often it would be too much. Lots of little things. I could make a flower bloom prematurely, if I wanted. My powers are more limited in scope than type and I haven't been on Earth for long enough that I've had lots of experience with stuff that could use a little push."

"Can I see your wings?"

"You look like a sunset!" exclaims Mehitabel in delight.

"You think so? There isn't any purple. I've been compared to fire lots more times than a sunset."

"Like... a tropical sunset. Why don't you look like a sunset all the time?"

"Because if people knew an angel was living as a small-town librarian, they would want to know why, and it wouldn't be hard to figure out that the reason was you, and then I'd have to deal with everyone who would want to do you harm if they knew who you were, and everyone who would want to do you harm because they wouldn't believe you were who you are and would be mad at you for pretending, and people who wouldn't want to harm you for your own sake but who would want to use you and not want to take no for an answer."

"Jesus wasn't a secret. ...Did people bring me presents when I was born? Am I supposed to start a religion?"

"Jesus was a secret when he was little. You don't have to be a secret when you're older and have your powers and can defend yourself. No one brought you presents when you were born, except Mrs. Chandler next door got you some baby clothes. Jesus had a specific purpose; you don't."

"Why don't I?"

"Because Jesus existed because someone needed to exist to do the thing he needed to do; it didn't have to be anyone in particular. You exist because God read some highly complimentary reviews about your template's ability to fix inadequate worlds, and I don't know if you've noticed yet but this one has a lot of problems. Not relative to most worlds, apparently, which is slightly worrying, but relative to what is acceptable, which involves things like people not going to Hell. Hell did not happen on purpose."

"How did it happen by accident? That doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should just happen."

"When people started existing, some of them were very bad and did terrible things to each other. And Hell started existing when the first very bad person died, and at first it was just an infinite plane that had first one and then several bad people in it, and it didn't seem like an immediate problem at first; they hurt each other some but not worse than bad people were doing to innocents on Earth. And then they started generating demons, and everything escalated from there."

"Generating demons?"

"Yep."

"How does that work?"

"If we knew we would probably be closer to stopping it happening. Current best hypothesis is that some combination of the inherent nature of Hell and the negative emotions of its inhabitants coalesces into something aliveish and usually--not always, but usually--malignant."

"The universe has always existed, as far as we can tell; even God isn't older than it, but she's older than all the things in the universe. She...did some things I can't really explain very well until you know more physics than you currently do, to make there be stars and planets and stuff. But to make the angels, and the humans, she had to give up a lot of power over Earth. She can still do whatever she wants with Heaven, and it's a lot nicer there, but everyone who isn't an angel or a demon starts out on Earth. Or Fairyland, which is its own can of worms."

"Why did she have to give up power to make stuff? What's Fairyland like?"

"Angels and humans are people, which are way more complicated than anything else. It didn't take as much to make angels as humans, because when a new angel comes into existence God makes it directly. In order to create a chain of self-perpetuating soul production, God had to invest a lot of divinity into the species that eventually evolved into humans. Fairyland is a sort of alternate Earth, but not quite. It's...if Heaven and Hell are ninety degrees away from earth in opposite directions, Fairyland is ten degrees away in a third direction. Does that make any sense, or do I need to come up with a better way of explaining it?"

"Maybe I could just go look at Fairyland?"

"Fairyland looks like Earth, but with different plants and animals, mostly, if that was what you were asking; I was trying to explain the metaphysical nature of it. And it has fairies, of course, which are like humans only different. They don't die of old age, they reproduce the same way as humans but slower, and they have some magic that humans don't."

"Does that mean fairies don't go to heaven, or that they have to wait to die some other way? Do humans have any magic? Can I learn magic while I'm waiting for my divine powers?"

"Humans don't have inherent magic but there is magic that anyone can learn to use. I know some of the theory but have never practiced it; there isn't much call in Heaven and I reiterate that I haven't spent as much time on Earth as I would like. I can teach you some but I think it would probably be best to find an actual practitioner to tutor you. Fairies can die, and if they do they can go to Heaven same as anyone else."

"I want to learn magic if I'm not going to get a lot of divine powers very fast. Especially if my divine powers are going to be silly like the wine thing."

"The magic's pretty finicky and takes a while to learn anything practical, but yeah, I hear ya. Oh, hey, speaking of, one of the other things besides teleporting that I can do occasionally but shouldn't do often is invisibility. I cannot believe it didn't occur to me to ask this until now, but do you want me to turn us both invisible for a bit so I can take you flying inconspicuously?"

"Ooh! Yes!"

So she scoops her up and turns them both invisible and goes outside and takes off.

And the little messiah she is carrying whoops with delight.

After a few hours, she regretfully murmurs, "I need to land soon so I don't overextend myself on the invisibility."

"Okay," says Mehitabel understandingly. "You can find me a magic teacher instead, that's okay."

"Yes. Although that will take a little while, and I do know some theory, so it'll be just me to start with." She lands, and as soon as they're inside she sheds the invisibility.

"Are there anything besides humans and fairies and demons and angels? Any people anything, I mean."

"There's lots of debatably-human stuff, like vampires and werewolves, that definitely used to be human whether or not you count them as currently human. And some things that are the descendants of humans who decided to magic themselves into another form and go commune with nature, like Yeti or swampdwellers. Actually fairies are the descendants of humans who did magic to themselves too, but they like to pretend they're not. I wouldn't advise doing that, though, even if you were just a bogstandard human; the survival rates are discouraging. If you were just an ordinary human and decided it particularly mattered to go on living on Earth instead of Heaven I'd recommend vampirism, personally; its bad reputation isn't totally undeserved but it doesn't actually do anything to your brain, it just gives a certain class of person an excuse to live down to the legend."

"If something does happen to me and I go to Heaven before I'm done doing everything can I come back?"

"I think it depends on what happens to you. Let's go with 'probably.'"

"What might stop me? Why don't people come back all the time, when people who are still alive miss them?"

"People don't come back all the time because God's powers on Earth are limited and it would be impossible to bring everyone back, and how would you choose who gets their loved ones back and who doesn't? I don't know of anything that would stop you, because you're a divine being--theoretically, sending you back to Earth shouldn't be any harder than transporting an angel to Earth whose physical form had been destroyed once. But I do know that messiahs are fundamentally different from angels on a number of levels--you are human as well as divine on a fundamental level; I can look it, but I'm not. It's theoretically possible that some demonic power or great spell that I don't know of could damage you to the point where it would take more power than God has going spare to send you back. I don't think there is, but I don't know, not for certain. ...Considering that it's never been done, and trust me they would have wanted to, I'm pretty sure you'd have to get tricked into it, if it were possible at all."

"I will try very hard not to be tricked," nods Mehitabel. "Is there math about how much power God has and I have and you have and how much it costs to do things? It seems like there should maybe be math of that."

"I suspect there is math of that. If there is, I don't know it. I was a librarian in Heaven, too, actually; I prefer books to numbers. There are eight other angels on Earth right now. I can ask them if any of them know the relevant math."

"I like books more too but it sounds like a math thing to me."

"Yes, it rather does. It just wasn't urgent for me in particular to know it before now. Like I said, I'll ask around."

Nod nod. "Does it grow back? The power to do stuff?"

"Oh, yes. If it didn't I'm not sure God would have been able to make you at all. Last time really took it out of Her."

"Maybe she can just pause the universe, and take a really long nap, and wake up and be really miraculous again!"

"That's a good idea, but pausing the entire universe would be a very big miracle by itself. Even moreso if it affected Hell and not just the material world. Keeping a timestop going would probably be low enough maintenance that it would be worth it in the long run, but she won't have the energy to do that for a long time."

"Oh. Are there any things that recharge her faster than just waiting and not doing stuff?"

"Human and near-human attention, for some reason, which is why religion."

"Oh. Maybe I should start a religion. Or fix a religion. Or fix lots of religions."

"If you decide to do that, you're probably in a better position than anyone else. But given that people are people, don't be surprised if a considerable number of people who are currently using bad interpretations of religion denounce you as the anti-Christ or similar."

"Yeah... I think I will think about that later when I am not tiny and easy to ignore and when I have cool powers."

"One thing I know you should be able to do early on is healing. Healing, at least in small doses, is a pretty basic divine ability. Next time you scrape your knee or get a papercut or something, try focusing on making it better yourself before coming to me with it."

"Okay. Do I have a battery to worry about too though?"

"Yes, but you should be able to feel it if you approach the edges of what it's a bad idea to do. If you try to heal yourself and you get a feeling like you're about to overextend a muscle instead of nothing, don't push it, but it means your powers are coming in."

"Okay. Do I recharge off attention too?"

"Some, but not as efficiently."

"Is there something I recharge off efficiently?"

"No, but it's a tradeoff--you use energy more efficiently on Earth than other forms of divine being because you're Earthly as well as divine."

"Were the rules just already like that even before the Earth was made?"

"Not exactly. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you operate more efficiently in the human sphere because you're human as well as divine. Because you have the kind of self-sustaining spiritual energy that human souls produce, you aren't as hampered by the tradeoffs God made when She created humanity in the first place."

"Huh." Pause. "All those other worlds where there are more mes fixing other worlds, do they work like that?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe they don't! Maybe they have already figured out other ways to do stuff, and God could copy them!"

"That would be pretty great."

"Can she go look at them whenever she wants?"

"No. She can read descriptions of them from other beings in their worlds, but she can't observe them directly."

"But she can read about them, whenever she wants."

"Yes. Unfortunately, many of the descriptions leave something to be desired in the salient details department--they're more likely to give opinions on how well they did than how they did it, and even then it was usually more along the lines of 'and then she enchanted this village' without an explanation of how enchanting works or how it could be implemented."

"Oh. Well, that's annoying. Maybe she should ask them to actually explain stuff. Maybe they would!"

"Good idea. I think she said there was a place to leave messages."

"She can ask them if anybody has a really cheap way to pause time so she can nap, or recharge in more ways, or borrow attention from worlds where the attention doesn't do anything, or stuff!"

"...Yes. Yes she can." She smiles. "No one else thought of that somehow."

"That's what I'm for!"

Since they are not flying, wings can be incorporated into hug.

Snuggly!

Feathers will do that!

And then Mehitabel goes off to scribble in her notebooks, digesting the things she has learned and attempting to come up with more useful ideas.

Mehitabel, after some thought, thinks that God should also ask at the breakroom if anybody has a way to travel directly between universes to maybe send care packages or something, and that if you can make tradeoffs between efficiency and battery maybe there is a way to make someone so efficient that they don't drain their battery at all to do stuff and that would be good, and that on consideration she really kind of does want to know why platypuses but not unicorns.

"Magic doesn't run down batteries. It does have visible signs, though, so other magicians will know you're not just miracleing. Gates between Fairyland and Earth are created by fairy magic, not the kind you can learn, but it's possible you'll be able to miracle one open when you've got enough power to do that, and gates can be found and traversed without that, it's just a little more complicated. If you want to go on a trip to Fairyland I can arrange that but it might take a while."

"Do fairies know about God?"

"Know for sure that she exists, or know the idea of her?"

"Both."

"The fact that humans have religion is common knowledge among fairies. Not all of them know the details, and not all of the ones who know the details believe that God is real. A handful of them have experienced proof that God is real, but not very many."

"Maybe it would be simpler to start a fairy religion than a human religion, if they don't already have a lot of religions that are wrong in all kinds of ways."

"Mm, harder in some ways, easier in others. Humans having lots of religions means they're used to having new ones. Fairies aren't, and might not be happy with a human--even a miraculous one--barging in to start one."

"I would like to visit Fairyland sometime but since I'm not miraculous yet it doesn't have to be any time soon and it should be at a cheap time."

"I'll look up when various gates to Fairyland are open."

"Also while I am there I would like to meet a unicorn but only for fun so do not arrange unicorn meetings if it is at all expensive."

"I'll probably want to wait long enough that I can teleport us around a few times anyway."

"Okay."

"So do you mostly want to just see the scenery, or do you want to talk to people? The latter is trickier but doable."

"I want to meet people there too. That's more important than the unicorn." Pause. "And any other particularly neat animals. But people are more important."

"I will see if anyone knows who in particular it would be good to meet in Fairyland. Probably at the same time as I'm asking around about a magic teacher."

"Thanks!" Pause. "I also want to know more things about demons and souls and Heaven and Hell and vampires and stuff like that." Pause. "Also is it a secret that you are an angel, not just a secret that I'm a Jesus?"

"Angels aren't well-known to be specifically real in the same way that vampires or demons or fairies are known to be real, by people who know that kind of thing, which isn't all of them, because angels come to Earth less than demons and fairies do, because there is a small but not quite negligible chance that someone could intercept the transport and use it to jeopardize souls who have died in the last few seconds and are in the process of ascending to heaven. It would be very attention-getting to be revealed as an angel, but it's not specifically a secret. I'm not going to tell people just because but if there's a reason to I will."

"Okay. I won't tell anybody unless there's a reason either."

"Thank you. Soooo...I think we've got enough space in the living room to draw some diagrams on the floor in chalk, and that's the most area-prohibitive step in magic, at least at the early levels. I think I've got a coherent sketch of a lesson plan worked out, although of course you should let me know if I'm going to slow or too quickly in any area. Magic lesson?"

"Magic lesson!"

Magic lesson. Magic comes in rituals, and rituals can be abridged through sufficient practice and association into words and gestures. Anaphiel recommends going heavy on the words and light on the gestures with the exception of spells she anticipates needing to cast while unable to speak; words can be written down with much more precision than gestures. And this ritual is apparently a good place to start; it's not too difficult and most of its components are common to a variety of useful spells.

Cool! What does it do?

This one generates a number of glowing lights (three, by default, but if you replace this numerical component with another one you can change that) that will move around and slowly change color in response to the caster's intentions.

Oooooooh. That sounds like fun to play with and good practice for controlling things with intention! Mehitabel wants to cast it.

Anaphiel has the steps for the various components written down for her, and will correct her if she draws a line wrong, but it's important that she do all the steps herself in order to condense them into a more manageable form later. But it's simple as spell-rituals go; even in its completely unabridged form it only takes about an hour.

Mehitabel spends the entire hour enthralled and diligent and detail-oriented, especially for a six-year-old.

"Okay..." says Mehitabel, looking at her lights. She makes them spin in a circle together, and then go red and green and gold, and then turns them into a halo for herself. "And it's got to be something I wouldn't ever just say. So not 'three lights'."

"Making up nonsense words that can be easily written phonetically seems to be traditional."

"They shouldn't be total nonsense though or they'll be easy to mix up." Mehitabel considers this, then says, "I'll think of a way to pronounce my cipher!"

"Sensible way to approach the problem."

Well, before she implements that, she'll have to condense the individual steps.

Yes. She will delightedly work on that now that she knows what she wants to squish them down to.

She can probably get each individual component reduced to a gesture or a word before bed, with a break to eat something for dinner, but not any sequences.

Well, she'll work on it more tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning Anna asks her if she minds being left alone for most of the day (having long since determined to her satisfaction that the house was still going to be intact when she got home if she left Mehitabel by herself) to work on her spell while Anna runs errands like trying to find her a proper magic teacher.

Mehitabel is fine with this plan!

"Leftover mashed potatoes and chicken are in the tupperware with the blue lid, leftover tomato soup's in the tupperware with the red lid, and you know where the cold cuts and bread and so on are." She pecks her on the top of the head. "Have a good day, then."

"What happens in six weeks and five days?"

"Gates to Fairyland open and close on schedules that relate to things like the tides and the lunar cycle and the position of stars relative to Earth. Six weeks and five days from now one that's not guarded by hostile fairies will be open, and three days after that a different gate with similar criterion will be open so we can come back. I assumed you would want to spend a couple of days."

"That sounds good. We can camp!"

"If you like it and decide you want to spend longer at some point I can keep an eye open for fortuitous gate scheduling, but longer than three days isn't feasible right now."

"That's okay. That's plenty for a first visit. Do you know enough magic for me to have magic to learn while I'm waiting for the teacher? Or should I just learn a lot of things about other stuff until then?"

"I don't know if I know enough magic to keep you occupied until then, and anyway it's probably better to learn other things as well--I think human minds do better at tasks when they have breaks from them?" She's genuinely uncertain. Angels don't work the same way as humans, that way--she can get caught up with reading, organizing and indexing books to the point of not noticing a year has passed.

"Yeah, I took a couple of breaks today. And I need to know other things too. I want to know what really happened instead of the Bible stories that aren't written down right, and how everything works, and the battery math."

"Biblical history, battery math, and science. Okay. Oh, and it's not necessary, but it would probably add to your gravitas if I taught you Latin, Greek, and/or Hebrew."

"What's gravitas?"

"It'd make you more impressive when you're running around publicly doing stuff."

"Oh! I need a lot of that."

"'S why I've been using Hebrew around the house sometimes--I don't know if you've noticed I don't usually use it around other adults."

"I thought that was just that nobody else knew it. Is it a secret that you know Hebrew?"

"Nah. Knowing Hebrew isn't usual, especially since I've mostly been acting Christian and not Jewish, but it's not the kind of unusual that draws people to conclusions we don't want them to."

"Okay. So I know some of Hebrew and I should learn the other ones."

"And maybe some Latin and Greek if you want, but those are less..." she makes a so-so gesture with her hand. "Actually holy. Angels translate their names into Hebrew; my actual name isn't something a human larynx can produce."

"Can I hear it?"

"...You know, I'm not actually sure? You'll be able to once your powers come in, definitely, but if I said it an ordinary human wouldn't realized anything had happened." She looks thoughtful for a moment, and then--it's not a sound, exactly. It's something perpendicular to sound. But it forms identifiable syllables, and an identifiable meaning: Branch of God.

"Sweet! Did you understand it, or just hear that I said something?"

"It means 'branch of God'!"

"Yes it does! Instinctive understanding of Angelic, that's great. Definitely try poking at it next time you get hurt a little bit."

"I will!"

Hugs!

Hugs. "I trip a lot. Maybe I can divinely not trip. Or magically not trip." She writes down that she should ask her magic tutor about that so she can use her divinity only on things that are not best done with magic.

"That would probably reduce the amount of ouch in your life, if nothing else."

"Yeah. Did Jesus trip?"

"Probably not none, but I'm afraid that's a you thing, not a Christ thing."

"Oh well."

"Oh well. I'm afraid I don't have any easy answers for this one, kiddo, but it's entirely possible magic or miracles can fix it."

"Those sound like good things to try, anyway."

"Yeah. Considering the kinds of healings Jesus got up to it would be kind of strange if you couldn't miracle it away eventually, but it may be that magic has a faster solution."

"And then I could save my battery for other stuff." Hmmm. "Is there a good way to know ahead of time when somebody might be going to Hell?"

"To know? No. To guess? Yes. Rapists, child abusers--anything that takes a really nasty kind of person to do is a potential indicator."

"I should probably heal them in particular when I can heal people then so they can stop being bad in time. That works, right? Stopping?"

"The problem isn't so much the action as the willingness. Someone who would throw a baby into a crocodile pit for spare change but isn't given the opportunity is just as much at risk as someone who actually throws a baby into a crocodile pit for spare change. Changing your mind works."

"Oh." Pause. "But nobody collects people who would do bad things all in one place and the ones who actually do are usually in prisons probably so that's still a thing I should probably do. And then tell them to be nicer."

"Yes. And it is willingness, not inclination--someone who wants to do something terrible but is given the opportunity and refuses, or would refuse given the opportunity, is usually okay. And by 'usually' I mean as long as there aren't other damning factors."

"Other factors like what?"

"If you have an opportunity to throw a baby in a crocodile pit, and refuse because you would never harm a child, but then you go and torture a grown man to death. For example."

"Oh. Yeah."

"Come to think of it, it might be a good idea to be at least moderately discreet about prioritizing healing at-risk persons, because then you get people who have cancer or other terminal disease being incentivized to do the kinds of things that get your attention."

Mehitabel thinks about that. "That," she concludes, "would be bad."

"Yeah. Law of unintended consequences: going with the first version of a plan without going over it for the obvious points of human failure is doomed to myriad unfortunate side effects."

"I will be careful about plans," nods Mehitabel.

"Anything that's intended to affect the behavior of large groups of persons is especially tricky, too."

"How come?"

"Because people are complicated, and different people are complicated in different ways."

"And then if you have a plan that works with one person's complicated it might not work with another one?"

"Right. The more people there are, the harder it is to get something that works for everyone. Once you get to really big groups of people, you have to start asking yourself if the plan is going to work for enough of them compared to how badly it would not work for the people it didn't work for to be worth it."

"Yeah..."

"Probably whatever you do will do significantly more good than harm, considering what people have said about your template in that between-worlds place. But that doesn't mean it's not better to be careful."

"I'll be careful," nods Mehitabel. "I want to meet more of me, can I do that?"

"If we find a way to do that, but right now we don't have any way to access other universes."

"Is there a usual way other people do it?"

"Apparently there's another between-the-worlds kinda place that more people can get to, called Milliways, and you can get to other universes from there or just meet people therefrom."

"Huh. I wonder if I'll ever go there."

"There is, apparently, no way of knowing until it happens. But I certainly wouldn't bet against it."

"Well, I won't plan on it," Mehitabel decides.

"Yes, even if we somehow knew for sure that you would, there would be no guarantee at all of when."

"Yeah. And besides, I want all the other mes to be proud of me when they meet me."

"I bet they will."

"Well, not yet they won't, I haven't even done anything yet."

"You also haven't found Milliways yet. And the suggestions you've made aren't as much as you're going to do, but they're not nothing."

"Well, okay, but I don't know if they're all the way to proud."

"Mm, I suppose I'm naively modeling the situation as occurring some significant time into the future."

"I will try to do things between now and the future. I have a lot of things to learn though."

"Yes, yes you do. Back to magic lesson?"

"Yeah!"

Magic! Magic proceeds magically. Once Mehitabel has her first spell condensed for easy casting, Anaphiel shows her another one with many of the same elements as the first. "But you should cast it as a ritual at least once, even though you have condensations of several of the steps."

"Why?"

"Basically it's so the components that haven't been condensed can sort of--link up to the ones that have. It encourages them to condense more easily. You could do it just with condensations in the spots you've got for them, but it would take more time in the long run."

Just a few times. The components of the spell that hadn't already been condensed slot together much more easily into their assigned abridgements than the ones in the first spell did.

That's very gratifying!

And then of course she has to condense the sequences before she has a single working spell. Anaphiel points out a few places where it would be more efficient in the long run to condense this group by itself before adding it to that other one because the sequence in question shows up enough to make it worth it.

Mehitabel follows her advice, naturally, inquiring after its theoretical backing as they go.

Anaphiel is happy to expound upon theoretical backing whenesoever asked!

Then they will burble along quite happily through all this spelling!

Mehitabel does like taking occasional breaks to read books in Hebrew. Especially if they are fun books.

There are a variety. Probably not all of them are fun but she is welcome to neglect those ones in favor of the ones that are.

Of course. Yay Hebrew!

Hebrew! And also some lessons on What Really Happened That The Bible Got Wrong, here and there. Interspersed with commentary on things like the euphemistic meanings of "foot" and "navel."

This too is fascinating. ...The euphemisms less so. Why, Bible writers. Why this.

Apparently it wasn't considered kosher (pun not intended) to refer to genitals directly for some reason.

But why are genitals-related things even in the Bible.

Well, most of the "foot" references are relatively innocuous; describing how Seraphim supposedly held their wings to cover themselves and explaining why this couple had to get married or whatnot. And "navel" only appears once, and if you want someone to explain the reason for the existence of the Song of Songs Anaphiel is probably not that person.

Fine, fine. The history parts are cool though. Though Mehitabel is surprised so many people are so fond of God if this thing is their introduction to her traits.

Most people don't read the Bible all the way through. And some people are so terrified by the prospect of annihilation upon death that they'll rationalize a lot to not have to deal with that level of fear in their day-to-day lives.

Well, they are right that annihilation upon death would be pretty awful.

Yep. Whatever else you can say about the world, at least no one ever just stops existing. That would be awful and bad and wrong.

...How bad is Hell, though?

...Pretty bad, but the threshold for going there is pretty damn (pun not intended) high, and it is not, in fact, eternal torment--a pretty large chunk of Jesus's purpose was to get out everyone who was there at the time.

"It's not great but as far as I know they don't go around torturing each other."

"How many demons are there and how many people went to Hell since Jesus emptied it?"

"I don't know exactly how many demons there are but ballpark of a few thousand. There were three thousand two hundred and seven tormented souls as of the time I came to Earth but I haven't received any updates on that particular topic since then."

"So like one or two people go there a year."

"On average, yeah."

"That's not very many but it is too many. But it also means that I probably wouldn't save very many people by going to prison hospitals anyway, so it's not so bad that it would make people do bad things."

"It is absolutely too many. But--yeah."

Sigh. "What are demons like besides torturey?"

"Depends on the kind of demon. Actually only the nastiest few kinds are actively torturey; most of the rest occupy themselves going to and fro on the Earth and walking up and down on it committing assorted mischief of massively varying maliciousness when they can manage it and just sort of--hanging out in Hell living their lives when they can't."

"I want to learn about the kinds that there are now."

"The worst ones are a category with many names but for expediency's sake I'll call them the Dukes of Hell; there are ten of them. They are basically concentrated nasty and a truly unfortunate level of power. The other kinds that go in for torture are the--there aren't words for it in English." And then she names them in Angelic, since Mehitabel can hear and understand it. There are four other kinds. "Those have assorted metaphysical differences from one another but on the psychological level are basically the same, which is 'a bit eviler than humans typically come in'. There are the incubi and succubi, which are actually the same thing and basically benign, at least for demons; current consensus suggests that they came into being because so many people think sex is evil but are fairly harmless because sex is not, in fact, inherently bad. I mean, it can be bad, but that's a different topic," she waves a hand. There's also..." and she goes on to describe the other sixty species of demon.

"That's one hypothesis, anyway, and one that matches the supporting evidence."

"Is sex the only one they got wrong?"

"...Well, there's demons for all Seven Deadly Sins, which...the problem with lust or greed or wrath etcetera isn't that you're not ever supposed to be lustful or angry or want things, it's that those things are really easy to prioritize more highly than you should. Lust leading you to not think of the person you want as a person with thoughts and desires that don't match yours, or pride leading you to not fix your mistakes or apologize, or wrath leading you to hurt someone even when it won't stop anyone else from hurting."

Mehitabel takes notes on this too. "Why are those the seven deadly sins in particular?"

"The Seven Deadly Sins as a specific, unified construct are actually a human invention. I think it might have evolved over time instead of being mad up all at once; I don't know exactly where it came from."

"Okay." Notes notes. "Are there ever new kinds of demons anymore or have all the kinds already happened long ago?"

"The last new kind happened five hundred years ago, but they were only happening at about one every few centuries anyway."

"Are demons ever kids or do they just happen already grown up?"

"They happen already grown up. Angels do too, for that matter. Although half-demons happen sometimes, mostly half-incubi and succubi, and those are born and be kids and grow up like regular humans."

"What are half-demons like?"

"Well, it depends on what kind of demon, but mostly they're humans with maybe some extra powers and behavioral influences--a half succubus or incubus is less likely to think sex is a big deal, a half wrath demon would have a temper etcetera."

"And they don't go to Hell automatically or anything."

"Oh, no. Definitely not."

"Good."

"People going to Hell who are evil is terrible and needs to be fixed, but if there were innocents going to Hell this would be a monumentally more urgent priority."

"Yeah. What happens with people who are bad but not Hell bad going to Heaven?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like, they're still bad, just not super special bad, so how does it happen that they can't hurt anybody so Heaven will still be nice?"

"Well, things in Heaven aren't really breakable the way things on Earth are, and if you want to avoid someone then--Heaven doesn't really have a stable geometry the way Earth does, you can walk to places if you want but the way to do this is to start walking and intend to arrive there rather than memorizing a set of directions, and normally this works on people too but not if they don't want to see you. If you end up in the same place anyway they can sort of--metaphysically pretend they don't exist, and it works."

"What if people don't want to ignore someone but the someone is being mean?"

"Like how?"

"Like, um," Mehitabel's limited life experience is not serving her very well here. "Like if they're family and they think they shouldn't ignore family but they're not being nice."

"Oh, yeah, stuff like that. Things sort of--rearrange themselves so accidental meetings that are going to go like that don't happen as often, but it turns out that you can't make absolutely everyone completely happy all the time without damaging free will."

Nod, nod. "Free will is important."

"Extremely, yes."

"If succubi happened because people thought sex was bad did Hell happen because people thought punishment was good?"

"It's possible."

"Hmm." Scribble.

"If we knew for sure it was that probably 'punishing people for the sake of it is bad' would have taken higher precedence over 'Hell exists and you really don't want to go there' in Scripture."

"Does it even work right if people are only okay to avoid going to Hell?"

"It would surprise me if there wasn't anyone who hadn't been scared straight by it, and also it was an opportunity to encourage people to be better rather than worse overall. Whether it did more harm than good or more good than harm in the long run is debatable."

Nod.

"Something to think about, I guess."

"There are so many things to think about." Pause. "Are there aliens?"

"Sooort of. Some magicians decided to go live on Mars a while ago and since then they and their descendants have been periodically popping back to Earth and pretending not to be humans."

"But the whole rest of the entire everything is just empty? That seems like maybe it would have been good to save battery and make a smaller universe."

"She didn't know how much it was going to take it out of her to make humans, and all the galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, these things had already been made by the time she found out."

"Oh dear."

"And considering how she made them I'm not sure if it would have been helpful anyway. There was a--mm, how do you say it in English. There was a sort of point of supercompressed reality that sort of exploded outwards into mass and energy and stuff, and then stars and planets and stuff were several layers of chain reaction down from that. Starting at nothing and then just instantiating the solar system out of whole cloth might actually have been harder, I'm not sure."

"Oh. Well, that's okay then, it's not worse having empty stars. Was she going to do lots of kinds of aliens until it turned out humans were expensive?"

"I think so. Not as many as there are places to be, probably, so everyone would have room to expand."

"Oh, that would have been nice. If we can think of a really good way to fix her battery will she make them after all?"

"Assuming it's not some kind of imported one-time fix or anything like that, probably."

"Yeah. But if it's a big enough amount she can nap for more, right?"

"Yeah...creating human life actively restricted some things, it didn't just take a lot of energy, but I don't know that creating more life would make that worse--the restrictions are stuff that prevent her from interfering with free will, mostly. Not that she objects to that part, but if creating another set of life did impose some less negligible restrictions...I don't think that would happen, I'm just guessing wildly."

"I don't understand. Why would more kinds of life do that?"

"I don't think it would, but if they worked differently enough that restrictions to protect their free will prevented things that wouldn't impugn free will among humans, that might be inconvenient. Or, you know, I could be drastically overthinking things. It's probably the latter."

Nod.

"We'll see when we see, anyway, eh?"

"Yeah. Can I help design aliens if we get there?"

"Well, you'll have to ask Her, but I bet so. You'll probably want to study some biology between now and then, too."

"Okay!" Mehitabel writes that down on her list of things to study.

"Come to think of it, science in general might be good for leveraging your miracle powers better."

Nod, nod. Scribble, scribble.

Over the course of the next few days, Anaphiel acquires several textbooks containing salient information (not having experience with educating human children, she just picks ones that look relevant, not filtering for grade level), assures Mehitabel that if she's having trouble with something she can let her know and she'll explain or acquire lower-level background material, whichever's necessary, and finally determines that of her fellow angels on Earth only Haziel knows battery math, and begins tracking them down.

Mehitabel needs explanations and background for some of the more esoteric stuff, and she runs to the dictionary frequently too, but makes dogged progress, hopping every day between magic and science and history and Hebrew and reviewing her notes on her universe's metaphysics until she is reading by the light of her triple light spell.

Anaphiel finds Haziel and convinces (currently him) to tutor the Christ child in the mathematics of divine energy use, explains science, and reminds Mehitabel about recommended average number-of-hours-of-sleep per night for optimal brain development but otherwise does not attempt to interfere when she stays up late studying.

Haziel's wings are black speckled with white where Anaphiel's are red and a dusky purple where Anaphiel's are gold, with similar fading in between them. He's not as good at pretending to be human as Anaphiel is--his face is often expressionless and his voice is often toneless (his human voice, anyway; when he speaks Angelic he sounds as lively as anyone) and his body language is stiff, but he complies when reasonable requests are posed and he really does know his math.

Mehitabel does not require warmth from Haziel. She just needs to know how much divine energy she should expect various tasks to take under what conditions and what her recharge rate will be given various assumptions, and similar things about God and angels and anything else running on comparable battery systems.

Oh, well, then. Mehitabel increases the science/other ratio.

Interestingly, demons don't work the same way as Mehitabel and God and angels, but they work similarly in some ways. He will enumerate the technical details of the similarities and differences and why the similarities are important if she likes. One difference is how they recharge. The kinds of demons that do torture recharge from pain, succubi and incubi recharge from sex, wrath demons recharge from anger, etcetera.

Oh, dear. That makes it less likely that she will be able to reform the demons, doesn't it. At least the ones whose recharge mechanisms are particularly reform-incompatible.

Oh! Then she can resume optimism.

If she is intending to do significant work with demons-in-general he recommends finding an adviser who is one of the not-actively-terrible kinds of demon.

That sounds like a plan! Where might such a commodity be found?

"Thank you!"

How fascinating! (Demons are very interesting because if Mehitabel turns out not to be able to solve the technical problem of awful people going to Hell she may still be able to solve the social problem of Hell being full of demons making it particularly unpleasant. There aren't even that many demons.)

That is mostly not an option that has been considered before, largely because of the risks inherent in the prospect of getting the really nasty kinds of demons out of Hell to talk to.

Well, maybe the nicer demons can be emissaries to them within Hell instead.

That sounds potentially actionable!

Hooray!

Probably she wants to get large numbers of non-terrible demons on her side before she goes after the really nasty ones, though, since those are much more powerful.

Yes, that seems reasonable. Even when the strategy is more "missionary work" than "holy war", it is probably not wise to bet on particularly evil demons not trying to shift the equilibrium.

Getting large numbers of non-terrible demons on her side is probably something she can do. Mostly they care about the things that give them power (succubi and incubi care about sex, wrath demons care about being around angry people, sloth demons...probably hang around sleeping people creepily? What do sloth demons even do) and Mehitabel seems likely to be competent at figuring out how to get them more of it more efficiently and ethically.

Sloth demons could run hotels!

That's possible. Haziel genuinely doesn't know.

It is weird that there are things the angels do not know like that.

Well, God probably knows, and for every given thing there is probably an angel who knows it, but not every angel knows every thing. If they did, Anaphiel could have just taught her battery math herself and Haziel wouldn't be here.

Yes, that's true. It's still a little weird. It is probably not urgent to know what sloth demons do all day. Mehitabel will imagine they run hotels.

Haziel does not further pursue the question of why this is weird. Instead: math and technical details.

Yay!

Technical details include some facts about angels like how their teleportation works, the flaming sword thing, the fact that they aren't natively shaped like humans which is why he's so bad at nonverbal communication, and the fact that their wings are arguably the most "real" part of their corporeal forms while they have them out. Math includes some good methods for figuring out how much energy she has, how much it's a good idea to use at any given time, and how much her cap rises over time.

Ooh, her cap rises! That's promising. She is puzzled about the "realness" of their corporeal forms.

The wings represent something inherent to the nature of an angel. None of the rest of it does. If she introduced herself as Isabel or similar, for some reason, the "bel" part of that would be more real than the rest likewise because it was part of her real name.

Huh. So that means "real" here means overlapping with what the person is supposed to be?

Essentially, yes.

What do the rest of angels besides the wings really look like?

Well, it depends on the kind of angel! There are nine kinds. Principalities like Haziel and Anaphiel are sort of like winged, motile trees.

Winged trees! What about the other kinds?

Seraphim are serpents with six wings each. Cherubim are spheres of hundreds of wings and hundreds of eyes. Ophanim are discs lined on the outside with eyes and wings on either side. Dominions actually do look a lot like winged humans, but differently-proportioned. Virtues are sort of cylindrical towers. With wings. Powers look sort of like winged crosses between an armadillo and an ankylosaurus. Principalities he already mentioned, and the classes of angel that are referred to in English only as "angels" and "archangels-specifically-with-a-lowercase-not-to-be-confused-with-Archangels-we-promise" but have their own names in Angelic are spheres with wings, with "archangels" being larger spheres than "angels".

...What are capitalized Archangels, then?

Capitalized Archangels are the four most powerful Seraphim: Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel.

Those are all boys' names. Why?

"Are angels even boys and girls like humans are?"

"Some of us have aesthetic or otherwise superficial preferences to present as one gender or the other, when we're human-shaped, but nope."

"So it's like how you cut your hair," suggests Mehitabel.

"More like what kindsa clothes you wear, but yeah, on that level."