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Nov. 11th, 2001 05:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolariBut for those of you who stuck it out, here's the rest of the story, as it takes place after Episode 7. If you haven't seen episode #7 yet, click the above page to see that strip.
Thanks to everyone who has been part of the comic. I only wish it could have gone on.
THE DANCING SHADOWS (Cont.)
With the shadows destroyed, the "Angel of War,"
Diana, runs over to the crumpled form of Hanna, the robed angel. Hanna gets up off the floor,
groggy and confused. The seven year-old Andrea, witnessing all this, barely hears the two as they
argue. From what she can make out, Hanna is upset that Diana spent more time sounding
righteous than actually vanquishing the shadows. Scolded, Diana jumps back into the mirror
leaving Hannah to make sure the area is cleared. She notices Andrea huddled into the corner, and
attempts to comfort her. Scared, Andrea recoils from her.
Hanna removes her mask to show a
beautiful smile. When Andrea asks if she's an angel, Hanna just smiles and dissapears. Andrea
runs to her mirror and sees nothing but her reflection. And a glowing halo above her head. She
crawls into bed and falls asleep, safer than she's ever felt before.
But from the mirror, a pair of
red eyes watch.
DOUBTING ROGER
The next day, Andrea's mother, Lisa, asks about
the noise from her room. Andrea tells her it was just angels fightings, and goes outside to wait for
the bus. Lisa is a little concerned about her response.
Outside, Andrea waits for the bus with
her next door neighbor, Roger. Roger and Andrea have that elementary school love/hate
relationship that's so cute in children. You can tell they like each other JUST enough to tease each
other about not liking each other. At school, the two talk about what happened that last night.
Roger tries to convince her that it was all a dream. Andrea, shaken, runs to a bathroom and looks
in the mirror - her halo is still there.
UNNAMED EPISODE
Once home, Andrea and Lisa
have dinner. Lisa asks about what happened the last night, and Andrea tells her mother about the
shadows and the angels who fought each other. Lisa dismisses it as a dream, but makes a mental
note to herself to have a talk to her about reality and fantasy.
That night Andrea waits up for the
shadows and angels to reappear but they don't. Dissapointed, she curls up for bed and falls asleep.
Once asleep, Hanna reappears, pulls down her mask, and gives Andrea a kiss.
UNNAMED EPISODE
At shool, Andrea begins telling her classmates that she is an angel. She
starts butting into school arguments trying to resolve them, tries her best to be a teacher's pet, her
behavior even improves. Until she begins to get a bit heavy handed with it. She begins getting in
the way, forcing her opinions on others, demanding that she get her way because she IS an angel.
Roger and Andrea have an argument over the tetherball on the school's playground. She
demands he give it to her, because the angels always win over the shadows. Roger is black.
A
parent/teacher conference is held and Angela is told point blank that she is not a "real" angel. Her
mother calls her an angel because she loves her. Andrea decides to play along with the teacher
and parent, and tells them she isn't an angel. But deep down...she knows better.
RED MOON
Andrea is left alone for an evening, her mother is out working. Andrea, still
convinced that she is an angel, feels invincible. Angels can do what they want, when they want.
She puts on her swimsuit, some floaties and dives into her pool. She begins swimming in the pool
behind her house for hours. The sky gets dark, and she can't figure out how to turn on the pool
lights. She swims into the deep end. Once there, she gets dragged down into the water by
something. Under the water, she can't find her way up. As she begins to lose unconsciousness,
she sees a pair of red eyes staring at her from the darker parts of the pool.
Just as the eyes get
nearer, she's yanked up out of the water by Roger's father, who heard her thrashing about. She
immediately runs away upstairs without even acknowledging Roger's father and looks into the
mirror. No angels come out. And her halo is dim.
WARPED REFLECTIONS
Roger
has been staying away from Andrea lately. Ever since the tetherball incident and hearing about how
she treated his father after saving her life, he's tried his best to stay away from her. But seeing her
sitting all alone on the playground for lunch has him feeling bad for her. So he comes up to
her.
She tells him how sorry she was about not saying thank you to his father for saving her life.
The two begin to talk like they were old friends again, and catch up with each other.
Jokingly,
Roger asks "Are you still an angel?"
Andrea replies unflinchingly with a yes.
Roger, not
realizing he'd get a serious answer is shocked. "I guess that means I'm STILL a shadow." He runs
off in a huff, while Andrea tries to catch up to him. Grabbing him, she tries to tell him she was
wrong about it, but Roger pushes her down.
THE DAY THE LIGHTS CAME ON
After
another parent/teacher conference, and a long talk with Roger's father, Lisa sits Andrea down, and
they have a long heart to heart about angels and humans. Angels are mythical beings that don't
exist no matter how many dreams you have had about them. Shadows won't come out and hurt
you. Humans lead boring dreary lives full of hardship and woe.
It all sinks in to Andrea this time.
She is no angel. She's just a little girl who has been told once too many times by a loving mother
that she is an angel. She was not ever an angel. She never will be an angel. She's just a little girl.
Period.
That night, as Andrea sleeps, a pair of red eyes appears and jumps into her
mirror.
Andrea goes to school the next day, despondent and unfeeling. She has a dreary day
filled with childhood versions of hardship and woe. At one point, she sees a pair of red eyes in a
darkened room in the hallway. She runs in, hoping that it's a shadow. Instead, it's simply the
school's VCR lights. She removes the tape so one of the lights turns off.
She goes home,
defeated...mom is working overtime again.
THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT
Lisa
calls Andrea to tell her that she will be very late tonight, and that she can use the emergency
money to order a pizza. After ordering a half pepperoni/half black olive pizza, Andrea eats her half
in depression in a whole sitting. She gets a terrible stomachache and goes to bed early. Just as
she's going to bed, her mother calls and says she'll be even later than she thought because of a
huge storm coming in.
Andrea goes upstairs and cleans up for bed. Looking in the mirror, she
can just barely see a dim outline of what might be a halo. She gives up on it, and goes to bed. But
before she can go to bed, a loud thunderclap booms and all the lights in the neighborhood go
out.
Now surrounded in pitch black, Andrea tries to find a flashlight. When she can't, she feels
her way into her bedroom and closes the door. As soon as she does, she's surrounded by glowing
red eyes. Only the flashes of lightning show her the bodies of the shadows around her. She begins
to feel the coldness of their claws pulling at her when she notices the mirror. In the mirror are three
robed angels fighting four shadows INSIDE the mirror.
Andrea begins to grow weaker and
weaker when she looks over to the mirror one last time and recognizes Hanna, fighting her way out
of the mirror. Andrea gets an idea...with the last ounce of strength she has, she invisions a white
light around her...and fires a blast of light from her body, wiping nearly all the shadows around her
out. She falls to the ground in a crumpled mess, streams of light fading from her body.
The
three angels manage to get out of the mirror, and look down at Andrea. They're obviously
impressed at her ability to create a lightblast. Hanna removes her mask, and retraces a halo over
her head, and kisses her gently on the cheek.
THE SHATTERED REFLECTION
(Cont.)
Andrea, in her late twenties explains that that night was the night she truly knew she
was angel. She kept it hidden for the next ten years because, at the time, she knew the grown-ups
would never believe her.
She regrets the rift between her family and Roger's family grew so wide
after several mistakes. But that it was her own fault that Roger never forgave her for the Shadow
comment. She saw the shadows occasionally over the next ten years, but less and less frequently.
Each time they dissapeared on their own. They stopped completely when she was seventeen. She
never saw the robed angels again.
PART TWO - APOTHEOSIS
Part Two
would have explored seveteen year-old Andrea's time in school and with a group of people she met
called "The Celestial Exchange Agency" a group of people who all thought they were angels given
human form. While dealing with the pressures of rumours about her "angelhood" at school, and the
stigmas of beign different, she finds solace in the Celestial Exchange Agency, eventually becoming
an officer of the group. Several of the CEA members come to the groups in full angel garb. And
Andrea begins to make her own set of angel wings, feather by feather.
We would also have
explored how the rift between Andrea and Roger turned into out and out hatred from Roger towards
Andrea. It is a religious argument between a school friend named "Albert" who demands that
Andrea pick a religion if she is an angel that she realizes the true mission of an angel. "An angel
doesn't need to be told what is right, or to tell others what is right. She DOES what is right." She
goes to the CEA meeting with that message.
She ends up causing the CEA's members to
split off into faction camps. Those that believe that angels DO good and others who believe she is
wrong, and that angels MUST adhere to a religion. She leads her group, not realizing the cult of
personality she is building up around her, and that these angels aren't doing "right" but doing
whatever she says. She leaves the group when people begin to come in, not dressed as angels,
but dressed as Andrea herself. On her way out of the building, she meets a man named Michael,
and warns him that is he is a true angel, he should turn around and go home. The people in that
building are simply humans dressed as angels.
Soon afterwards, Andrea's mother breaks her
neck putting up Christmas lights. Her will leaves the house to Andrea.
THE SHATTERED
REFLECTION (Cont.)
The twenty-seven year old Andrea relates to us that the CEA soon fizzled
out without her guidance, and that she came to the conclusion that she was the last true angel.
Once out of high school she immediately took a job to pay off the property taxes on her house, but
was unable to completely pay them. She started selling off the furniture and antiques her mother
had to try and keep the house. But on her waitresses salary, she couldn't do it, and eventually,
several years later, she sold the house and moved to a small apartment in a seedy part of
town.
PART THREE - ANGEL MADE REAL
Part Three is a year in the life of
twenty-six year old Andrea. While working at her job at a 1950's gimmick short order diner, Andrea
meets Michael from the CEA meeting. They recognize each other immediately and start talking.
Michael lets her know that she was right...the group was really just a bunch of "humans in angel
outfits." Eventually, they begin to form a relationship with each other, both believing themselves to
be the last angels on the planet. The two work on Andrea's wings together, and fall deeply in love.
Andrea takes Michael to her "secret place." She takes him to the top of the Tower Life
building, one of the larger skyscrapers in her city. The security guard waves her in and she takes
the elevator to the top floor, then up several more flights of stairs. Another security guard waves at
her, calling her "Goldie" (due to her golden yellow hair) and lets her through the door. She is at the
absolute top floor of the Tower Life building, and a small railing is all that keeps her from flying down
to the ground below. She tells him that she's been coming there for years, just to look over the city
watching and guarding the people below. The security guards, knowing she wasn't up to any harm,
and couldn't find a way to keep her off the roof, let her through. Up there, the two watch over the
city, angels protecting their flock.
Through the months, we find out that Michael has been doing
roughly the same thing in The Tower of Americas, a space needle type building downtown. The
Tower of Americas, though, has a metal grating around it, to keep people from falling off the
observation deck. He manages to sneak in using a stolen passcode, and takes her up to the tower,
showing her the view from the Tower of Americas. The view is spectacular, an Andrea regrets never
going up there, first.
On Andrea's twenty-seventh birthday, Michael promises her a surprise.
They first attempt to go into the Tower of Americas but the passcode has been changed. Instead
they go to the Tower Life building. There are no guards today, as it's late on a Friday. At the top of
the Tower Life building, Michael tells her that he has two presents for her. He gets down on bended
knee, and proposes to her. The ring is attached to a small tag on a stuffed bear dressed as an
angel. She happily accepts the proposal. he then tells her that he had been planning this surprise
for the Tower of Americas for a long time, but the Tower Life building will do even better. He tells her
that he is such a happy angel that he can fly.
And then jumps off the Tower Life
building.
And plummets to his death.
She runs downstairs as fast as she can to be with
Michael. Michael died on impact, and the police come to investigate. She lies to them, telling
them that she was comign to the Tower Life building to see him and he'd already jumped before she
got there. She goes home, distraught and irrational.
THE SHATTERED REFLECTION
(Cont.)
"And that's where we are. My halo is completely gone. My halo is gone, my wings are
destroyed. I never was an angel."
Andrea tosses the bear in the living room, and goes into her
bedroom. She turns off the lights and goes to bed. As soon as she is asleep, hundreds of pairs of
red eyes appear and jump into her. She never moves a muscle.
APOTHEOSIS
"Hi, this is
Andrea...I'm not in right now, but if you'll leave a message, I'll get back to you. Thanks." "Andrea,
this is Wendi from the Diner. Are you in? Pick up if you are."
"Andrea, it's Wendi again. The
police have called. Are you in?"
"Hello, Miss Andrea Williamson? This is San Antonio
Metropolitan Police. If you can please call us, we'd be most appreciative. Thanks."
"Andrea it's
Steph. Wendi called me and we're worried about you. Where are you?"
"You bitch, you killed
my son! I HOPE YOU ROT IN HELL."
But Andrea's not at home. She's at the Tower of
Americas, looking down at her flock. She's spent most of the day there, watching the people and
the ground below. She now realizes her lie makes her look like she's thrown Michael off the Tower
Life building. She is not only NOT an angel, she's wanted by police. There's nothing left to do, and
the Tower of Americas closes in ten minutes. Just before she leaves, she sees a father and son
looking out on the city. The father puts the son on the metal grating...but just as Andrea is abotu to
walk into the elevator down, she ses the metal grating give way. She remembers her last
conversation with Michael: "He had been planning his surprise on the Tower of Americas."
The
grating swings open with the child dangling on the far end. Before the father can react, she runs
outside and tells the father to grab her ankles. She reaches out hand over hand on the grating until
she is stretched out. Father holding her feet, hands stretched out. Andrea tells the son to use her
body to crawl over to his father. The boy shakily manages to get to his father, but not before the
metal grating begins to warp and twist on the part still connected to the tower. As Andrea begins to
walk hand ove rhand back to the tower, the metal gives way. The father nearly loses her, but grabs
her shoe. Andrea feels a tug on her arm and looks down. She sees a long line of shadows pulling
her down, trying to yank her fro mthe father's grasp. She sees more shadows climbing up the
chain, trying to get at her. She manages to get enough concentration and she manages to create a
lightblast. The shadows nearest her disintegrate, and the chain falls away.
And then she feels
her foot slip out of her shoe.
The horrified father sees her fall. Andrea looks up at him, and in
her decent, she realizes the father is Roger.
Looking down, she realizes that at least she's
going to die doing the "right" thing. She begin to recite the poem her mother taught her so long
ago.
I want to be an angel
And with the angels stand.
A crown upon my
forehead
A harp withing my --
She never finishes.
Looking down at her body, cracked
and broken in the pavement, Andrea wonders why she landed with a smile on her face. Three robed
angels appear around her, and for once, she can see and ehar them perfectly. The one we know as
Hanna introduces herself as Andreas guardian angel. They tell her that the high quorum of angels
have been watching her carefully, and her heroic deed, despite the presence of so many shadows i
nher soul and pulling her down has turned heads in the quorum. Unlike most humans, Andrea has
the potential to be a true angel, and not one of the many temporary sub-angels like the Angel of
War she saw so long ago.
She asks for Michael, if he made it into Heaven. Hanna tells her she
needs to look beyond the ideas of Heaven and Hell. On further questioning, Hanna tells her that
Michael will make a Pennsylvania Amish couple a fine daughter.
They usher her away from the
scene. Unable to explain why Andrea died with a smile on her face.
THE
END
TILTED HALO
In Tilted Halo, we would have seen Andreas training as
ana angel, and her problems with the temporary sub-angels, many of which want to be True Angels.
Unfortunately, we learn that there are very very few True Angels, and that they are appointed by
other True Angels from the humans. Many of her episodes involve training sessions, logging
prayers from the humans, and attempting to answer wishes. She does even get to train with
Hanna, who takes her out to get two people to fall in love. And while it fails "Love is love, no matter
who it's with. I just wish you'd gotten Angie for Bob, and not David for Bob." She sticks it out, and
is finally given the robes of a True Angel, but only in exchange for her Human Soul.
TO her
apprehension, she finds out that Angels have no souls.
A HARP WITHIN MY
HAND
With decades as a True Angel under her robes, she shows herself to be a fair
and competent True Angel. Directing people to their fates, greeting them as they enter the afterlife.
Choosing destinies for children. And fighting the Angel's brothers - the Shadows....fallen sub-
angels. But she is missing something in all this. She no longer sees the world as a beautiful thing.
Humans are simply things to her now, and the magic is gone. Hanna tells her it is the last vestiges
of her human soul dissapearing. She talks abotu it with the few other Human-picked True Angels.
And she realizes that they all ahve lsot the magesty and granduer of the world below. The original
True Angels never saw it to begin with. Even Hanna tells her that the seven year old Andrea was
simply a human with promise. She takes a leave of absence, and wanders the earth for several
years, defeating shadows where she finds them, but trying to find happiness with the humans she
cared about for so long.
It takes several years, but she finaly realizes why things are no longer
beautiful to her. She cannot die. She's seen so many sunsets that they are no longer beautiful.
She's seen so many births that they are commonplace. She's greeted so many souls that they all
look alike. She realizes that in death, there is a "finality." There will one day be a LAST sunset. A
LAST soul. A LAST kiss. And it is the idea that this may be the last time somehting that is done,
that makes it beautiful.
She talks to the other angels, asking to have her soul back. No other
human-picked angel has ever asked for their soul back, and there is no procedure for it. But they
do tell her that she can't go back to beign a human. If and when she gets her soul back, she will
simply be another dead human. Here she can make a difference as a True Angel. She says that
she cannot handle the idea of humans as "things." As sunsets and surises as simply markers of
time. If it means having to die to appreciate these things, then she must.
The full quorum of
True Angels hold a farewell party fo Andrea, but Hanna is nowhere to be seen. She says her
godbyes to the Quorum of the Twelve True Angels and each one wishes her luck in her last few
minutes of life. A portal opens and Andrea walks through it.
In total blackness, Hanna appears,
and hugs Andrea with all her might. Hanna says she as something special in store for her. But
first, she must have her soul back. Hanna takes a small glowing vial from within her robes and tells
Andrea to drink it. Hanna tells her to look up after drinking the vial. The moment Andrea drinks
it...
The horrified father sees her fall. Andrea looks up at him, and in her decent, she realizes
the father is Roger.
Looking down, she realizes that at least she's going to die doing the "right"
thing. She begins to recite the poem her mother taught her so long ago.
I want to be an
angel
And with the angels stand.
A crown upon my forehead
A harp within my
hand...
Just before impact, she remembers Hannas words to look up.
Andrea sees a
sunset. A beautiful sunset. And smiles.
