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Christina Theodora and warlock Bruce
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"Well, Bar has every book ever written everywhere; we can do some research."

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"Excellent." 

She asks Bar for any books written in Bruce's dimension that might be useful for figuring out his world's God's limitations. 

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The single book with the largest quantity of relevant content is the Bible, but there are also a handful of things written by demons on how to operate unnoticed on Earth, plus one treatise that was technically made publicly available before all extant copies, the theologian who wrote it, and said theologian's house were destroyed in a spontaneous fire. (Most governments banned all of his earlier publications after that, just to be on the safe side, but Bar only cares that something was published at some point.)

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"Fuckin' me," she mutters under her breath at this anecdote. 

If she hands out various copies of the Bible to the angels she has in here and splits the treatise and the demonic texts between her and Bruce, they can get through it reasonably quickly. What's the verdict?

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From the Bible, they learn that either God can neither teleport people nor reliably predict the outcomes of His actions, or He really likes sending ineffective plagues on the Egyptians.

The theological treatise looks, at first glance, to be surprisingly benign for something that got its author killed. It's a rather abstruse document on how Heaven, being a realm of Spirit distinct from matter, must have different properties of space and time, with some speculation on what those properties are. For instance, Heaven and Hell as seen in prophecy both have a top and a bottom, and the treatise suggests that the local equivalent of gravity points in a single direction everywhere rather than toward masses. Furthermore, since Heaven and Hell are perfect opposites, they must have opposite directionality, such that objects in Hell fall towards objective cosmic up.

The demon books put the treatise into some very valuable context. Apparently a handful of demons took an interest in interplanar physics after seeing a piece of Heaven torn off and turned into Hell, and they theorize that that event may have caused lingering instability. This has a couple of consequences. For one thing, the bottom edge of Heaven is "adjacent" in higer-dimensional space to the bottom edge of Hell, and it may be possible for a small quantity of spirit to move from one to the other as the boundary "twitches" back and forth. Perhaps more interestingly, there's some speculation that a sufficiently large release of (earthly rather than spiritual) energy might destabilize a portion of spiritual spacetime, with disastrous results for any beings in the area. The first batch of books they get doesn't include reports of anyone testing that theory empirically.

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"...This speculates that Heaven might be vulnerable to being blown up. That's--weird, if true."

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"That's super weird! Do you just mean that Heaven can have explosions in it, or that things in Heaven can be destroyed by explosions, or . . . ?"

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She shows him the bit of speculation in question. 

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"I guess a piece of Heaven getting ripped off and turned into Hell would cause, uh, bad stuff. That's probably good but mostly it's just disturbing to think about. Earth is supposed to pass away at the end of days but Heaven is supposed to be perfect and eternal."

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"Yeah. Heaven's not supposed to be fragile the way Earth is."

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"I guess if Hell was destroyed, that would be good? Better if we could get the people out first."

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"Yyyyyyyyes. Definitely want to evacuate first, the poor damned..."

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"And then Heaven has people in it too. The saved, and also nobody's sure whether angels are separate people or extensions of God."

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"Yeah, of course. --I mean to the saved bit, not the--nobody knows? Really?"

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"Well, I guess the angels know, and presumably the demons know too since they used to be angels, so really it's just humans that don't know. I bet Bar has something that will explain it."

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"I don't know if the existence of demons proves that angels aren't all just God's fingers or if your God is just that perverse."

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"The fact that some rebelled and others didn't at least suggests they're multiple minds, but every time someone tries to explain the Trinity to me I go cross-eyed and this seems like the same sort of question so you should consult someone more knowledgeable than me."

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"Well, I'm all homoiousios over here, so I can't give a good explanation for how it works, but I've found some good analogies for how it could work, if you...know anything about computer programming...which I have no reason to think you do."

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"I've done a bit? Not much, I'm afraid, my school didn't cover it."

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She gets a napkin from Bar and scribbles out: 

 

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He stares for a bit. "There are programming languages where the equality operator is intransitive? I guess if someone wanted it to be a metaphor for the Trinity . . . I'm sorry, I've gone off on a tangent, where were we, angels. Uh, I guess what to do about angels depends on, um, what you're . . . planning to do to God?" It's not the easiest subject to wrap his mind around, people planning to do things to God.

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"I really wish I could make that decision based on better information," she sighs. "But I think the blowing-up thing might be the best lead we have..."

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Bruce isn't sure which is worse, that he agrees or that he doesn't know whether he would say anything if he didn't. "We can see if any angels have written anything relevant? About whether they're separate people, I mean."

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"Yeah. Bar?"

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Angels: do not produce publicly available writing. Humans in heaven: do not produce publicly available writing either. Humans in hell occasionally publish things, usually very short and in the medium of "finger dragged through sand" or "blood smeared on a rock".

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