I don't know about all of you, but my teenage years in the early 2000s was filled with me and my friends giving angel wings to all of our characters, all the time, for no particular reason except the Aesthetic™. Glowy swords, too, some of them (though that part was never really my jam—I was, am, and probably will always be a bow and/or staff gal).

Anyway turns out the writers of the D&D 5e campaign "Descent Into Avernus" had similar histories because (spoilers, I guess) on Monday our group came across a glowy magical sword that, when picked up, instantly and irrevocably transformed the wielder into an "heavenly, idealized version of yourself, blessed with otherworldly beauty" and also made their eyes "luminous pools of silver" and gave them "a beautiful pair of feathered wings." Of course, we didn't know that in advance; all we knew was that the sword was stuck in a stone on a dais, and there was an engraving on it that said "The hero who becomes one with this blade will exist no longer."

Three of the four people in our group spent forty-five minutes arguing back and forth about who should be the idiotic, self-sacrificing loon to off themselves to get this sword that we were told was pivitol to our goal of saving a bunch of folks who had been dragged down to hell against their will. The tank insisted it should be him, because he always puts himself in danger to protect others. The healer insisted it should be her, because she was an aasimar and maybe it wouldn't affect her as badly (because she's resistant to radiant damage I guess? I'm still unclear on whether this was Amara or her player making that particular argument, lol). The DPS insisted it should be him because the party needed both their defender and their healer, and "the guy who shoots arrows into things and makes them die" was the most expendable/replacable option. I think the implication from all three of us was also that we didn't want to see our friends disappear so we would rather be the one doing the disappearing, but despite it being a very RP-heavy moment, the group is not very RP-inclined, so it was a little hard to tell what was in-character and what was out-of-character during the whole thing. Our tiefling was mostly eating popcorn on the side (though at one point he typed in chat that he was just gonna steal the sword while we were arguing, but nobody actually took him seriously at the time—I didn't even see the message I was so heated about our argument in voice chat—so oops.)

Eventually Alexus (my character, the half-elf archer) suggested that we were getting nowhere and that we should draw straws, because we were also wasting time and people were dying while we argued which of us was the most idiotic and/or expendable. I rolled a natural 20 on my Sleight of Hand check to rig the game, which I mean... a crit at a pivitol narrative moment is chef's kiss, but on the flip side there really wasn't anything the other two could do to combat it so I do feel kinda bad in hindsight, lmao.

Anyway I needed to draw my boy a new character portrait (and probably a new token for the roll20 virtual tabletop at some point too, hhhgh) but then I had the idea for this image pop into my head straight from all that early 2000s Angel stuff and I had to roll with it at that point. So: what might have been, had each member of the party been the one to draw the sword. Gotta say, Nicodemis swapping from (probably) chaotic neutral/evil to lawful good would have been hilarious, but I'm not sure if his player would have been too happy with that; my dude swapping from Neutral Good (leaning Lawful) to Lawful Good is a lot less of a stretch, which might actually be harder to RP in the little bits of RP we do because how am I gonna make it clear that Things Have Changed? 🤔

Anyway I'm getting better with actually making color dodge layers work for me, which is very exciting. Glowy stuff is hard.