Larry's Angels: Larry reads Angelology

[Antonius Pius]

It used to be part if the subjecting colonials curriculum. Repressing feelings is more on the personal side of the spectrum (unless you jump back to the purpose of atrocity as a tool of domination, which may have been on the curriculum in Otterley's day).

[Alytha]

Maybe it's one of those Evil Knievel cannons?

Otherwise, the author has obviously never seen a real life cannon...

[Lummel]

Well yes, angels seems to have bird-like wings which means that they are supported by a framework of bone.If wing-rot reduces them to stumps, then clearly it's a disease that causes the underlying skeleton to wither as well-which means it is well within the realms of possibility for it to affect and weaken the spine, causing scoliosis and twisting of the rib cage which can cause severe compression and collapse of the lungs.

I am as convinced of your explanation as I am of the goodness of Stannis and Tyrion.

Ah, family history's always interesting. But is it actually explained why this uncle guy enjoyed shooting people out of cannons?...

Don't understand your question. Isn't this characterisation, so we know who the bad guys in the story are?

Maybe it's one of those Evil Knievel cannons?

Otherwise, the author has obviously never seen a real life cannon...

Both are equally strong possibilities.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Here's the infamous child/cannonball passage starring Sir Arthur Grigori. Warning, passage involves children being stuffed into a cannon, which is then fired.

Oblivious to the stares of the natives, Sir Arthur led the child before the prisoners of war--as the villagers were now called--lifted her into his arms, and deposited her into the barrel of a loaded cannon. The barrel was long and wide, and it swallowed the child entirely--only her hands were visible as they clung tight to the iron rim, holding it as if it were the top of a well into which she might sink.

"Light the fuse," Sir Grigori commanded. As the young soldier, his fingers tremblin, struck a match, the girl's mother cried out from the crowd.

The explosion was the first of many that morning. Two hundred village children--the exact number of British killed in the Kanpur massacre--were led one by one to the cannon. The iron grew so hot that it charred the fingers of the soldiers dropping the heavy bundles of wriggling flesh, all hair and fingernails, into the shaft. Restrained at gunpoint, the villagers watched. Once the bloody business was through, the soldiers turned their muskets upon the villagers, ordering them to clean the market courtyard. Pieces of their children hung upon the tents and bushes and carts. Blood stained the earth orange.

Note that the soldiers have the villagers at gunpoint, and then... turn their guns on the villagers? I guess they're doing some kind of musket-spinning exercise? And these local children have a peculiar diet that makes them be mostly hair and fingernails? The Mighty Keratin Clans of Kanpur?

[Lummel]

hmm. Here's a picture of twelve inch gun. You could probably fit a child into the barrel of that provided they were scrawny enough.

[The BlackBear]

..and you had a convenient railway running through the village.

And most babies have a shoulder width of 12 inches

[Larry of the Lawn]

hmm. Here's a picture of twelve inch gun. You could probably fit a child into the barrel of that provided they were scrawny enough.

Some more angel classicism: The more plump, well fed children simply can't be turned into cannonballs. The Grigori wrath is disproportionately shouldered by the poorest villagers.

[Lummel]

..and you had a convenient railway running through the village.

And most babies have a shoulder width of 12 inches

well then he probably had a Big Bertha on loan from the Germans. That's 16.5". Perfectly reasonable.

[MinDonner]

So, do angels have some kind of mind-control powers then? Or are we to believe that the British are so fiendish that the soldiers would just have stuffed children into cannons without question? I mean sure, the Empire was not exactly rosy and pleasant, especially in the aftermath of the Mutiny, but this seems rather excessive - I could even see Flashman himself balking at the task.

[Winter's Knight]

So, do angels have some kind of mind-control powers then? Or are we to believe that the British are so fiendish that the soldiers would just have stuffed children into cannons without question? I mean sure, the Empire was not exactly rosy and pleasant, especially in the aftermath of the Mutiny, but this seems rather excessive - I could even see Flashman himself balking at the task.

Oh I don't know-there was the Jalianwalla Bagh massacre.

On Sunday, 13 April 1919, Dyer was convinced of a major insurrection and thus he banned all meetings. On hearing that a meeting of 15,000 to 20,000 people including women, children and the elderly had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer went with fifty riflemen to a raised bank and ordered them to shoot at the crowd. Dyer continued the firing for about ten minutes, till the ammunition supply was almost exhausted; Dyer stated that 1,650 rounds had been fired, a number which seems to have been derived by counting empty cartridge cases picked up by the troops. Official British Indian sources gave a figure of 379 identified dead,[1] with approximately 1,100 wounded. The casualty number estimated by the Indian National Congress was more than 1,500, with approximately 1,000 dead.

[The BlackBear]

well the soldier who lit the fuse's fingers were trembling, so either it was a fucking scary indian child, or he wasn't totally cool with it.

[MinDonner]

Oh, for sure some very nasty shit was done at the time. But even if morally the acts are the same, from a believable-human-action perspective there's a huge gulf between standing at a distance and firing a rifle at a large crowd for ten minutes, and spending half a day manually butchering children one by one. :dunno:

[Larry of the Lawn]

St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York

Evangeline is feeling guilty and panicky about betraying her order, and she's concerned that her guilt will be apparent to her sisters. She says that even the smallest emotional display by one sister is immediately apparent to all the rest, so she's nervous of whipping the hive into a frenzy with her guilty visage. Naturally, she heads down to the adoration chapel to pray away some of the guilt.

The enormous oak door that connected the convent to he church stood open night and day, big as a mouth waiting to be fed. Sisters traveled between the two buildings at will, transposing themselves from the gloomy convent to the glorious luminescence of the chapel. To Evangeline, returning to the Maria Angelorum throughout the day always felt like going home, as if the spirit were released just slightly from the constraints of the body

But it's not just in prayer and the glory of the divine that Evangeline finds spiritual comfort, she also finds respite in her bureaucratic duties; in the anagrams and schedules of the organized nun life.

One of her responsibilities in addition to her library duties was the preparation of the Adoration Prayer Schedule, or APS for short. Each week she wrote down the sisters' regular time slots, careful to mark variations or substitutions, and posted the APS on the large corkboard listing the roster of alternate Prayer Partners in case of illness. Sister Philomena always said, "Never underestimate our reliance upon the APS!"--a statement that Evangeline found quite correct. Often the sisters scheduled for adoration at night would walk the hallway between the convent and the church in pajamas and slippers, white hair tied up in plain cotton scarves. They would check the APS, glance at their wristwatches, and hurry on to prayer, assured in the soundness of the schedule that had kept perpetual prayer alive for two hundred years.

Taking solace in the exactitude of her work, Evangeline left the APS, dipped a finger in the holy water, and genuflected. Walking through the church, she felt calmed by the regularity of her actions, and by the time she approached the chapel, she felt a sense of renewed serenity. Inside, Sisters Divinia and Davida knelt at the altar, prayer partners from three to four. Sitting at the back, careful not to disturb Divinia and Davida, Evangeline took her rosary from her pocket and began to count the beads. Soon her prayer took rhythm.

As she prays, she thinks about the events of her childhood. She remembers how after her mother's death in France, her father brought her to New York. She learned English quickly, whereas he struggled to learn the correct pronunciations. At home they would speak her mother's French or his native Italian. They would take day trips into Manhattan, and her father would meet 'contacts' at bars, cafes, or park benches.

She concentrates on one such trip in particular, to a cafe in Little Italy. The owner gives Evangeline a fancy slice of cake to eat while he converses with her father. The cake is a rare treat and she has something of a religious experience enjoying the cake and trying to draw out the pleasure of the sugary, butter cream icing.

Her cake induced rapture concluded, she begins to eavesdrop, and learns that some kind of live cargo was shipped over from Europe the night before. The cafe owner, Vladimir, continues...

"I hear they are horrifying creautures--very pure. I don't understand how they managed to transport them to New York. In the old days, it would have taken a ship and full crew to get them here so quickly. If they are of the pure stock that they claim, it would be nearly impossible to contain them. I didn't think it possible."

Her father offers speculation that these creatures (golly gee whiz, I wonder kind of creatures?) have been weakening due to a new disease that his wife Angela had been studying. So now we can be sure that the Angela Valko that Sneja referenced is the same person as Evangeline's mom: the maverick Angelologist studying the curative effects of music on Angels.

"Angela used to speculate that the Nephilim are beginning to feel emotion as humans do. Compassion, love, kindness--everything that we define ourselves by may be emerging in them. In fact," her father concluded, "they consider this a great weakness."

This goes on in this vein for sometime, and we learn that the pure, 100% angels are called Watchers (well done, Gigei!). Angela also speculated that the cause of the disease was from chemical pollutants being absorbed into human bodies since the industrial revolution, which were introduced into the Nephilim blood, and causing the wing rot. So Angela was also sort of an environmental angelologist.

*Maybe with enough mercury and PCBs in fish, lead in the water supply, and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere we can finally overcome the Nephilim? Was the Kyoto Protocol really an angel-backed conspiracy?*

Her father asks Evangeline to stay with Vladimir in the cafe for a minute while he runs an errand. Vladimir tells her he has a picture of her mother, and goes into the back of the cafe to get it. While he does this, little Evangeline runs after her father and follows him through the streets of Manhattan. She trails him into a warehouse near Chinatown. Inside are three cages suspended, with a group of men below them. Each cage contains a creature, two seem unconscious, but one is raging insanely, grabbing the bars and cursing the men below.

Studying them more closely, Evangeline saw that the creatures were completely naked, although the texture of their skin, a luminescent membrane of clarified gold, made them seem encased in pure light. One of the creatures was female--she had long hair, small breasts, and a tapering waist. The other two were male. Gaunt and hairless, with flat chests, they were taller than the female and at least two feet taller the the size of a grown man. The bars of the cage were smeared in a glittering, honeylike fluid that dripped slowly down the metal and onto the floor.

...At the center of her long, lithe back grew a pair of sweeping, articulated wings. Evangeline covered her mouth with her hands, afraid that she might call out in surprise. The creature flexed her muscles, and the wings opened, spreading the entire length of the cage. White and sweeping, the wings shone with mellowed luminosity. As the cage swayed under the angel's weight, tracing a slow parabola through the stagnant air, Evangeline felt her sense sharpen. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears; her breath quickened. The creatures were lovely and horrifying at once. They were beautiful, iridescent monsters.

Her father asks if they'll be sent to the lab in Arizona for preservation and dissection, and one of the men confirms this. We learn that these are the strongest Angels found in years, but still weaker than their ancestors. One of the male angels pulls himself upright and exchanges some threats with Evangeline's dad, and comments "Angel and devil. One is but a shade of the other."

Evangeline runs out of the warehouse.

...Present day, a dive bar in the middle of nowhere...

Apparently Verlaine hasn't made it all the way back to New York yet, and is somewhere between Milton and the city.

He drinks a couple of beers while waiting for the burger he ordered, and it turns out that Verlaine is a Corona man, which seems sort of out of character, but also strangely appropriate for Verlaine, in the middle of winter, considering how he dresses for the cold. Why not enjoy a lager typically associated with warmer weather?

He muses over the copy of the Rockefeller letter as he nurses another beer, wondering who Celestine Clochette is, being as she's the only person mentioned in the letter. He is puzzled again by how he could have ended up working for a man like Grigori, who likely cannot see the beauty in art or artifacts beyond the monetary value. He wonders how he'll get back home, and considers "calling the convent. Perhaps the beautiful young nun he'd met in the library would have a suggestion. The thought struck him that she too might be in some kind of danger."

Next we zip back over to the convent, and Evangeline is about to introduce us to Sister Celestine, a seventy-five year old, wheelchair-bound nun...

I promise we'll have Evangeline find Verlaine at the divebar soon, but first she has to talk to Sister Celestine and fill us in on some expository stuff regarding the Rockefeller letter.

To be continued...

[Larry of the Lawn]

So, do angels have some kind of mind-control powers then? Or are we to believe that the British are so fiendish that the soldiers would just have stuffed children into cannons without question? I mean sure, the Empire was not exactly rosy and pleasant, especially in the aftermath of the Mutiny, but this seems rather excessive - I could even see Flashman himself balking at the task.

Yeah, they definitely have some kind of mind control ability. There was something about how the Grigori's persuaded men to do their bidding with a Svengali-like staring technique...

[Alytha]

So there's about 15 people in this world, and they all know eachother / about eachother in some way?

Am I the only one to think that the Angfel thing is totally illogical? On the one hand, there's the shiny socialite angels, on the other, angels in cages in Chinatown?! How does that happen? If humans can see angels for what they are, how are the others still alive and free?

Also, I don't think any vertebrate winged creature has its wings growing from the middle of its back, either horizontally or vertically...

Am I overthinking this? :idea:

[Larry of the Lawn]

So there's about 15 people in this world, and they all know eachother / about eachother in some way?

Am I the only one to think that the Angfel thing is totally illogical? On the one hand, there's the shiny socialite angels, on the other, angels in cages in Chinatown?! How does that happen? If humans can see angels for what they are, how are the others still alive and free?

Also, I don't think any vertebrate winged creature has its wings growing from the middle of its back, either horizontally or vertically...

Am I overthinking this? :idea:

but they're, like, anjulz!!!!!!

[Alytha]

Vampires with wings, you mean :P

[Larry of the Lawn]

Vampires, angels, vikings, cowboys, tomayto, tomahto

[Alytha]

Viking vampire tomato ninja nuns!

[Gigei]

Clearly the evil angels had a cannon custom-made for children to fit into!