The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Darth Wong]

He had to keep the humans tied up, chasing their own tails down on Earth for if they turned their full attention to gaining access to Heaven, it would only be a matter of time before the tanks arrived.

Does Michael expect this to just blow over if he keeps screwing around long enough, or does he believe he can stay one step ahead of the humans forever?

He's probably hoping to keep the humans tied up until he can overthrow Yahweh and then hand his head to the humans as a gift-wrapped present, along with a convenient disavowal of responsibility for Yahweh's past actions.

[Siege]

I get the feeling that Michael is a pretty shrewd guy, but not nearly as smart as he likes to think he is. Having stayed one step ahead of the law in Heaven may have caused him to massively overestimate his own cleverness...

[Shroom Man 777]

It would be awesome if Micheal and Yah-yah end up going down together, with Yah-yah's hands around Micheal's throat right before everything explodes!

I'd imagine Micheal's last moments might be something like Cutler Beckett's, from the Pirate movies.

[Samuel]

I wonder who the founder of the le resistance in Heaven is. Oh well, Michael is making the mistake of forcing people into service- the problem is that if people hate you more than they need you...

[erik_t]

That was quite a fantastic chapter. Dealt with a number of lose ends.

[MKSheppard]

I like the Thomas Jefferson editing of the bible throwaway line.

[barricade]

Methinks Maion is going to be our Chekov's Gun analog in the angels. Michael didn't catch her at her absolute most desperate, when she would be willing to do literally anything asked of her to get her next fix. Instead he got her in a 'whiny/needy' stage where she was running dangerously low, but not actually OUT of stock. This could be disastrous in the long run as she might just run into someone that's having a bad day or something, whatever, and/or ends up in the resistance by a sheer fluke.

Considering she's coming across as a teenage to young 20-something, I imagine she'll be easy prey for anyone that spots her weaknesses. That and if she ends up on Earth and gets captured alive (or nearly ODs/actually ODs but lives), it'll be a PR coup of, pun intended, truly biblical proportions.

Michael from what I'm feeling is still not a 'bad guy' as we'd generally lump them all together. He's more of an amoral strategist & spymaster who's smart enough not to fall for megalomania, but still has tasted 'true' power by being the right hand of God, and wants the throne. Then we get into that he's also effectively Heaven's 5-Star general equivalent as well, which lets him, fully officially no less, pick away at his opposition before they ever realize what he's done or link together things they've been ordered to do or seen. And while from our POV the drug addictions are frankly horrible, he does have a point in that he wants to do a top-down takeover, which generally are a lot less bloody then a bottom-up one.

The problem is that now with the 2nd conspiracy showing up, its at the worse possible moment, and is likely our second Chekov's Gun, in that Michael's own plans never accounted for someone else trying to upset the breadbasket. And while its true that he might just be a better ruler, considering he's at least (partially) grounded in reality, he has no clue as to who/what this resistance will eventually be targeting, or already is. And that their timetable could overlap with his and turn everything into one gigantic Charlie Foxtrot.

I'm wondering who's going to be the first one that's a resistance cell member, that used to be a drug addict, spots Maion and her shakes & obvious drug addiction problem.

-=-=-
Oh and....Stuart, you rat-bastard. You made Benny Goodman(!?!?) an accomplice to Michael?!

[CaptainChewbacca]

"Not a chance Belial, Euryale is your problem, that I agree. But Gaius Julius Caesar is off-limits. He is under the protection of the others and they will not tolerate harm coming to him."

You and your dangling hints, Stuart...

I wonder who there is that demons and angels would be afraid of them that would protect Caesar.

[Peptuck]

The "yah-yah" line had me laughing way too hard.

That and Saint John tripping balls and writing the Book of Revelation.

[The Vortex Empire]

Well, that explains Revelations fairly well. I love Michael.

[Darth Wong]

The "yah-yah" line had me laughing way too hard.

That and Saint John tripping balls and writing the Book of Revelation.

Well, most (reasonable) people already thought of the Book of Revelation as an acid trip anyway, because it's so bizarre.

[Jamesfirecat]

Okay very glad to see a new chapter and very glad that we get to see more of everybody’s back stabbing angel.

I’m also quite surprised to find out that evidently, I was more or less right on the money about the organizational style of that second conspiracy going on in heaven. Granted I was just reading the signs so maybe I shouldn’t pat myself on the back too hard.

Can’t wait to see what happens when the Angel of Death heads to California, though of course wouldn’t it be more dramatically appropriate if Michael had sicked him on… crap my knowledge of homosexual culture is really bad, but isn’t it Los Anglos that has like the huge gay community? You know putting the “sodomy” back in “Sodom and Gomorrah” not to mention “city of angels” so that makes it a doubly ironic place for him to get blown to pieces? But I suppose Michael chose his “friends” destination for how likely it was to get him killed, not for how hard the place it happened would cause him to laugh afterwards…


“Not before time, they lost one of my packages once." I had to read this line over several times before I finally understood what it was trying to say. I’d suggest it be replaced with something like “Just in time to, they lost one of my packages once.” Or “Not that they didn’t disserve it, they lost one of my packages once.” Or “Not that they didn’t have it coming, they lost one of my packages once.”

Any of the above would carry the same basic meaning and read a bit more clearly in my opinion. Did anyone else get tripped up on this phrase? Is it just supposed to be part of how Michael talks?




“I found this tramp sitting by the roadside, begging for food, so I gave him a dosed-up mushroom salad, sat back and watched the fireworks.” Okay clearly my preconceived notions about language are at play with me since when I see the word “tramp” I tend to think of it more in terms of hoar than the hero of that Disney movie. But I suppose its my own fault for needing to double back a bit when I saw we were talking about someone male…



By the way, after learning about how the prophecies came to exist, why does Yahweh feel the need to act upon visions that he was not personally responsible for giving? I mean I figure that it would in fact even rub up the wrong way against his ENORMOUS ego to think that he, GOD, would have to have his actions dictated by human preconceived notions about how he’s going to go about killing us all off. Or is Yahweh’s ego so large that it sort of wraps around itself and he figured that he liked how the Book of Revelation’s sounded so he promptly decided “Yeah I was responsible for that!” Since after all he did make the mushrooms and the cocaine (or at least he tells his servants he did, the “Young Earth” theory where our world was all created by Yahweh doesn’t hold true in this reality does it?) and who is going to argue with him?


By the way just on something that would make it funny while “angel pole dancers” is good, in my opinion “angelic pole dancers” is funnier just because it drives home the oxymoronic nature of what’s going on better if you care to take my advice…

I hope that next time we get to see Michael he’s going to be doing some work of his own to uncover what exactly is going on in that second conspiracy, he has some names to work with after all (he saw the proverbial big board) makes me wonder if he won’t approach some of them throw in a sly “I’m in on it..” Winkity wink wink and see how much he can get them to divulge about what’s going on. Of course given the “nobody knows anybody else” nature of the second conspiracy this might not be all that effective, but if we’ve seen anything it’s that Michael knows how to dangle a good carrot in front of those he wants something out of…

[Setzer]

I had always heard that the book of Revelations was mainly an anti-Roman propaganda piece.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Can’t wait to see what happens when the Angel of Death heads to California, though of course wouldn’t it be more dramatically appropriate if Michael had sicked him on… crap my knowledge of homosexual culture is really bad, but isn’t it Los Anglos that has like the huge gay community? You know putting the “sodomy” back in “Sodom and Gomorrah” not to mention “city of angels” so that makes it a doubly ironic place for him to get blown to pieces? But I suppose Michael chose his “friends” destination for how likely it was to get him killed, not for how hard the place it happened would cause him to laugh afterwards…

From the text, its pretty obvious Uriel is heading for San Diego, as it is much more of a navy and marines town than Los Angeles.

[Darth Wong]

Uriel might even think that Michael is doing him a favour, since San Diego is really close to Mexico and it might therefore seem like a relatively safe incursion into American territory.

[Samuel]

Or is Yahweh’s ego so large that it sort of wraps around itself and he figured that he liked how the Book of Revelation’s sounded so he promptly decided “Yeah I was responsible for that!”

This is a man who took credit from Sodom and Gommorah despite Behial doing the work because he claims credit for everything. If a prophecy is made... why, he is all powerful- he can easily fullfil it.

[Peptuck]

Can’t wait to see what happens when the Angel of Death heads to California, though of course wouldn’t it be more dramatically appropriate if Michael had sicked him on… crap my knowledge of homosexual culture is really bad, but isn’t it Los Anglos that has like the huge gay community? You know putting the “sodomy” back in “Sodom and Gomorrah” not to mention “city of angels” so that makes it a doubly ironic place for him to get blown to pieces? But I suppose Michael chose his “friends” destination for how likely it was to get him killed, not for how hard the place it happened would cause him to laugh afterwards…

That would be San Fransisco.

[Junghalli]

And yes, slower wormhole ships would mean the empire gets to grow older before meeting anyone, but we're still talking only a difference of decades to centuries, as opposed to the billions of years you'd expect without wormholes.

Depends on how fast. You need to reach very high c-fractional speeds to get the kind of time dilation factors that article was talking about. Even at .9 c time dilation is a mere 2.3; it will slightly more than half your journey time, but it won't reduce it by orders of magnitude.

Had things gone the way they had, the discarded humans would have been condemned to Hell, there to disappear slowly, just as they themselves had replaced the ones who had gone before them. Michael-Lan wondered if, somewhere tucked deep in the bowels of Hell, there were still survivors of those earlier races.

Is that a reference to the nonhuman hominids?

------

Does Uriel actually have to be in the air to make his attack? In Armageddon he wiped out a village from the ground. It sounds like maybe he needs line of sight, in which case he could do his attack almost as well from a hilltop with a commanding view, and he would be much less conspicuous and safer that way.

Any high hills around San Diego?

Edit: on the matter of making sky volcanoes, what about that newly converted planet full of primitives? If it's a conventional world rather than bubble world and is Earthlike it should definitely have volcanoes somewhere.

[Pelranius]

Some of the prophecies seemed to have been genuinely inspired by Yahweh and the angels. After all, I think the Patriarchs are Yahweh's personal chorus.

Seems like Michael's operation is small enough that he seems to have time to deal with run of the mill addicts. Again, interesting lines about the 'others' (though that seems to beg the question of why their followers still end up in Hell instead of other pocket dimensions) and the races before humans.

[GrayAnderson]

1) I think Uriel's ability is a bit like a nuclear bomb: If it goes off at ground level, its range and damaging abilities are limited. If he fires an airburst, his range (and thus his destructive capabilities) go farther. With that in mind, there are a lot of hills in and around San Diego.
2) As far as the "other" races, that could be a reference to either nonhuman hominids (CroMags and whatnot, no relationship to Sliders) or some other planet that Yah-Yah and Co. were watching.
3) Text interpretation assistance request:
"Yah-yah never grew tired of people worshiping him. Still, he'd found a whole new planet full of primitive sentients he could convert into a new cult. Had things gone the way they had, the discarded humans would have been condemned to Hell, there to disappear slowly, just as they themselves had replaced the ones who had gone before them."
-First, I interpret this to mean that there were other races in Heaven earlier, and that Yahweh cleared them out as he brought the humans in. One suspects he did so in stages (simply phasing the prior guys out to avoid irritating labor shortages and whatnot).
-Second, did you mean "Had things gone the way they had planned"? The line makes more sense that way, but I can also read it as, in effect, "Had things worked out like they did the last few times around".
-Third, on the disappearance front, I'd presume that either the demons ate their way through their stockpiles of the older races while humans were coming "up to par" in quantity, but the line does raise the issue of them just fading away (as in literal Jedi-like fading or some other effect; the "incorruptible" bodies might actually have a cap on their shelf life at a half a million years or something like that).

And of course, I'm also led to wonder, on the Caesarian section of this chapter, whether there might just be a third race running around bubble universe land. After all, Stuart did make an explicit distinction between "demons" and "devils" at one point.

[Crayz9000]

Can’t wait to see what happens when the Angel of Death heads to California, though of course wouldn’t it be more dramatically appropriate if Michael had sicked him on… crap my knowledge of homosexual culture is really bad, but isn’t it Los Anglos that has like the huge gay community? You know putting the “sodomy” back in “Sodom and Gomorrah” [...]

That would be San Fransisco.

Well, to our credit, we do have West Hollywood.

[Zim]

I thought angels and demons were distantly related to humans. If they are, then who were Yahweh's servants prior to the humans? Were those servants phased out as well?

[Crayz9000]

1) I think Uriel's ability is a bit like a nuclear bomb: If it goes off at ground level, its range and damaging abilities are limited. If he fires an airburst, his range (and thus his destructive capabilities) go farther. With that in mind, there are a lot of hills in and around San Diego.
2) As far as the "other" races, that could be a reference to either nonhuman hominids (CroMags and whatnot, no relationship to Sliders) or some other planet that Yah-Yah and Co. were watching.

I think Stuart was more explicitly referring to the "Orcs" already mentioned in Armageddon, plus whatever other races might spring up / come to the foreground later on.

3) Text interpretation assistance request:
"Yah-yah never grew tired of people worshiping him. Still, he'd found a whole new planet full of primitive sentients he could convert into a new cult. Had things gone the way they had, the discarded humans would have been condemned to Hell, there to disappear slowly, just as they themselves had replaced the ones who had gone before them."
-First, I interpret this to mean that there were other races in Heaven earlier, and that Yahweh cleared them out as he brought the humans in. One suspects he did so in stages (simply phasing the prior guys out to avoid irritating labor shortages and whatnot).

I think it would have been better to write the paragraph as:

Yah-yah never grew tired of people worshiping him. Still, he'd found a whole new planet full of primitive sentients he could convert into a new cult. Had things gone the way they were supposed to, the discarded humans would have been condemned to Hell, there to disappear slowly, just as they themselves had replaced the ones who had gone before them.

[FireNexus]

"Yah-yah never grew tired of people worshiping him. Still, he'd found a whole new planet full of primitive sentients he could convert into a new cult. Had things gone the way they had, the discarded humans would have been condemned to Hell, there to disappear slowly, just as they themselves had replaced the ones who had gone before them."

This seems likely to signify that there was another race of primitives that Yahweh had used and discarded when he discovered humans. It will be interesting if we manage to pull one out of the fire. Maybe that race is still around and technologically advanced?

[JBG]

As Jan said, good chapter Stuart! Lotsa interesting stuff.

Darth Wong wrote:

"Well, most (reasonable) people already thought of the Book of Revelation as an acid trip anyway, because it's so bizarre."

There are also a couple of interesting references in the Bible. I've had fun for years with these with bible-bashers. There's the articles eaten with the first dew - psylocibin mushies that lead to seeing pillars of fire in the sky - and a reference to the eating of some bitter tasting paper after which great revelations follow. Que?

Is Uriel really that slow to accept a recommendation of a target in the US that is, well, further into the US, despite the approach point? He comes across as a potent yet dumb weapon.

His injuries are quite interesting and knowing Stuart they are noted for a reason. For a wing to be badly broken suggests a hard physical edge, at least for him, to the portal that he created. Here it is also noted that the wound is taking sufficiently long to heal that he speaks out about it. But of more interest are the effects of fragments of the missile and missile warhead when they detonated. There may be some steel but there's also a lot of aluminium and titanium I would suspect. And to shield/isolate Belial Michael uses bronze rather than the aluminium etc used by humans...

So, do Angels have some issues with a certain metal or metals?

Michael is becoming a quite filled out character. He appears to have some endearing features. But I have this nagging feeling that he is being dissected by Stuart somewhat as he dissected Goering. ie, appears to have a lot of endearing qualities - can be avuncular, friendly, gregarious, witty, generous etc but at base he's a cold calculating utterly evil bastard who'd sell his mother down the river if it suited.

Given Yahweh's apparent incapacitation even if only in part, Michael is the enemy. Maybe we can get at him through the NKs and Burmese

GJC being protected by others was only really broached before with respect to not being tormented in Hell, now it is fleshed out into a protection that Michael feels bound by or given his antics considers to be well above Yahweh's pay scale, so to speak.

Hmmm. So after we kill Yahweh and Michael we have to go after much more potent adversaries. That's life, I suppose.