Banished Divinity: Learning to be Human

Ten minutes later, I found myself in a small room with more white walls and more humming lights. A bed-like contraption sat in the center, surrounded by machines with blinking lights and screens that displayed nothing I could interpret.

The nurse—whom I now understood to be one of the many women dressed in these garments, clearly some form of official healer uniform—was a young woman with kind eyes and an unfortunate fondness for floral prints.

She told me to “lie down so we can do a scan, honey.”

Who is this, Honey? Isn’t that what Dad calls Mum. So does it mean that Mum should lay down instead of me. This is so confusing.

In my confusion, I had not moved. I just stared at her.

Mum stood beside me, her arms crossed, her expression a thundercloud of something that reminded me of a broodmother Varkhess moments before it devours its own offspring.

Tangled Menace had been banished to a chair in the corner, where she was pretending to draw but was obviously still suppressing giggles.

Dad had been sent to “get coffee,” which I suspected was code for “escape before you say something that makes this worse.”

“Lie down!” Mum said.

“I do not wish to be scanned. And she called the name Honey. So that means it’s you. Not me.”

“She is calling you, dimwit. And It’s not a request.”

“Why does human address each other the same. It is so confusing. I am a celestial being. I do not”

“Sera.” Mum’s voice dropped to a whisper, low and dangerous. She leaned in close, her eyes boring into mine with an intensity that made something ancient and primal in my hindbrain sit up and pay attention.

“One word that you say which rhymes with Assent, or anything that comes out of your nonsensical, unintelligent mouth, I would know where my slipper would end up next. Got it?”

I swallowed.

“Got it,” I whispered.

“Good. Now lay down”

I lay down.

---

The nurse smiled brightly, as though nothing unusual had occurred, and began attaching small round things to my head. weird colour lines trailed from them like the tendrils of some mechanical sea creature. I lay very still, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember what it felt like to be feared.

“I’m just going to take some pictures of your brain,” the nurse said cheerfully. “It won’t hurt at all.”

“My brain is fine,” I said.

“Of course it is.”

“It’s a very good brain. Celestial, in fact.”

“Mmm.” The nurse pressed something, and the machine began to hum. “Just hold still.”

I held still.

Mum stood at the foot of the bed, her arms still crossed, her eyes never leaving my face. She was watching me like I was a puzzle she was trying to solve. Or perhaps something sinister she was waiting to defuse.

Either way, it was unsettling.

“You know,” I said, because the silence was becoming unbearable, “in the High Heavens, we did not have machines that looked at brains.”

I think I saw Mum’s eye twitch.

This was… excessive.

I had not realized a human eye could twitch so frequently within a single day. It seemed inefficient. Possibly defective.

Surely, this was not normal.…Is there a malfunction?

I would have to report this to the deity was responsible for maintaining the human realm.

I watched her carefully but continued my explanation of things from my world to the nurse.

“We simply knew,” I continued. “We could see into the minds of lesser beings. Read their thoughts. Their fears. Their pathetic little desires.”

The nurse’s smile became slightly fixed.

“Sera,” Mum said warningly.

“It was quite boring, actually. Human thoughts are remarkably repetitive. Mostly about food and mating.”

“Sera.”

“And what you call ‘worrying’ is just—”

“Sera.” Mum’s voice was steel wrapped in velvet. “My Slipper.”

I closed my mouth.

The machine hummed.

In the corner, Tangled Menace’s pencil scratched against paper. I could feel her grinning without looking at her. It was infuriating.

---

Fifteen minutes later, I sat in a different room. This one with a desk, and books, and a man in a white coat who looked at me over the top of his round glasses with an expression of mild curiosity.

Doctor Kim.

He had introduced himself when we entered. I had stared at him. He had stared back. The staring had continued for an uncomfortably long time, until Mum had cleared her throat and launched into an explanation of the morning’s events.

Now he was looking at a series of images clipped to a lightbox, the “scans” of my brain, apparently, while Mum stood beside him with her arms crossed and Dad hovered near the door with two cups of coffee he was definitely using as an excuse to be as far from the conversation as possible.

Tangled Menace sat in a chair by the window, her notebook open, her pencil moving.

“So,” Doctor Kim said, his voice calm and measured, the voice of a man who had learned long ago that panic was a luxury he could not afford, “Sera. How are you feeling?”

I stared at him.

He smiled gently. “Sera?”

I continued staring.

The seconds stretched. The doctor’s smile faltered. He glanced at Mum, then back at me, then adjusted his glasses in a way that suggested he was buying time to think.

“Sera,” he tried again, “can you tell me what day it is?”

I stared harder.

In the corner, Tangled Menace’s pencil stopped moving.

“Perhaps,” Doctor Kim said carefully, “she’s experiencing some disorientation. That’s quite common with head injuries.”

“She’s been like this all morning,” Mum said, and there was something in her voice that I couldn’t quite identify. Concern? Exasperation? Both? “She woke up and didn’t recognize any of us. Called us peasants. And at one point she called me invincible pathetic puff, a she-Devil, called her dad “Your Dad” then Magworm and demanded I fetch her water.”

The doctor’s eyebrows rose. “I see.”

“She also,” Tangled Menace added without looking up from her notebook, “just tried to ask a man in the waiting room for help contacting the Celestial Tribunal. She thought he was the Grim Reaper and asked to send insects messages.”

Mum and Dad both turned to shush her loudly. Tangled Menace just snorted, her pencil never stopping.

Doctor Kim’s expression remained impressively neutral. I was beginning to respect the man’s composure.

“Head injuries can present in unusual ways,” he said, turning back to the scans. “I’ve heard cases where patients wake up speaking languages they’d never learned. Others developed entirely new personalities. One woman—” He paused, as if deciding whether to share the story. “One woman became convinced she was a cat. For three weeks.”

“I am not whatever you call that,” I said flatly.

“No,” he agreed. “You’re not.”

“I am a celestial being who has been unjustly banished to this mortal form by a tribunal of self-righteous arbiters who couldn’t recognize wisdom if it struck them between the eyes.”

Silence.

Doctor Kim removed his glasses, polished them slowly, and replaced them.

“Well,” he said. “That’s certainly more specific than the cat.”

Mum made a sound that might have been a sob or a laugh or something in between. Dad took a very long sip of his coffee.

“In my professional opinion,” Doctor Kim continued, “Sera is likely experiencing a form of temporary memory loss combined with some… unusual ideation. The scans show no signs of internal bleeding or swelling, which is excellent news. The bump on her head, while significant, does not appear to be life-threatening.”

Dad stepped forward. “So, what do we do? How long will she be like this?”

Doctor Kim leaned back in his chair, his expression thoughtful. “That’s difficult to say. For some people, recovery takes days. For others, weeks. Months. Occasionally years.” He spread his hands. “The brain is remarkably resilient, but it works on its own timeline. The best thing you can do is go home, maintain a normal routine, and let Sera settle into her new… circumstances.”

“You mean we just wait?” Mum asked.

“For now, yes. I’ll give her a week’s medical leave from school. No need to add academic pressure to the situation.” He looked at me with something that might have been kindness. “Sera, I want you to rest. Eat well. Sleep. Your memories may return on their own. And if they don’t—well. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

I stared at him.

---

For the first time since waking up in this nightmare, I didn’t feel the urge to correct him. To assert my true nature. To demand that everyone recognize me for what I was.

Because for the first time, I realized that no one was going to believe me. Not the doctor. Not the parents. Not the sister who drew pictures of me making a fool of myself in waiting rooms.

I was, for all intents and purposes, Sera. Just Sera. The girl who climbed out windows and got caught in explosions and called her mother a peasant or was it ‘invincible, pathetic puff’?

The thought settled into my chest like a stone.

“Well,” Doctor Kim said, standing and offering a professional smile. “I’ll send the discharge papers to the front desk. Take her home, let her rest. And maybe—” He glanced at me, then back at Mum. “Maybe hold off on the slippers for a few days.”

Mum’s cheeks coloured. “I don’t know what she would say to you, but I—”

“This lady here, who says she is my mother, has a very effective disciplinary method involving footwear.” I said helpfully.

“Sera!”

“I’m just being honest.”

Mum looked like she was calculating whether the doctor would intervene if she threw her shoe at me now. Dad, wisely, stepped between us.

“Let’s go home,” he said, his voice carrying the desperate cheerfulness of a man trying to prevent a domestic incident. “Who’s hungry? I’m hungry. Let’s get lunch.”

Tangled Menace closed her notebook with a snap. “I want noodles.”

“Noodles sound good,” Dad agreed.

“Sera?” Mum asked, her voice carefully controlled. “What do you want?”

I considered the question. It was a small question. An ordinary question. A question that humans asked each other every day without thinking about it.

And I didn’t have an answer.

Because I had never been asked what I wanted. Not once. Not in my entire existence.

I had always been told. Commanded. Judged. And now, Banished.

But never asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Something flickered in Mum’s expression. The hard lines softened, just for a moment. “Okay,” she said quietly. “We’ll figure it out.”

---

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