sroloc--elbisivni asked: um hi feel free to tell me to take a hike but. i really like your blog and your writing and i may or may not have gone 480 pages back in it and seen "In which angels are a thing that happened around 1947 and just kind of never left; also everyone is LGBT because fuck you I do what I want" and now i'm really curious--would you be willing to elaborate?
BABE I will never tell you to take a hike about my original writing, I have real shit to get done and a bunch of older asks to answer, but I’m gonna do this instead, sorry. I have many novels started and that’s one of the ones that gets an actual place where I’ll find it to work on, I love it very much. Okay, so, *clears throat* let’s do this.
So. First off, some backstory: an insane percentage of my stories are rooted in an original conversation with someone, somewhere, that goes “But it’s so stupid that this book/TV show/movie did this, because it would be so much better if they’d done that” (see also: Falls the Shadow, product of a Supernatural rage quit, Emrys Ascendant, product of a Merlin rage quit, and Polaris, product of a “please God I just want a F/F couple that lives” tirade). This one was the product of a half-dozen episodes of Dominion in very short order (which I have yet to rage-quit, by the by, and love very much in its capacity as a ridiculous lovely garbage pile) and me turning to @twistedangelsays and going “But it would be so much better if there were two angelic factions openly, one that thought humanity was past redemption and one that believed that they were still duty-bound to love and protect us.” And then I did kind of this weird magician trick and pulled a fully-formed universe and plot with main characters and ships out of thin air.
And thus Battalion (this novel) happened.
So the idea with Battalion is that, following the Second World War and the atrocities that humanity committed against itself in and around that time period, some three-quarters of Heaven declared us past saving. They were led by Uriel (who…is ALWAYS a dick in my writing, I don’t know why, but ALWAYS, male, female, good, evil, none or all of the above, Uriel = dick to me, it’s been like this since forever), and on the first Easter Sunday after the end of the war, she brought the wrath of Heaven down on Earth and started another war, angels against humans. Michael, with Gabriel, led the resistance, the last quarter of Heaven defending humanity. Raphael is kicking around somewhere too but no one’s seen him since the start of the war.
Humans won, largely by sheer bloody-minded stubbornness and also because angels aren’t fundamentally that creative, and crushed Uriel’s faction pretty well into oblivion…and then they were left with thousands and thousands of angels–and Touched, or people who’ve been healed by angels and left with uncanny powers, everything from always hitting your target with a rifle or being able to find true North no matter where you are to being able to bench a truck.
The angels were the easy part of that problem, because Michael–the last living archangel as far as anyone knew, and therefore the last bastion of Heaven’s command–went to the UN and said “We have done you a terrible wrong, we have broken our promise to defend you, and we will do penance.” The Touched were more of a problem, a whole new flotilla of mistreated minority.
But so flash forward to the modern day. Angels are basically a slave class, down to being addressed as ‘it’, and largely humans think it’s okay because…well, the angels asked to be enslaved, didn’t they? Shiloh, the main character, is Touched and ridiculously powerful–she can ‘hitch’ her senses to any other person, anywhere in the world, as long as she knows them. She has a best friend named Zeke, who is rather peculiar and who ultimately turns out to be something called a cloaked angel, meaning he pretends to be human and lives on the street and helps people from there (he’s the reason Shiloh’s Touched, he saved her life when she was hit by a car as a little girl). Zeke acquires himself a human boyfriend, because Gay Angels Are Happening and you can fucking fight me. Shiloh breaks up with her (really kind of emotionally abusive) girlfriend and ends up kind of blundering into a thing with Michael (I wrote archangel smut and honestly I can’t wait to be explaining to whoever’s punching my ticked to Hell after I die). And Michael’s right-hand angel (and Zeke’s immediate superior) is named Amira and she’s a fucking badass and she has a super cute scholar-angel girlfriend named Illys (ILL-iss).
And they break out an angel whose name is Jude because I think I’m very clever, and the reason Jude needs breaking out is because…um, humanity said “We want to know more about angels and angelic anatomy and physiology because??? Wings??? Hideable wings??? What???” And angel bodies kind of disintegrate after they die (actually it’s more like a small supernova and it doesn’t leave much behind) so an angel walked up to the door of a university and said “Here I am, we don’t know much about our anatomy either but you can look, I’ll heal quickly from whatever you do.” And humanity took that a little too far and Shiloh draws the line pretty emphatically at watching a sentient creature get vivisected, so they break Jude the fuck out and deal with the fact that Uriel’s not so dead after all and do social justice stuff.
Aaaaaand that’s the summary of Battalion.
