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The natural order had always held. The representative of Hell popped up in front of a representative of fallen humanity and held out something shiny or delicious, or shiny and delicious and twirled it round and round till the representative of fallen humanity made a grab for it. At some point in all of that, the representative of Heaven showed up and put a metaphysical spanner in the works. The representative of fallen humanity was generally left somewhat bewildered in the middle while the representatives of Heaven and Hell either glared or giggled at each other, and thought up new ways of messing each other round. The shiny delicious thing usually turned out to be merely chrome plated and full of worms.
After the first couple of thousand years, appearing in person wasn't as much fun as it had been. It was much more subtly challenging to tempt and thwart humans at one remove and to compare notes later. Or simply to set something big in motion, and to bugger off for a century or two and leave them to their own devices. Crowley thought of it as winding the bastards up and letting them whirr round the floor. Aziraphale thought of it as a self-regulating mechanism. In both cases it meant a bit of a breather until the spring ran down and some supernatural twiddling was called for.
The current whirring around the floor had given Crowley a nice four hundred-year lunch break. He'd been convinced Aziraphale was up to good with a disreputable group of sheep farmers. One of the kids had a horribly bright and shiny air of destiny about him. He was also an obnoxious little prick, which Crowley encouraged and encouraged and wound the kid's brothers tighter and tighter until there was a satisfactory attempted murder and a spot of selling into slavery. Crowley slapped a famine on the whole area to keep the rest of the family busy, and headed off for a well-deserved rest.
He roused himself from a tipsy slumber with the sure and certain knowledge that Something Big was going down. He could feel the air crackling with ethereal lightning, somewhere off . . . to the south. And the southwest. If it looked like he hadn't kept his finger on the pulse he'd be in trouble. He set off immediately, stealing horses and a chariot from the first garrison he came across. After a deeply unsettling few minutes where the horses attempted to bite him, bite each other, escape from their traces and kick the chariot to shreds, he started walking.
He ran into them as he came to the Egyptian border. Lots of them. Hundreds and thousands -- no, millions of them. He was dumbfounded. He wandered round the crowd, listening in on conversations. Ah, fuck. It looked like the spring had run down, and there were currently pudgy angelic fingers busily winding up the key. He was going to track Aziraphale down and give him a piece of his mind. Or -- no. This looked like the entire bloody working class. That couldn't be good for the economy. He fought his way through the crowd and went straight for the tax officers, who shortly thereafter pointed out to the king that the country would go down the plug hole, not to mention being an international laughing stock and - bang- one set of humans chasing another set of humans.
He caught up with the crowd by the seaside. Maybe Aziraphale thought they'd like a nice picnic. They seemed rather panicked, especially when reports of the approaching army came in. Crowley wondered how Aziraphale was going to get out of this one. Maybe some of these people could make a heroic last stand, allowing the women and kiddies to flee. It wouldn't be sporting not to allow that. Maybe there'd be a mass suicide. That would be dramatic. There were plenty of them to work with. Crowley metaphorically sat back and waited for his opponent's move. He could see Aziraphale rushing round, pretending to be one of the yokels, and encouraging them. Oh well, it looked like a dither rather than a plan. So much for this lot. Here came the army.
Crowley suddenly found it prudent to hide behind the most pious people he could find as a massive pillar of fire poured down from heaven. Holiness crackled over his skin. It was not a pleasant feeling. He worked his way forward, determined to get the hell out of range. As he got nearer he saw Aziraphale hadn't been running round in a dither at all, he'd been getting people organised into neat companies. The angel was now standing unobtrusively near a rather ratty looking fellow who seemed to be the crowd's leader. As the man swung his staff round impressively and whacked the surface of the sea, Aziraphale looked right into Crowley's eyes, grinned impishly and snapped his fingers. Crowley pursed his lips as the sea tore apart like a cheap curtain and the crowd ran forward over the suddenly dry sand. Lightning was splitting the sky and Aziraphale was dancing round, dramatically backlit and gleefully yelling something. Crowley had no immediate wish to find out what. He applauded sarcastically, and got out of the area before Anyone noticed one small demon hanging around.
All in all, it wasn't what he would have called subtle.