random bit based on a comment I found in the depths of tumblr

Fear not!

There is a reason we always open with that. We didn’t always – we had to learn the hard way to slide into a human gathering with the least amount of shock and awe possible and even then, it was best to try to calm everyone down from the get-go. But to be fair, there’s only so much “fear not!” will do in that situation. We usually had to follow it up with “wait!” or “come back!” or - if it’d been a really long day and you were two sin cities away from smiting everything in your path - “get the fuck back here!”

We just weren’t made for human compatibility. Everything that we are is immediately visible, all in one glance – in that respect, we are very efficient. But human beings are used to seeing only a little bit of someone at a time and so they tend to think of everything that exists as existing in a nice, contained little package with all of the really big bits being completely invisible. You can imagine the mess when we took it upon ourselves to start showing up with a little guidance now and then. Apparently, we can melt human eyeballs. Who knew? We sure didn’t – it isn’t like the human race came with a handbook. Well after a time or two, we thought it was lesson learned and we started – I think very generously – bending over backwards to try to cram our splendor into shapes that were at least recognizable to them. Now, as you can imagine, we had to get pretty creative and no one was really in agreement on where to go in that venture, so I’ll admit, we never really put together a face that was particularly streamlined. Still, I feel like we generally kept to the wings, eyeballs and tongues theme pretty well.

As clever and sneaky as we thought we were being, the effect – while considerably less damaging in the melting eyeball department – didn’t optimize our communications as much as we’d hoped. Essentially, if you didn’t have a message brief enough to shout after them as they fled you in terror, you just weren’t going to get your point across. So we finally all go together and started to try to hash out the root f our problem. Even in forms humans could understand, we were reducing them to pee stains. Apparently, they could look at as many pairs of eyes in a day as they liked, but a few hundred too many belonging to one angel was horrifying. The same went for tongues and later it was decided that this was straight across the board, with or without mouths to go with them. Wings were sort of the wildcard, so for a long time we optimistically kept those in the mix.

After a few experimental stints with animal form, we realized, with a deflating confidence in the hardiness (and therefore future promise) of the human race, that if they didn’t see something just about every day of their lives, it was an occasion for profound horror. This seemed to include, but was by no means limited to, talking animals, talking light, talking anything that wasn’t human, humans who flew with wings, humans who flew without wings, humans who spoke with more than one voice at a time, pretty much anything to do with fire they didn’t make themselves, and anything that changed shape to that of a human while they were watching. Now, we aren’t wizards. There is only so much most of us can do to cram ourselves into a shape that is acceptable to the simple little human mind. So by the time we’d run through all the sensible options, most of us were up for staying out of it entirely and I can’t blame those who have – the stress of being responsible for not only conveying a matter of importance, but NOT giving the fragile little things a heart attack in the process is pretty daunting. This was supposed to be kind of a side project, after all – we just couldn’t let it eat up all of our efforts.

So those of us with some time to spare and the resolve to see this through really stripped down. I mean we lost the wings, we settled for three dimensions (the least flashy three we could think of) and basically contorted ourselves to the bare minimum of human. And at first, it really seemed to work – we managed not to maim, kill, or permanently traumatize any of them! But as the mission went on, it was increasingly clear that if you look like a human, smell like one, have all the hair in the strangely arbitrary places they have it, then they listen to you just about as well as they listen to anyone… which is not much at all.

It was around that time that we made the interesting discovery that nothing, not even a mundane object turning into a human before their eyes, was half as petrifying as a mundane human turning into a mundane angel and yelling: “FEAR NOT!”