Thanks for the kind words – glad you liked it. The talent that Rick recruited to turn my little story into this awesome audio production really deserve the credit for how it turned out.

Also – I’d be lying if I claimed The Prophecy had no influence on me or this story. Its one of my favorite movies EVAR (the first one only, you are right: the subsequent installments chewed root).

Viggo Mortensen as Lucifer was awesome (”I love you more than Jesussssss”) and Christopher Walken is just great to watch no matter what he’s in (”See you kids. Study your math…key to the universe”).

Michael

Lucifer was played by Chuck Tomasi. Chuck does a great job. Check him out in Delve (http://www.variantfrequencies.com/2007/06/30/delve/) as well. We love Chuck, and I’m certain you will hear him again on our podcast.

As far as story quality, I think you guys are in a tie with Escape Artists. For production quality, you’re beating them. This episode especially. The narration was great, the mood music and sound effects subtle but definitely adding a nice environmental touch. Who was the voice of Lucifer? It was fabulous.

Someone has to have made the comparison between this story and The Prophecy. I loved it for all the same reasons, and while somebody might validly slap the “derivative” epithet at this story, I just didn’t care. Different media, different comparisons… but this certainly beats the hell (pun unintentional) out of any of the craptastic sequels to what was an excellent movie. (And to my geek cred, I remember seeing The Prophecy and filing Viggo Mortensen away as someone I had to keep an eye on. I’m glad I was not disappointed.)

Great stuff, I hope you guys keep at it. My perfect-world podcast would be where we take the quality that both you guys and Escape Artists has, add the production quality that you are doing better, and add in the personality that all the Escape Artists feeds have. Getting to know you guys as narrators, authors, and editors adds a lot to the mix.

All the way through it, my sense of dread grew as I felt the inevitable conclusion draw me in. It was all in the voices, both written and spoken: the angels were all resigned, even at the start of the story. Resigned to the idea that there was no chance of redemption for anyone anymore, because the big G was gone; without evidence of a divine presence, time leached away their hope. It seemed even Raph was only continuing out of a sense of bloody mindedness.

I find this sense of resignation fascinating in vampire stories too: when they grow so old that they lose the ability to be interested in anything. When they become resigned to the idea that there is nothing worth .. un-living for anymore. In those stories it seems to me that it is fitting and right, because it shows that even their great evil can pass.

It this story, it is horrific – the wrong entities are giving up!

Perhaps the only sequel story to this should fall into the same vein as Louise Cooper’s “Time-Master”.. eventually, millenna from now, the pendulum will swing the other way.. Lu will be so bored of ‘ever lasting’ dominion that he will face his own sense of resignation…

Rick

I really need to add Milton’s Paradise Lost to my reading list.