Winchester-Nabu Detective Agency Year Three: Case File No. 01-105

AMBER LOVE 20-MAY-2019 Catch up on Year One and previous Year Two cases at the Winchester-Nabu Detective Agency. We are in YEAR THREE!

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Where We Left Off:

To wrap the end of Year Two cases, let me be brief. Professor Oliver Winchester was hexed and coughed up a frog. Detective Inspector (or rather PI) Burton Guster Nabu has leveled up his panther parkour and escapist skills.
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City of Angels

Our new adventure year kicks off with one hell of a mystery. Year Three is looking to be as interesting as the previous two. I was worried we had discovered all there was to see around here. Then one day as Gus and I were outside Ollie’s bedroom window so I could photograph the pussywillows, I looked down and saw a face.

I was horrified! I clearly saw lips emerging from the soil. I joke that it would be great for us to finally find some human remains, but I was freaked the fuck out.

Gus was busy doing Gus things while I was temporarily frozen in place. Finally, I snapped out of it and Gus put his Super Smeller™ to use. He telepathically called Oliver to come to the window the way cats do. If he called out vocally, I didn’t hear it because I was mesmerized. There were lips, for christsakes!

Part of me wanted to call the police, but I know they already think I’m a whackjob because I’ve called them before for things that of course, they don’t witness even though I did (no, none of the calls were a white woman calling the cops on black neighbors). This is why people don’t get involved. Anyway, Oliver showed up and sat in his window to supervise the excavation.

Fortunately, I had my adventuring bag around my shoulders. This was clearly going to be something too large to fit in one of our evidence baggies. I fished inside my bag for the old toothbrush and began clearing the soil away from the lips. My heart raced and felt like it was going to burst through my ribcage any moment. I didn’t know if these lips belonged to something that would be pissed off at being disturbed. Was something going to leap up and attack me or Gus?

I noticed how perfectly camouflaged the specimen was. Its coloring matched the ground so perfectly. The leaves of the sprawling plants provided even more cover for it. Still, how was something like this there for so long that none of us noticed it? I continued to brush away the dirt. I wanted to pull up right away, but I kept at it and worked the soil at a steady pace. Eventually I found the edges of the artifact. It was solid and not living — at least not at that moment.

Wings spread from each side of a round baby face. It was cherub in style, but the thing is, cherubim are not darling little fat babies with wings. That was a magnificent rebranding by Raphael and his compatriots.  The book of Genesis did describe cherubim as holding flaming swords, but that wasn’t even the strangest version. Ezekiel allegedly said they had four faces and four wings (different than the six-winged seraphim). Those faces were not necessarily humanoid either. Even on the Ark of the Covenant, the cherubim are not depicted as infants.

There’s some speculation that since humans can’t look upon Heaven (while alive), our peanut brains would not be able to process visual cues before us. It’s like a really bad trip on acid. Whether the cherubim actually have four different animal faces including a humanoid one, is up for debate. It could be something else entirely. Nonetheless, throughout hundreds of years, fat little babies with wings have become the iconic cherubim visual which is something our brains can process; and thus, it spread worldwide to the masses that this is how they will be for us if there was to be further interactions.

The role of the cherubim is essentially the guard the Throne of God. That sounds pretty damn important as far as the Universe goes. So why was one in the ground next to our residence? How was it transformed into a clay relief?

This is how we get pulled back into one of our other greatest tales. The Gorgons. 

In our first year of exploring, we discovered evidence of Gorgons right in our backyard. Sure, an angel is a heavenly being, but they could be susceptible to some of the physics or metaphysics that other creatures are, right? Who’s to say? No one has mentioned it before specifically. There’s been plenty of artistic renditions of angels falling in love with humans, losing their wings, interacting like humans — so if one pissed off a gorgon, it sounds plausible to me that it could be turned to stone.