Glorious Archangel St. Raphael

[Raphael, this time, looks less like the bleeding pile of shit she did last time and more like a meditative businesswoman with dry skin who hasn't slept in a while. She is seated Indian-style on the floor of what is obviously a run-down house; her normal illusions of nice drawing rooms and furnished libraries are gone. Forgotten, even. There's a tenseness around her eyes, a flickering darkness and she has the distinctive sallow-faced, corrosively-dry-skinned unhealthy look of Lucifer himself.]

I have heard talk and complaints about this latest event. People think they have been robbed of their identities, stripped of their selves.

[She looks vaguely disdainful at the concept, but so contemplative.]

The empty places within us call for something to fill them. Can you not wait a week? If you insist on squandering this.

[A blade emerges slowly from one sleeve until Raphael is holding a short sword in one hand. She brings it up to chest level and holds it gingerly between her two index fingers, so it rotates slowly in the air like a rotisserie.]

We do not know our own families. [One hand returns to rest on her knee, and the sword turns up until it's turn in mid-air like an impossible basketball, the sharpened point hovering centimeters over her outstretched finger.] I find it difficult to divine my motivations for my own actions.

But we have no ties that bind us from action or blinders to shield us from essential truths.

[The sword touches her finger and she looks to it slowly- curiously, like she's never seen it before. It presses down harder until drops of bright red blood well around the blade-tip. Raphael seems fascinated when her blood shimmers and tiny but dazzlingly white beams of light strobe from the small wound. Anyone looking at the sword can see creeping veins of rust spread slowly up the blade.]

In the absence of prejudice, clarity is easily grasped. The irrational contradictions we tolerate fall away.

We are not stripped. We are free.

[Hi, Adstring. Have a Raphael.

She looks like shit.

We're talking pale, dark circles under the eyes, like she did when she was human and when three days without eating or sleeping. Or maybe this is the look of someone who's been living on a diet of meth and back-alley blowjobs- it's hard to say. What's easy to tell is the exhaustion, the lines around her eyes, a creeping paleness that, to some, will be recognizable as the same sickly skin tone found on Lucifer when he's been too long without a demon blood fix. She's uncharacteristically sitting down against the inside of the outer wall, and looks like she just lost a fight, with bruises blossoming darkly against her dark skin; they're hard to see in this light, but obvious to anyone who notices. There's blood on her shirt, but none on her.]

I would like today to talk about faith. [There's blood on her teeth she hasn't washed out yet. Raphael pauses, thinks for a moment, and when she speaks they're sparkling white again. She's tense, but it belies the massive amount of pain she's currently in.] Ideas about the divine are obviously shaken by time spent in this pandimensional cell block, but any world worth knowing knows some version of the Almighty.

Tell me, Adstringéndum. What do you believe in?

[Private to Lucifer (added in many hours later):]

Lucifer. Talk to me. In person.


((ooc: This is open to offlines from anybody! She's against the outer wall in the Northeast quarter. NOTE to anybody who can sense evil and good, or darkness and light: Raphael may confuse those senses... more than you'd expect. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.))