tampered | Log: Ongoing

Log: Ongoing

When: September 25, just after the end of the Out Damn Spot curse
Rating: PG-13, doubtful to get much harder than that
Characters: Crowley

itsjustafruit, Aziraphale

mr_phale, and Pilot Abilene

do_you_bleed
Summary: Abilene just happened to share that he's from post-Apocalypse Earth and now a certain angel and a certain demon who are heavily invested in averting said Apocalypse are looking for details.
Log:

Shit, shit, shit! It was an ongoing refrain for the demon ever since he had spoken with Pilot Abilene and heard details of the Apocalypse that just weren't far enough off to be false. The anti-Christ was American, he'd gotten involved in politics. Right, 2008 was a bit off, but it wasn't far enough off to be wrong. In fact, it could be devastatingly right.

Crowley couldn't even concentrate on cheating at pool.

Obviously, things were grim if he couldn't get that much done. He glanced over at Aziraphale, looking for something, maybe reassurance from the angel's boundless optimism. It might be annoying when things were going well, but when things were going vastly awry, a bit of angelic optimism could be just what the demon ordered.

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Unfortunately, the angel's reserves of optimism were flagging tonight. Aside from the fact that the day's curse had been, well, disheartening... It did sound like this Abilene fellow's Apocalypse could be in their future. Aziraphale and Crowley probably worked harder to produce their careful moral tie between Heavenly and Hellish forces than they would if they were really in opposition; and the idea to extend their Arrangement to the end of the world had really seemed brilliant at the time. It didn't help his mood to know that there was a good chance it would fail.
Catching Crowley's glance, he managed a smile that was likely too weak to be properly reassuring; the best he could do under the circumstances. Right now, the angel was fervently hoping that this would prove to be the wrong final battle between Good and Evil.
He didn't even want to know who had won.

Abilene enters, his white shirt still a bit bloodstained. He had to wonder why these two were so interested in hearing about what he'd seen at the Apocalypse, but hey, at least they weren't accusing him of being a liar like pretty much everyone else.

"Hey." he raised a hand in greeting.

Sure, sure, even the angel was looking wan. Wasn't that just perfect?

Still, he turned on a bright smile when Abilene came in and raised his drink in a welcoming toast before knocking it back.

"You must be Pilot Abilene. Have a seat. This is my friend, A.Z. Phale." Points for him, he didn't even want to introduce Aziraphale by his real name.

"What are you having?"

"Just a beer's fine for me. Any kind, I ain't picky." he says, giving a wave to Mr. Phale as well, "I've been here a few days now with no drinks."

He pauses a moment, "Still, this place beats where I came from. But I guess that'd be pretty obvious."

Crowley waved a waitress over and ordered a pitcher of whatever they had on tap with the admonition, "Just keep it full."

He wouldn't tip. The woman would be lucky if he paid, but come to think of it, she was lucky because the angel was along and wouldn't let Crowley get away with stiffing her.

He looked over at Aziraphale and decided to just take the lead. "Probably. Why don't you tell us what it's like there. You said Revelation was right, so it doesn't sound like things are good."

"Guess I should go from the beginning, then. The war in Iraq was calming down until Texas was nuked in 2005. That's when shit hit the fan, you could say." he takes a drink, "So with the Middle East completely blocked off, oil was in short supply. The ecenomy was about to crash, when along comes The Baron and his machine called Utopia."

He pauses a moment. It is a lot of information for someone who hasn't been there. "So, Utopia draws on this thing called Fluid Karma, and it can power the entire country. The Baron does it for seemingly no cost, but he has a major influence over Republican predidential candidate Senator Frost. Frost'd be the False Prophet in Revelations terms. You follow so far?"

Crowley slotted those pieces of information into his understanding of the world as he knew it. He well knew that things could change quickly with human ingenuity at the helm, but Utopia and Fluid Karma were definitely new.

"War in the Middle East, Utopia, Fluid Karma, False Prophets. Let's say I'm following you. And Fluid Karma is like what? Petrol?"

Oh look, more beer. That was definitely a good thing in between glasses of whiskey.

"Fluid Karma is...hard to explain. It's this substance discovered by The Baron, it circles around the core of the earth like a serpent. And there are only two places where it reaches the surface, where The Baron built his machines." another drink, this is a difficult topic.

"The problem is that the machines are slowing the Earth's rotation by .00000006 miles per hour per day. Yeah, that's a really small number, but it starts to fuck things up. By now World War III is in full swing and all you gotta know about that is that my best friend Taverner accidently hit me with a grenade." he motions to the scars on his face.

"Anyways, everyone's freaking out, and taking advantage of the fear The Baron's company USIDent comes into power. They make it so that you can only access your bank account with your fingerprints. They know where you are at all times. They will cut your hands off and take your money. They will shoot you. No one fucks with them now."

"Never heard of it." Which didn't actually help anything. There were plenty of things that Crowley had never heard of, even in 6000 years. It wasn't as though he'd been clued in to the totality of the Plan, now had he? He was just a professional troublemaker, not one of the higher ups... or lower downs as the case may be.

"But the mark fits. Not being able to get to your money. It's deucedly clever, even." It almost sounded like his work.

That was a thought that called for more whiskey. Hello, handy bottle of whiskey. Hello Crowley's glass, and a passing how do you do to Aziraphale's while they were at it.

"What I want to know is," here he looked at Aziraphale, "where did this von Westphalen come from? What do you know about him?"

The angel, meanwhile, had been rather sullenly downing drinks as he listened to the story. It did sound depressingly like Revelation; but, of course, a lot of things did. The sheer number of disappointed apocalyptic sects through the ages attested to that. It wasn't the author's fault, of course; John probably hadn't been able to understand half of what he'd seen, given his own background, and Aziraphale suspected the mushrooms hadn't helped that much.
The original manuscript, incidentally, was locked in a climate-controlled cabinet in the back room of Aziraphale's shop in Soho. All book-collectors have their special tastes.

He nodded at Crowley's question. "Anything about his family?" he chimed in. The technological rot was all a bit over his head, but if Abilene could identify this Baron's parents, and they weren't the American diplomats whose baby had been switched... Well, it would mean they'd at least managed to buy a little more time, right?

"I have no idea where The Baron came from. He came out of nowhere with this energy-creating machine and won a Nobel Prize for it. I don't know who his father is, but his mother is Dr. Inga von Westphalen, a German engineer."

He had to wonder why they were so interested in The Baron. Did they know him? Were they from the same world as he was? He hadn't met anyone else here who was, so someone had to show up eventually.

And with that, Crowley was already planning a quiet little, "It's not our apocalypse!" party. Still, he hadn't lived as long as he had without considering that maybe, just maybe, he'd better pin down more details before canceling his sell order on Microsoft.

Aziraphale might even still care about Abilene's world's plight, but Crowley didn't.

"His mother is German? You're sure?" He was leaning in a little eagerly and at least remembered to push his dark glasses up before he scared the man off prematurely. "No adoptions or anything fishy?"

It was difficult to restrain a sigh of relief; although really, he couldn't feel much better about the situation. Just because this wasn't proof that they'd failed, didn't mean they were out of the woods.
And, well... Even if this man hadn't lived through their Apocalypse, he'd been through something awful. And something close enough to be comprehensible.
He waited for the other man to answer Crowley's questions, frowning slightly.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure there were no adoptions or anything. Inga von Westphalen is a well-known engineer, she's been helping The Baron since day one." he said, "Baron was born in America, though."

He took another drink - his first drink in a non-apocalyptic world in quite a while.

Definitely not their anti-Christ and all was as well with the world as it was going to get until they found out if their little nurture versus nature campaign with Warlock worked out or not.

That was good enough for Crowley to consider his vacation back on though, which was probably noticeable when his mostly-concealed tension was replaced by wholly unconcealed good cheer.

"It sounds to me like being here's a bit of an improvement, then. Would you say so?"

"Yeah, I guess so. Pretty much anything is, though. Except prison or something, I guess." he said, "The money's kinda fucked up, though. I like numbers over colors, thanks."

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Log: Ongoing

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