the end of vigil

[inherpiety]

Keziah continues to routinely invite Junia to sing with her.

Today they are practicing the Third Angelic Rite.

And then - how rude! - the door to the music room opens.

But not to the hallway - and not to any visible hand - and there is a strong press of magical presence emanating from it, and a faint sheen of rainbow water droplets hanging in the air.

Comments

[inherpiety]

"Yes. A lot of worlds are really strange."

[pythbox]

"I am beginning to see that," says Junia.

[inherpiety]

"The one who said she had one of you at home is not from the world with the talking animal souls or the one where people can be made out of magic, though," says Keziah. "Minting is from there and sometimes people have magic powers - supposedly I should have one of those by now, but if I do I don't know what - but nothing else that weird except for more technology and they don't live on one of this planet. Nobody lives on one of this planet but us, actually, it is not very popular."

[pythbox]

"I wonder why that is," says Junia.

[inherpiety]

"The most popular planet is this one called Earth. There's one in this world but no one lives on it anymore. The whole ancestors-had-a-lot-of-wars thing goes really far back."

[pythbox]

"Goodness."

[inherpiety]

"Yeah, except in other worlds they didn't have quite the same thing so there are still people on Earths in all the worlds that have Earths. And no angels, except there's a different kind of thing called angels that aren't like us much at all except sort of being shaped alike in the animal-souls world, and they aren't very nice."

[pythbox]

"In what way are they not nice?"

[inherpiety]

"Well, most of them worked for a god who wasn't very nice. The one of my mom from there had to make them stop doing what they were doing so she could save some people."

[pythbox]

"...A god," Junia repeats.

[inherpiety]

"Ye-e-es."

[pythbox]

"I am confused," says Junia.

[inherpiety]

"- Um, there is a god there. And there's another world with a bunch of them but they aren't that good and one of them is bad. There aren't any most places though."

[pythbox]

Junia looks at her.

[inherpiety]

"Um."

[pythbox]

"You seem to be leaving things out," says Junia.

[inherpiety]

"Yeah, I just didn't realize till now that I'd left this stuff out and now I'm trying to - figure out how to not leave it out."

[pythbox]

"Take your time," she says, and waits.

[inherpiety]

"Our world, um, doesn't have gods in it."

[pythbox]

"How does it not?" says Junia.

[inherpiety]

"It just - doesn't?" says Keziah. "Um, there is a thing that is Jovah that does weather and stuff, just - it's not a god thing, it's another kind of thing."

[pythbox]

"What kind of a thing is it, then?" says Junia. She is confused, intrigued, focused, but not necessarily disbelieving.

[inherpiety]

"It's - Mom told me stories about the kind of thing when I was little so I would know what she was talking about later - it's called a spaceship? It's an - enclosed - giant - boat - thing - that goes in the sky, up where there's no air - you know how if you fly really high there's less air, if you go high enough there's none, and this is a kind of boat that can be there and move around there. And there's a machine on it, a smart machine that can hear and - make it rain and stuff."

[pythbox]

"How do you know?"

[inherpiety]

"Well, Mom told me, and I've seen it and talked to it - but it'll talk differently soon because now all the Bells are going to try to fix Jane and she's another machine but she's smarter than the spaceship and she sort of absorbed it and when she's working she talks through it instead of the voice it had before."