Pearl of Eden

PLEASE READ: This is written as a work of FICTION and is NOT intended to be offensive to anyone. Religious themes are not only touched upon, they are twisted, stretched, drowned, and set out in the sun to dry. If you are anal about your faith, or disgustingly closed-minded, DO NOT READ FURTHER. If you are open-minded enough to accept religious ideas being bandied about, then please continue and be welcome.

---

"Oh no."

He looked cautiously at the empty place on the shelf - the empty place that had been occupied by a very powerful, very valuable piece of jewellry not three seconds earlier. A shifty glance at his supervisor told him that his accident had gone unnoticed; for the moment, at least.

"Ohh-ho-ho-no." This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening. It was just... under the shelf. Yeah.

He ducked to his knees, folding his wings carefully so as to avoid further mishap, and looked around quickly.

The Gods were not with him this day.

"Schuldig?" His supervisor had noticed he wasn't cleaning any more, and was coming over here. Shit. Shit shit shit. Profanity was generally looked down upon, but Schuldig felt that the situation called for nothing less than a round of swearing hot enough to blast the ears off of any seasoned sailor. The prized necklace - the Pearl of Eden - had fallen out of Heaven. The supervisor - Hael or Hamael, he wasn't sure - was all but looming over him at this point. Schuldig jerked up so quickly he bumped his head on the shelf he'd been searching under, knocking several other pieces loose. Luckily they landed on the more solid parts of the floor, and did no more than skitter across the tiles.

"For God's sake, boy, could you be any clumsier? Why were you under there in the first place?" It wasn't the first time Hael-or-Hamael had been forced to oversee the youthful angel, and he was getting fed up with Schuldig's antics. For his own part, Schuldig tugged on a single feather, embarrasedly.

"I ... er..." He flushed as red as his hair, and Hael-or-Hamael glowered as he picked up the fallen trinkets. Schuldig noted the careful way the elder angel handled them, almost muttering, and was inching his way towards the door when a fiery stare stopped him where he stood.

"If you have done what foolishness I think you have done, you are in for more punishment than simply dusting the relics, Schuldig. And since I can clearly see you have forgotten again, it is Uriel and this is the last time I am going to remind you. We have been here for centuries, Schuldig; my threadbare patience with your foolishness is at it's end. We will see His Majesty." Without even bothering to arrange the artifacts - in fact, simply dumping the lot back onto the mantel - Uriel stormed out in full glory.

Dodging a stray bolt of lightning, Schuldig followed at a less then enthusiastic pace. He'd only been an angel for three thousand years by the human reckoning, but he'd spent more than half of that time picking up after the other angels. Cleaning floors, ironing robes, re-stringing lutes, harps, guitars, and lyres, taking out the metaphysical trash - everything that no one else wanted to do. This time he'd even forgotten why he'd been ordered to dust the relic room - it was just one more in a long string of punishments for not being righteous enough, for not singing loudly enough with the choir, for accidentally bleaching His Own favourite pair of trousers - which really hadn't been Schuldig's fault, now that he thought about it, because that nasty little cherubim had pushed him as he'd been reaching for the soap.

Uriel's passage was marked by scorch marks on the tapestries that lined the wall - another thing Schuldig would be blamed for, no doubt - and small fires that the cherubs were trying desperately to put out. They did, however, find time to watch Schuldig's passage and snicker behind their pudgy little hands. He clenched his fingers into fists and reminded himself just how quickly the One could and would send him to Hell for touching the little buggers. It rankled endlessly that Schuldig was lower on the Angelic Spectrum even than the lowest of the lowest cherub. They never let him forget it, either, and even if they weren't supposed to be allowed to order him around, if he dared disobey any of them anyway, they set him up to get into even more trouble with the Higher Ups.

He'd been carefully avoiding the thoughts of why he was heading towards the Throne Room, but as the doors rose up majestically before him - the effect was spoiled by the burnt mark where Uriel had shoved the doors open - he had no choice but to face up to it.

No one had pushed, pulled, prodded, or shoved him in any way. This was Entirely His Fault, and he had no excuse for his own clumsiness in this instance. He trembled for a moment, trying not to picture the hell God would send him to, and then knocked gently.

The door swung open silently to reveal a rather different vista than that he was used to seeing in the Almighty's rooms. Generally, there were two or three hundred angels and other heavenly beings milling aimlessly around, eating, drinking, and talking amongst themselves. This time, there was only Uriel, lightning still flickering angrily around him in a cloud, and He Himself. The Big Kahuna, God, The One, or as he was generally known in Heaven, Yahweh.

COME IN SCHULDIG, AND CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND YOU.

He didn't so much speak as roar. Generally, he used his mouth to form words that would then be heard by the ears, when he was feeling jovial. The fact that he'd used what Schuldig had privately dubbed 'the big boomy voice' spoke much about just how much trouble he'd gotten into this time. Without even bothering to beg forgiveness, he simply approached the throne, knelt, and said softly, "I accept whatever punishment you deem fit, my Lord."

YOU HAVE BEEN PUNISHED, SCHULDIG. Hearing his name out of God's ... well... mouth was supremely disconcerting. He generally dealt with the older and more powerful angels who were used to God's divine presence. YOU HAVE BEEN PUNISHED UNTIL I HAVE HAD TO TURN MY HEAD OUT OF HEAVEN TO THE EARTH TO FIND THINGS FOR YOU TO DO. NOW, I AM TIRED OF TURNING TO EARTH. THIS TIME YOU WILL TURN TO EARTH. YOU WILL BE SENT IN CORPOREAL FORM TO RETRIEVE THE PEARL OF EDEN FROM WHEREVER IT HAS FALLEN AND YOUR ANGELIC STATUS WILL BE STRIPPED OF YOU. IF YOU CANNOT FIND IT, OR YOU CHOOSE TO GIVE UP THE SEARCH AT ANY TIME, YOU WILL BE SENT DIRECTLY TO HELL - DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS AND WITH NO GET OUT OF HELL FREE CARD. THERE YOU WILL REMAIN FOR FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS, OR UNTIL WE NEED THE PRIVY SCRUBBED OUT, WHICHEVER COMES FIRST. DO I MAKE MYSELF UNDERSTOOD?

What a joker, saying things like tha- stripped of my - directly to hell - oh, shit. "U-understood, your Illustriousness." He barely had time to get the period at the end of his sentence before he found himself plummeting towards a vast, deeply blue sheet. As he fell, the Earth turned quickly beneath him, moving the sheet away and bringing land - forests, plains, and deserts passed rapidly beneath him as he tumbled heels over head. His wings burned away painfully in the atmosphere, as did much of his ankle-length red hair, but he was for the most part unharmed when he at last came to a thumping rest against something warm and soft.

He groaned, and heard an answering moan from beneath him. Startled, he rolled, and heard - The hell just hit me? there wasn't anything above me before, I'm sure i would have seen it a GIRL?
Righting himself, Schuldig sprang backwards, peering like a startled animal at his first human. Homo sapiens sapiens, otherwise known as human beings - bipedal primates in the family Hominidae thought to have originated in Africa approximately two hundred thousand years ago by their own reckoning. They had done great and terrible things with their two hundred thousand years, things that had made God weep and tear them apart, and things that had caused all of Heaven to rejoice in the ingenuity and creativity of the earthly beasts.

"Good God, you're a man. Where on Earth did you come from?" Alongside the spoken words came another set, something Schuldig sensed rather than heard- Didn't realize it was a man at first, what with the long hair and the dress, but what's he doing here anyway, and where the hell did he come from?

Schuldig swallowed, and coughed a bit. "I'm not from... Earth. Or Hell. I'm -" His words cut off there and refused to go on like an unruly horse. A geis, he realized - he would not be able to speak of his purpose here, then.

"...An alien?" supplied the unfortunate man who'd broken his fall. Schuldig peered at him oddly. An alien was the common name of an extra-terrestrial visitor thought to have come in a highly technologically advanced space craft designed for-
He shut the thoughts off, feeling overwhelmed.

"I'm not an alien," he said, affronted. "What are you?"

"American," the other replied promptly. His golden-brown eyes became guarded, however, as though he were expecting a less than pleasant response to this statement. Schuldig heard the reason in his mind. If he's going to start in on me like the last biggoted asshole who came sniffing around my dig site, harping on me because I'm not English even though my papers said I was from England, I swear I'm going to stab my toothbrush straight through his eye.

Schuldig was momentarily terrified by the easy violence with which this human regarded him, but if his curiousity didn't overcome it entirely, it at least won out for the time being. "Begging your pardon," he said politely. "What's a toothbrush?"
Another violent stream of thoughts. He speaks English flawlessly, but he doesn't know what a toothbrush was? He comes tumbling out of a tomb in the middle of Egypt like it's the most natural thing in the world and doesn't have the good sense God gave a gnat-
"I certainly do have the sense He gave a gnat, and more besides. Who are you to say I don't?" The American's rudeness on top of his recent exile was almost too much. Thankfully, both words and thoughts stopped dead at his question. After a pregnant pause, Schuldig felt a tentative thought reach out.

Can you hear what I'm thinking?
He saw no reason to lie, and didn't. "I can. Can't you?" This seemed to take the American by surprise.

"Can't I what? Hear what I'm thinking? Of course I can hear what I'm thinking, but it's generally frowned on to go digging through other people's minds without their permission."

Schuldig felt chastised. "My apologies. I'm not digging, though," he denied, hoping he wasn't going to get into trouble his first day. "It's just ... I can't quite help hearing you. It's very loud." There was another long pause, and then the American's easy voice.

"And now?"

Schuldig wasn't sure where the mind-reading had come from, or how he was meant to deal with it, but he knew he was expected to listen to the other man now, and did. "Not a thing?" he ventured, and then tried to actively seek the other's thoughts. He heard several men dozens of yards away, but complete silence from the man in front of him. He shook his head. "How did you do that?"
"I'm not entirely sure. I pictured a wall in my mind, and tried to keep my thoughts behind it." He pulled his glasses off and rubbed them on the bottom of a dusty blue shirt. This did nothing at all for the cleanliness of the glass, and he scowled and slid them onto the top of his head.

"Do they do any good up there?" Schuldig asked, earning himself a startled look. He understood what glasses were - some of the more scholarly angels wore them for comfort and ease of reading - but he'd never seen any of them wearing the spectacles nestled in their hair before.

"They do as much good up there as they do on my face," the American said. "You're weird."

"No, I'm Schuldig. Who are you?" It seemed the next logical step, as they'd already established that he was a human American.

"Brad Crawford. I'm an archaeologist."

-TBC-