This is the name of an angel in Milton's Paradise Lost who has been beguiled by Satan, but who has repented and returned to the Lord.

Her use of the name could be interpreted as a gesture of goodwill, but anyway. If the real "Abdiel" existed, she or he would be uncomfortable or angry with it.

But Mike seemed oblivious to this, as if the name really belonged to the maiden in front of him. His sister moved to the far end of the sofa to make room for him, and he sat down. In fact, the sofa was so long that there was room for more than three people between the two of them, and even if Abdiel did not move, Mike would not touch her. But they still do these things, as if they were some kind of ritual. Or maybe these distances are necessary for them.

Abdiel stopped looking at her brother and withdrew her gaze.She had been looking at the screen directly opposite the sofa, which was divided into six frames. Each frame had a main character.

The main character in the first frame is a young white male in his 30s. He is wearing a jacket and boots, leading a hound and smoking a cigarette as he walks through the endless dark night. He was illuminated by a floating ball of yellow light at his side. In the darkness beyond the sphere of light, something seemed to be stirring.

The main character in the second frame is a black woman in her mid-twenties. She is very tall with strong muscles and strong expression. She was supposed to be wearing a tracksuit, but now she has taken off her coat. This person is building a camp with a group of strange, short, ugly creatures with many human features, out of all kinds of stone, sand, and strange things. Outside the camp there was a ring of braziers. Those braziers use a black herb as fuel. They burn fast, so the humanoid creatures have to set aside a large portion to feed them. There were a number of weaker-looking and younger-looking creatures in the middle of the camp, who seemed to be cooking something over some stone pots. There are actually very few of them who follow the main character as he builds the camp. But she doesn't seem to find the situation anything to be upset about. She's fast on her feet, full of energy, and can do the work of several people on her own. Occasionally the humanoid creatures would glance at her with candle-like awe.

The third is dominated by a white girl who appears to be a minor. She wears a little Lolita-style dress and sits in a pumpkin carriage with a delicate interior. The scene is straight out of a fairy tale, and it's a far cry from the style of the previous couple. Zoom out to see the pumpkin carriage moving through a hilly area. In the driver's seat is a clown dressed as a butler, who drives two skeleton horses through the hills with incomprehensible skill. There were thousands of hoarse growls around the carriage. The girl seemed a little impatient and reached out of the window. A ball of light, very similar to the one in the other picture, was thrown from her hand and flew onto the carriage to shine everywhere. As the howls faded away, the girl closed her eyes. There was darkness on all sides of the coach, and it galloped along. Ahead lies the palpitating unknown.

Mike frowned again. There were faint lines on his forehead, because he had done it so often. "Are they your war correspondents?"

"Of course they are." With these words, Abdiel was already lying on his side on the sofa. Her shoulder rested on the soft armrest, and in her hand was a bucket of popcorn that had appeared at some point.

Before she could respond, a short end table appeared in front of her. The table was just the right height and distance from her. There was a glass of Coke on it.

Perfect viewing status.

"Do they know you're invading their privacy like this?" Mike is not happy,“And give me something to eat while you're at it."

Abdiel snorted. "Are you sure you want to talk to me about Privacy, brother? I might not be able to do my own work if you think I should be restrained in this area. And what you're going to eat. How about stubble goose and oatmeal scones?"

Mike's brow furrowed deeper: "I thought you'd abandoned your duties a long time ago. And some serious food. Like pizza and Coke."

Abdielwaved, and another, short table one appeared in front of him. Along with it came what Mike had asked for: "Only FATHER has authority over my work. Dear brother, come and see if the pizza with pineapple is to your taste."

"Um, I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry. And then I'm going to ask you something else, and it's probably the one I should ask."Mike picked up the pizza and Coke and leaned back on the couch, eating and talking. Amazingly, his voice was unaffected. "You know what I'm going to ask you."

The girl sat up, picked up the Coke, sucked into the straw, and turned to her brother with a mischievous smile. "Why do I put pineapple on your pizza?"

"Why did you change the past?" Mike didn't look at her, but was absorbed in eating his food. "Now, I haven't told Gabriel about this, but if you can't give me a good reason, I don't mind taking you back to heaven. Ask your sister to ask you about it."

“Oh-eh-ah!” said Abdiel, with a squeal of nervousness, as she dropped her popcorn and Coke on table. Her expression became twisted. "Are you the demon, sending your lovely sister in front of that woman?"

"I'm not. You are." Mike fired back with a statement. He eats at an inhuman rate. Within a few words, his pizza and Coke were gone. Now he pulls a wipes from his pocket and wipes his hands. "You are the demon, your employees are almost all the demon, you are the source of the concept of the demon."

He stopped wiping his hands and turned to meet Abdiel with a calm, terrifying look. "You even figured out that I would cover it up for you until I found out what was going on with you, and then decide whether to let Gabriel and Rafael know. You were even using me, The Most Powerful ANGEL. Who is more demonic than you? My loving and crazy sister, Sa-Tan-El. "

As Mike spoke, his eyes began to change. The brown eyes were set on fire by something, and they broke down into gold and red. They shone and flowed, like molten gold, majestic and fiery.

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Abdiel turned her head away, but her face was still smiling.She pointed at the screen with her slender index finger wrapped in black silk. "Look at this, then. Look closely."

Mike listened. He went on to see what he had left behind.He had been watching carefully so that he did not have to repeat the scenes he had seen before.

At the center of the fourth scene is a young man wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He is Latino. He was standing around a table in a large white hall with a group of other guys dressed in different styles, seemingly from different times and places. He was drawing a map, and to be honest he was a terrible painter, so the people around him were constantly arguing with him about what to do. From time to time, some of the same kind of monster Chisel had previously encountered came in and out of the white Hall.

The protagonist of the fifth frame seems to be in the same room as the protagonist of the fourth. In one corner of the picture can be seen the back of the arguing crowd. The main character in the frame is an East Asian woman. She's, uh, she's lying in a hammock made of rattan, wearing an eye patch and noise-earphones, and she's sleeping under a little comforter. One of the more remarkable things is that her left arm, which is not covered by the comforter, appears to be covered with something made of metal and cuticle, and the eerie material forms a large animal claw that wraps around her hand.

The sixth frame, well, it's Chisel. He was walking into the white stone church after the cowering monsters.

Mike's face grew worse as he saw the frame. The light in his eyes lit up. He did not turn to meet her eyes. He did not want her to go up in flames just yet. “I suppose you're going to explain to me why I can't see that man's face.” he said, in a voice as dull as a prison door opening and closing.

"Because he doesn't have a face yet, isn't that obvious?" And Abdiel put her hands round her chest and laughed. She held the umbrella in her arm, trembling with her laughter.

Chisel in the frame has no face. In other words, his shape, appearance, and posture are blurred. He looked like a transparent man in clothes.

Mike waited quietly for Abdiel to grow tired of laughing before he asked, "So it's your turn to explain. Lady Abdiel. If you can't give me a reasonable explanation, I'll probably throw you to the Fire Hell once before.”

“That's not a very pleasant way to threaten a lady.'' Abdiel's laughter became lighter, but the pleasure grew stronger.” It's a complicated story. Where do you want me to start? '

“At your pleasure.” The flame went out of Mike's eyes and his voice became calm and less aggressive. "You just remember to take responsibility for your words and actions."

"That's very forgiving." murmured Abdiel.“You're making me a little ashamed.”

When Mike stopped speaking, Abdiel took another sip of Coke. “It all started two thousand years ago.Someone gave me a thing."

“That sounds scary." Mike scoffed.

"Indeed.The things he gave me were pretty scary.” As she turned over her right hand, a bulbous object about the size of a normal person's thumb appeared on it. “Look, isn't it scary?” she admitted.

Mike looked closer. It was an indescribable cube, translucent and gleaming white. Its shape changed every second, from one shape to another.Sometimes it's a regular hexahedron, sometimes it's a regular icosahedron, and sometimes it's some other regular polyhedron that doesn't work in three dimensions. It's so regular, but it's so incredible.

Mike stared for a moment. "What's it called?"

"Heimarmene. That's its name." For the first time, Abdiele's face became serious. "I can give it several options, and it will choose one of them and became that result true. Which outcome it will choose is random and unknown."

"Random? Unknown? For us, too?"Mike's face changed. The fire was about to ignite in his eyes again. "For us in our perfect state?"

Mike and Abdiel were the highest spirits, almost omnipotent with respect to the physical world, without any constraints. They have always confined themselves to inefficient and weak vessels. Not once since the creation of the world have their powers been fully unleashed. Human bodies are the smaller vessel, and angelic bodies are the larger vessel. For them to have the power of the Laplacian Demon simply by switching to a container with a higher capacity. The world to them has no random, no unknown, no secret.

All they do not know is what is inside each other and what is hidden from each other.

"So maybe it's our little brother or sister in essence?" There was finally some wavering and trembling in Mike's voice. He realized who had given it to Abdiel.

“Perhaps.But it seems to have no consciousness of its own, only power. ”Abdiel was a little troubled. "I've tried to communicate with him more than once, but he hasn't responded.And I've told you what its power is, to make its choices become ture."

Abdiel paused and held out three fingers of his left hand. "But this power has three limits."

"First, not all options can be one thing or different expressions of one thing. Otherwise it will add and subtract options on its own."

"Second, this power doesn't work on you or me. No one else will perceive the abnormality of the things in which it interferes. Except creatures at our level."

"Third, its power cannot be created out of nothing, but can only interfere with the operation of events and the state of being of things." She gestured to the frame where Chisel was. Chisel was now summoning something in front of a crowd of smaller monsters.

"But what is he?" Mike rubbed the stubble on his chin.

"My children." Abdiel smile. “I used my male body’s sperm and the female body's egg to form him in the embryonic state, and then implanted the Heimarmene into him."

She pointed to the cube in her palm. "This is just a projection of it, a terminal equipment. Like us, the Heimarmene is not constrained by size, and has qualities that make what touches it belong to it. I put the body of the Heimarmene into his body, and the child became a surrogate of the Heimarmene."

"As Giorgio is to me, as Azariah is to Raphael?" Mike frowned again, but this time he looked less displeased than his previous frowns.

"True, but Heimarmene has no consciousness of his own. So the consciousness of Chisel is for the most part his own." Abdiel's voice dropped to a low, as if to avoid waking something up.

"And because you're using biotechnology, not magic or miracles, Gabriel doesn't know what you're doing." Mike nodded. "And you gave the baby to a couple to raise? And create a coincidence to get him hooked on your game? And finally invite him into your plan?"

"No such trouble."The girl in black smiled unpleasantly. “The baby is only three days old. ”

Mike was silent. He began to pinch his knuckles and make them creak. "Yes."

He mulled over the word again, and he understood once and for all: "You modified his past with the power of the Heimarmene to make him think he went through......."

"After twenty-four years of his life.""He thought he had parents, a family, friends, a career, a life."

“But those are the background stories you thrust upon him.” Mike stopped pinching his fingers. His voice sounded like a eulogy for something. "It's just that Heimarmene modified the past, and everything became real."

"That's exactly right. It's true for him and for the world." Abdiel put away Heimarmene"His audience will remember that this man existed. His friends, his classmates, his opponents in the game, and his parents, whom he has just resurrected, will bear witness to his existence.There are traces of his actions in this world, parts of the air that he breathed."

“I had other backgrounds for him, but Heimarmene chose a more modest one. I was disappointed to be honest, it would have been nice to have him win at least one CC World championship. But Heimarmene didn't choose that one."Abdiel shook her head. "He's my son. He can't even play my games, and the best he can do is finish out of the top eight.What a disappointment. ”

Her semantics are full of disappointment, but she says it with a laugh.

Mike just watched her laugh quietly and waited for her laughter to stop before continuing. "I understand what happened, then why did you do it?"

"You haven't used it in two thousand years. No, you have not used its power to modify the past for the last two thousand years. I am sure you are well aware that if you use it, we will find you. You are well aware that I or some other angel will come after you and may stop your plan. But you use it now."

"So now, tell me your reasons for doing it."

"This is going to be a whole bunch of messy stuff again."Abdiel seemed to have a headache. 'Do you know Russell, brother?'