Part 17: Clean Slate Part 3: Lysander's Abuse of Women.

Clean Slate Part 3: Lysander's Abuse of Women.


In Boreal, the party meets Dasani and Lily. Dasani has angel wings which... the party finds shocking, for obvious reasons.


The idea is holy mages just mysteriously grow angel wings for some reason if they're especially devoted to Arcadius. Almost like being chosen by him.

Dasani is also a psychic and uses her telepathy to help check around Boreal for Lysander and Ariels presence, and finds nothing. And since it's a very, very cold island, that could only mean they're hiding in some dumb ass cave.

Then we cut to Lysander having a complete meltdown because he's afraid to set foot in Boreal due to Dasani's telepathy but now they have no place to sleep and all that. Ariel's a bit confused since dark mages like she and Lysander can easily learn to shield their minds, but Lysander tells her he never learnt how to do that since he's a dummy and thought it'd never come up in combat. Then he angrily blows up a tree.
Ariel's briefly caught offguard by Lysander showing any sign of vulnerability but quickly takes the chance to manipulate him by suggesting he's becoming weaker and more like Arius.

Then, she... propositions him under the guise of helping him forget some of his problems.

Well, he hits her.


"Honestly, I thought you were better than that. That's something an elf woman would do."

Ariel sobs out an apology and Volrath says she's actually genuinely upset here and not trying to manipulate Lysander... Lysander is moved though, and apologises for hitting her and tells her he appreciates her being here with him. That he doesn't think he'd have survived this long without her.

Then he suggests since Ariel DOES know how to shield her mind, she can go and murder Dasani for him.

Arius and co. track Lysander to his cave but he escapes him, but he has nowhere else left to go but Boreal, backtracking or continuing on through the border guard without rest. The party guesses Border Guard but are interrupted by Dasani sending a message asking them to come back and help her as her home is under attack.

When they make it back to Boreal, Seth and his party are already there. In fact, they seem to be the ones threatening Dasani. It seems they saw Ariel sneaking into the house and jumped to the wrong conclusion: That Dasani is working with Ariel and Lysander.

Arius and co. have to fight Seth and his party to make them back down from burning down the whole house.


While the two hero parties are fighting out the front, Ariel makes her move and when Dasani tries to engage her in debate, it's implied Ariel doesn't give a shit because she doesn't care for Gallian ideology. She's just in it for power and to be on the winning side.

The two women engage in a lengthy cutscene fight where they wind up flying through the back wall of the house.

Ariel winds up winning the fight despite being unnerved by Dasani's repeated attempts to make her give up on her selfish evil ways, and is about to finish her off when...



And then Seth's group shows up too.

Ariel tries to fight them for a moment, but then relents and flees via teleportation just in time to avoid being murdered by Seth.

Mina and Galdar have a small moment here, after the fighting's over.


That night Arius has another dream. A memory of Lysander spending time with his family, debating the merits of if going to the beach is better than sitting in front of a fire.
It's interrupted by Lysanders subordinate 'Tod' having a message to deliver.


Apparently a tree fell on their house. Volrath points out that this is a pretty odd way to handle this, but what can you do.


Anyway, Lysander manages to sneak by the Border Guard using a disguise so the pursuit is back on. And now they're finally into Gallian territory. They find a dwarf that tells them that the dwarven kingdoms finally fell a year ago. The Gallians built a huge fortress in the ruins.


Spending the night at dwarf house, Arius has another Lysander memory dream.



The importance of Erva's legacy cannot be overstated, but for now, Lysander's asking her for help. She's an extremely powerful psychic, but a reluctant one. Afraid of the scope of her powers, she refuses to use them for all but Lysander, since the two of them are very close. He asks her if Arcadius' turning away from him is the cause of his parents death, as well as a rise in anti-Gallian insurgents.

She uses her power and has a vision of two Lysanders, one killing the other. This confuses them since this is back before Lysander somehow split into two different people.


And as he goes to leave Erva's, he runs into his sister Molly. She tries to reach out to him because of the loss of their parents but he's not having any of it, and she winds up saying some anti-Gallian stuff and he hits her. Volrath is actually shocked when he sees this because he had completely forgotten he'd put it in the game and says if you hit your sister you're a real bad guy (if you're an adult), because there's not likely to ever be a good justification for it.


Arius and Nova have a heart to heart about Arius' conflicted feelings and loyalties to a family he's never met which gets rather rudely interrupted.



Ariels like super powerful and starts wrecking these two. Nova's too hurt to run, so Arius starts tanking spells for her. He does this for a pretty long while until Ariel admits he may have inherited some of Lysanders better qualities.
Ariel relates a story we already heard in Arc I of MOTW. Where a horde of angry elves stormed Gallia and Lysander fought them off. However, Ariel gives us some extra details, like Lysander stood at the gates alone and took countless hits and arrows and kept on going. That the battle probably would've been lost if not for him. She's talking about the battle that directly lead to Lysander's rise to fame.

So she offers Arius the chance to turncoat. Volrath says this is motivated by the idea that if Ariel can't have her affair with Lysander, then Arius is the next best thing.

He refuses of course, saying he'd never betray Nova, which causes Ariel to flashback to when Lysander hit her for propositioning him.

Ariel is completely taken off guard by this, bursts into tears and teleports away. Not something you see very often.

The party quickly vacates the area. Nova though, begins to doubt her own competence, and tells the party she should go home. Even the big jerk Turnus tries to tell her she's cool, but her 'weakness' in the face of Ariel has eaten away at her self-confidence.



It's not too long before she regains it after facing off alone against 'Squad Commander Felicia Stormblade' and her squad of Gallian scouts, as they try to murder an elven family.
I actually recognized the name Stormblade right away, first time I watched this VLP, since it'll also come up in Master of the Wind.

Felicia manages to get away but not before warning Nova she takes her battles very personally.

When Nova tells the party of this, they're shocked, and Arius recognizes Felicia by name, saying she was a real hotshot that impressed the Gallian nobility, but had a hard time besides that due to there being a lot of ill will towards the Stormblade family for some unknown reason. This causes Nova to remember that a Stormblade was the last Grandmaster of the ancient first knighthood before the dark knights rebellion caused it to tear itself apart.

the end