Angelsplaining
Some angels, having found themselves in a spaceship engine room surrounded by an army of demons, might have decorously retired to heaven and sought reinforcements. Constance was not that kind of angel. She had an absolute confidence in her own angelic qualities. The thing about angels, she believed, was that they were on the side of Good. And Good always kicked Evil’s butt. Always.
She drew herself up, her wings outspread, her halo sparking like a small lightning storm. “I don’t care whether you call yourself Legion or Spivey or my Aunt Matilda,” Constance said. “I’m an angel. I serve the Big Guy. You know who that is. You know his name. So, therefore, I command you to begone! Shoo!”
Constance wished she hadn’t added on the shoo; it sounded undignified, even for her. But it did the job. Blinding light blasted through the engine room, disintegrating the horde of evil Spiveys in shattering explosions. Quite suddenly Constance was quite alone. The steady whum whum whum of the engines kept on comfortably around here. “Welp, glad that’s over,” Constance said.
Then something chirped, loudly and annoyingly, like an upset cricket. Constance looked around, and noticed a communicator lying on the floor. Apparently it had not been disintegrated and banished to the lower regions along with its formal owner. “Mr. Spivey?” a staticky voice said. “Are you there? Did you determine the nature of the unusual readings in the engine room? Mr. Spivey?”
Constance shrugged, and picked up the communicator. It was a tiny badge-like device, with several blinking lights. The angel wondered how it worked. She hadn’t kept up with the details of every human technological development. “Hello there!” she tried.
No response came. Constance tapped the communicator. “Anyone listening?”
Communicators are dicey things. Constance did not know that what she should have done was to clearly identify the name of the person to whom she wished to speak, following which her communicator would contact that person’s communicator and set up a link. By asking for anyone, Constance inadvertently opened a link to everyone. She, however, assumed that the communicator was not working.
“Okay…” she mused, apparently to herself. “So I can’t tell the captain that Spivey’s gone. Eh, she’ll figure it out. Back to the original plan then. I wreck the engines so they can’t go and find the Ark of the Covenant, then fly away. No problem!” Constance looked at the padamantium-crystal powered engines, whumming away contentedly. “Pity, though. I hate to smash up a good ship.”
“Then you’d better not,” said Captain Jolene coolly. She had used an emergency teleporter to bounce herself directly to the engine room. Now she held a laser rifle steady on the angel. “You want to tell me exactly what happened to my science officer, and why you know all about the secret orders he just handed me not an hour ago?”
“One, your first officer was a demon. I don’t know how your HR people missed that. Anyway, I cleansed the ship of evil, you’re welcome. Two, I know because…” and here she powered up her shoulder-glow dramatically, “I’m an angel.”
“You’re a what?”
Constance sighed. She’d have to angelsplain again. She was beginning to get tired of it.
It’s been a little while since I updated this story arc, but I couldn’t resist. Constance is fun to write. And I had left her situation sadly unresolved. Now it is!
