DragonRage

Samantha hears the noises and eldritch vibes of all the CRAFTING! and SCIENCE! going on in the Engineering Bay, and feeling somewhat unsettled by this decides to go investigate. She invites Kino to come along and see what's giving her a headache if the medium would like to see more of the castle.

"Oh, I know him! He's a good man. We just had a mission together," Lexiel shares, "He saved a lot of innocent lives, and me a lot of regrets. He's also a jaded, grumpy edgelord who acts like his life has sucked even worse than mine. Maybe it has. I doubt it, if only because I'd like to think my past sets an extraordinarily low bar."

I'm signing up, but as a veteran of D&D I don't want to make a character until I know what our party has. I can be happy in any role, so it's best to fill pick based on what others want to play.

Cobalt sits in the back and listens. He's not really much for strategy, and can't share his thoughts very effectively until he evolves enough to have hands.

"Well, the ones that he hit in my head left Marisa look like someone went at her with a poleaxe," Lexiel points out, "So I'd expect there's a fair amount of danger involved in dealing with them."

I haven't played 5e before. I can look at the rules on d20srd, but they don't do a good job of explaining things, so that's more a secondary reference.

"Oh. You talk to ghosts!" Samantha realizes, "No wonder I couldn't see them. Magic and psychics don't always mix too well. I'm an empath. I can sense people's emotions, if they're strong enough. So I could feel your sister and yourself there at the same time. I guess the other ghosts around you aren't feeling anything strong enough for me to pick them up. Or maybe because they've been dead for so long they're kinda apathetic? I dunno... I'm kind of new at the whole psychic thing. I've had powers for years, but they were really weak until recently."

"But I choose to follow the law that makes it illegal to not breathe," Lexiel replies, taking Marisa's hand, "If you dig deep enough into Ravnican legal code, you can justify anything short of another Experiment: Kraj. I've never seen lawmages work so fast as when they closed that loophole."

"I wouldn't worry about it too much, Marisa. We both made some assumptions about each other when we first met that, in hindsight, were lacking in perspective. Also, I am really, really sorry for consigning you to the Azorius. Before you freed me, I couldn't consider another course of action," Lexiel smiles slightly, doing her best to mend bridges, "And no, I suppose I'm not going at it alone any longer, am I?"

"Doomfist? Why would he- Huh," Lexiel muses, "I think that's given me a lot to think about. I'm not sure I feel different, but considering how many huge changes I've been through recently I really don't have a control group to compare it to. No alcohol should be fine though; the stuff doesn't do anything for me. But no strenuous emotions might be hard considering the circumstances. I might be freer than I was, but that doesn't mean I can stomach sitting on the sidelines. I'll do my best to keep 'em positive when they come, though."

Lexiel considers this, and then she amps her aura to the max, sending waves of music and healing magic over Marisa and Laver. "Urza's bones! You look like you got stomped by an Indrik! What happened in there? And how the heck did you hear that? ...Oh. Huh. You pulled Winston's cheesy line out of my head?"

Laver and Marisa burst out of Lexiel's headspace to a shower of unravelling knots! They're not gone, but they are fading and getting smaller. While inside her head, they helped her get over the guilt of surviving an explosion that killed her adoptive father, the trapped feelings and distrust associated with being screwed over by Tezzeret the Seeker for almost ten years, the massive inferiority complex spawned by her feeling completely inadequete as an Archangel, and the depression borne of losing every fight she's been in before the Trespassers plot in an epic cage match with the Warlord of Africa, Humbler of God Programs himself, the mighty Doomfist! Once beaten, Doomfist asked Marisa and Laver to look after "his successor", presumably Lexiel, since he wouldn't be able to do that anymore. This has left Laver with a lot to think about, since he's never seen a knot that wasn't a horrible, twisted abomination before. He also got a rather nifty Accord that lets him summon a squad of Boros legionaries as an ultimate, and punch people to make their attacks take longer to cool down.

"You do remember you were surrounded by demon-summoning Rakdos cultists?" Lexiel points out to Marisa, "Who were mostly dressed similarly to you, and not attacking you? Well, not by Rakdos cultist standards. And how your servants tried to maul an officer who admittedly was being a little rougher than he needed to be, but can you really blame him after trying to suppress that fracas? Because if you don't remember it that way maybe something is going wrong with my memories." Laver would notice that while Lexiel's knots were not dislodged further by her explosive transformation, they did shift around. He can now see a single knot, far darker than the rest, connected to the others by sickly, black strands, so tight they are humming. Were this knot to be dealt with, the others would probably loosen and start to break down on their own.

"I think I'm still Lexiel?" The angel says uncertainly, "I remember the same things. Or I think I do. If my memories are different is there any way for me to know, since I'm basing my judgement on those memories? Perhaps there's a way to view them and run them through an image analysis program... I need a very large, clear chunk of crystal, six kilos of conductive metal, some form heat-resistant gloves, and an indeterminate amount of time. Oh, and also an image analysis program. Maybe that homocidal construct from the Arcology mission has one!"

Lucinda lays on the ground and cries quietly, clutching at her wounds. Unlike the rock stars she idolizes, she's never actually been in any sort of fight, or even gotten an injury more severe than a pulled muscle before.

Marisa is able to grab the enchantment in a few tries with her arcane tweezers, bend its targeting parameters until it feeds back into itself instead of Lexiel with relative ease, as the targeting seems particularly damaged, and fix it into place with a hefty blue-mana patch. It seems like it's working perfectly at first, but then it starts glowing brighter and brighter, becoming visible even to the untrained eye as the targeting runes feed back into themselves, rapidly burning the enchantment's power supply up even as they build to critical mass. Everyone in the room has just enough time to dive for cover before the whole thing, and Lexiel, detonate with a sound like a giant stepping on a glass-blower's shop, sending waves of raw mana blasting outward! The magical explosion washes over the entire room, bathing it in raw power, while a single glowing mote hovers in the center of the room, shifting through colors both recognizable and sanity-pinching. Slowly, the immense amounts of ambient mana are drawn toward this point alongside what looks like wisps of the void itself, covering it in energy that shapes itself into a vaguely humanoid form. The energy seems to condense, slowly, from a person-shaped blob into someone who looks a lot like Lexiel herself. The facial features and body type are the same, but her skin is a healthy tan instead of the unearthly pale tones she had before. Her hair stays platinum blonde, but dipped with red at the ends, and her four wings take the same colors on. Her eyes look more human, but retain their piercing, almost-neon tone. And her halo of light seems to have been replaced with a circular, lazily-shifting lightning bolt, though it has not returned to over her eyes. Most of her clothes have remained the same, though the fabrics are colored white instead of what they were before, and a distinctive insignia of a Boros signet nested inside Overwatch's sigil has been stamped over her heart, and on each shoulder. The same aura of speed and inspiration washes over the room, just as strong, but somehow cleaner. "Holy shit. Did I just explode?," Lexiel exclaims, "Holy shit! I can say 'Holy shit'!"

Lexiel doesn't actually have any wards, but her aura does provide a measure of passive defense, and she does her best to shut it down before standing very still in front of Marisa. Marisa's exploration of the enchantment reveals that there's a lot of mana in it, of the white, blue, and green variety, heavy on the white. The enchantment itself is very robust, with redundancies for a lot of things. However, on the positive side, it's also very straightforward and easy to understand; whatever laid it seems to have substituted brute force and sheer quantity of mana for skill. Furthermore, red mana seems to have bled into it from Lexiel, eroding the magical matrix somewhat, and the enchantment appears to have been designed to be connected to an external power source. Presumably, that source is the plane of Bant, as it isn't currently hooked up, which means that while the enchantment has a lot of power left, its structure is a bit brittle and its ability to resist outside intervention finite.

Lucinda is not exactly dealing with this well. She's just been whipped in the face with a braid that somehow hurt more than anything she's ever been hit with before, everyone around her is apparently a quick change artist and a Street Fighter character, and absolutely nothing is making sense at all. She decides her best course of action is to whimper, collapse to the floor, and play dead.

"I can't think of any reason not to try that," Lexiel replies, after considering the problem a few minutes, "Even if it's not the kind of spell that has a set target, that would just mean nothing changes. Give it your best shot. Please."

Lexiel stares at Laver for just long enough to be awkward, and then starts giggling quietly to herself. "You have blue eyes," She informs the boy between fits of laughter.

With a rush of magic and a loud 'pop', Lexiel's halo snaps upward to hover just above her forehead, glowing warmly. Unfortunately, that isn't the end of it. Kozilek may be dead, but his magic endures, and it's in no mood to be cooperative or respect the usual rules about what it can or cannot do. It bounces off Lexiel's reflective ward with a cartoonish 'poing!', rushes out of the circle, barely slows at the defensive wards, and... It sticks Morgan's wand to his forehead. [OOC: If you don't think Kozilek's magic should backfire in this particular way, PM me and I'll edit my post accordingly.] As Morgan goes cross-eyed to examine his new hood ornament, Lexiel opens her now-uncovered eyes. Her whites are pure and uniform, with no visible blood vessels, and her irises a deep, cool blue. Lexiel's eyes snap to Morgan's face, and she starts laughing. Quietly at first, but quickly picking up steam until she's on her knees, pounding the floor as tears stream from her eyes. It's an incredibly beautiful sound, like listening to an entire church choir singing, and almost makes up for having his wand stuck to his forehead. If Laver were to be looking at the angel, he'd see one of her largest, foulest, and most twisted knots detatch from her and fall into the aether before unravelling and vanishing.

"You think you can undo Kozilek's curse? A lot of people have said that," Lexiel says, "Well, I won't stop you, though only because being able to see again would greatly increase my ability to dispense justice. However, I am obliged to warn you that the last three people to try this failed, and were not happy about the backlash. Kozilek might be dead now, but his magic is as persistent as ever."

Since everyone else is retreating, Cobalt uses Endeavor on the Lairon to try and get some HP back and slow it down, then follows them.

Lexiel spends some time considering her options, but only one really seems to be the good one. "Procrastinating will only increase the damage. Cutting off my emotional bonds is as likely to make things worse as better. I think I would like you to loosen my bindings. I want to be free. I know it's possible to be happy and be an angel. ...I'd like to know what that feels like. And I really like the idea of being able to pick my battles. It's a rather good thing I don't need to sleep anymore, because I'm not allowed to."

"Hm. I take it then you didn't have the resources for a true artificial intelligence?" Alexandria theorizes, "I could offer my expertise in the matter, but I don't have much of the hardware needed to create one at the moment. A speaker would be easy, but the coding and hardware needed to hook it up to your creation less so. What is her operating system like?"