Lorelai

Hall Of Fame!

Survival - 8 Wins!

Brutal - 1 Fatalities

AFFILIATION

Alignment: Villain

Team: The Fallen

VITAL STATS

Strength: Weak

Agility: Standard

Mind: Supreme

Body: Weak

RECORD

Personal Wins: 8

Personal Losses: 3

Abdiel

"Tell me a story, Lorelai." The girl's eyes were large and guileless, and her Fate was clearer than the hazy midday breezes that wreathed the two, as they lay in drifts of heather. The woman's eyes glittered, and she spoke. "Of course, child." Her fingers curved against the midnight curls of the young one, and she opened her mind. Her voice rose steady, calm, deliberate over the vagrant winds "Once there lived a girl. She had golden locks, and grew meek and gilded in halls of marble, under the watchful eyes of robed women who were all tall and beautiful and never smiled. She had horrible dreams, visions of peace shattered by terror, and she begged to be taken back to a place where sleep was bliss and not burden. But the women refused; they took accounts of each nightmare, shook fiercely at the strongest tales, and paled when she spoke of the destruction of things they must have held dear. They forced foul concoctions down her throat, and kept her in a room of white crystal where light shone so brightly that the girl lost all notion of where she was, who she was. In time the visions came to her in her waking hours, and on a quiet day she turned to her jailor/mothers and spoke. 'Take me to the old one. It is time.' She silenced the protests forming in their mouths, adding 'She will pass soon. We do not have the luxury of training. Take me to her now.' They led her down, down, into the bowels of the earth, where an old woman lay chained to a bed of rock, mumbling incoherently. She recoiled in fear when the child approached. The girl slipped her small, soft hands into the gnarled claws of the ancient, and opened her eyes. The old one sputtered, moaned, and screamed at the awful loss, the things subtracted from her that would never be returned. Three nights later, she died, the young child's hands still frozen in the same position. In that moment, she could See everything. More than that, she Knew. The universe opened itself to her, and the girl collapsed under its weight. When she regained herself seven years later, she was chained to the same rock. In time she would escape this prison as well, though the price would be high and the road long." Lorelai paused, waiting for her companion. The raven-haired girl lying in her lap made a grimace. "This story is boring. Tell me a different one." The seer nodded slowly. "Very well."

"Once upon a time there lived a girl. She had dark, velvet hair, and grew cold and sharp in halls of ebony, under the simple protection of those who did not understand her. She spoke with spirits, trading tales of what should not be when the sun went down. The child was strong, the child was brilliant, and her will was seconded only by her fear. She was afraid of growing old, of death. She wanted to wrest herself from the filthy, crawling cycle of life. So she took her salvation in her hands, rent it asunder, and offered it as a sacrifice before things dark and unending. The black things granted her wish, though she was to learn that they had extracted a terrible toll. Her soul would not die, however, caged within a mortal coil of flesh; it would remain until the end of days, impotent within a rotting husk of ash once Time had claimed its due from her aging flesh. She sent pieces of her spirit out across eternity and the universe, searching for an answer, a cure. She too Saw things no mortal mind was meant to See. She grew strong in the ways of those who had broken her dream, caring little for their cruelty, making it a part of herself. She surrounded herself with powerful servants of the Void and Chaos, and shattered the souls of others of her own accord. In time, her hands would be steeped in blood, her existence draped in endless webs of deceit and decay." Lorelai paused, her eyes distant as they often were. When she began again, her voice nearly faltered, dulcet tones tinged with regret "In truth, though some small degree of time and space separated the girl with the golden hair and our dark haired friend, their paths would converge more than once, and in their final meeting their lives would change forever. They would find themselves bitter foes, and in their struggle, one would find a moment of true peace, and the other would be granted oblivion. As to which - that is not for me to say at this time, perhaps ever. But take heart; Time will tell, wouldn't you say, Ravenna?" But the young Cervantes child had already drifted off, breathing slow and deep, her lips curled slightly in a secret smile.

Past

     Decay: Supreme

 

No one, save Lorelai herself, knows exactly when the Council of Iolus began its long standing practice of storing the entirety of its knowledge and history in the minds of a single unbroken chain of women. Perhaps the first such women were powerful mages in their own right, conscientious volunteers who gave themselves to the cause of the Order, that its teachings and past be kept safe for all time. Perhaps the first such volunteers were not driven insane by the sheer volume of information their minds were forced to store, like a clay vessel filled to bursting. In any case, before Lorelai, the title Athenaeum had long been spoken of with pity and scorn, as an atrophied appendage of antiquity with little practical use. Small wonder - for centuries the position had been passed on to those without significant magical ability or mental capacity beyond an ordered mind. Rumors were circulated to the effect that only failures were selected, involuntarily no less, for the job. This would not surprise many members of the Council - getting information out of the Athenaeum was nigh impossible, as they were uniformly half crazed and seldom coherent enough to answer simple questions. Still, tradition was to be honored, and the hapless women who represented the collective experiences of the powerful order of magi were spoon fed information from enchanted sounding stones every day, right after the plants were watered.

 

Present

     Environmental Awareness: Ultimate

 

All of this changed with Lorelai. Augustus Mar, a high ranking agent of the Impergium, was the first to suggest that passing the burden of the Athenaeum onto an oracle, or seer, could yield potent results. While the inner workings of such abilities were still largely a mystery to the Council, it was generally accepted that the majority of soothsayers were able to produce greater results with more immediate information, and that their primary limiting factor was an inability to absorb necessary data from the outside world. What then would be possible if a prophetess were given instant and irrevocable access to the combined knowledge of the Iolians? Instead of a relic of the past, the Athenaeum could become the Council's most potent weapon, able to advise them on all possible courses of action. Mar's request was approved, and in a handful of years they had found the perfect candidate. At the age of four Lorelai was easily purchased from her parents for the price of a year's harvest. In the hands of the Iolian wardens her delusions and visions became more pronounced, and nearly overwhelmed her young mind. The shock of becoming the Athenaeum was nearly the final blow, but after several long years of recuperation Lorelai eventually learned to filter out the torrents of information flooding her senses, block from her sight the fates unfolding so rapidly that she was forced into a dozen perspectives at once. All in all, the experiment was considered a grand success. Lorelai's predictive powers were unprecedented; she made not a single error, and had photographic recall of all events of the Council's past, which alone made her significantly more useful than her immediate predecessors. There were setbacks - the young prodigy often refused to provide information when it was requested, responding with flippant remarks like "If I tell you, we shall all die" and other such exaggerations. The few mind probes instigated by the Council all failed, some even causing permanent damage to the mentalists initiating them, and all requests to more "forcibly" demand answers from the girl were denied on the basis of promoting continued good relations between the font of knowledge and her keepers. In time, the Council mused, she would warm to their advances, and surrender the future to them, on a silver platter.

 

Future

     Decay: Supreme

 

What the Council would learn, long after Lorelai was dead and the Athenaeum no longer existed, was that their experiment had succeeded beyond all expectations. Lorelai was possessed of a brilliant mind, and without their intervention would have grown into one of the greatest seers in recorded history. As it was, her merging with the other Athenaea revealed a horrendous secret. Her predecessors had not been mad at all; rather they had become lost in the annals of time, adrift in a sea of knowledge, their only solace endless exploration of the winding truths and falsehoods recorded by the Council. Each Athenaeum carried not only the collective history of the Iolians, but also the life experiences of the dozens that came before her. The convergence of forces within Lorelai reached a critical mass, and somewhere along the line she stepped across a threshold none knew existed. She had achieved, for all intents and purposes, complete Omniscience, past present and future. More than that, she found she was able to search out individual strands of possibility and explore each branching node until the most ideal came to her. Over the years she learned to temper knowledge with understanding, and to quiet the raging voices in her head, giving them free reign only when circumstances were most dire. In so doing she limited herself, perhaps, but regained her sanity, and a portion of her life as it would have been. In spite of her knowledge, she judged herself unworthy of deciding whether the Council of Iolus was worthy of ruling the Multiverse, and as such, did significantly less to help them than she could have. She fell into the habit of speaking in generalities, as was the wont of her kind, though in her case the motivation was altogether different - she wanted the Council to underestimate her abilities, not overvalue them. In return for her meager assistance she was granted a measure of freedom beyond chained rocks and daily watering. Despite knowing what she would encounter in each instance, she traveled through existence, nudging here and there, visiting Khazan, Inusaka, Earth, lying when she was forced to. Thus, when she asked to be granted a berth in the Iolian Impergium for the express purpose of hunting down the Council's hated foes, the Mystrans, the Council was hard pressed to question her foresight.

 

The Facile Edge

     Polymorph: Standard

 

Having no direct magical capabilities of her own, Lorelai was literally forced to accept the weapon known to the Iolians as the Facile Edge before embarking on her journey. Though she refused to explain why it was necessary for her to travel to Khazan at that specific time, she grudgingly accepted that if she were to do battle with the forces of the Void, she would need a more direct means of defending herself. To the Council it was merely a case of protecting their investment. The Facile Edge was more knife than dagger, set in a curved golden hilt, its small five inch blade of indeterminate metal humming with positive magicks of the Iolian variety. While far from the Council's most valued or most potent weapon, it had its own merits, which lent themselves well to use by a warrior who knew Everything. When it penetrated a target - and there were few defenses that could resist it - instead of splitting metal or stabbing flesh, instead it changed the composition of the victim, or at least a significant portion thereof, into whatever the wielder willed. The grip felt cool and steadying in her hand, and she marveled at the oftentimes miraculous difference between knowing something completely and experiencing it even perfunctorily. She had known for years that the blade was to be hers, but its beauty and simplicity surpassed her expectations. She weaved her way to one of the Impergium's training rooms, bypassing the novice levels and stepping into the experts' chamber. The warrior-mages chuckled, and suggested that she had lost her way. She had not. With a click the artifacts slid into place, and the first of her illusory opponents appeared, a behemoth with a large spiked club. Lorelai knelt quickly and dipped her knife into a precise spot in the floorboards. Impossibly, a crack formed, into which the left foot of the ogre fell and became wedged. Lorelai walked slowly to her foe, stepping left and right quickly to avoid the clumsy swings she knew were coming, danced around the hulking thing, dodged a mule kick easily, and slid the Edge against the back of his neck, turning the top of his spinal cord to acid. Several small firedrakes slithered from the top of the sky, diving down to meet the impudent young seer. She dragged her knife through the air in a horizontal motion, changing the atmosphere around her into a deadly poison gas specific only to reptiles, blowing a tainted kiss at the scaled monstrosities as they descended upon her. Before the drakes could right their course they had flown into the path of the cloud and inhaled enough of its fumes to fall twitching to the floor. Suddenly a cloaked figure manifested itself, garbed in black robes, strands of dark hair sliding down and out of its cowl. Lorelai paused, her mind painted pictures of her target on the dark sorcerer, seeing her a foot shorter, skin more pale, features finer, the mark of Mystra emblazoned on her cloak. Her mind snapped back with a start as she felt the illusion begin to move. It was readying bolts of force, which would not miss their target. Lorelai dove to the side and sunk her blade into the wall, pulling out large chunks of mithril as she extracted her weapon, flinging the gobs of metal at her enemy, each one incinerated by the dark incantations of her foe, in turn deflecting the better part of their force. She quickly tired of the game, and spoke several forbidden words, interrupting and distracting her adversary's stream of spells. As her opponent sputtered, Lorelai sauntered forward, carving away the dark mage's hastily raised shield by converting it, piece by piece, into bubbles of anti-magic. Her last challenge at her mercy, the oracle drove the Facile Edge deep into the heart of the mage, her weapon needing no transmutation to find the pulsing organ and end its steady beat. It was time. She turned on her heel and left the room, the Council, and her quiet life behind. The Iolians in the room gaped, dumbstruck, at Lorelai's expressionless features dripping red. It was well that the image burned itself into their minds, for they would never see the prophetess again.