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Crowley will tell you that the only reason he encouraged Muriel to get out and learn things was to avoid having the personification of perky interfering with his sulk.
Crowley will also tell you that demons lie.
I’ve changed my hair style so many times now, I don’t know what I look like.
Crowley knows there’s no hiding from Heaven or Hell if they really want to find you. He also knows how much of an effort that is (unless the Metatron deigns to get involved, and then you’re fucked). So he keeps moving. No sense in going to all that effort to embed an agent just to get caught on the home front.
Crowley drives a Citroen. Reality quickly warps itself around the car’s radio, which develops a much more end-time vibe than the Bentley.
(Crowley knows the cars are not choosing the music; he’s the one warping the world, they’re just picking up on it.)
He never turns the radio off, no matter how annoying. One of the possible information conduits was the same radio trick the demons used to love. At any moment he expects Freddie Mercury to break in with a message just for him.
The Citroen stubbornly plays REM.
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
“Nobody wants Berlin,” he grumbles. He’s right. This isn’t a war of armies and occupations, this is a war of climate disasters and propaganda. Cult leaders and politicians whose only message is hate, and whose followers adore them because they’ve been granted permission to spread that hate from the very top.
The best time to delete your account was when you first created it. The second best time is now.
Crowley tries to stem the flood where he can, but there’s too much of it - too many humans being creative in too many ways. That it’s being spread through the social media that he’d helped make popular for the sheer chaos of it is an irony not lost on him.
What he needs is to know where Heaven is giving everything a push so he can push back. Left to themselves, humans are capable of being far worse than demons and far better than angels. Crowley wants them to have that chance. What he’d planned was for a perky low-level scrivener to quietly get back into Heaven; the archangels might not have ever discussed the Plan in front of their minions, but just knowing what research they’ve been tasked to do would have told him almost as much as a direct line to the Metatron.
What he got was a low level scrivener suddenly promoted and brought back in to the fold, which is totally what he would have done - you don’t read in more people than you have to, and you don’t leave people on the outside when they might have information you want kept quiet.
It really pisses him off when the other side is as clever as he is.
The whole darn world seemed upside down.
Crowley had worked with the SOE during the war after… well, after. A team whose nickname was the Dirty Tricks Department and whose task was explicitly “to set Europe ablaze”? How could he possibly resist?
He’d watched the spymasters send wave after wave of young women in, singers and poets and mystics, all with the incredible skills needed to relay coded messages under great duress, all hopefully able to be overlooked by the enemy. He’d watched the losses wear them down - all that talent thrown away, all that burning desire to do the right thing. He’d been very glad not to be in their shoes.
A phone rings in a record shop in Soho. An angry voice on the end of the line growls, “What the Hell is this?”
The shop owner listens. To her trained ear, it sounds like the caller is outdoors, holding the phone up some distance away from the audio source. She guesses - accurately - that it’s a landline payphone, and that she’s hearing a car stereo at full blast.
She listens long enough to make out the lyrics.
“Guerrilla Radio by Rage Against the Machine, from their 1999 album The Battle of Los Angeles.”
The phone hangs up.