The stunned silence that reigned in the wake of Lex’s pronouncement was finally broken by the sound of Sonata’s laughter.
“Oh wow!” she chuckled. “Okay, you totes had me for a second there! I mean, I actually thought you were serious! Whew!” She punctuated that last part by wiping her hoof across her forehead in an exaggerated manner. “Who says this guy doesn’t have a sense of humor, right?” she snickered, nudging Aria.
But unlike Sonata, Aria wasn’t laughing. “Y-yeah…right…” The cause of her concern wasn’t hard to figure out: despite Sonata’s attempt at levity, Lex’s expression was devoid of anything that remotely resembled mirth.
Nor was he content to allow Sonata to misinterpret his statement. “I’m in no way joking, Sonata.”
“Oh come on!” she giggled. “Don’t say that!”
Lex sighed. “Sonata…”
“Don’t say that,” she repeated, her grin smaller now.
“For what you’ve done,” Lex continued, “the two of you-”
“Don’t say that…” interrupted Sonata, and this time all trace of disbelief was gone from her voice, openly pleading now.
But Lex was pitiless. “The two of you will be permanently turned to stone,” he finished.
Blinking back tears, Sonata swayed in place, looking like she was about to collapse. “Lex…come on…y-you can’t-”
“So that’s it then?!” In contrast to her sister’s growing heartbreak, Aria’s expression was a mixture of fear and anger. “We mess up one time – one time! – and you’re going to kill us both, just like that?!”
“This is not the first time either of you have made serious errors in judgment,” shot back Lex immediately. “Only the most egregious. Moreover, petrification is not death. Being turned to stone does not compromise your body’s functionality; it merely arrests it, placing you in a state of suspended animation. From your perspective, it will be no different than entering a dreamless, never-ending sleep.”
“But…but…” Making no attempt to hide her distress, Sonata flailed for something, anything, to change Lex’s mind. “But what’ll you do without us here? Who’ll be your spokespony without me? Or guard you at night without Aria? Or…or…”
“I’ll navigate whatever issues come up in the wake of your sentence being carried out,” replied Lex evenly.
“So that’s what losing us means to you?” hissed Aria, her face now twisted with hate. “That without us here, you’ll just ‘navigate whatever issues come up’?! Last night you were telling me how much you love me, how sorry you were that you hurt me, and today you’re not just getting ready to throw me and Sonata away, but kill us altogether – oh, excuse me, ‘put us in a state of never-ending sleep’ – and your only reaction to losing us is that there’ll be ‘issues that come up’?!” She raised a hoof then, pointing at him balefully. “I thought that wretched queen who took my voice away was a cold-hearted monster, but you’re worse! At least she didn’t make me fall in love with her before she got rid of me!”
Lex’s response was to simply look at her impassively.
Somehow, that infuriated Aria more than if he’d said something heartless or cruel. “WELL?! SAY SOMETHING ALREADY!”
His eyes alternating between where Sonata was starting to sob quietly and Aria’s towering wrath, Lex’s composure didn’t waver. “The sentence will be carried out at the earliest available opportunity.”
Almost choking on her fury, Aria called the deadliest spell she knew to mind. “You’re not going to get that opportunity, you-”
“W-wait!” hiccupped Sonata, throwing herself at her sister when Aria began to sing the words to a spell. “Aria, wait!”
“Lemme go, Sonata!” roared Aria. “If he thinks I’m just going to stand here and let him turn us to stone then he’s got another thing coming!” Struggling to get out of her sister’s grasp, Aria shot Lex a vicious look. “Last time I wasn’t being serious, but this time will be different, do you hear me?! THIS TIME WILL BE-”
“ARIA STOP!” Holding onto her sister for dear life, Sonata lowered her voice to a whisper. “I don’t think he’s being serious!”
The words made Aria freeze in place, paralyzed by the sliver of hope that her sister’s words sent through her. “What…?”
“I don’t think he’s being serious!” repeated Sonata, voice still a whisper. Risking a look back at where Lex was continuing to watch them calmly, she swallowed nervously before continuing, desperately hoping that she was right. “Look at him! He already said a bunch of times that he was going to turn us to stone, but he hasn’t actually done anything! None of that chanting or waving a hoof in the air or anything! His eyes haven’t even changed color!”
“I…” Aria’s rage began to ebb as she realized Sonata was right. “S-so what’re you saying?” she whispered back, glancing between Lex and Sonata. “That this has something to do with all of those weird rules he has about everything?”
“I don’t know! But there’s got to be some sort of reason for it! Lex, like, never hesitates when he says he’s going to do something!” Sonata’s voice was frantic, desperately clinging to the idea that maybe there was some way out of their current predicament.
“Or maybe he’s just waiting for us to let our guard down,” muttered Aria, no longer sure what to believe. “Maybe this is all just some vicious, spiteful game he’s playing.”
“Lex doesn’t play games!” Desperately searching for some sort of clue, Sonata looked back at Lex, raising her voice back to normal levels. “Why stone?” she asked abruptly.
His brow furrowed slightly. “What?”
“Why stone?” repeated Sonata. “I mean, I know you don’t kill ponies, but why not – I dunno – why not banish us to some other world or take away all our memories or change us into muskrats or something?”
“Because petrification is the apex of responsibly confining someone without causing them to suffer,” answered Lex, the reply coming easily now that he knew what she was asking. “Banishment means being sent to a remote location, which impedes the state’s duty of care to prevent unforeseen dangers from befalling someone so condemned as well as keeping third parties from interfering with their sentence. Likewise, removing someone’s memories is not only a grotesque violation of an individual’s sense of self, but does nothing to remove their intrinsic capabilities, and so accomplishes comparatively little in terms of mitigating whatever danger they pose to themselves or others. Similarly, polymorphing someone is both cruel and irresponsible; even leaving aside the potential conservation of non-physically-dependent magical abilities, the effect on their identity-”
“Great, wonderful, so you think that turning people into rocks is the best way to punish them whenever they do something wrong,” snapped Aria. Lex’s arcane explanation had done nothing to calm her nerves. “I’m amazed this place isn’t full of statues already!”
Lex’s eyes narrowed. “It’s far from an ideal punishment. The total inhibition of cognitive function means that its use as a method of reform is completely nil. Hence why the use of petrification as an instrument of criminal justice is only allowable when the subject in question cannot be put to death but is too dangerous to be allowed to retain any autonomy whatsoever.”
Sonata bit her lip, trying to parse what Lex was saying. There was some sort of clue in there, she felt sure. Some sort of hint that he was trying to give them about why he was talking about turning them to stone without actually doing it. But even though she was already thinking so hard that she could feel her brain starting to hurt, nothing was coming to her. It was in desperation that she threw another question out there, just trying to keep him talking before he decided to act on what he was saying. “So, um, do we get to choose what pose we’ll be in when you do it?”
Aria gave her a look of disbelief. “What does that matter?!”
Sonata threw her forelegs in the air in exasperation. “I’m just asking! It’s not like you’re helping any! Besides, if we’re going to become statues or whatever I’d like to at least look good!”
“Well I’d rather look like I went down fighting!” snarled Aria.
“Great! Then you can…can…” Sonata couldn’t finish. “That’s it,” she murmured, her eyes going wide. “That’s it!”
“What’s it?” snapped Aria nervously. “What are you talking about?!”
Sonata didn’t answer her, turning her attention back to Lex. Wiping her eyes, she let out a breath, forcing herself to stay calm. “You know what?” she began. “You keep talking about turning someone to stone when they’ve, like, done some totes horrible thing. But that’s not all you can use it for, right? You could also use it in a fight. Like, if you’re fighting something like a dragon, or a devil, or a big ugly squid monster, you’d want to use a spell that can one-shot ‘em by turning them into stone, wouldn’t you?”
“…or a princess,” murmured Aria, eyes widening as she suddenly saw what her sister was getting at.
Sonata nodded vigorously. “That’s right! You said that what we did was just as bad as Luna, but you didn’t turn her to stone! Or Celestia! In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do that! Lex…” She took a step closer to him, hope written all over her face. “Do you actually have a spell to turn people to stone?”
“Or a curse?” added Aria. “Or some ritual thing?”
Lex gave the latter mare a response first. “Curses are designed to impact an individual’s quality of life, which requires that they be cognizant of the condition that they’re afflicted with, and so necessarily rules out petrification as something they can accomplish,” he explained. “As for a ritual, those aren’t well-suited for carrying out criminal justice. Utilizing ritual magic is an inherently fragile undertaking, and a condemned individual is likely to do everything in their power to disrupt the process. Moreover, since there’s no way to tell how a disrupted ritual’s energy will manifest – and because the individual so condemned will be the one to bear the brunt of whatever happens – that subjects them to a level of risk of such a degree that it violates the state’s duty of care toward its people, which includes the criminal population.”
Sonata nodded impatiently. “Right, so that’s a ‘no’ to both of those, isn’t it? What about just casting a plain old spell? Can you turn someone to stone that way?”
Lex didn’t answer immediately, instead looking at her in silence. Several long seconds went by as both mares waited for him to reply. Finally, he opened his mouth.
“No.”
Sonata collapsed with a cry of relief, smiling even as her eyes started watering again. “For realsies?”
Aria could only stare at him. “‘No’? That’s it? Just ‘no’?” Her eyes narrowed, remembering how he’d thought up that ritual to call Harrowing Ordeal in just a few hours last night. “You’re not working on one right now, ready to spring it on us tomorrow morning?”
Lex shook his head slowly. “I can assure you, I’ve looked into that particular venture before, and developing a petrification spell would require significant time and material resources, neither of which I have in abundance at the moment. And even if I did…” He stopped then, and Aria had the impression that he was choosing his words carefully. “Such an instance of thaumaturgical development would be necessarily proximate to preparations for allocating the requisite energies involved in actualizing the cognitive structures required to transcend the immanent-transeunt divide.”
Before Aria could even begin to try and wrap her head around what he’d just said, Sonata threw herself at Lex. Throwing her forelegs around him, she buried her face in his chest. “I knew it,” she sniffled. “I knew you wouldn’t do that to us!”
Any lingering doubts she had were wiped away as she felt Lex gently nuzzle the top of her head, one foreleg pulling her close.
But the same couldn’t be said for Aria. “So you deliberately gave us a punishment that you knew you couldn’t carry out?”
“Strictly speaking, your sentence is suspended due to difficulties with practical implementation,” answered Lex softly, not looking up from where he was still holding Sonata.
Aria felt herself start to shake, the tension of the last few minutes starting to flow out of her. “But wh-” She had to stop, licking her lips and taking a deep breath before trying again. “What about all that stuff about how you couldn’t just let us off the hook? That we did the same thing as that Luna lady so you couldn’t do something with no force or effect?”
“This has force and effect, Aria.” He looked up at her then, still embracing Sonata. “Your sentence is suspended, not revoked. When I acquire petrification magic – which I will, since I determined that it was a necessity for dealing with extremely dangerous criminals long before I’d met either of you – I will use it on the two of you.”
Sonata lifted her head, looking up at Lex with a gentle smile. “You say that now, but there’ll be some other loophole or something that’ll come up then, won’t there? Like, you’ll find some reason to forgive us the same way you forgave whatshername, Fencer.”
Lex made sure to keep his expression neutral. “The possibility of my granting the two of you clemency prior to implementing your sentence of petrification remains entirely hypothetical.”
Now it was Aria’s turn to throw her forelegs up. “So this was all just one big show! You could have told us right from the beginning that you weren’t going to do anything to us, but instead you completely ambushed us out of nowhere with a bunch of crazy-talk and let us flail around trying to figure out what to do even though you were never…never going to…”
By the time she realized what she was saying, the irony was so obvious that it made her blush, her ears folding back. For his part, Lex simply gave her a flat look, while an embarrassed giggle escaped Sonata’s lips.
“Alright. I get it,” admitted Aria in a small voice. At long last she trudged over and stood in front of Lex, shamefacedly looking down. “Payback’s a nag, and so am I.”
“You are,” admitted Lex, even as he reached out with his other foreleg, pulling her to him alongside Sonata. “But that doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
You thought the thicked-plot-soup had reached the boiling point, but it seems salt has not even been added, what awaits our goofball, sour puss, sour puss 2x, and nosy-nosy, find out next time on
Dragon Ball ZLateral Movement!Well, if the night mare were to"gift" him such a spell now...
*Lets out a huge sigh of relief* Oh man, the suspense from the cliffhanger followed by the NMK's adventure was killing me.
Somewhere out there, there is a reality where Lex and Sonata are a comedy duo/couple with Lex being the ultimate straightman.
Still, Sonata is right with Lex creating loopholes or reasons to not carry out the sentence down the line. Especially since he has successfully held off carrying out his end of the bargain with the Night Mare until the goddess put her hoof down on the matter. So as long as the Sirens don't cause anymore problems like that again, there should be no issue.
Still, the only reason Lex would willingly cast that spell if and when he acquires it is it is to save their lives...does petrification work like that?
Currently I can see two more loopholes of legalese at least Lex has left himself, given he has shown he is perfectly willing to explicitly abuse them. Still, Celano or Kerfuffle aint around to give him ideas.
bbbaaaawwwwhhhhhhh hee hawwww giggle.
careful Lex karma is a cold hearted bitch and will come back to you in time.
i will hold father comments as posable spoilers.
9916268 Heck, that's just the appetizer. I still have a lot of ideas that I want to put into play, though in some cases it will likely be a very long time before I'm able to. But I don't see this as being close to the end of things yet.
9916273 Just giving him the spell, unto itself, wouldn't accomplish much. Remember, without Severance Lex is unable to prepare more thaumaturgical spells anyway; the next time he'd be able to do so is the autumnal equinox, which is weeks away. So there'd be time to figure out what to do.
Now if she gave him a magic item that he could use to enact the spell from, such as with that resurrection gem, then things would become tricky...
9916290 This chapter saw Lex doing some very quick thinking in order to have his cake and eat it too. Namely, that he had to satisfy the seemingly irreconcilable challenges of living up to his duty of governance – which demanded that he levy a harsh penalty on Sonata and Aria – while also listening to his heart, which demanded that he protect the mares that he loves. In this case, he couldn't simply hoofwave the penalty for their actions away, even though he had the authority to do so, because that action had no justification behind it other than "I love them," which doesn't live up to the stringent rules for the use of power that he's set for himself. So he had to declare a harsh penalty on them, and then sidestep it via the technicality that he currently wasn't able to put it into practice.
In a way, this was a reverse of his original decision not to try and arrest Celestia and Luna prior to their (disastrous) meeting. He'd come to the conclusion that the Royal Sisters were so incompetent that it warranted forcibly removing them from power, but that his circumstances prevented him from acting on that. It was only because Severance acted on its own and changed the situation so drastically that Lex realized he couldn't afford not to take action, lest Luna be slain, and so he cursed her instead. Fortunately, there was nothing to do that here.
As for the suspended sentence he's put on the girls now, Sonata isn't wrong to have faith in him, but in his own way Lex was telling them that they need to step their game up. He can't openly guarantee them a pardon; they have to earn it. Hopefully they will.
In point of fact, petrification could be used to suspend an otherwise-lethal process, which isn't how it's often used (for good reason, since a subject that fails their saving throw when being changed back to normal dies in the process, though interestingly, a break enchantment seems to sidestep that particular peril). Though to be fair, there are stronger spells to put someone in a state of suspended animation; Lex considers petrification the "apex" of such magic, but there's magic out there which he isn't aware of...
9916372 I'm curious what loopholes you see.
9916457 Well, I'd like to think that karma is less concerned with legalese and more concerned with his will to help others, since in this case he's quite clearly going out of his way to spare Sonata and Aria without violating his principles...even if he is skirting the edges of what he thinks is acceptable.
9918842
Maybe my change in medication is making recent memories easier to use, but analyzing things to try and remind me, makes me think he didnt Explicitly define Offset, Duration, Percentage etc?
The Bird and the Mountain trick?
9918892 Well, he did say "permanently" turned to stone, so he couldn't petrify them and then just change them back a second later. Likewise, the presumption that they'd be petrified in toto is understood due to his not specifying a qualifier (i.e. "turn you to stone" has the "you" being understood to mean "all of you" unless stated otherwise).
Very clever, Lex is once again able to pivot on a loophole.
I thought Lex used a ritual to carry out Luna's mortalitizing? Perhaps it was just him heightening the spell with metamagic and class abilities.
The only thing I will point out is, that scabby little nightmare implied that a large group of LE outsiders are keeping careful watch over Lex, at least to the extent they are able. If one had the capabilities, I could see one showing up and giving Lex a scroll with flesh to stone and the scribing materials and material components, either to weaken him by removing his lieutenants, or just out of pure spiteful glee. It's not a likely thing to happen, it's just the sort of thing I would expect a devil to do if they could, if only to assert dominance in loophole-spotting.
9919304 It was fortunate that Lex was able to think of a way out of having to punish Sonata and Aria without actually doing anything to them. Now he just needs to figure out what to do about breaking up with them to satisfy the Night Mare's mandate.
And Lex used a curse, not a ritual, to lay Luna low, something which I went into more detail about back when it happened.
As for what Harrowing Ordeal said, he simply noted that Lex's name and exploits are known among the denizens of the Night Mare's realm. That, to me, doesn't so much imply direct spying (remember how Lex has alluded to keeping an anti-scrying spell on himself at all times) as it does details about his adventures being uncovered and rumors spreading, much like what happened in the camp when he first arrived. The Night Mare herself has no particular reason to keep quiet about Lex, and neither does Severance now that it's left him. For that matter, there might be a few others who have some knowledge of him (I dropped a very subtle hint about that back during the exchange with Harrowing Ordeal).
9919438 I thought it was a curse, time dilation of readers vs characters can make things hard to keep track of.
I was assuming that if Harrowing Ordeal, who was deliberately chosen by Lex because he's not that powerful, is able to have at least some level of awareness of Lex that other, more powerful servants of the Night Mare would be better able to keep track of him. I don't think he is constantly being watched by dozens of fiends, but I could see at least a few mid-level fiends expending some divination magic on him to track this welder of Severance, especially now that he's rejected Severance.
I just imagined some devil or other related fiend showing up with a scroll of Flesh to Stone because Lex's actions and desires set up that kind of opportunity for cruel and malicious helpfulness that every good devil lives for. Like wish granting without having to actually have the mortal make a wish!
9919474
Well, that's why the material is still right here on the site, where you can check it at any time.
Things like this are why I went with an RPG system, because it lets us get into the nitty-gritty of how something like that would work. Specifically, in that we can look at various creatures and determine if they have the magical abilities necessary to do something like that. And the fact is, most of them don't. A bone devil, for instance, has no spell-like abilities or other powers that would let it do anything like that. Something like a contract devil could use its vision power once per day to get some indirect information, but that's going to be as good as it really gets...and that will be at least a DC 25, quite possibly 30, on the caster level check (to which it has +13).
This is without getting into the issue of exactly what sort of creatures the Night Mare has as divine servitors. I mention that because I'm reminded about how the major types of fiends - demons, daemons, and devils - tend to not have their more powerful representatives be interested in serving deities. Demons are too untrustworthy, devils are too focused on rising up through the infernal hierarchy, and daemons are too hostile to religions in general. So at best you'll get mid-level representatives from those serving deities. Most of the rest will be creatures that don't belong to a particular sub-group.
Right, this is the other thing. Leaving aside how they'd even get there (quite a few don't have plane shift), there's also the matter of their Treasure value/NPC gear. Obviously, those numbers don't match up, which just goes to show how artificial the whole thing is, but that's still something of an issue. For instance, two scrolls of flesh to stone are cheap (only 3,300 gp in total), but if you follow the breakdown on the table for NPC gear, you'd have to hit 4,000 gp in the "Limited Use" column, which requires a level 17 NPC (or level 16 heroic NPC). The Treasure value in a monster entry is even worse, because it tags it not to the Challenge Rating of the monster but to the level of the group that defeats them and how fast they're advancing.
Most won't be able to craft something like that themselves either, particularly since the Pathfinder FAQ (rather oddly, to my mind) says that you can use spell-like abilities to meet the spell prerequisites for creating an item, but the caster level of spell-like abilities doesn't count towards the prerequisites for item creation feats. Master Craftsman won't help here either, since it only works for Craft Arms and Armor or Craft Wondrous Item. Plus, spell completion items such as scrolls require you to expend the spells you're imbuing them with; no sidestepping that with an increased DC to make them.
And, of course, there's a limit to how spiteful (and how stupid) a lot of fiends are. Doing something like that gains them nothing except an enemy, one whom the Night Mare personally recognized. Antagonizing someone like that is something you only do to get something out of it.