Death of 7 Billion Angels Setting Notes

Art by Zdzisław Beksiński

So at long last, I'm returning to this post, and taking a pass at that crazy mess of prose to try and turn it into a setting with some degree of cohesion. Fair warning, this is basically just a text dump of my notes: there's a TL;DR at the bottom, but if you're interested in seeing my thought processes, read on!

• officer cut me up so that my blood can see the sun — kill seven billion angels — kill them with old age and with bones that work themselves loose — lose their places and kill them with a series of sunrises each one more beautiful than the last — 
• There’s not a whole lot to work off of immediately here, but the stuff about “old age” “losing places” and “sunrise” makes me think of some once powerful force now in decline, having lost its place in the world 
• We obviously get the 7 Billion Angels, though not much about them
• The fact that the whole thing starts as an address to an officer tells us a few things: namely, that commands etc. will be addressing the officer, and that whatever world we’re in still has law enforcement/military or at least continues to hang on to that parlance.
•   throttle them by the river wring their necks and submerge them in the water — dripping wet and glorious — halos slightly askew — eyes crossed — lips blue and bitten — lay them in a heap and cold in the night sleep beneath them — bring an oxygen mask to breathe under the smothering heap and a cuckoo clock for keeping time — do not get sidetracked think only of your hallucinations — bleed your cheeks with frostbite
• This more visceral description of the Angel’s deaths tells me that actually someone literally did murder all 7 billion of the Angels, which is insane but also cool 
• also, oxygen mask and cuckoo clock imply that at the time of the killing, modern-ish technology was a thing 
• The fact that it was really cold is interesting
• Hallucinations just seems like a bit of info about the Murderer: maybe the Angels were killed in error? Maybe not. Maybe killing them all drove the Murderer mad?
• snap off your thumb at the base and write with it — write on the back of one of the angels “there is nothing like this anymore” and let that be known  — that after they are dead chicken-plucked and stone bruised where your fingers and thumb have bitten at them — no one is to touch another human — let this be enough violence for the whole of the world — let this sacrifice be the last lamb —
• Okay so “there is nothing like this anymore” can both mean that there will be nothing like the Angels anymore, but also that there will be nothing like this insane genocide anymore 
• “No one is to touch another human” so this was all done for the sake of ending violence somehow, perhaps some sort of ritual? It’d be a bit lame if it was just symbolic, and the “sacrifice” and “last lamb” thing does imply some sort of ritual
• So the killing of every Angel was done in order to end violence against humans forever 
• Maybe the Angels were the main perpetrators of violence against humans? Or maybe not, maybe the ritual required the killing of innocents in order to prevent all further innocent deaths 
•  let the pile of angels tower against the trees and melt in the day — let them join the river — join the river and let the rocks tear at you — join the ichor and silvery clay of angel’s flesh and you count them each by name — all seven billion and there are seven billion  and you — you can smile and let the river carry you all away from the mountains and drain you into the vast meaningless sea 
• So time passes, this was a while ago
• The Angel corpses are swept out to sea, and the Murderer with them
• The smile and the letting go of the Murderer seems to imply that whatever effect they were after, they succeeded, the ritual was successful, etc. 
• So we don’t know who or what the Angels were, but we do know that this setting takes place in a world where at some point in the past, this act of genocide made it so that human suffering or maybe just human death is impossible and does not occur 
• Let’s say suffering is still possible but death does not occur, there’s more options that way. So humans can no longer die, at least not violently, not sure about natural causes yet. 
•  a boat is swallowed by a wave and then coughed out by another — a yellow hat is lost in a corridor and lands in a puddle much to the merchant’s dismay — the boat bounces away from the shore too small to be afraid — saffron in its belly the crew in its belly saffron in the belly of the crew — the hat is saffron yellow with a pink ribbon the puddle has ruined it — it has caught it spat upon it — it has clawed away at the delicacy of ribbon and velvet it has spun the hat around 
• Weird little transitional thing going on here. So time has passed, we’ve established that. Mercantilism still exists, and fashion, to some degree anyway. Things aren’t really incredibly post apocalyptic, or if they are, not in a way that alters ways of life that much. 
• — the ship spins around and strikes a rock and is destroyed — the water is stained yellow the crew does not try to swim — they sink towards the ocean floor they want to be conscious — they want to see the strange earth that approaches them — what lies at the center of the world — lobster because they live for they think forever — continue to grow bigger the ocean floor far down past the floodlights and the chime and twinkle of radar and television screens far at the murky bottom of the world which they long to see — which has been worn smooth and solid by the ministrations of the ocean and the churn and pulse of the silt and the waves — the lobsters scuttle, each one so enormous that they pile over one another slow clacking their claws — they can fit forever around the little marble of earth that floats somehow disconnected — as though all the continents were free floating above the homes of these tremendous crustaceans — this is the case —
• There’s a lot here
• So we learn some important things about the setting: namely, that modern technology exists - stuff like floodlight and radar and TV is all a part of this setting 
• Also, the continents of the world free float on an enormous ocean that somehow orbits a little sphere of earth that floats in the middle of it
• And there’s enormous lobsters that crawl endlessly around this center of the earth
• lobsters that don’t die, just keep getting older and huger and more awful
• So all that’s pretty fucking weird/cool
• They will continue to crawl like that until everything around them gives out and they are exposed to the heat death ray of the sun which will have sunk close in the horizon hot and burning poison — evil to boil us away mankind will not even be a twinkle in the mind of somebody who cared — mankind will not witness the smell of the lobster boiling in its man-eating world ending armor and they will writhe in the light and the dark and everything will be full of the smell of shellfish — the sailors do not see them — one does — his name is michael — and he sees the slow gradient shift in mass on the back in the back of the lobster as it continues to pace through the swirling murk at the heart of all things—  around his heart even now the little vice grip pincers are pressing the flesh together and tearing it up and apart in little ragged chunks of meat — this is what everything is really made of that little heart-flesh he thinks 
• Mostly just driving home the apocalyptic enormity of the lobsters
• Also the sun seems pretty sinister but that also could just be poetic language 
• “this is what everything is really made of that little heart flesh” is really interesting though
• The parallel is between the actual heart of the sailor and the “heart” of the world that the lobsters crawl around: maybe that inner substance is somehow the building blocks of reality? Maybe it’s actual meat/the heart of something? Maybe it’s both?
• — and now he enters a world of slow moving colossi as a mere bundle of wreckage — hardly a suitable offering for beasts of this stature — the lobster the slow twisted or its green plastic eyes and mouth and somehow it is smiling with its brethren they are like a group of holy men all driven quite mad with the knowledge that god will forever be beyond them —michael touches the mud and the wing of a dead angel long rotten —  it tears away in its hands it remembers the air and it remembers desperation and a final sad flutter — and it twists upwards and he is borne with it and when it crests the surface and floats strange and molting and grey he is unconscious but draped over it — when he wakes he throws up strange fish and stranger waters and cold coins and chewed paper and fishhooks caught in plastic bags and his angel wing is still with him 
• More stuff we know already: plastics and other modern paraphernalia exist, the lobsters are extremely awful and awe-inspiring 
• There’s potential in “they are like a group of holy men all driven quite mad” for the origin of the lobsters: perhaps they were once human?
• Also, we get a tie-in to the death of the Angels: it’s been a long time since that happened, their flesh is scattered throughout the ocean but retains some life, since the rotting wind brings the sailor back up to the surface. 
• — and when he reaches the jagged rock that burst the belly of his ship he clambers out of the water to the very top of the rocks and tucks the wing into his shirt — it tickles and the tips stick up around his neck — he is very alone  —he sings to himself — he dies of exposure on top of that rock angel wing and all — when a ship comes the next day and finds his corpse there they take his body and leave the wing which has begun to fall apart — bone is exposed like a transplanted tree it takes root against the stone and stretches broad and skeletal — pointing the way like a strange hand saying “turn back” and the peaceful ships that spot it say that there is no more use for such a landmark but it is comforting in a way — but they did not tell his family and the man is buried at sea 
• More driving home of the power of the Angel’s corpses: the wing takes root, finds life even though it’s just a skeleton at this point.
• Also, more reinforcing “modern age” stuff: the time where landmarks were useful is past, ships can navigate using GPS or whatever. 
•  tea stained sky and forest like a dripping nest of eagles in the rain — a twisted net a flapping sack of canvas — a tattered coat with the name torn out of it — a feast of bread and sky and water — a hide stretched too thin over something precious — a child perhaps a bird wing crushed against the ground — a treetop spotted with pennants and scarves of runaways and vagabonds — a sleeping woman beneath the child under the hide is her child — the bird's wing is an angel wing her mother says giving it to her as she turns ten years old — and she has kept it tucked against her hip all this time — and now that the child is her child not the child of a ditch as it once was — she is hoping that after all it is the wing of an angel found dead in the river as her mother had claimed — and she is hoping that the tree will shelter her from the rain and maybe the snow — the sky looks like snow all dark — tea-stained and in the distance she can hear the rattle of a wind and the rattle of ice and the rattle of bones clicking in a far off cave— 
• Okay, things seem distinctly less modern here, with the hide and the cave imagery, the power of the elements exerted against the woman and the child
• So maybe this is after the fall of whatever modern era preceded it?
• The Angel relics are still around though, which makes sense: 7 billion semi-immortal corpses will leave a lot of remains
• There’s question about their origin though: enough time has passed that people think it might just be superstition 
• and she shivers and is glad that the child is too hungry to cry — and she clutches at her coat and watches the hide above her dance as the wind arrives — and watches as the scarves fill up with first rain and then snow — and watches as the wind catches at  child and watches as the child is swept away and she cannot lift a finger— she watches all this the child seems no more than a bundle of cloth a rag doll a ragged baby — she is sorry to see it go but this seems fitting it catches in the tree and sways there watching her — 
• Hard to know what to make of this apart from the fact that it seems to fit with the “suffering without death” ideas I had rolling around
• The child carried off by the wind and hanging in the tree is a haunting image, but I’m not exactly sure what to take from it except for the fact that it would take crazy strong wind (or a very light child) for that to happen, so having extreme weather play a factor in the setting seems reasonable. 
• Maybe that’s what the apocalypse was:global warming, environmental crisis, etc. Makes sense if it was preceded by a modern age that looks at lot like our own. 
• An environmental collapse but none of the humans can die
• God that’s bleak. 
• So, assembling what we know/have decided and where to go from here 
• We know that Angels exist
• What we don’t know is what they are
• We know that, after the killing of the 7 Billion Angels, humans can no longer die
• And we know (or strongly suspect) that this was made possible because the Angels were innocent, and so in a very christ-like fashion, died so humanity could live. 
• So the Angels were likely benevolent, or at least non-harmful
• That’s nice, because the easy out for any setting with angels is to say “oooh, but our angels are scary and bad.” Angels can still be scary while being good. A benevolent sphere of eyes and wings is much more unsettling than a malicious one.
• Sadly, these angels do seem to be humanoid, having throats and things, but we can always deviate from that if we’d like 
• A question to consider: if there are Angels, should there be Devils? 
• hm. I say yes, because I like dualities, but I also think that because they’re not mentioned in the fiction, perhaps they ought to just be another form of the Angels
• That obviously hews closer to the biblical style of Angel/Devil breakdown anyway
• But the Devils weren’t killed, only the Angels. 
• So the Devils lack their better half, which possibly means they run rampant?
• However, again, they’re not mentioned at all, so I don’t think they’re a dominant force in the setting
• Another point: nobody can die anymore, so it’s not like souls will be going to hell
• Maybe the Devils don’t have much purpose anymore, then
• That seems like a pretty huge existential hurdle for them to get over
• So basically, sad, lost, but still probably evil/dangerous Devils wandering the earth weeping is what I’m hearing
• And I am down for that. 
• We know that the world is free floating on an enormous ocean with a strange heart in the center of it 
• We know that there is potential for the “heart of the world” to actually be flesh of some sort 
• the world was potentially once a living thing? Or is? Or some enormous flesh-god squirmed onto the world at some point and died 
• hm, I like the world being in some sense flesh, or flesh being tied intrinsically to the makeup of reality
• That provides a clear delineation between Humans and Angels as well, if humans are fleshy and of the earth, and Angels less so
• Maybe in some sense Angels are the “soul of the world” or something
• Or rather, perhaps they are what happened to the soul of that flesh-god we mentioned earlier
• So the flesh-god died, its corpse forming the earth and its soul escaping and becoming 7 Billion Angels
• That takes away from the feeling of Angels being strangers to the earth though, which I kind of like
• Maybe it’s the other way around?
• Like the soul of a flesh-god wanted to escape, and did, so as a result the flesh-god died.
• its heart sank into the depths, and around it formed a world, and life etc. 
• The escaped soul became the 7 Billion Angels (not sure why yet) but found that they could not leave the earth, as the heart of the flesh-god still beat in the center (or something) and so founded civilizations of their own on the Earth, waiting for the heart at last to die so that they could be free
• Not sure I dig that, but there might be potential in a reversal
• maybe the soul of the flesh-god was severed from it and scattered as the 7 Billion Angels, which now wait and attempt to perfect themselves so that they may unify and once again join the flesh that once housed them
• I like this direction more: it gives more reason for the Angels to be odd and isolationist
• But in that case I’m not sure that I like the world having once been the god that housed the angels
• Because I like the idea of the Angels wanting to get off world
• Perhaps there are many flesh-gods: the earth was once one, and now all that remains is its heart 
• The Angels were once the soul of a living flesh-god. They desired autonomy and escaped, fracturing into 7 billion distinct entities in the process 
• We know that there’s lobsters that live on that heart and grow bigger and older forever and that maybe they were once human 
• What if all of humanity is just like that now? Nobody can die, so people just grow older and older until they become monsters 
• that gives monsters a pretty cool origin honestly, if all monsters in the setting used to be human
• and it plays into existing expectations about power/age: old dragons are more powerful, etc. 
• Perhaps the lobsters were just the first people that underwent that process
• if that’s the case, then there was a huge time gap between the death of the 7 Billion and the time that the sailor narrative occurs, because the lobsters have been down there for a long time, and things like oxygen masks and clocks existed when the massacre took place 
• perhaps all modern technology like that was created by the angels and people didn’t really have access to it before the massacre
• that would explain why so much time could pass without technology becoming incredibly advanced, if people don’t really properly understand it 
• that also suggests a pretty big structural inequality between the humans and the Angels, if the Angels had tech but the humans didn’t. 
• That in itself is interesting because we’ve decided that the Angels are good or at least innocent 
• So maybe they just lived isolated from humanity, keeping their wealth of technology to themselves
• Although my first instinct was to have them dole out technological assistance as needed, giving medicine to the sick etc. I think that slides really quickly into the Angels just being the rulers or god-kings of a feudal society, and I think we can do better than that. 
• If they’re just living in isolated technologically advanced communities without bothering anyone, that (to me) gives the impression of “not wanting to be here”
• One assumes from their name and their presentation that they don’t have the same earthly origins and nature as humanity
• Maybe they’re stuck on earth as punishment
• Just biding their time until they can finally go back to wherever they came from
• I don’t think they’re “fallen angels” though, or at least not edgy ones.
• We’ve established that they seem to be mostly ambivalent morally, and they’re certainly not evil
• So less “cast down from heaven for sins” vibe and more “lost and confused in a strange primitive world”
• At least until this madman murders all of them
• Okay, a final TL;DR for now, here’s what this all looks like in my head at the moment
• A very long time ago, the soul of some great alien god of flesh desired autonomy and escaped. In this process, they fractured into 7 billion distinct entities: the 7 Billion Angels, creatures of almost pure soul, with only a faint remement of the flesh they had once been clothed in.  The Angels fled in panic from the now-soulless flesh god, and took refuge on Earth. 
• At first, they reveled in their freedom, and built an incredibly technologically advanced civilization. They were not alone on this new world: the race of humanity eked out an existence as best they could. They were nearly all flesh were the Angels were soul, and as they grew older their flesh would overwhelm them, smothering their soul until at last they died. The Angels felt pity for these strange people, and sought to learn more about them and their plight. 
• This lead them to discover that the world they dwelt on had once been a flesh-god like the one that they had fled, and that humanity were once beings of soul like the Angels. But the soul dims, while the flesh grows and rots eternal, and over time, the flesh of humans overwhelmed their fading souls, leaving them in the position that the Angels now found them. This news terrified the Angels, for surely, though their soul was now mightier than their flesh, over centuries the same fate that ground humanity low would befall them. 
• They withdrew within themselves, hiding away in great cities to avoid the horror that humanity represented to them. For years they searched the heavens for their flesh-god, but even if they found it, they now means to reunite with it, to once more be safe to the ravages of time and the dimming of their soul. 
• At last, they decided on a course of action: they must perfect themselves, diminish the flesh within them to nothing, and so become one with each other. This being done, surely their flesh-god would return for its lost soul. Until then, they would not rest until they numbered 7 billion perfect Angels. 
• But how to do this? They were desperately far from perfection now, some of their host little better than the average human, having souls too firmly entrenched in flesh, while other’s souls were muddied with amoral and material concerns. In fact, the most virtuous of the humans possessed souls of greater power than the weakest of the 7 Billion, even shrouded in flesh as they were.
• In this way their plan was put into place; they would court the most virtuous of the humans, ensuring that their souls were not sullied. And when the humans soul was fairly brimming out of their flesh, and before it had begun to dim, they would lead them to the distant cities of the Angels, and enact the rites that would free the human’s soul from their flesh, where it would take its place amongst the Angels. To ensure the perfection of the 7 Billion, an Angel with less virtue than the one newly created would be cast down. 
• Such Angels became known as Devils, and most, bitter at their rejection from the 7 Billion, sought to ruin the virtue of humans and Angels alike, so that their own souls might prove superior, and their place in the 7 Billion restored. And so things were, for many, many years. Humanity, though still crawling in the mud, learned to live virtuously, so that they might be selected to join the Angels in their walled cities, and the Angels felt a swell of hope that they might indeed become a single soul once more. 
• And then they were killed. In a single day and night, by a single man. Such a slaughter was never dreamed of, and would never happen again, for in their deaths, the man sealed the souls of all humanity inside their flesh forever, so that they would not dim or fade, and the flesh of mankind would be sustained unto eternity. There is no knowledge of the means in which the Murderer carried out his deed, nor is there knowledge of why he did. Perhaps he desired to share the technology of the Angels with his people, or perhaps he tired of humans being raised, their souls fattened with goodness, only to be plucked from their flesh and made angelic. 
• For a time, the death of the Angels seemed to have been good for the fate of mankind. Humanity prospered as never before: death held no claim over anyone, and the technology of the Angels connected the world, elevated all out of the degradation of the past. Only the Devils mourned: no perfect 7 Billion to aspire to join, no reason to degrade the souls of others, they wandered, lost. 
• But then the flesh began to take hold. Preserved forever by the soul it desired always to grow, to smother the soul that now in turn would not fade and die. The older a human grew, the more their flesh twisted and contorted, grew into strange shapes, and foul. Soon, the cities of man began to fall. The laughter of children was heard less and less, as few wanted to doom their child to a never ending spiral of monstrosity. Still, some live as best they can, fleeing from the monsters that must have once felt and loved and wept as they do. 
• Okay, so that’s that for now. Next time, I’ll take another pass at the summary I just wrote, and expand it more, try to figure out how to get an actual gameable setting out of this.