Gallahad?

“Not using the heater during quarantine to save $$. Thought the cat was missing 🙃”

I saw this picture on Twitter years ago & it reminded me of my cat. She used to wear a collar that had a jingly bell on it, Then we took it off, and she got good at sneaking onto tables and eating butter when no one was looking. Also she likes to eat her dinner very fast. 

Estimates actually put the death toll between 30 to 60 percent of the European population, there were so many dead and so much variation from area to area you can't accurately estimate how many it really was

People who got infected by the "Black Death" were to 80% dead within 3 to 5 days, the population was reduced so dramatically that it took between 80 to 150 years to regrow to where it was before, varying from location to location

Some places were almost entirely depopulated. Over 60% of Norway died within two years, China's population was reduced from around 125 million to 65 million in the late 14th century, at its peak Damascus reported around 1000 dead every day, between 75 and 200 million people died overall in a time where the world population didn't even reach 500 million.

And let's not even get into the persecution the Jewish had to face. No wait, let's do that actually. "The Jews are poisoning our wells" was something people liked to say because they couldn't think of anything else and hey, why not blame the Jewish? The Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were completely annihilated (not a lot of character development happening in Germany, hmm) and about 2000 more people were killed in the Strasbourg massacre. Simply because they couldn't figure out where the disease came from and hated the Jewish enough to blame them without evidence

Fun fact, the word quarantine originated in the time of the first global outbreak. It comes from the Italian word for 40, which was the period of time people were isolated if they came from infected areas.

The world didn't survive the Black Death, too many people died for the disease to spread effectively

And then it came back several more times, including two more major pandemics and many more outbreaks. The most deadly one in modern times was, buckle up, 2017 in Madagascar where it killed 170 people and thousands more were infected.

Now, before someone starts worrying, here's the good news: thanks to modern medicine the fatality rate was pushed down to around 10%. I think we can all agree significantly better than before.

Your mask protects others more than it protects you

You can still spread covid even if you’re vaccinated or not showing any symptoms

The more this spreads around, the more mutated variants of the virus will appear and they WILL be stronger than the original

The first step he takes after the Master-at-Arms calls to him is halted by him rather suddenly grabbing at his right leg, as if there was a wound he’d forgotten about

It’s not just a one-off thing, too; he spends the entire walk up to the podium limping heavily, and only removing his hand from his thigh after four or five steps. You could argue that the injury happened to his body during discorporation, but seeing has he’s no longer attached to it there’s no reason he’d still be able to feel its pain. It could also be something got twisted on landing, since he stumbled pretty heavily when he was first entering Heaven, but honestly the thought of a noncorporeal form pulling a muscle (or something else that would cause that much discomfort) doesn’t really make much sense - and we see later that even though Zira looks like he has some sort of physical manifestation, he flickers when the Master-at-Arms asks him about his body, so I’m not really sure there ARE any muscles to pull.

Which leaves me with what I think is the most likely scenario: that the injury is an old war wound - as in, one from the First War. And, that War being before anyone had a body, the injury would have been to his celestial/noncorporeal form, and possibly only felt outside of a body.

A lot of people have speculated on Aziraphale’s role in the war in Heaven; he doesn’t seem like the type interested in fighting, but he IS a Principality, and he was given a flaming sword (by God, no less) and a post as the guardian of the East Gate of Eden. I think he not only fought in the First War, but got pretty badly injured in it too. Judging by the way he’s holding his leg, it wasn’t just a flesh wound, but something that cut deep, close to the bone (or the angelic equivalent?) - something that could have cost him his life if it had landed just slightly shy of where it did, or if it had been a smidgen deeper than it was.

You could also take it a step further; if we are to believe Aziraphale when he says he’s never killed anything (miracling his unfortunate dead doves back to life aside), then that means he didn’t kill whoever injured him, even in self-defense. In fact (and this is pure character speculation, at this point), he might have even looked at his opponent and decided not to fight at all; that even if they made the move to kill him, he wouldn’t try to take their life. And whoever faced him took advantage of that, and struck a near-deadly blow that likely only missed something vital because Aziraphale tried to dodge or parry it.

Gabriel arranging to meet Aziraphale while JOGGING, is not just sort of dickish anymore, it’s a direct insult to a wounded veteran. Gabriel refusing to stop jogging when Aziraphale is clearly struggling is an intentional slap in the face intended to humiliate him.

“Wrap up whatever you need to wrap up down here, report back to active service,” Gabriel says, “and lose the gut.” As if the only reason for Aziraphale’s reluctance to join the war is laziness.

the incorrect way to do an anthropomorphic cat: