The angel is in a foul mood.

It yanked its suit off and struggled to fold it before tossing it back into the ship. The suit’s wings tend to become rigid and springy when the suit is not worn. The angel was in the middle of a well-deserved vacation when this job got assigned. It cannot refuse a job; it has to do the job or die.

The angel is neither a man nor a woman. For the most part it looks human. It is about six feet tall with a thin and wiry build, white skin, whiter hair and yellow eyes. What makes it appear strange is its smooth features and expressionless face that lack eyebrows. It’s the bloody eyebrows, the humans always notice the eyebrows.

It makes a mental note to once again inform the Architects about this. How hard can it be to add a pair of eyebrows and a couple of wrinkles! Being strange looking makes it so much harder to infiltrate and that makes the job unnecessarily difficult.

Dressed like a peasant, the angel sends the ship into orbit where it will remain until needed. The clothes came from the ship’s constructor, freshly made and still warm. It felt strange on the angel’s body, rough and constricting, very different from the suit. The suit is basically an airconditioned second skin equipped with many weapons and gadgets. The angel does not expect violence, and is not concerned, even without the suit it is lethal.

It opens the virtual folder containing its assignment. It adjusts the focus of the projection onto the back of its eyes because it was viewing it unassisted, without the aid of the suit. It studies the case as it walked to the nearby town.

It encounters no other travelers on the dusty path, and walked leisurely, admiring its surroundings. Romania in the mid-14th century is beautiful. The task at hand is simple enough. A rich man with an adventurous palate imported a large bat from Asia. He will eat this bat tonight; honey roasted, with mashed potatoes and a generous side of vegetables and flat bread. The angel must prevent this from happening.

The bat is supposed to live so that the black plague will happen. It must happen for various reasons.

The plague will kill half the population from Romania to Great Britain. This will bring great relief to the environment that is already strained to support the current numbers. Most importantly, it will reduce the workforce dramatically, which will lead to much higher wages that will lead to progress. The old master-serf bond will be irrevocably broken because sharecroppers will be able to vacate a landowner’s property and find a better deal elsewhere. The living standard of many will improve.

Those in power will not accept this easily and will seek to use the law to reinstate old practices that benefitted them at the cost of the poor. This also is needed for revolution to happen. Revolution also leads to change.

This is the way – strife leads to a better life.

It is ironic that these humans cause their own strife. The dinosaurs just knew how to be dinosaurs and would have continued their simple lives forever. They eventually had to be exterminated with a guided asteroid. The owner of this planet, and the angel’s employer, likes to say that these humans will one day end themselves by eating or screwing the wrong thing. He wants to see that happen, so the bat will live.

***

The angel is annoyed by the stares it gets from the townsfolk. It does not understand why. It was worried about standing out, so it drew eyebrows and lines on its face before sending the ship into orbit. Maybe one solid line for an eyebrow was not a good idea. It ignores the shameless stares and walks directly to the wealthy man’s house.

Antoniu Barbu inherited his fortune from a long line of crooked businessmen. They owned most of the mines, and all the railroads and had their hands in brothels and the slave trade. Antoniu himself has never worked a day in his life. He received a fine education as a child, and first travelled when he was in his teens.

Romanian cuisine is diverse, with many influences from different cultures. Antoniu loves Romanian food, but he became absolutely obsessed with food from other countries. When he was a young man, he used his wealth to travel the world and eat anything and everything that was served. People speculate, behind his back of course, that he probably knows what people taste like. Now that he is older, and his health is failing, he imports many different plants and animals from all over the globe and prepares these himself. Nobody but him will handle the bat, and he will not get sick from the bat’s cooked body.

Antoniu was enjoying a bourbon induced nap when the angel separated his head from his body. This was not a required task, but somebody had to pay for the interrupted vacation. Human beings are strange creatures, they are uniquely capable of both fantastic art and terrible atrocities. Mostly they are a fucking annoyance, always requiring intervention, often actively praying for it themselves. Since all intervention is achieved by deploying an angel, humans are also responsible for disturbing angelic peace, and vacations!

The angel was amazed by the array of caged animals Antoniu kept. He saw an aardvark, a pair of possums, a crocodile, various other reptiles and even a cheetah. After he deals with the bat, he resolves to free these animals.

The bat must be killed, cut into pieces and distributed throughout the town. The bacteria that will cause the black plague resides in its blood, and the town’s rat population will consume the scattered pieces. According to the instructions the angel received, the rats will be able to handle large concentrations of the bacteria with no ill effect. The bacteria will finally be spread by the fleas that are riding the rats throughout the town and surrounding country. Human travelers will complete the task by carrying these fleas with them on their way through town, and even the actual infection in their own blood from flea bites.

Unlike the rats, the human hosts will get sick very quickly. After five days they will be infectious, and after ten days most of them will be dead. Their cadavers will then restart the process by passing along the virus to other people and scavengers.

***

With the task completed, the angel left the town the same way he came. He was hoping to encounter highwaymen. He enjoys a good fight, and humans are ferocious adversaries. Unfortunately, he did not. He suspects everybody is in town trying to catch the strange animals that emerged from Antoniu’s house, and without a doubt some of the humans are inside that house helping themselves to the late Antoniu’s belongings.

He hails his ship from orbit, strips out of the uncomfortable clothes and slips back into his suit.

***

A group of priests saw the angel standing next to an orb that shone like the sun. The angel was extending his wings and shook its feathers into place. They watched the angel fold his wings tight against his back and step into the orb. The orb floated up and then shot away at incredible speed.

When the towns people got sick a week later, and then started dying in droves, these clergy attributed the black death to the angel they saw. Like most clergy do they preached to anyone that would listen that god sent the angel of death to bring them this pestilence because they were such awful sinners.

Many people packed up and moved west to get away from this cursed town, taking the curse with them.

The black plague continued to maim and kill for five years, claiming 50 million lives. As the owner of the planet predicted, people changed and took a giant step forward on the path of societal evolution.

The angel went back to his vacation, and tried to relax, expecting to be called to duty at any time.

Those damn humans always need intervention.