Sandbox / Angels And Aliens

Angels & Aliens

Trenton Granville

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Angels & Aliens provides examples of:

• The Ageless: Angels don't age. Laura is 111 years old but still looks like a young woman.
• Amazon Brigade: Mabba Inc.'s support staff comprises both men and women, but the Angels are exclusively female.
• Applied Phlebotinum: The Mabba's nanites, which have several uses. They can turn people into Angels, they can stop the built-in Betrayal Insurance from activating and killing them, and they can turn Angels back to normal upon retirement.
• Benevolent A.I.: Joe, who mostly shows up as a really overpowered virtual assistant, but does lots of other stuff behind the scenes.
• The Bet: After Trent moves into the Mabba Inc. headquarters, the male staff make bets on how fast it'll take her to "go Angel" (i.e. integrate psychologically into her new body).
• Betrayal Insurance: To make sure they can't desert, enlisted Angels will die if they don't take the nanite doses that the Mabba bring every five months. At the end of an Angel's enlistment (in Trent's case, 9 years and 2 months), she'll be offered an optional retirement dose during every visit, which will make her normal again and let her walk free.
• Big Eater: Angels in general, since their powers mean they consume a lot of calories even at rest.
• The Casanova: Trent, before he was turned into an Angel.
• Conveniently an Orphan: Trent's faked death didn't leave behind any grieving parents, because they both died in their 40s from cancer. Justified by this being one of the reasons he was selected in the first place; a lack of family ties is an attractive quality in potential recruits, precisely because they need to disappear. (It's also implied that the cancer was most likely hereditary, and Trent expected to face the same fate within a decade or two.)
• Cosmic Flaw: Causing one of these is supposedly the key to destroying the universe.
  Laura: It's not an explosion. It's more like poking a little hole in the rules, the very equations that define how all matter exists. The entire universe would collapse into a different configuration of physics.
• Cover-Blowing Superpower: When an FBI agent investigating Therese reveals his discovery that her "Alicia Lipperman" persona is fake, she tries to run away and jumps over a car in the process. Later, after his superior (who actually works for the Angels) claims she's simply an undercover CIA agent, he protests that he saw her jump over a car. She passes it off as adrenaline.
• Crossover Cameo: While there are never any actual crossovers, characters from other comics sometimes appear as purely background characters. (Usually from comics with similar themes, like El Goonish Shive, The Wotch, and Sailor Sun.)
• Death Faked for You: Mabba Inc. does this to their Angels and gives them new identities, since their physical attributes no longer match their old identities and never will again. Trent "died" in a car accident.
  Laura: Your death has been faked. Your DNA and fingerprints have changed.
• Differently Powered Individual: "Angels". Apparently the male staff came up with the term. Gas claims that it's not just because they're beautiful women, but also because they're "good people who do good stuff."
• Dreaming the Truth: Trent's psychological integration into her new body is demonstrated with (or perhaps caused by?) a series of dreams, in which she symbolically interacts with and speaks to her male self, trying to figure out if her new self is still the same person, what happens to the old Trent, how she feels about it, and so on. In the last of these dreams, the old Trent gives her his blessing to accept the new form, and she wakes up finally feeling comfortable with her body, deciding to christen herself "Therese".
  Trent: Go on. I'll always be here if you need to talk.
• First Law of Gender Bending: Becoming an Angel is reversible upon retirement, but becoming female isn't.
  Trent: What? Why?
  Laura: They won't tell us.
• Fictional Sport: Z-ball, played in an anti-gravity chamber. Each team comprises one Angel and two "wingmen". There are three teams, one for each translational degree of freedom (up-down, left-right, forward-backward). Every wall has a goal, but the active goal for each team swaps walls whenever any team scores a goal. The goals are mounted away from the wall, so the ball can be bounced in from behind. There are four balls, each with a different color and point value, and the point values differ depending on whether you're an Angel or a wingman. And those are just the first few rules.
  Trent: So Z-ball is really 3-D basketball as designed by M.C. Escher on a bad LSD trip?
  Wingman: Close enough.
• Forced Transformation: Angels are often forcibly recruited, which starts with being transformed into a woman. (A predetermined phenotype, so you'll transform even if you're already a woman.) Laura says they wanted multiple forms, but the Mabba would only give them one (possibly to make it harder for the humans to reverse engineer the nanites), so they don't have the option of giving people powers without transforming them.
• Heads-Up Display: Angels have this built right into their neurology, to display symbols in their peripheral vision telling them status information, such as when they're healing or when they're poisoned.
• Healing Factor: Anything that doesn't kill an Angel will eventually be healed by their nanites. Additionally, the nanites will preserve their brain cells for several hours after cardiorespiratory failure, allowing Angels to be repaired from injuries that would normally kill even them.
• I Hate Past Me: Downplayed. Occasionally Therese's interactions with men give her some perspective on how Trent's efforts at seduction might have come across to women. But while she briefly worries that Trent was bad enough to be outright villainous, she ultimately decides he wasn't. (Though who knows if that's accurate or just a rationalization.)
  Therese: No. I never tried to get anybody drunk. I wasn't like this. Really, I wasn't.
• Informed Attractiveness: It's obvious that the Angels are supposed to be hot, but the art isn't really equal to the task of making them actually look hot most of the time.
• Kidnapped by the Call: Trent wasn't technically ever forced into the vehicle that took her to Mabba Inc., and didn't object to staying once she got there, but she wasn't exactly asked if she wanted to go, either. (Plus, when she got in the car she assumed she was being driven back home.) Aside from that, she was forcibly turned into an Angel, and Angels don't really have a choice about working for the Mabba unless they fancy dying in about six months. She also didn't get to choose the length of her enlistment — 9 years and 2 months.
• Loads and Loads of Rules: Even if you ignore the extra dimension of movement, Z-ball is a bit complicated.
  Wingman: There are four balls, colored cyan, yellow, magenta and black and they count 1, 2, 3 and 4 points for a goal, except if you are an Angel, in which case they are doubled, but the order is reversed to 8, 6, 4 and 2.
• Logical Weakness: Angels' bodies consume a lot of energy to feed their various abilities, so in addition to being Big Eaters, they use a lot of oxygen. An Angel can only fully exert herself for about 60 seconds (although she can run about a kilometer in that time), and can only hold her breath for about 15-20 seconds even at rest.
• Most Common Super Power: Since Angels are designed to be hot, this is a given.
• Mutually Assured Destruction: It turns out that the word "Mabba" doesn't refer to a race or a civilization; it's a word that means "intelligent being". A civilization qualifies for the moniker when they learn how to destroy the universe, which seems to be the reason that the 40+ different Mabba factions, which are mostly hostile to each other, haven't wiped each other out. As Laura says, "It's the mutual assured destruction scenario to end them all."
• Never Gets Drunk: Angels normally can't get drunk, since their Healing Factor treats the alcohol as a poison. However, they can get drunk on "Makeover" day every five months, because they have to turn the healing off to let the new nanites take effect. They also can allegedly get at least a little bit drunk if they drink really fast (a discovery they supposedly owe to Laura).
• Noodle Incident: When a few characters tell stories about Laura, some provide more context than others.
  "I don't know how she got that bulldozer into the embassy ballroom."
• No Periods, Period: Invoked. The form Angels use has been engineered to eliminate as many disadvantages as possible, including the menstrual cycle, and with it pregnancy and hormone shifts.
• Older Than They Look: Since Angels look like young women and don't age, any Angel that's older than about 30 qualifies. Laura, who was part of the first batch of Angels, is 111 years old. Denyatta isn't much younger.
• Painful Transformation: Turning into an Angel makes you extremely ill for about 24 hours, complete with high fever, weight loss, and so much vomiting that a normal person would die from dehydration.
• Purpose-Driven Immortality: Angels don't age as long as they remain Angels, so they can stay at the job for as long as they want. (Laura's been at it for 87 years and has no intention of retiring any time soon.) But when they retire, they have to take a nanite dose that makes them normal again.
• Saved by the Phlebotinum: Willa, whose life would have otherwise ended as a Tragic AIDS Story.
  • Possibly Trent, whose parents both died of cancer in their 40s. Believing it to be hereditary, he was expecting to also die from cancer at a similar age.
• Second Law of Gender-Bending: Downplayed. In addition to transforming the body, the Angel nanites make some changes to the brain that let the Angels feel comfortable in their new forms. Full integration takes a few weeks. Once it clicks for Therese, she doesn't seem to feel like she definitely never wants to go back, but she doesn't want to go back yet.
  Trent/Therese: Call me – Therese. When I awoke this morning I was finally the person in the mirror.
  Laura: Therese – would you go back if you had the chance? We may decipher the nanites someday.
  Therese: Perhaps – someday. But Therese is real. Therese needs to live.
  • On top of the psychological integration, being in a perpetually healthy, energized, and superpowered body makes the form hard not to enjoy, even if it's not specifically being female that makes it enjoyable.
    Dream!Trent's Male Self: They're bribing you with your own abilities!
    Dream!Trent's Female Self: It's… working. The first thing I think every morning when I wake up is "Wow, I feel great!" I can do so many things — like the time I jumped off the wall in the gym, then sailed across the room at least 20 feet in the air. It was like flying!
• Secretly Earmarked for Greatness: Laura reveals that Mabba Inc. first noticed Trent at investment fund meetings he attended a year before he was recruited.
• Slipping a Mickey: This is how recruiters administer the nanites that transform new recruits into Angels. Or at least, that's how it was done to Trent.
• Starting a New Life: Retired Angels can't return to their old identity, but they can go free with a new one.
• Super Gender-Bender: Becoming an Angel turns you into a woman if you aren't one already. (In theory Angels don't have to be female; that's just the form the Mabba provided, and they weren't willing to provide more than one.)
• Super-Intelligence: Apparently not part of the Angel package, as Therese laments after making a wrong turn during a car chase and thus getting caught by a unit of FBI agents.
• Super-Reflexes: Part of the Angel package.
• Super-Speed: Part of the Angel package.
• Super-Toughness: Angels have stronger muscles, tendons, and bones; their vital organs are better protected; and they have a reinforced skull, and shock webbing in their brain.
• Terminally Dependent Society: The Angels will die if they don't take the nanite doses that the Mabba bring every five months, so if the Mabba were to ever stop bringing them, or the Angels were to collectively decide to rebel, they'd have at most about six months left to live.
• Touched by Vorlons: The Applied Phlebotinum that turns people into Angels is supplied by an alien race called the Mabba. The trope applies most squarely to the original seven Angels, who were given the nanites directly by the Mabba, whereas nowadays it's the Angels themselves who administer the nanites to new recruits.
• Tragic AIDS Story: Would have been Willa's fate, if she hadn't been recruited as an Angel:
  Therese: Willa, you used to be "William". How long did it take you to get used to being attracted to guys?
  Willa: I was always attracted to guys. The Angels pulled me out of an AIDS hospice in 1984.