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Crowley thought he might as well go see the thing, since he was getting a commendation for it. He had no idea why—he saw the note saying one of his temptations was paying off in a big way with a quote direct from one of his memos, but he couldn’t figure out what it was for the life of him. But hey, a commendation was a commendation.It was just: He stayed away from the bone stuff, as a general rule. He thought it was, he didn’t know, unsportsmanlike, or something. A cruel joke. Plus, he just didn’t like misleading natural scientists; he liked them too much.The Times had said the bones were a “diplodocus” from Wyoming in America, with a helpful map showing that Wyoming was both very far inland and much larger than Great Britain. Apparently, they’d been discovered by a bloke named William Harlow Reed and gifted by a Scottish immigrant to America called Andrew Carnegie to the King. He’d checked and double-checked his memory for Reed and Carnegie’s names, or references to America, or to the bones: nothing. The only thing that came close was an assignment he’d passed off to Aziraphale for some stuffed shirt at Yale, to tempt him into some academic intrigue. He had a weird name though, like Orpheus Bog or something, not William. It couldn’t be the philanthropist, because he hadn’t gotten credit for capitalism: It had kind of invented itself, and by the time it was obvious it was sticking around, it was too late to file the paperwork [1]. It definitely wasn’t the king, because Bertie had a soul like vulcanised fucking rubber. No matter how many mistresses he took or how much money he gambled, the sin bounced right off him. If Crowley didn’t know better, he’d suspect God of playing favorites [2].So off Crowley went to see Dippy the Diplodocus.It was a great big beastie, taking up the entire new Reptile Room, tail sweeping across the ground. The bones they’d found really did seem to fit together more or less the way they’d been arranged, although Crowley hadn’t been involved in the biology project really. The humans’ explanations were immensely convincing, grounded in the physical laws they’d discovered so far. If Crowley hadn’t been an eyewitness to Earth’s baptism and Time being turned on six millennia before, he’d fully believe what they were saying about these great lizards.Like he said: he didn’t like getting involved in the bone stuff.As he looked around at the crowds gathered to marvel at Dippy, he didn’t see anything worth their HQs getting worked up about. There wasn’t much sacrilegious, there wasn’t much holy. Although if he were here, Aziraphale would argue with that, say that there was always sanctity to be found in the wonder of the Lord’s Creation. That wasn’t a company line, either; Heaven didn’t go in for that puff. It was something the daft bastard really believed.Crowley missed him horribly.He took another loop around the hall, wondering at all the human creativity and scientific inquiry and plain hard labor that went into these plasters of a mean-spirited Divine prank. Wondering how they’d already been setting up the humans long before splitting up into two camps. He wondered whether the angels who’d put the bones in the ground were in Heaven or in Hell. Or if some of them were in both.To be honest? He really thought that there were some in both. The first Heaven-Hell collaboration, long before he and Aziraphale took the plunge on their Arrangement.And he still had no idea what that commendation was actually about.–[1] Aziraphale had worked quite hard at the invention of philanthropy once capitalism had become obvious even to the most introverted of angels. Heaven hadn’t given him any credit for it, at least as far as Crowley knew. He and Aziraphale weren’t really speaking these days.[return][2] However, Crowley did know better. God’s favorites usually got prolonged bouts of suffering and grisly, horrific deaths, not women and wine and kingdoms.[return]