Tatiana

She/Her

Messy brainstornming:

So lets see, sweetie. Why did you leave the Heavely Meadows?

Gonna let you happily be an ace baby. And demi romantic. So you really didn't struggle with the rules surrounding sex. Like a good and indoctrinated little pet of Melangel, you were sufficiently terrified by the idea of hell and didn't exactly go there on purpose. However! You did feel a bit smothered by a few other rules in the meadows. Particularly,the severely limited and regulated day-to-day activities had you feeling trapped. Gardening, cooking, cleaning, singing, and drinking tea...? Sure, Tatiana, you liked your kin well enough, but was that really all there was to look forward to for the rest of your life?

And so, in terms of troublemaking, you were simply known being "one of those buns," that kind with a vivid imagination and a fixation on fantastical things like (gasp) other animals and people besides your own kind, angels, and demons. You spent more time writing theories and very involved fiction about them, attempting to share your nonsense with anyone who might listen, than doing anything your community might consider helpful or productive. You also constantly tried to send letters and/or make contact with other angels, or... anything beyond the meadow really. Anything, that is, except the scary hell dwellers.

That changed the day a certain face of defiance, Dove, returned to challenge Melangel. Tatiana, you were too busy slogging through another several punishment chores to witness the event directly. But no amount of busy work, shaming, food restrictions, or solitary confinement to reflect upon the error of your ways would have kept you from learning what everyone else in the community now knew. That not only had someone successfully left the meadows, but they made contact with outsiders and *lived*.

Tatiana, you hadn't exactly worked up the guts to willfully dive through. But you did wish, more than anything, to make a penpal down there, someone to share all the new ideas and echoes of fiction beyond your exposure at home. Despite everyone's warnings... despite Melangel's displeasure... You fell into your usual habits, secretively opened the heavenly door a few times, and dropped messages into it.

Melangel began having you watched... And after a particularly grueling punishment and verbal rebuke, Tatiana, you decided to make one last ambitious effort to make contact with someone in hell. You swore to yourself this would be your last attempt. Swore that if it failed, you would give up and live the rest of your days in dreamless and dreary obediance.

It took you almost a year, but you naively wove an incredibly long thread from spare vegetable fibers. After all, hell couldn't be that far if Dove survived that first fall, could it? Your idea was to dangle a message (with instructions for how to reply) down on the end of a string, wait until you felt the specific tugs as a sign, then reel the return message up to yourself.

You even tied your end of the cord around your waist, to be sure you would not drop it so easily. Too bad things in the meadow never seemed to go your way.

Never mind the fact that later you'd discover your thread was no where near long enough to go down that far, or that at the time, you were distracted as you spotted the watcher buns scurrying off to report you to Melangel again immediately. The last thing you were expecting, Tatiana, was for there to be a tugging signal on the end of your line so quickly. Hesitantly, you leaned slightly forward, peeked through the door, and carefully began pulling your line back up. While it wasn't a terribly strong thread, apparently it was just strong enough that whatever yanked suddenly from below managed to pulled you off balance. The thread snapped from your waist and you flailed to catch yourself. But it was too late. You toppled forward through the hole.

As it turns out, a rather bored flying demon had been keeping an eye on the heavenly door lately, and the dangling message on a string piqued their interest.