God's Gone AWOL

[7] The Showoff

Including Atticus and Ruth, there was a total of five angels accepted into Damaris' choir. There was an angel named Zion, an angel named Ultima, and Ephrath: the angel who had run off with Ruth after their baptism. Although they had their differences in terms of personality and temperament, they were all talented and useful in their own ways. And under the careful guidance of Damaris, things went pretty smoothly.

For the first little while, anyway.

By this point in world history, humanity had just started to enter its Bronze Age. Proper cities and towns were all starting to pop up, bringing with them all sorts of new human things. Money, tools, clothing, fancy stuff like that started to develop. The sun was finally rising on the primitive monkey race —but that was not necessarily a good thing.

Even in the early stages of civilization, the nature of evil had already set down its roots. Unfortunate emotions such as greed, lust, and hatred had already started to grow in the hearts of humans. In turn, these passing feelings started to develop into more systemic issues, such as violence, prejudice, corruption, and so forth. And as the world of humans grew, so did the evil within it.

For some reason, the responsibility to fix humanity's issues fell on the shoulders of angels. Why the mortals of earth couldn't just figure out a solution on their own, nobody knew. God told the angels to look after the Earth, so they had no choice but to do so, even if it meant handling problems caused by creatures who should have known better than to cause them in the first place.

The mission was simple enough.

A rich man in one of the river-cities had started a rather illegal crime network in order to bring himself more money. By accepting bribes and secretly killing off or socially destroying anyone who opposed him, this man —alongside many others in the world— was sowing the seeds for what would later become common practice in the eyes of twenty-first century politicians. And it was up to Damaris' choir to stop him. That was the entire assignment. It was nothing new for the little band of angels, they had dealt with far worse together.

Except there was a catch. During all of their past assignments, Damaris was carefully guiding and supervising the whole choir. This time, however, Damaris was going to step back and let the group handle everything on their own. For the first time in over a thousand years of working together, it was finally the younger angels' turn to figure things out for themselves. None of them were quite sure how the whole situation would turn out.

One sweltering hot Earthly day, the five junior angels descended. Unseen by the mortals, they all gathered around a tree just outside their destination city to discuss a proper plan of action.

"This isn't the correct answer. But if the rich man has become corrupt, the simple thing would just be to kill him, right?" said the angel Zion, "That would eliminate the main problem,"

Ruth had gotten ahold of a stick and was doodling around in the dirt. When she heard this, she shook her head.

"No it wouldn't," she said, "See the important word in the sentence you just said wasn't the word 'Corrupt'. It was 'Become'. Nobody is born with evil in their heart. It's the society that drove him down the wrong path,"

"Are you suggesting we eliminate the entire city, then?" Zion asked.

Ruth rewarded Zion with a well-earned "what is wrong with you?" look. Meanwhile, off to the side, Atticus was thinking everything over very carefully. It took him a little while, but he was pretty sure he'd come up with a good solution. Raising his head, he joined the conversation.

"She's suggesting that we find the root of the corruption, then destroy it," he said clearly.

"Well the root is obvious." Ephrath tossed her hair over her shoulder. "It's greed, plain and simple. But we're unable to eliminate fundamental human flaws, so we can't challenge that."