[ elena hesitates once she remembers who she is talking to; leia has probably seen a great deal more than she has. why wouldn't she believe? ] Where I'm from, angels and demons were religious figures you only found in the Bible. Beings some people believed in, but never saw. [ you couldn't prove they were real. elena would go to mass occasionally. her parents were friendly with the town's pastor. elena would babysit his daughter, after all. but her faith was and is rooted in people, in her loved ones. once she began to see the world in ways that went beyond merely 'black and white', such acceptance applied almost exclusively to the supernatural world. faith in magic replaced faith in science. magic is what has saved her more than once. ]
The world I ended up in before Marina, on the other hand, was different. Angels and demons are born human. They don't turn until they're sixteen; that's when they receive their wings and their Callings. The Callings are incompatible. Angels are meant to hunt demons and demons are meant to hunt angels. For centuries it was believed they couldn't co-exist, and the two were always caught in wars that lasted for hundreds of years. They eventually sectioned off parts of the world, claiming states and countries for themselves, until certain spaces became either exclusively angel territories or demon territories. For an angel to find himself in a demon territory or vice versa -
[ they were killed on sight. ]
A couple of years before I arrived, a powerful angel and a powerful demon - both from Chicago - sat together to draft and sign a treaty so that everyone, regardless of what species they belonged to, could co-exist there peacefully, free of war. It worked for the most part, but ...
[ elena fits in somewhere, honest, it's just another layer to the complicated reality that was chicago. ]