fandomtownies | Our Lady of Fandom, Thursday

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Our Lady of Fandom, Thursday

It was that time again, time for Castiel's weekly sermon.

After the reactions to last week and how confused it made people, he decided to go with a topic he could get more . . . particular on.

This was not necessarily a good thing.

"I would like to speak to you all today," he said, "about Hell."

Really not a good thing.

See, Castiel had been to Hell. He'd seen it, and what it did to souls. He'd seen how it could turn otherwise good, righteous people into twisted things that delighted in the pain of others, how after decades of torture a soul could forget the very things that made them them in favor of the promise of not having to hurt any more.

And he went into particulars. About tortures he'd seen used. In detail.

This was not for the faint of heart.

Not to say, of course, that Castiel seemed to be enjoying telling you all this. His expression ranged from stoic sadness to mild disgust -- a decent range for a guy like Cass -- all underscored with a deep, honest pity for those who would suffer these torments. And he finished off with "Heaven is much nicer."

Dude needed to hire a speech writer. For serious.

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"I thought that you didn't have demon-dead," Karla said, confused. "So why do you need a place for the dead to live if they don't get back up after they die?"

Francine frowned at that, because the closest guess she had to what demon-dead meant were ... well, neither of them were pretty, and she'd been one and she'd seen Katchoo be another. "It's not um. Like zombies or vampires? It's not their bodies. It's their souls. Their spirit."

"Our demon-dead combine the body and the Self. As long as there is a measure of psychic strength remaining, a member of the Blood may die but can continue on after death. Hell is their Realm," Karla explained.

"I have no proof for it, but I hope my parents are in Hell. And proud of me."

But she said she'd come through Hell, to get here. "Can't you, um. If you can go there, can't you see them?"

"I did, but we were in a Coach, riding the Winds. Hell is its own Realm, there's no saying we passed anywhere near my parents. And..." Karla suddenly found the back of the pew before her very engrossing. "...I wasn't really paying much attention as we travelled. I was recovering."

Hopefully, Francine would assume from a cold or something.

She might have asked, if the fact that she'd just been quizzing the girl about why she hadn't visited her dead parents hadn't dawned on Francine right about then. "Oh, God, I'm so sorry, I didn't even think. It's... different, for there to be a place where you know people go when they die. We just have to take it on faith."

"They don't have to go there," Karla said quietly. "It's just easier for the dead to remain among the dead. And the forever twilight of Hell is easier on them than the Realm of the living." Karla paused, then said, "So they could have come to say goodbye to me. Afterwards."

It was still easier to think they could have but they didn't, rather than think that they'd never transitioned in the first place. Because knowing for certain that they'd faded back to the Darkness would be like losing them all over again. There was a reason she'd never asked the High Lord for confirmation one way or another.

Francine had no frame of reference for this at all -- except a glimpse of one she hated that wasn't the same -- and yet... it somehow didn't seem all that strange.

"Maybe they thought it would be easier on you not to see them like that," she suggested gently.

"That's what I'm thinking," Karla said, sounding a bit hopeful. "There is a reason most of the dead go to Hell for a few centuries. It's easier to be dead when there aren't people around to remind you of what it was like to be alive."

Karla would remember this conversation in ten years when she lost Morton and be the slightest bit comforted.

"When I went home last week, we ended up getting a demon art teacher. Dujae--he was the Blood's most famous painter about four hundred years ago and has only gotten better since. He keeps talking about our itsy-bitsy faces and how much fun they'll be to paint."

"We use the same words, but a lot of them seem to mean different things," Francine said, glancing up at the pulpit. "Here we use demon to mean something evil. Not a person who's just... not alive anymore." Granted, they didn't have a word for that, aside from vampire, zombie, or ghost.

Francine got the teensiest, tiniest bit of a glare for that 'revelation.' "Believe me," Karla said slowly, "since arriving here, I have learned that there are a lot of words we share that have very little in common." If Karla'd had a gold note for every time that had happened, she'd be able to retire in style at fifteen.

"At home, neither Hell nor demon have any moral connotation to it. And Uncle Saetan is the most caring, honorable, and decent male you could ever hope to meet. He's saved more than my life, by sending me here," Karla added quietly.

"They don't mean him, when they're saying those things," Francine pointed out. "They're not deliberately trying to insult a good person."

"They keep talking about the ruler of Hell. And calling him Satan," Karla retorted, unaware that lowercase satan just meant adversary. "I've been trying to read the book." She gestured towards the Bible. "It's poorly written and they spell his name wrong, too. And don't even get me started on the way it depicts females."

Please forgive her. She hasn't quite grasped that it's a holy talisman. It wouldn't change her opinion any, but she'd be nicer about expressing that opinion.

A little bit anyway.

"It, um. Was written a really long time ago," Francine said apologetically. "And there's been, like... wars fought over whether people are reading it right."

"Your people fight over reading a book?!" Karla asked, boggled. "That's insane!"

"Well... they were fighting over what they though God wanted them to do... or whether it was the right book at all, or..." Francine shrugged helplessly. "Yeah, I don't know. Religion is weird."

"I'm glad we don't have anything like it in Kaeleer," Karla huffed. "We have Witch and the Darkness, and neither of those make us fight."

Of course, they didn't really need reasons to fight. While the Territories of Kaeleer hadn't been at war in over fifty thousand years, that didn't mean they'd abolished violence.

"Maybe it's because your god is male," she suggested. "That might be the problem."

"I don't know if God really makes people fight," Francine offered. "He's supposed to be all about peace and love." You know, if you skip the Old Testament. Shhh. "But people are, um. Dumb. And they like to use God as an excuse."

"Maybe you need something like Protocol," Karla suggested. "It's a code of behavior for the Blood so we don't haul off and murder each other for the slightest offense. Then you could figure out what this god wants you to think without going to war over it."

Because that was just stupid. Honestly.

"Like a law that everybody follows? That'd be nice." No, Francine, it wouldn't. Stop and think who'd end up in charge of deciding what it was.

"It's less a law, and more codes of behavior," Karla explained. "The Blood are dangerous, and so people who don't know how to properly act around certain castes run the risk of getting seriously hurt or killed. Learning Protocol means that chance is minimized."

Francine was right. One day Karla would learn how Dorothea had twisted Protocol in Terreille and be horrified.

"At its best, Protocol reaffirms the matriarchal nature of the Blood, while giving males rights and privileges that help balance that power."

"I don't think that would go over all that well here," Francine said. "Men have been in power for a long time. Women are supposed to be equal now, but there's still a lot of things people think girls can't do, even if there's no rule that says they can't."

Karla shook her head in disbelief. "Why is that? Who put the males in charge--besides the males, I mean. Even though Kaeleer is matriarchal, we don't have such foolish ideas as all that."

"We don't have magic," Francine pointed out. "Men were bigger and stronger, so they got to be in charge, I guess."

"Humph," was Karla's only reply. She couldn't really argue with that. "Even if males don't rule, that doesn't mean we have laws about what they can and can't do. Queens can only rule after they've formed a Court with twelve males in it. Males and females are have different strengths and are suited for different things, but it's complementary, not forbidding. And Queens usually answer to the Warlord Prince of their Territory, so males rule, some, too."

She shook her head. "Your world makes no sense."

Pot, kettle on line one; kettle on line one.

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Our Lady of Fandom, Thursday

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