>>I can't see her rising through the ranks quite this swiftly...
>>
>>The Seraphim Council is really something of an Old Boy's Club, [etc.]
>
>Celestial politics don't work quite the same way in the world of
>NXE, but it's important to remember that Rachael is a very
>young angel without much of a power base. She did some impressive
>things in Apotheosis Now, but the most impressive one was only
>possible because she had three Archangels backing her up; if they
>hadn't been willing to answer her call, they wouldn't've come. She's
>not much more powerful than a starting player-character angel would be
>in In Nomine.

*grin* Sounds cool. Someday, when you have time and creativity on your hands, I'll have to ask what kind of neat trick Malakim of Light get to do.

>
>Reilael, with her newly awarded Word (and probably at least one
>distinction to follow once the paperwork is finished), would hold
>somewhere between 15 and 20 Forces at movie's end. She'd be a much
>more likely candidate to be elevated to Archangel status - and she's a
>long, long way from ever getting there.
>
I was wondering for a while now how many Forces she picked up from Moloch! If she lost a bunch (including all her Celestial Forces) at Second Impact, and Moloch gave her what he had left...hmm. Maybe she got 10 or so from him. But yeah, that's nothing like what an Archangel has.

>Mind you, all this assumes that the process follows its usual slow
>progression. The Lord has been known to do some pretty off-the-wall
>things by fiat, and I won't say I can't see Him doing something like
>elevating a random nobody angel to the Seraphim Council just to put
>the cat among the pigeons - but not without a much more solid
>background reason.

*snicker* Wasn't one of those off-the-wall things elevating Laurence?

>
>Anyway, all of this overlooks one very important fact: The Word of the
>Sword is not vacant. Laurence still exists, and is still bound to his
>Word; he's just going to be... um... out of the office for a while.

I was curious about this, too, once I read all of AN. I was comparing him to Uriel in the IN canon...Uriel was the Archangel of Purity, and Purity was never awarded another angel, either. I suspect he's in much the same boat.

>
>His absence does leave a vacancy on the Seraphim Council, but
>that will be taken care of in due time. They still have a quorum, as
>evidenced by the fact that they were able to tackle other business
>after Laurence left.

Fortunately, they're in a position to bend the bylaws should it be needed. Especially once they voted Michael in...can you see -him- tolerating being hamstrung because not enough were around?

>
>As for the army of God's soldiers on Earth, well, they did a
>bang-up job handling this crisis under centralized
>Archangel leadership, didn't they? Nowhere to be seen, and a couple
>of angels everybody thought were dead had to round up a Nephallite, a
>human experiment in celestial engineering, the Eternal, and...
>whatever Asuka is... to handle the biggest crisis to hit the War since
>the War. I think that whole system is going to be re-examined in
>detail, since its biggest flaw has just been pointed out: If the
>Archangel charged with leading the army is involved in the conspiracy,
>the army doesn't do squat about the problems the conspiracy creates.

*LAUGH!* Yeah. That's what Dominic's internal inquisition system is supposed to fix--but amusingly enough, Dominic's biggest ally among the archangels was...Laurence, thanks to their mutual desire to see humans guided through Christianity. I'm sure that hampered the Archangel of Judgment.

>
>(Speaking of Asuka, I'm a bit surprised nobody's asked what she
>is, since everybody else who ever drove an EVA seems to have something
>at least a little odd going on.)

Actually, it hadn't occurred to me that she could have been anything but human. Certainly, I was thinking 'Whoa, almost too much coincidence!' when it was clear Shinji was a Nephilim right around 3:7 or so...but I'd never seen anything to indicate Asuka was anything but human. She's a Soldier now, of course, but -did- she have anything else going for her?

"They say one should not speak unkindly of the dead, so I say, 'nice try'." --Lezard