Chapter 3: Stole Many A Man's Soul and Faith
Ashley spent some time recovering from the procedure. She wound herself up in fluffy clouds until no light came through at all. She wasn't in any pain, she just... wasn't ready to deal with the new her. Time passed, but she had no idea how long. She just rested until she could get back to her work... whenever that would be.
All she had to do was break out of her little cocoon. She was mighty. She had swung her sword and cut through an inch of solid steel. This flimsy cloud would prove no impediment to her escape. She'd put it there herself.
And yet... she just couldn't. She couldn't even raise her arm to cut through it... in case it would not be moved by her feeble limbs. She had never experienced such a feeling of powerlessness. Ashley just sat there, waiting for her strength to return, if it ever would.
Fatigued. That was the word. Ashley had never felt so spent, so entirely depleted of energy. Like an electronic device with no batteries. She couldn't sleep. She could hardly think. All she could do was... exist. Wait there patiently as hours slowly ticked away. An hour had never seemed like a long period of time... until now, when there was absolutely nothing to do and nothing to take her mind off her predicament.
How had she let them talk her into this? How could she have known the procedure would be so difficult? Would she ever recover, or would be stuck like this forever? Was this what the people in the pit experienced? This unshakable gloom that she was too weak to escape her predicament, and she would never return to her important labor?
The work they did never felt like 'work...' until now. Deprived of her purpose, she felt a little hollow of misery in her stomach. Surely, things were going undone without her assistance. Even when she was there, events missed her eye. Injustice on scales even she could not change either way... but she never knew which small problem would blossom into something that would alter the entire world.
At long last, Ashley summoned her strength and put her hand through the cloud, clutching at it and tearing it away until it was gone. The sun hit her skin, and she immediately felt a bit better. Do the surface dwellers really do this every single day? How do they get anything done in the day? Maybe it's all that coffee...
Ashley stretched her wings out and brought herself to a reclined position. This was how she chose to watch the surface anyway. She opened up the eye that showed her the surface, that bustling and busy world, the humans scrabbling around like ants with briefcases.
She closed the portal again. She threw a cloud over her head again. The sun felt great on her skin... but it was still too bright. Soon, she would get back to work...
But not until she got some more rest.
As it was, her dispelling the cloud around her body and wrapping one over her head while staying reclined on some cloud... meant that her brand-new attachment hung out from her body like the tongue from a snoozing bear.
Thankfully, when an angel did not want to be disturbed, she could not be disturbed. Thus, nobody saw her in this undignified pose.
But if they had, they would have gotten quite the eyeful.
--
When Ashley finally dispelled her little ball of fluff, she felt more ready to attempt returning to her labors. She opened her lens to the surface, making sure she hadn't been away long enough for the Earth to turn into a far-flung utopia. She felt like she'd slept for ages, but it looked like she'd only been out for a few days, a week at most. The surface wasn't any more chaotic than she'd seen before. It hadn't taken a turn for the worse in her brief absence. Maybe she needn't have been so worried... maybe she could go back to relaxing for a few more weeks...
No. Ashley was experiencing an emotion that angels rarely experience in their productive and busy lives: boredom. Pulling up that all-seeing window barely inspired anything. After so long away, she barely remembered how she did what she did. Some of the humans seemed to experience this after they took a week off exercising and then somehow never left their couch, their home stationery bikes morphing into clothing racks.
Looking at the entire world... it was daunting. So, she looked closer, focusing on a random metropolitan area, dense with people to protect and chaos to mitigate. Start with something small, walk before she flies...
As she watched from her perch, she was struck by something. Something she hadn't noticed about the dusty, pest-saturated ball of dirt that she was forced to protect. Despite her resemblance and former life, she didn't consider herself human. She'd always thought of the humans as almost like a giant crowd of dogs to wrangle. Comparisons to flocks of sheep, often as they were invoked by those who revered her... that didn't quite give the flock enough credit for how cleverly they could get themselves into trouble.
But now... Ashley was looking at some of them in a different way. She saved a woman from tripping... but kept her eyes on her after to look at the interesting curvature of her legs, sticking out from those remarkably short shorts. The denim had been cut, leaving threads of cotton hanging like tassels. But they'd been cut so high as to expose the fold between the buttock and the thigh. How had she never noticed this detail before now?
She shook her head to clear her mind. That woman was safe, and that was all she needed to know. Move on to the next potential problem.
Her mind went to the horrible sight that inspired this entire project. The demon woman bouncing aboard that human...
There was no horror in the memory anymore. Recalling it was no longer revolting. In fact... thinking back on the demon woman... her body was pretty nice. Shiny hair, fit but not muscular, large enough bust. Her nudity was different than that of her fellow angels. They were all built like statues. Wavy curves and pleasant shapes, but hard and strong. Even her own breasts were as resolutely firm as a clenched bicep. The demon's bust jiggled like the mound of fat it surely was.
Ashley nearly slapped herself. She needed to stop thinking about that demon and start looking for her.
She took her lens over to the hot shores of America. The sandy beaches were filled with swimmers, sunbathers, volleyball players. Lots of women packed into tiny lycra outfits in a staggering variety of colors... and sizes. Sweat, seawater and tanning oil dripped from their bodies, lashed about as they jogged. Some dripped off their canned beverages as they pulled them from styrofoam containers. (What human invented that stuff? Maybe she should go visit them for unleashing that environmental disaster.)
Ashley watched around the beach. She was looking for trouble, but not in the way the humans used that phrase. There might be a purse snatcher or other variety of thief around. It wasn't normally the sort of thing she worried about, but if she happened to be watching when it went down, it was easy enough to lower a slab of concrete sidewalk down for just a fraction of a second, causing his foot to come down just a little later, setting his center of balance off and bringing him to the ground.
There didn't appear to be any crime at this particular crowded beach. Maybe those people shouldn't have been changing into their swimsuits behind those bushes because the line for the changing booths was too long. But even in the strict world of the sky, that was clearly a victimless crime.
A big kid seemed to be teasing a pair of enterprising young architects, having just finished a rather impressive sandcastle. They have just discovered the incredible building properties of wet sand, and used it to great effect. The bully reeled his foot back to kick over the new structure.
Ashley felt the anger rise up her heart and into her neck. She pulled a rather complicated bit of legerdemain in the moment before the bully's foot contacted the edge of the sand castle. His foot stopped shortly after piercing the edge, but went no further. The bully yanked his foot back and hobbled off. The bully summoned his mother and pointed at the kids, still wondering how they'd somehow accidentally created concrete.
