841 - Family Therapy
“I HATE YOU!!!”
Howling, Nenet rushed toward Adagio – she refused to call her “mother” anymore, even in her thoughts – claws out and wings spread wide as she telekinetically thrust Belligerence forward.
Adagio’s eyes widened at the unexpected assault, and Nenet felt a surge of spiteful satisfaction at the sight. She hadn’t gotten the chance to pay Grisela back for all the abuse she’d put her through, but now she could get revenge on the one who’d let it happen! This is for all the pain you let me suffer! she roared in her mind, driving Belligerence directly toward Adagio’s center of mass.
It was within a foot of her when Adagio managed to sing a spell.
Although it was barely more than a half-dozen syllables in length, the magic in her voice activated instantly, before Nenet could even think about trying to use her countermagic to undo or redirect it. Not that she could have anyway; there was a limit to what her countermagic could overcome, and the spell that Adagio used then was beyond it. There was nothing the sphinx could do as the power sped from Adagio’s lips-
And wrapped around Belligerence.
A half-second later the spear struck Adagio just below her ribs...only to come to a dead halt without so much as leaving a bruise, as though Nenet had tried to puncture a stone wall with a tree branch.
It was enough to shock her out of her rage, and in her surprise she lost control of her forward momentum, slamming into Adagio full-tilt. But even that did little more than draw an irritated grunt from Adagio, one hand reaching out to grab Nenet by the hair before violently wrenching her to the side.
In her sphinx form, Nenet knew she had to weigh nearly half a ton. But Adagio flung her aside as though she were still the size of a kitten, and Nenet hit the far wall of the workshop hard enough that she momentarily saw stars, the air exploding out of her lungs in a whoosh. Slumping to the ground, she needed several seconds to remember how to breathe, gasping and choking before finally managing to inhale, sitting up with a groan.
“You’re not one of Kryonex’s minions.”
Adagio’s voice made Nenet shudder, trying to recover the hatred that was even now starting to drown beneath a resurgent wave of terror.
“Which makes sense, since my children and those daemons I hired killed almost all of them,” continued Adagio, striding toward Nenet in a slow gait, twirling Belligerence in one hand as though it were an oversized baton.
Taking a deep breath as she tried to marshal her courage, Nenet made herself look at her mo-, look at Adagio, trying to discern how much magic she had active on her.
The answer, as it turned out, was that she had a dishearteningly-large amount.
Virtually everything she was wearing was ensorcelled somehow. Her hair was tied back with a simple lace ribbon that nevertheless glowed with some sort of beautification enchantment. Her earrings were inlaid with a powerful defense against mental tampering. The ruby hanging on a golden necklace was a similar ward against scrying. Her gown – a slinky purple number that left most of her cleavage, as well as one leg, one display – was designed to protect against external magic while boosting the wearer’s own. Her left wrist was adorned with a jeweled bracelet that wrapped her in a ward against physical injury. Even her shoes, high-heeled and open-toed, were awash with magic, being designed to not only stabilize her balance but also increase her speed.
But it was the bracelet on her right hand that shined the brightest to Nenet’s magical vision. Wrapped in an aura so vivid that it was hard to look at, the magical emanations were strangely intermingled with those from the five rings she wore; one on each finger. The bracelet’s aura overshadowed those of the individual rings, making it impossible to tell what their enchantments were, and it was only after a moment’s examination that Nenet realized that they were all connected, with a small length of chain attaching each ring to the bracelet.
That was disconcerting enough that Nenet’s didn’t notice that Belligerence’s barbs weren’t activating – contrary to what her Master had told her about the weapon – until Adagio swung the weapon around so that the head of it was pointed at her. It was only then that Nenet noticed that the spell which had stopped the weapon was still active, somehow keeping it quiescent. “Or at least, not one of the minions he kept close to his realm. And even for a demigod, it should take him a little while to gather his remaining forces.”
Coming to a stop right in front of the downed sphinx, Adagio slowly brought barbed tip of Belligerence to within an inch of her face. “So I think you want to tell me who you are and why you’re here, before I decide that I don’t care enough to keep you alive.”
Nenet couldn’t resist a bitter laugh at that. “You really don’t recognize me? Even Paska caught on right away.”
Adagio’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “What are you talking about?”
“You used to teach me spells right outside here, in your boudoir,” spat Nenet. “I would ask you when I’d be able to come in here, to your workshop, and practice casting them. But you always said that would come later, that for now I just needed to study and learn more.” She glared up at the one who bore her, baring her teeth. “I didn’t realize that was a lie before. I do now.”
For a heartbeat confusion reigned on Adagio’s face. Then her eyes widened, her jaw dropped, and – most importantly – her arm holding Belligerence lowered. “Nenet?! How-”
That was when Nenet sprang, one claw coming up to swipe at Adagio’s face as she leaped toward her.
This time, it didn’t surprise Nenet in the slightest when her attack didn’t connect, Adagio easily sidestepping the attack...but that was fine, since it wasn’t an attack in the first place.
Yelling the single word to activate another one of the very few spells she’d prepared, Nenet squeezed her eyes shut as a dazzling radiance gathered in her paw, immediately flaring up into a blinding shine that flooded the entire workroom with light.
The pained yelp that came from Adagio a moment later told her that her flare spell had worked.
The light died away immediately, the spell not being designed to make the brightness last longer than an instant, and Nenet was already moving as she opened her eyes again, rushing toward where her master’s spine was still hanging in the air. Without slowing down, she snatched it with her telekinesis, and very nearly tripped over her own paws at the resistance she felt as she tried to drag it along; it was as though it was anchored in place!
It took only a fraction of a second to realize that whatever magic Adagio had worked into Lex’s vertebrae was interfering with her telekinesis, and Nenet turned around, intent on scooping it up with her paws if magic wouldn’t suffice-
But Adagio was already recovering, tossing Belligerence aside as she brought her left hand up to rub at her eyes. Her right hand – the one covered in rings – came up as well, and she pointed it in Nenet’s direction, blinking as she tried to get a bead on the sphinx.
Not knowing what was about to happen, Nenet tried to dodge anyway, but was caught unprepared as the ring on Adagio’s index finger – a silver band composed of several metallic tendrils enclosing several red- and amber-colored gemstones – glowed with a soft golden light, which was equaled by the matching aura that surrounded herself, arresting her movement mere feet away from her master’s bones.
“So you’ve learned a few new tricks to go with your new look,” sneered Adagio, drawing herself up to her full height as she finished blinking her eyes clear, keeping her ring pointed at Nenet. “But I’ve spent too much time around ponies not to realize how useful telekinesis is.”
Thrashing in the golden aura, Nenet growled. She was so close! Her eyes lit up as she wrapped her magical grip around Lex’s spine again; if she could at least drag it close enough to grab-
“Stop that!” snapped Adagio, teeth bared in a snarl as she hurried over and snatched Lex’s spine out of Nenet’s purple aura. “I haven’t finished inlaying the enchantments needed to stabilize the godsblood yet!”
“What does that mean?!” growled Nenet, more out of a desire to keep Adagio talking than because she was curious. “What are you doing to my master’s spine?!”
One of Adagio’s eyebrows rose as she released the vertebrae, letting them hover aloft without being touched. “Your ‘master’?”
Nenet winced at that. She’d just committed the same mistake that Solvei had so recently made in front of her tribe, accidentally volunteering information that she should have kept secret!
And Adagio wasn’t about to overlook what her wayward daughter had just revealed. “Paska said he tore the spine out of Hvitdod’s killer,” she mused, her eyes moving from the floating bones to the struggling sphinx. “And now, here you are with a grown-up figure, spellcasting, telekinesis” – she moved a few paces to the left, looking at Nenet in profile – “and a cutie mark on your flank, looking for your ‘master’s’ backbone. Let me guess, you're hoping that if you can put him back together he’ll be that much easier to resurrect?”
Ceasing to struggle as she felt herself starting to grow tired, Nenet settled for glaring at Adagio, refusing to say anything else.
“You know, when I was told that you’d been captured, I figured that whoever did it wanted to get access to all those spells I put in your head before they fought Hvitdod,” murmured Adagio, a calculating look on her face. “I never thought they’d try to win you over by turning you into a sphinx the way you always wanted. But I suppose if they were strong enough to take out Sissel, Grisela, Vidrig, and Hvitdod all on their own, that’s not out of the question.”
Her features darkened then, and she glanced back at the open doorway. “And if you’re here now...did you kill Paska?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” bragged Nenet, suddenly finding herself eager to let Adagio know that she was completely alone now. “But only because he tried to stop me from coming here, knowing it’d clue you in that something was up. He was planning on leaving before you got him killed, the same way you did the rest of our brothers and sisters.”
“That ingrate!” snarled Adagio, and the sudden display of anger made Nenet’s breath catch in her throat. “After everything I did for him!”
Swallowing, Nenet forced herself to laugh at that. “Like what? Promising his soul to daemons after he died? Or did you tell him that you’d introduce him to his father someday, too?”
That last part came out angrier than she’d intended, and Adagio gave her a sharp glance in reply.
“Yeah, I know,” growled Nenet, gesturing as best she could toward her tail. “My father was a manticore. Probably the same one who sired Blat, right?”
A sour expression crossed Adagio’s face at that. “I didn’t tell you for your own good.”
“You’ve never cared about my own good!” shrieked Nenet, struggling again as her anger overtook her. “You let Grisela beat me! You knew what she was doing and you didn’t say anything to stop her, even though you told me you would! But all you wanted was to make sure she didn’t kill your backup spellbook!”
She sagged in the telekinetic aura again, tiring quicker, but her anger didn’t abate. “You were a terrible mother. And not just to me. You lied to us. You manipulated us. You got almost all of us killed. And then you sold our souls to daemons. How could you do that to us? We were your own children!”
“I didn’t have a choice!” shot back Adagio. “I had to make deals in order to get the power I needed, but I was never going to honor them if I could help it! That’s why I’m building this weapon” – she gestured to Lex’s spine, still covered in the bluish sheen of godsblood – “so that I can finally get out of all those bargains I struck!”
“‘All those bargains’?” echoed Nenet. “As in plural? Mo-, Adagio, what did you do?”
“What I had to,” came the flat reply as she gave Nenet a look of deep bitterness. “You can’t begin to imagine what it was like. A thousand years, trapped in a world without magic, unable to use my powers to the fullest and make those pathetic little humans adore me! And then, finally, I came here! And you know what I found?!”
Spinning in place, her foot lashed out, kicking Belligerence across the workshop, finally rolling to a stop near the entryway. “That I’d gone from a world with no magic to a world with too much!”
Nenet’s brow furrowed, intrigued in spite of herself. “What?”
“At least on Earth, everyone who looked at me adored me!” raged Adagio, seemingly caught up in her own tirade. “Men would forget their wives and girlfriends if I smiled at them! Women would question their preferences if I winked at them! There wasn’t anyone who wouldn’t betray their vows, forget their principles, and sacrifice everything if it meant having a chance with me!”
Her glower deepened then, before turning into a sinister smile. “And if anyone did resist, all I had to do was use my voice. There might not have been much magical energy on Earth, but I could still gather enough power to bend any of that world’s people to my will...” Her smile faltered then. “But never many at a time, and never for long.”
She took a deep breath then, seeming to regain some calm, before waving a hand as if to indicate everything around her. “Coming here should have been the answer to all my problems. Instead, it just made them worse.”
Nenet shook her head slowly, not following. “How did-”
“Because in a world with this much magic, almost everyone knows how to use it!” interjected Adagio, seething. “Do you know how common charm spells are here?! Not to mention defenses against charm spells?! And that’s just the beginning! Beautification spells! Transformation spells! Erotic spells! They’re everywhere! It’s like I’m living in a world full of Sirens!”
“Sirens?” echoed Nenet.
But Adagio wasn’t listening. “And it doesn't stop with spellcasting and magic items. On Earth, the only creatures that could compete with me were found in fairy tales. But here? There are selkies and catgirls and nymphs and succubi, not to mention actual sex goddesses...”
Her voice turned brooding at that last part, and she paused for a long moment before shaking her head. “I didn’t come here so I could just be another pretty face in a crowd. I’m going to be the most beautiful, most desirable, most adored creature in this world or any other...and in order to do that, I needed power. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to get it...so long as you’re willing to make a few bargains, and renege on them later.”
“And that’s what my brothers and sisters all died for?” muttered Nenet, looking down. “All because you weren’t the prettiest girl around anymore?”
“I’m a Siren,” replied Adagio tersely. “It’s my destiny, my birthright, to be adored. And you’re going to be a good girl and help make that happen, whether you want to or not.”
She started singing then, and Nenet felt Adagio’s magic settle over her mind like a fog, holding her breath as she realized she was about to get another opportunity.
Most likely, it would be her last one.
A second later Adagio’s spell fell into place...and just like her master had promised her, it shattered a moment later, the “dark magic” he’d given her shredding the attempt to invade her mind.
In the same moment that it happened, as she heard a shocked grunt pass Adagio’s lips, Nenet acted.
Using the Two Feet at Noon technique, she changed from her sphinx form into a human body. Instantly, she felt Adagio’s telekinesis falter, no longer grabbing her in the right places, and Nenet didn’t miss her chance to vault out of the golden aura, rushing forward to snatch up Lex’s spine – and even managing to grab Belligerence – as she bolted through the workroom door and ran as fast as she could.
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I can't wait to read how you make our heroines squeak by this time, it's going to be a wild one!
Shapeshifting is always a problem with restriction, as a fixed form can generally be contained in a skin tight surface field even if the object itself cancles direct magical contact. As soon as tehres a shape shift, the encapsulation no longer matches unless its a much higher spell, and weakens or fails?
Just like what Adagio did with Belligerance to avoid it triggering on contact?
The third sister makes her call! I hope this precludes what the other sisters were doing in Equestria this whole time.
11616157 Certainly, "squeaking by" is probably the best that Nenet can hope for in this situation! But given that her big plan right now is "run away! Run away fast!" I have to wonder just how well that'll avail her.
11616189 In point of fact, Nenet's use of her Two Feet at Noon feat to go from being a Large-sized gynosphinx to a Medium-sized human, as a method of escaping Adagio's telekinesis spell (via her ring of telekinesis), isn't really a good idea under the normal rules of the d20 System.
That's because grappling (which is what Adagio was using that spell for), is something for which you have a better bonus the larger you are. Now, normally there's a corollary for this, which is that being smaller tends to give you a better Dexterity score, which is the ability score that modifies Escape Artist skill checks (which can be used if you're trying to escape a grapple)...except that the Two Feet at Noon feat specifies that, although it functions as per alter self, it doesn't actually change your ability scores (and honestly, that spell's alteration of ability scores are slightly out-of-whack anyway; you shouldn't gain a +2 to Strength for changing into a Medium-sized creature if you're a Large-sized creature).
So overall, all Nenet did was give herself a -1 penalty compared to what she normally had when making her check to escape.
The problem there is that this an example of one of the d20 System's minor-but-pervasive weaknesses: it ignores its own guidelines about the effects of size-changing spells and abilities. There's a table for what changing your size does to your Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution scores...but that table (which is hidden away in the "Monster Advancement" section of the rules) is routinely eschewed for things that PCs and NPCs could use, under the idea that it's unbalancing. So spells like enlarge person and reduce person end up doing almost nothing compared to what "normal" size-changing would entail.
Now, you can blame that on the effects of the spells themselves (i.e. those spells were designed not to give the "full" effects of changing size), but even then, I don't like that idea. It's an excuse to get around the fact that internal consistency is being ignored in favor of game balance, which I can understand, but don't always agree with. Increasing your mass by something like eight times over should make you a physical powerhouse, while shrinking down to a fraction of your normal size and weight should give you a better chance of escaping a grapple!
All of which is to say, this is an area where the GM (which is me) had to step in and say that the rules were borked, so I'm instituting my house rules to change them. Nenet should have gotten a Dexterity bump from changing to a smaller-sized form (albeit with penalties to Strength and Constitution), the same way Solvei does. So that's what happened, and why she got a better result to escape from Adagio's grapple.
It's somewhat similar to how Adagio's artificer's curse spell (spoiler alert: it's not actually a curse) managed to shut down Belligerence. Strictly speaking, that shouldn't have happened, since Belligerence is a minor artifact in its own right. But there's no mythic version of that spell (I even checked the third-party Mythic Spell Compendium and Mythic Character Codex to make sure), so I was quite free to posit that there's a mythic version which does work on minor artifacts (since if a non-mythic mage's disjunction can potentially destroy even a major artifact, there's no reason why a mythic artificer's curse can't potentially suppress a minor one).
11616272 Hm, I have been pondering a "Meanwhile, Back in Equestria" chapter for a little while now...
A tad shallow of a motivation but considering her life so far, I can kind of see why it is. Still, I wonder what what she's planning to do with this so called godsblood. A guess would be the desire to become divine or at least as powerful as someone who is divine. In turn, this might amplify her Siren Magic to overpower any anti-Charm defenses and take over her own little slice of paradise for herself and stay quiet so as not to attract any powers that could take her down. Or just do as she wishes and draw in adventurers to charm into her service though she might encounter someone who could resist her powers and put her down.
Or
She wants to leave and go back to the human world, and armed with all the magical artifacts and spells she can take so as to take over the human world. Before being potentially overcome by Sunset Shimmer and the human counterparts to the Mane6.
Either path won't end well for her and given how much thought she put into this plan of hers, she probably knows this and learned from her mistakes. Or not, hard to say given the motivation behind her actions.
Not that it matters since Nenet just pulled a fast one on her. Now to hopefully get away scott free. Run Nenet! Run!
11616947 The thing about Adagio, at least as I understand her character, is that while she's the smartest and most driven of the Sirens, she still wants the same thing as her sisters: to be adored. When we first met them, in the beginning of Rainbow Rocks, Adagio's plan isn't to return to Equestria, after all, but rather to take the Equestrian magic that the Rainbooms used and take it so that they can make everyone (on Earth) adore them. (Though we do still see Adagio ruminating over being unable to return to Equestria in Sunset's Backstage Pass, which is kind of a face-palm moment, since as far as I know the statue-portal in front of CHS was permanently open at that point).
In that regard, the fact that she's gone from a situation where she had no real competition but lacked sufficient magic to capitalize on her opportunity (i.e. on Earth) to a situation where she has plenty of magic at her disposal but has numerous competitors, some of whom clearly outclass her (i.e. on Everglow), is clearly deeply frustrating for her. As she noted, this is a high-fantasy world, where magic is prevalent and powerful, not to mention there are lots of creatures for whom supernatural beauty is part-and-parcel of what they can do. In that regard, a Siren simply isn't anything special...and Adagio has the same need to be the most special person there is.
Of course, how exactly she plans on accomplishing that is still unclear. Perhaps we'll find out soon, but it seems that Nenet is less interested in that than she is in escaping. Here's hoping she can make it!