Hello. Welcome to Milliways. Can I interest you in a beverage? First is free.

"...Hi, Milliways. Is this some kind of weird attempt to cheer me up?"

I'm Bar. The larger establishment is Milliways. I cannot speculate on the motives behind the placement of the door, unfortunately.

"So you're saying you're an actual person and not something one of my mom's siblings is doing to mess with me."

Yes.

The door you came in through appears in various places throughout various worlds at various times. If you go out and let it close, it will no longer lead here, but instead wherever you originally would have gone had Milliways not intercepted you.

"...Various worlds? Do you mean different planets or different dimensions?"

Technically, reads the next napkin, both.

"So...how does that even work? I think things mostly pretend to be corporeal in Hell, I could see a doorlike thing existing there, but how on earth would you access Heaven? No pun intended. And I don't think there's currently sapient life on other planets..."

If there is no door there will be no Milliways. And many dimensions have multiple inhabited planets.

"How many dimensions do you think there are?"

I don't know. Many millions at least.

"...I. Am familiar with three. Or with the existence of three, anyway, I've never been to Hell. This...does not seem like the kind of prank my mother's siblings would play on me. I wonder why..." she trails off, shaking her head. "You said something about a drink?"

"Um. Hi. This place claims to be a magic bar that can access dimensions other than Heaven, Earth and Hell, which I didn't know existed yesterday. Or five minutes ago, for that matter."

"...I didn't know of those."

"Well, it's said that Jovah looks after the dead, but the name of the place is unspecified. The place I am from is called Samaria."

"My world had a place named Samaria in it, a long time ago. And Jovah sounds like some of the ways people pronounce God's name."

"That's interesting, but this entire business is very strange and I hesitate to draw any conclusions. Why do you have so many napkins?"

"Apparently the bar is a person and...you know, I have no idea if they even have a gender, they communicate by appearing napkins with words written on them." She holds out the napkins.

"No kidding. I wonder if your God and my God are the same one, or if there are actually more than one in the multiverse."

"I think the Edori think that other people on other stars have their own gods, but I haven't studied their beliefs in much detail."

"There are definitely people in my world who think different things about the nature of God and how He works and, to be frank, whether or not He even exists, but most people are wrong about most things about God, so."

"Apart from the question of whether Jovah is the sole god and how to pronounce his name even the Edori agree with the general consensus, where I'm from..."

"Maybe he talks to more people? I only know everything I do about Him because my adoptive mother is an angel."

"I don't know, how many people in your - dimension - does he talk to? Jovah speaks directly to oracles, of whom there are three, and answers prayers from angels - possibly other petitioners as well but we get more reliable results praying aloft."

"Are we? Do I not look like an angel to you?"

"You look like someone who wants to look like an angel. Real angels don't walk around with their wings out all the time."

"...As opposed to what? I can't imagine it would be comfortable to put them under a cloak or something."

"My kind of angels aren't inherently corporeal. They can dematerialize their wings at will."

"I wouldn't want to do that any more than I'd care to be rid of my arms. They're attached. I've had my wings my whole life."

"Like I said, they're not inherently corporeal. They haven't had their any body part their whole lives. Remember how I said dead humans go to Heaven? Angels are from there."

"Even if I could become - incorporeal - at will, I would expect to want to do it all at once. But then I'm accustomed to corporeality and may be missing something."

"...Angels are older than the human race. What form they take on, when they do, is largely arbitrary. You and I, we have the head, torso, limbs model hard-coded into our identities. They don't. They look like humans because it's convenient, not because they have some particular attachment."

"Then why bother with wings at all? Why not just - expand incorporeally towards wherever they wish to be and then contract into a convenient form there?"

"I'm not completely sure I understand you're question, but an angel's noncorporeal form isn't mist or just not being there, it's way too much energy for the landscape to handle."

"I don't understand, but perhaps it's not readily described. ...So why are we here?"

"Because of the arbitrary whims of that door over there, apparently. Unless you meant that more philosophically."

"She gave me this thing," Anna says, gesturing to her drink. "Which I haven't tried yet. I should do that." sip

"Very delicious blue fruit punch," Anna commented. "Odd, I usually don't like fruit punch very much." sip "You do good work, bar."

Thank you ever so.

"So what's it like, being your kind of angel? I imagine it must be very similar to being human."

"Well, there are differences - even besides the appendages - but compared to being a hazardous field of energy I suppose it's a lot like being a human indeed. We live in angel holds, we sing a lot, the leader of our country is always an angel - co-ruling with a mortal spouse, though."

"...So their kids are hybrids or something? Is interbreeding common?"

"Oh, all angels - with a very, very tiny handful of exceptions, long ago - have one angel and one mortal parent. If two angels try to have children the results are horribly deformed. Sometimes even angels' children are mortal, though."

"That's odd. When my kind of angel has kids with a human it has strange effects on the child. Not bad effects, necessarily, but it was starting to cause problems so it was forbidden."

"It's forbidden absent special dispensation for two angels to try, on my world. What happens when yours - hybridize?"

"It wasn't. What do they do instead?"

"Well, they don't die, so they don't really need to make more of them, but if for some reason God decides there should be more angels he makes them. It's also theoretically possible for a human to become an angel, but I think that's happened a grand total of three times in human history, and one of them was one of the 'hybrids'--an unlucky one, who had enough self-possession to make sure she didn't hurt anyone but herself. Most of the unlucky ones would have been really really inconvenient to give full angelic powers, but she could be helped. The other two were just really devout mortals."

"How odd. ...Our sort of angels do die, not even later than mortals. Calling them 'mortals' is just convention."

"I had guessed that, seeing as how you're all inherently biological and stuff. Why do you call them mortals, anyway?"

"I'm not sure. It's just what they're called, misnomer though it is."

"That's strange. I wonder if your world does have my kind of angel in it...or the idea of my kind of angel anyway, and your kind of angel got lumped in with them? Only no, you said your God talks a lot more freely...you know what, I just left my mom's house, I bet she could shed a lot more light on this situation than I could. Bar, is it feasible for me to fetch my mother?"

If she can be contacted while you hold the door, and reach the door before you tire of holding it or fail to continue doing so, yes.

"Hello. I'm Isabella," says Isabella.

"Hello," she says, recovering from whatever it was that happened when the door closed. "I'm...well, I usually go by Victoria amongst mortals, but since you're obviously from one of the other universes my daughter mentioned, I might as well tell you my name is Heylel."

"Why do you usually go by a different name?"

"I confess the way your sort of angels works seems... excessively complicated," remarks Isabella. "Particularly if abridged versions of your life stories qualify as scripture."

"Less that our life stories qualify as Scripture, and more that they intersect with it. We are side characters, not protagonists."

"Still. The first Archangel and angelica are named in the Librera, but everything known about them personally is from other sources."

"It doesn't really say anything about who we are, just 'and then Gabriel told Miriam that she was to bear a son' and 'Michael showed up and looked impressive because that was useful apparently' and 'Lucifer royally screwed up,'" she gestures to herself, "Lucifer being the Latin translation of my name."

"...That is a word in my language," remarks Isabella.

"I think... that I might need to know you better before I could take your promises on such a subject. I don't quite understand how powerful you are, and feel rather responsible for my world. I do apologize."

"That is entirely understandable. Would it help if I didn't physically leave the bar? If you just opened the door a crack, I could look through--well, look is perhaps not the best word, I have senses you probably don't. And you could close it again before I could push past you."

"Unless you also have speed that I don't. I'm given to understand that the body you're occupying is a convenience. But I don't wish to have an elaborate conversation about the details of my limited trust; that seems rude."

Isabella tilts her head curiously.

"This place is cut off from my God somehow. There's still the connection that is me, but it's not wholly comfortable. Think stepping out for clean air while in a place with an unpleasant smell."

"Oh. We don't have anything quite like that."

"You don't seem to, no."

"You believe you could tell even if mine worked completely differently from yours?"

"I think I would probably feel something from you, even if I had no idea what it meant. I could be mistaken, but since you don't believe you have such a thing either," shrug "it seems simplest to believe I don't perceive anything because there's nothing there. In that case, anyway. Honestly--to my senses you don't seem to be different from a human at all. Aside from the obvious biological differences, of course."

Isabella waggles a wing. "They are generally considered sufficiently obvious to make identification trivial."

"Right. But I'm not sensing anything from you on the metaphysical level aside from a bogstandard human soul."

"The metaphysical specialness of angels is often exaggerated at home, but anyone can tell it doesn't do very much if it exists at all."

"...My God isn't cut off from this place when I have the door open. It...is my strong impression, via I-am-a-living-conduit-of-his-will, that he wouldn't...interact with you, without your consent. If looking at your world isn't possible due to entirely reasonable practical concerns, could He get a look at you?"

"Has he not already, when you opened the door?"

"Mm, there's a difference between observing you as you exist and trying to derive things from that...to be blunt, yes, but he won't do anything with it unless you say yes. Basically I'm asking permission to try to figure things out about your world from you."

"I don't mind that, assuming that's all you do. No reading my mind."

"That makes sense. Although once two angels were given dispensation to marry. They had mostly angel children, all healthy, and one mortal."

"If someone with a Lucifer's blood were somehow rendered healthy without changing their blood, and they grew up and had children with a mortal, they would have naturally healthy children all of whom were angels," she adds. "Not that that's particularly relevant, but just as an addendum on how that sort of thing works. I suppose in the instance you refer too...if I had to guess, there would be something about the angel woman's body that would make her miscarry a lucifer before it was old enough for the pregnancy to be noticed."

"I wouldn't know. It was generations ago. But that seems like a reasonable guess."

"And...I think I have an idea of why your world has some of the terms it does. It looks like the people who first came to your world were the descendants of people who had lived on an Earth much like ours, and much of your culture based on our mythologies. 'Lucifer' as 'bad angel'...makes sense in that context."

"There is a folktale about the origin of the word, but it's unclear how true it may be."

"Well, that's what I'm getting. Oh, and interestingly enough, your kind of angel doesn't seem to be a different species from humanity, as our world's scientists would reckon it."

Isabella shrugs. "How do you reckon it?"

"They use, oh, interfertility and such. You literally cannot maintain a population of only angels and no humans naturally. A species is...a population that freely and fertilely interbreeds, I think. At least the most recent time it was defined, scientists sometimes redefine things."

"Then yes, of course under that definition we qualify - except that you can maintain a population of all mortals and no angels perfectly well, but perhaps that doesn't matter?"

"No, that part was just for emphasis, not part of the definition. You could maintain populations of only people who had brown eyes or blue eyes perfectly well but that doesn't make them separate species."

"I see."

"Still, that answers a lot of my questions. And it looks like the bloodwork was directly done by other humans, which would explain why the design is imperfect like that."

"...Excuse me?"

"The original people who came to live on Samaria were humans. They created the angel gene--genes are what they call the blood thing."

"And he couldn't have done it by telling the humans to make an angel gene?"

"Oh, yes, we were not intended to be a surprise."

Isabella winces delicately. "You're reading the Librera with magic or something, aren't you? The answer's in it. Our ancestors came from a place of desperate violence and watched their neighbors fail at lesser compromises with similar stakes and did not want the same to happen to their descendants. If we cannot even put on a concert, we have failed, is the idea. There are warning shots. One year one of them was invoked deliberately."

"No, I'm still looking over what could be extrapolated from you personally. I probably should read your holy book with--I'm not personally offended, but it's generally considered incorrect to refer to power directly from God as magic." She places one hand on the book, mostly for show, and says, "I'm still not convinced that's a good idea. Some kind of noticeable penalty, sure, but the entire planet? Surely a bunch of squabbling factions would be superior to everyone dead." She looks deeply disturbed.

"How can you derive from me, without reading my mind, that the thunderbolts will fall if we do not hold a Gloria?"

"Because any object contains in itself an imprint of the world. You were formed by thousands of millions of billions of trillions of tiny coincidences and chances and decisions and actions and if any one of those things had been different you would not stand before me in the precise form you do today. I can tell from the shape of your skull what evolutionary pressures produced your ancientest ancestors, and I can tell from the precise tears in the keratin how you cut your hair and nails. When I look closer--at the position of microscopic dust particles on your clothes--I can tell the wind patterns that deposited them there. I do not read this information automatically from everyone because even my mind couldn't hold it all. What I did when I looked at you was that my God within me took in all that you are and gave me the information about how you became that way relevant to what I was looking for. The information is less perfectly complete than it could be because we weren't looking at anything in your brain proper, but that doesn't change the fact that it's possible to tell things like what you had for lunch when you were five by the composition of a tiny piece of the material in your leg bone."

"You were not complete about the nature of this scan even after it was clear I value my privacy and I want you to stop at once."

"It only happened once, it's not an ongoing process. And 'it's possible to tell' isn't the same as 'we checked.' I have no idea what you had for lunch when you were five. I don't know anything about you at all, really, beside what you've chosen to tell me and what I can guess from what I've seen of your culture. I apologize if I misrepresented my capabilities to you. It wasn't my intention, but I sometimes forget what other people don't know or understand."

"If there is ever a time to be particularly cautious about what others understand it is probably in an interdimensional bar. What did you even check to determine the bit about the Gloria, if you're determining it from what's rubbed off on my skin and the flecks of color in my eyes, what other information did you learn and not happen to find conversationally interesting?"

Isabella grits her teeth and doesn't comment, just holds her wings close to herself and looks away.

"I don't know anything about you you haven't chosen to share," Heylel says quietly. "And I'm not picking anything up now. But--yes, I've massively screwed up, and if I had done so just a bit more massively it would have been an immense invasion of privacy. I'm sorry. I'll go now."

"I apologize for my outburst," murmurs Isabella.

"I believe you."

"Are you okay?"

"As far as I know."

"If she says she doesn't know anything about you besides what you told her then she almost certainly doesn't. If she had violated your privacy she might have dodged the issue to make you feel better but I can think of too many half-truths she might have used for it to be likely that she outright lied."

"As you say. And of course if I were harmed the only responsible thing to do would be to sit here rather than dare open the door and make it worse, so."

"Are you saying you're planning on camping out here forever? ...Or just until there's no one else here, I don't need space-folding bar time seriously and it would be rude to make you wait after what just happened."

"Okay. I guess I'll probably finish my delicious blue thing and then go, I guess."

"I apologize for my part in the - events."

"The worst I ended up suffering was some minor awkwardness, but thank you anyway." She finishes her blue thing, and leaves.

And Isabella lingers in the bar a while longer, but eventually also goes home.