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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/