foreigner's god wip: part one

So I'm...really turning into Ineffable Bureaucracy trash. And I got some of the worldbuilding from one of my original wips into this one too, but I love how well it fits anyway. This is stlil a WIP because i set out to write this as a short thing, but as with most things, no, it spiralled out of control and now it's gonna be way longer than planned.

NOTES:

- Eiael (angel of occult sciences) - Beelzebub
- Dagiel (angel of fishes) - Dagon
- Caphriel (an old fandom angel name for Crowley, popularized by The Sacred and The Profane) - Crowley

part one

Heaven has a rather efficient governing system. Although, because of the fact that these are the early days (where days didn’t really exist at all), there isn't really anyone other than the residents of Heaven to give any judgment on whether or not this is true, and there aren’t even a whole lot of them. There's still a couple thousand angels, compared to the millions that will be coming around soon, but that's for later. 

The Almighty is busy at work with the rest of the Host, and as such, the angels that are already here are tasked with organizing themselves. Hard to cultivate being able to think for oneself when they're always being dictated on what to do, after all. 

Heaven has a rather efficient governing system mostly thanks to its job department, which at this point in time doesn't have a name yet, but everyone knows that's where everyone is assigned what they're supposed to do. 

This department is run by Gabriel. 

His siblings already have their own departments - Michael has her construction team, Lucifer has his music department, Raphael has the medics on standby for Michael's in case of emergencies, and Gabriel… has the rest. 

He’s not complaining. It’s not like it’s the throwaway job. It's harder than other angels think it is. He'd been the one to evaluate and split the angels between he other three at the very beginning before he’d had the idea to get help and build a department.

There's around five thousand new angels everyday, and his office has to keep up with the work of making sure all of them are given jobs. The department is small, since the other Archangels had asked for more for their troops. Gabriel had let them - an angel of the Lord is charitable, compassionate, and generous, and he understood, anyway. Build Heaven, the Almighty had said. You are given dominion over this space, and so they’d decided to do just that. 

So Michael’s troops are constructing buildings and rooms and areas of rest. Raphael’s troops make sure those who get injured are tended to. Lucifer’s troops are in charge of the most pressuring job of all, which is to show love and reverence to the Almighty. 

Besides, it’s not going to be like this for Gabriel and his team forever. Maybe, when all the angels are around and everyone's been assigned to what they need to be doing, they can finally get out and relax or something. 

Eiael slides a stack of folders onto the side of his desk. 

He sighs. 

“We've gotten thirty new angels in the past hour,” they say, grabbing the empty chair beside his desk to sit. “They're waiting outside.”

“Can they wait?”

“I told them angels are patient,” they say. “So they're gonna have to.”

“What would I do without you?”

“The same thing you always do, really,” they say, flicking the rim of their hat and grinning. 

They’d been one of the first angels who’d volunteered to help him since they hadn’t been particularly inclined for construction, music, or medicine, and they’d been responsible for putting word out for other volunteers and grew their small team into an actual department. Eventually, they and Gabriel both figured out that handing jobs to angels and then telling them to go do said job just gave them a lot of angels with job titles but little to no knowledge as to what to do, so Eiael had made a subsection of the department dedicated to training seminars.

Angels are smart, thankfully, and only really needed one job orientation. It, as Eiael had joked after the first few seminars they’d taught, was an actual blessing. 

The office alarm (which Michael had made for Gabriel, when he'd expressed it was getting confusing to keep track of time with so much paperwork to sift through) rings, a tiny little thing made of metal and runes that counted things by a system of time Lucifer had made up. That means break time's over. 

Gabriel looks over the papers that are still spread out his desk. He hadn’t even taken break time.

“Do you need someone to sign those with you?” Eiael asks. As second-in-command (as no one has thought up of the words vice-chairman yet) of the department, they could step in for him anytime.

“No, no, I'll take care of them. You have orientations to run,” he says. “How many batches have you gone through today?”

“Three for Michael, One for Lucifer and Two for Raphael. I held one for Michael and Raphael each, personally. And I've got an orientation for new officemates this afternoon. One batch, fifteen angels.”

Gabriel breathes a sigh. Fifteen more angels means that he'll be able to get a few more hands on the deck. 

“Thank you,” he says. 

“Are you sure you don't want any help?”

“I'm fine,” he says, and jokingly makes a shooing motion with his hand. “Now go. Your students are waiting.”

Eiael laughs. “Don’t work yourself too hard, Newsboy,” they say. Gabriel makes a face at the nickname he’s earned from his first days of going around Heaven and announcing decrees from the then-small circle of Archangels. “This ship still needs you with it.”

-

Fifteen more angels really does help around the office. For one, there's a lot more people to help file things and sort through applications, and he can appoint and promote as he pleases because it's his department, so he gets three of them that he thinks have a good sense of judgment to hand out angel assignments.  He asks for volunteers for organizing and scheduling seminars to help Eiael and gets four people on board. One particular angel, Dagiel, appears to have an actual passion for paperwork, so Gabriel puts her in charge of everyone else in the filing section. She loves it. 

“Gabriel.” 

There's a knock on the front door, which opens without waiting for anyone to get it, and Michael walks in, holding a box of something in her arms. 

“Michael, hey,” Gabriel says, looking up from the papers he’s reviewing. His sister always tries to find time to visit him, even with how busy she is. “How's work been?”

“Tiring, which is new,” she says, but she's smiling at her little joke. She sets the box on the table and sits on the edge of the desk. Gabriel watches with rapt attention as she pulls out her latest creation. 

It's a couple of flat boards with tiny metal circles and blocks on it. Gabriel doesn't have the slightest idea on how it works, but Michael lives and breathes for creation. She'd been the first of the angels, after all. 

“What is it?” he asks. 

“I don't know what to call it yet,” she says. “It's just a bunch of chips of metal and bits of wire that's connected, but - that's not all. It moves input.”

He raises an eyebrow. 

She sets the board on the table, and then pulls something else out the box. It's a small, unpainted, metal rectangle that still has wires sticking out of it, wrapped haphazardly in some sort of rubbery strip. 

“Look,” she says, pressing a button. 

A bar on the top of the rectangle lights up. Michael points to the bottom, where there are other buttons, with marks on them. Their writing system, Gabriel realizes, broken into individual characters and printed onto the metal butttons with paint. 

“If you press this - “ Michael taps one of the buttons on the device. After a few seconds, a character printed on the button shows up on the lit-up bar. 

“Oh, wow,” Gabriel breathes. 

“Yes.” Michael beams. “Give me a bit and I'll manage to make the transmission faster.”

“I see possibility, but you're better than me at this, so...” 

“A bit of wire and metal within a case can transmit input. What's to say we can't take it out the case, keep the wire and metal, and still manage the same thing?” she says, “The case is just there to hold it together.”

“With input travel fast enough, that could make communication easier.” He leans back in his seat, reeling a little from his sister's genius. “Michael, this is brilliant.”

“Thank Mother,” she says. “If I can manage this, your work will be much easier, brother.”

Gabriel smiles, fond. Michael has always looked out for them, as best as she can, the way older siblings do even when the concept of older siblings hadn't really been invented yet - although her siblings haven't been newly-created fledgings in a long, long while.

“Thank you,” he says. “Maybe you can distribute them to Raphael and Lucifer too. It would be nice hearing from each other every once in a while.”

Michael laughs and moves to sit on the chair by the desk, leaning back, the tension leaving her shoulders. “How have you been, Gabriel?” she asks. “Outside of work?”

“Quite alright,” he says, not yet aware of the concept of lying, not that he needs any reason to lie, really. He is quite alright. They have jobs to do, but they're all helping each other, and his siblings are looking out for each other. 

Heaven is, in fact, quite alright. 

-

“Michael says it's called a ‘typewriter’,” Gabriel says. 

Eiael presses down on a key curiously. It needs a bit of a push, and it makes a loud clack that seems to shake the entire machine. A small metal arm hits the paper that has been fed into the whole thing, and when they let the pressure up on the key, the letter they'd hit had imprinted on it. 

“A type writer indeed,” they say. 

“It's fascinating, isn't it? She said it was a bit like a metal brush, but with an inked ribbon to do the imprint instead of paint,” Gabriel says, feeling a swell of pride in his chest. Not the taboo sort, of course - not that they had a taboo sort of pride just yet. Some rules had yet to be made.

“Very,” Eiael says. “Makes me wish I had an ounce of talent with metalwork.”

“Ah, well, you could learn it,” Gabriel suggests. 

Eiael snorts. “And then where would you be with the officework, Gabriel?”

“True,” he says. “How's your end of things?”

“Same as always, although I might have to adjust my schedule a bit,” they say, “Or - I don't know. I suppose I'll put a pause on regular orientations, and then open up a new spot, but that would cause a backlog... “

Gabriel winces. Right, there were new orders, specific roles certain angels had been graced with, and now they had to figure out how to rearrange everything again, and run more sessions in order to give the angels their instructions. At least it’ll be easier to talk to the ones who have been given jobs by group.

“We'll find a way around it,” he says. “Perhaps we can borrow some of the new rooms that have been constructed?”

“Can we borrow a whole building?” Eiael says. “I think they just finished a new one, but we haven't organised room arrangements yet.”

“That might work,” he says. “I'll write a letter to Michael.”

“With the new type writer?” they ask, a little excited, “Or is it just, typewriter, without the pause?”

“Without the pause,” he says. 

They nod. “We better sort this out first,” they say, sitting down and falling into a bit of contemplative silence. “What do you think about this whole new subgroup being organized, anyway?”

“I'm not sure,” he says. “I mean, I suppose it makes sense if Heaven is going to expand, and I'm quite excited to see what ‘ocean’ and ‘earth’ are.”

“I'm getting the blueprints,” Eiael says, a little smugly. 

Gabriel leans forward, interest piqued. “From the Almighty Herself?”

“Yes,” Eiael says, dropping their voice like it's supposed to be a secret, just because it feels right. “I'm not sure if it's going to be free-for-all, and the first oceans and earths are just going to be touchstones, or if the new groups are going to have to make them exactly alike.” They pause. “I was thinking bringing in Michael to help, actually, since she's better at discussing creation than me.”

“I'll include it in the letter,” Gabriel offers. “I’m going to have to write to Raphael anyway.”

“It's not too much trouble?”

“Of course not,” he says. “I love talking to my sister.”

“How sweet,” Eiael teases. “But thanks. I don't know the first thing about creating anything but lesson plans.”

“That's already impressive enough,” he says. “I could never.”

Eiael laughs. “You do so much work, your hands are always stained in ink,” they say, “I keep finding you with ink on your nose from how much you lean forward to get to the papers.”

“It really is a good thing we don't need to rest,” he says. 

“I'm thinking we should have days for rest, though. We don't need rest, but it is still somehow exhausting,” they say, search for the word they think really captures the meaning of what they're trying to say, then, “Draining, I think.”

Gabriel thinks it over. That does sound nice. The Almighty hasn't given them much directive side from what is essentially ‘go wild’, so it's probably fine.

“I think that sounds nice.” He looks at the stack of papers beside him, in the tray that's labelled ‘to look over’. He thinks about not having to look at it for a while. “It definitely sounds nice.”

“I'm thinking we could call it days off,” Eiael says. “Or something. Just a day every now and then to take some time off.”

That really sounds nice, actually. 

“How about we work on a proposal, draft it for a while, and then call everyone to discuss whether they agree on it or not?” Gabriel says, “And then we can have myself and my siblings sign it.”

“Approved by the Archangels themselves!” Eiael laughs, “Brilliant. Do you think we can get the Almighty to sign it?”

“Maybe,” Gabriel says. Nobody really knows with the Almighty. “We’ll see, and we can try.”

“Not much can get in the way of our negotiative powers, right?” Eiael jokes. 

Gabriel snorts. “Perhaps,” he says.

“Oh, hush, be proud of it, Gabriel. Look at this little office,” they say, motioning their hand around the room. Some of the angels are taking their breaks right now, so it’s emptier than usual. Gabriel eyes their empty desks and their stacks of paper.

“Very cluttered,” he says.

“Well, yes - but!” Eiael lifts a finger. “It’s organized clutter. And it’s organized clutter because you had the idea of taking the rest of Heaven and putting order into it. Sure, we’re not out there writing songs, or building rooms or inventing medicine, but we get things done, in the background.”

Well, if he thinks about it, without them, it would be infinitely harder knowing which angel  should be where and how many angels are under whose command, spreading around assignments would be messier, and suggestions and complaints would never reach where it’s supposed to and nothing would be done.

And sure, he doesn’t run the department by himself anymore - thank God - but he had started it. He’d been the one at the meeting between him and his siblings to raise his hand and say, but what about the rest of us?

“Bask in the pride a little,” Eiael says. 

Gabriel snickers, but gently nudges their shoulder. “Hey - as Lucifer says, glory to Her and Her alone,” he says, sounding mock-scandalized.

“Lucifer’s not here,” Eiael says. 

“Still,” Gabriel says. “There’s going to be a rule for that, I’m calling it. No - I don’t know the word for this. Um, pride works, I guess, but that’s the feeling, isn’t it?”

“Make one up.”

“You can’t just put me on the spot like that,” he says. “But there’s going to be a rule for this soon, I can feel it.”

“Well, I’ll have to sign it. You’ll have to sign it. Dagiel will have to sign it. It’ll be a whole office affair, so it’s not going to be that easy,” Eiael says. “They can’t just say no pride allowed or something.”

“You might be outnumbered,” Gabriel says. 

“I reckon if anyone’s going to be making changes, we should ask everyone shouldn’t we?” they ask. “Wouldn’t be fair otherwise.”

“Huh,” Gabriel says. “You have a point.”

“I always do.”

He laughs, but they’re right. Build Heaven, the Almighty had said, but Heaven’s not just them, or him and his department. It’s every angel living there too. There’s a reason why they’re all here, and why there’s some of them being given specific assignments and everything.

Gabriel has yet to put a word to the concept of choice, but he’s getting the general idea of it. It sounds quite nice, he thinks. If someone decided to suddenly take him out of the office and put him somewhere else and not give him the option to say no if he doesn’t like it, he’d be quite miffed, he thinks, because he likes his work in the office. It’s tiring, yes, but it feels rewarding, knowing that his department is the backbone of Heaven’s structure, making sure everything is running smoothly, and Michael knows exactly how many rooms to construct in certain areas and how many copies to make of a certain item, Raphael knows exactly how many garrisons he has under his command and how many angels are in each, and Lucifer knows exactly how many instruments his angels need and how long it’ll take for them to be made so he can adjust their program.

“You’ve gone silent,” Eiael says.

“I’m trying to debunk your…” he searches for the work. “Theory. Idea.”

“For what, you know I’m right.”

“Yes, but it’s the principle of it,” he says. “It would be quite messy, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s what we have the paperwork for,” Eiael says. “If we do it right, nothing needs to be messier than necessary.”

“I love that,” he says. It’s one of the things he appreciates, he’s found. Trite sayings with a point to them. “We should put that somewhere here.”

Eiael snorts. “That sounds intimidating though, don’t you think? Pressuring?” 

“Is it?” 

“Little bit,” they say, and pause. “Hey.”

“What?”

“We could ask everyone if it is,” they say, smiling like it’s a brilliant, funny idea. Gabriel makes a show of sighing, and they laugh. 

Most days in the office are like this.

-

They put out another call for volunteers after Michael approves of Gabriel’s request to borrow some of the rooms her team has made. Quite a lot of people actually respond, which surprises Gabriel a little, but he appreciates it.

“I mean,” Caphriel, one of the new recruits, says, “There’s mostly like three jobs, and there’s over a million of us at this point. You’d think there’d be, uh - ” He snaps his fingers as he tries to find the word. “A bit of variety in our talents, right?”

“Variety?” Dagiel tries the new term out. Caphriel shrugs.

“I don’t know. It’s like, varied, but, differently,” he says. 

Gabriel doesn’t really mind much of the discussion in his office. It’s fun, in fact, seeing the points in what everyone’s saying, and he can see where Caphriel is coming from. There only had literally been three jobs, aside from his department, and there’s more than a million angels in Heaven. There can’t only be four skills. That’s probably why the Almighty had given some of them specific assignments.

He himself also isn’t predisposed to creation, or mending, or music, even if Lucifer had invited him over once and they’d had fun trying out the new prototypes for instruments he’d designed for Michael to create. He’s just better with this, writing things down and sending them out, telling people this and that, relaying messages, forming systems. It’s relaxing, in some ways. 

“He made up a word on the spot, Newsboy,” Eiael says as they pass by his desk to get to Dagiel’s and pick up a stack of folders. “Where’s yours?”

“Like he said, you’d expect all of us to have different talents,” Gabriel says, “If his is an imagination fast enough to make words, mine is just putting up with you.”

Caphriel slaps a hand over his mouth and turns his chair away to avoid laughing at both of them. He’s just started working here, after all, he doesn’t want to make too bad an impression. Gabriel doesn’t really mind. It’s not like this isn’t how he and Eiael just are. 

Dagiel sticks out a foot to nudge Caphriel’s leg to tell him as much.

“How could you.” Eiael puts a hand over their chest, dramatic. “Your poor best friend, and you tell me this.”

“You can take it,” he says. 

There’s a small chime from outside the office, and then several slips of paper slide down the slot in the middle of the door and into the little basket attached to it. Letters. Caphriel stands to get them.

“You ready for tomorrow?” Gabriel asks as Eiael sits on their usual seat beside him, when they’re not cooped up in their own office.

They flip through a folder marked GARDEN ASSIGNMENTS idly. “As much as I can be,” they say, “It’ll be alright, though, it’s just going to be one section and like, three sessions of the same thing.” They look up. “Oh - and I’ve gotten the blueprints for the ocean project.”

“Lucky,” he says. He’s not sure if he’s allowed to see them since the Almighty had given them to Eiael, and he’d been too unsure to ask them for a peek. “What do you think?”

“I would say it’s nothing I ever would have thought of, but then again, there’s a reason I’m here instead of the construction team,” they say, “I’ll tell you, though, I love it and I want to see it when it’s done.”

He blinks. Right. He’d actually forgotten they wouldn’t be there when the project is completed. They’re always so involved with thing he’d somehow started to expect that they’d be a given at its completion. They’re just there to instruct and hand out the work, not actually witness it. And with their schedule, even if the creation of angels is slowing down a little, they might not be able to, at least not soon.

Well, there is still that draft for rest days sitting in the drawers of Gabriel’ desk. It’s not official paperwork, just an idea for a proposal, but with a bit more polishing, it might be one. 

He opens the drawer and takes it out. Eiael, reading the list of names in their folder, doesn’t notice until he slides the marked drafts towards them.

“Wha’ssat?” they ask, glance at it, and realize. “Oh. I forgot we had that, actually.”

“If we can get it done soon enough, maybe we could both go down to see the ocean,” he says, “It would be a nice thing to spend the first day we get off of work, wouldn’t it?”

Eiael gets a curious look on their face. They look up at him. “Really?”

“Why not” he asks, “When’s the last time we were outside the office and we didn’t have work to do?”

“Oh, never,” they say, and then go silent at that. Gabriel takes the pause to go over his own thoughts. He had it a little easier than them since he had siblings who visited and called him over, and he was also technically one of the pillars of Heaven, but Eiael and the others mostly worked and only took short breaks in between. As much as Gabriel loves his work, he does know that it’s quite...torturous over long periods of time. 

“Sir?”

Gabriel turns as Caphriel dithers by his desk. The young angel places two letters in front of him. One of them is marked from Michael, the other is marked Request for Reassignment. 

“The other ones were for Dagiel and Nanael,” he says. 

“Thank you,” he says, and Caphriel gives him a polite bow before going back to his desk. Timid boy. He’ll likely loosen up a little after he’s spent enough time in the office.

“Request for Reassignment?” Eiael asks.

“Caphriel really does have a point,” Gabriel says. “We have variety. Of course angels are going to try to find what suits them best.” He picks up the letter and sets it on the to look over pile, and then opens Michael’s.

She tells him about her work - she always does; Gabriel’s happy that she’s really found her passion in creation, especially when it’s obvious now that some angels are having a bit of trouble finding theirs. She tells him that one of the angels under her care has come up with something rather genius, something simple but comfortable, especially for when the rest of them are tired after days and days of building. Pillows, they were all thinking of calling them. She’s thinking about mass manufacturing them and then sending them over to Raphael’s, for his patients. Gabriel smiles.

She asks him how he’s doing, especially with all the new stuff that he needs to take care of, and she hopes he’s not wearing himself out, to which he feels a little guilty over because he has been skipping breaks again, but at least she’s reminded him not to. Between her and Eiael, they’ll keep him functioning.

She mentions something about having talked to their Mother recently, and about being told beforehand that they’re going to make not only a garden and an ocean and some animals, but an entire thing called a universe. 

A universe. Their wonderful Mother - he doesn’t know how She comes up with these things, really. 

He folds the letter up after he’s done reading and keeps it along with where he collects the rest of the letters from his siblings. He glances at his clock (they finally found a name for it), noting that it’s five minutes before his break. There’s still a lot of things that need his attention, but - well. 

“About that day off to see the ocean,” he says again. “What do you think?”

Eiael glances at the papers, and then at the clock, since they know Gabriel’s schedule as well as he does. They think it over.

They both need a break.

“You know what?” They close the folder and take the drafts. “Why not?”