Blackridge Institute (wlw) - DA 1

Chapter 1

At the edge of the world is a point that begins and ends at the same place; the world is a thing unto itself, contained and content. A true and accurate way of thinking, if you are human.

If you aren't, at the edge of the world is Blackridge Institute.

Majority of humans are ignorant. Emotion as currency, luck that depended on how many times you clicked your teeth together, prayers screened for review; these are all hidden from humankind.

And so there are people—and they are people, because people had never been synonymous with human—who have to handle these affairs.

The creatures that perform such wouldn't call it a duty or an obligation, because having a job is not an obligation. A human who did not have a job still has value as a person, but their life would not be easy.

Simply put, our goal is coexistence without letting humans know. Humans are important, because for a great deal many of us, humans are inseparable from our way of life.

However, this touches the difference of duty and purpose. Energy feeders, for example, convert human emotion into fuel for their hearthfires, which in turn can become material. A succubus that chooses not to gather energy would not have fuel for material manifestations.

Similarly, an angel is an ephemeral shard broken from the Architect Herself. Angels have a rich and diverse culture, as well as a hierarchical caste system that denotes their function in regard to the services they provide to humans. Furthermore, an angel may choose not to serve humans. However, this is an uncommon belief among angels, which their own philosophers attribute to the aspect of the Architect that calls for obedience to the Word.

These are only some of the things you will come to learn here. You, as a human, are incredibly important to our cooperative effort to better relations between human and non-human entities.

To thrive at Blackridge, you need only consider that taking the supernatural and shaping it to fit human concepts is impossible and inadvisable.

Remember: Open minds, open arms.

Welcome to Blackridge Institute!

...

Casandra, scion of the angel Abaddon, crop of the never-fallen, denizen of the Pit of Souls, realized she picked up the pamphlet meant for the human students by the third paragraph but read the whole thing anyway. Afterward, because she resented the remark about being a shard, Casandra it put back on the kiosk but not before considering the ramifications of putting it in the trash.

Even if she could have, she would not. She was an angel. She operated within guidelines for how an angel should act, and no stricter rules were written than for how to behave in non-angelic company. This prohibited actions motivated by spite, including binning a school pamphlet.

But the Dream was so so far away, and here there were much much less eyes watching. She was free as a bird! Except she could fly higher, and also had the capability for articulate language. Freer than a bird, then.

She pulled at her luggage and walked on. As a rule, angels did not need luggage. Angels themselves were non-corporeal; as much as she disliked what the pamphlet said, it was true. An angel was imbued with a drop of the soul of the Architect, She who made the universe and all that was in it. It was an honor to be chosen, and angels were more pure than any other creature. A certain heretical belief among angels was that no other creature believed this.

Casandra had a rolling suitcase and another bag she carried in hand, because it was where she put her things. The idea was to make a hands-on approach to understand how humans lived, because soon she would live among them.