Asena

First appearance: S2E2 — Prize Fight — Asena v Ralzamon · watch it on YouTube

Asena is a cheerful, forgetful, punch-first adventurer from another world who became the first champion crowned in the second season of D20 Deathmatch. She beat her long-time nemesis Ralzamon in the kitchen of The Dread Fortress with spilled milk, spectral dragon wings and a pair of alien snake arms. Later she returned to The Void on purpose, chasing him across it with her partner John Carmichael. She fought alongside the resistance against The Arbiter, and in the end she let her nemesis fall into the dark rather than finish him.

Story

Prize Fight

Asena arrived through the Arbiter’s portal, used to portal travel, and called the trip “pretty lovely.” In her home dimension of Northport she fights as a pugilist with dragon heritage. For this arena she chose to lean into that heritage and become “a version of myself that is just more epic and more dragon-y.” She greeted her opponent as “Ralzypoo” and told the Grandmaster to say it to his face, because “He loves it.” The Grandmaster said she was keeping her eye on her. Ralzamon, the ghostly “master of the unknown,” declared that her energy corrupted every world it touched and swore this would be their last clash. Asena, who admitted she had never really understood his “whole shtick,” suggested “Ralzy Poo lies here” for his tombstone.

The arena was the Dread Fortress kitchen, and the food fight began before the fists did. When The Acolytes pelted the room with everything from pickles to burning snowmen, Asena simply ate the barrage and took half the damage. She refused only the raccoon, because “raccoons are sacred animals.” A friend had told her about The Matrix, so she downed the red vial without a second thought and went into “bullet time.” Then she karate-chopped a jar of milk onto the floor as a threat. It turned out to be the right threat: Ralzamon is lactose intolerant. Her frightful dragon aura rose around her feet as a swirl of milk. When he levitated out of reach, she sprouted spectral draconic wings, flew up, and sent his teeth flying with a perfect punch to the jaw.

Ralzamon struck back with fire and psychic terror and sealed her inside a mental prison full of ninjas and slimes. While she was trapped, the silver saucer hovering in the opened ceiling sent down its beam. Asena had learned about aliens that very morning in another dimension, thought they sounded cool, and let herself be beamed up willingly. She came back with snake arms, each with its own brain. That extra thinking helped her break out of the prison. She hopped over the clock he pulled down to block her, yelled “Boop!” and bit into him until, as the Grandmaster put it, he looked like “a vampire saw you as a snack.” She finished him with a Flurry of Blows. As he lay dying, Ralzamon called her “the harbinger of elder evil” and promised, “Death is but a door, time is but a window. I’ll be back.”

Asena said she didn’t think she was evil, though maybe an evil dragon, because she didn’t “really know much about my past.” The Grandmaster told her not to let the labels stick: “You will get to decide how this power of dragon comes to you.” The Grandmaster then turned her arms back to normal. Asena said “I like having fingers again” and asked for some of the mead. She was raised before the crowd as “our queen of the fight,” with drinks on the Dread Fortress. Behind the scenes, the Arbiter dragged Ralzamon down the kitchen well and quietly revived him as a general “for the days to come.”

Fate of the Faithful

Champions usually go home without their memories, and Asena kept hers only as dreams that John never believed. In the world of Yord, she and John had Ralzamon on the brink of defeat when a hand reached through a rift and dragged him away. They leapt in after him with the scholar Lawrence Booker Green and landed in Prexmarin, the Hanging City. Asena ran straight into a market brawl and asked the thugs whether they had seen Ralzamon. Every one of them turned on her. She fought through them with silver-glowing fists, a double-barrel shotgun and a planar slip from her amulet. She also caught their leader lying when he claimed to serve the Grandmaster. When the werebear Lyrus mentioned the Grandmaster, the memories came back: crowds chanting her name, and a fight against Ralzamon in the arena. Lyrus confirmed it had been “one of the greatest battles in the Kitchen of the Dread Fortress.” He also explained that the Arbiter was plotting a coup, using Ralzamon as his general. Asena’s verdict: “Why would he do that? I liked that lady.”

“I don’t have a good imagination, John. Of course they’re real.” — Asena, on her “dreams” of the arena

At the Faithful’s blacksmith-shop hideout, she happily ate Frank’s boot stew, sparred with a shirtless Lyrus using her smart laser, and was told by The Seer that he sensed a dragon nature in her “not from this plane.” Through a shared vision she watched the Arbiter fuse Ralzamon’s dying spirit with a resurrected Josiah Parsons, then saw the new Ralzamon turn and look straight at her. On the hunt for the spy Kenny, the inventor Circe shrank her to the size of a house cat. Tiny Asena still cursed Circe with a spell tattoo and later robbed a treasury with her slime companion Slakura acting as a key. A can of spinach restored her, and an extra ray made her enormous. Among the loot she grabbed a drawing of “a dead purple rock land man,” which turned out to be a map of The Tumult. In the Tumult her touch opened the giant plant that held the silver ewer the party had come to steal.

Before the jump into The Shadowlands, she gave Lawrence her blood as a divination anchor, so he could find her if she got hurt, cutting her palm “like they do in the movies.” In the Shadowlands she saw a vision of Josiah Parsons at the gate. She dropped onto a mercenary from above like a squirrel and pounded him until he walked off a ledge and splattered on the ground below. In the final battle her amulet unlocked a new power to step through space. John threw her at Ralzamon, and she cursed him “directly in the face.” Once John shattered the psychic visage, she held the broken Josiah Parsons by the throat over a pit. He begged her to let him die alone and keep their world, Yord, out of his master’s sight. He told her that things he had seen were “far worse than anything you might be.” She let go, and he fell. The thing in the pit stirred and reminded her of the ancient hungry dead she had been brought before as a little girl in the tomb of Sennepolker. Asena wisely suggested nobody look down there. On the escape, her overcharged laser brought a tower down on a mecha.

Back at the hideout she reported that they had “killed half of Ralzamon” and admitted to the Seer that she would miss him. Lawrence used a torn collar from Josiah’s expedition shirt, which Slakura had been carrying, to open a way out of the Void. Asena was pulled home by her own memories to Yord, to the Crystalline Cavern where she and John had been about to defeat Ralzamon. In his ice throne room, the Arbiter glimpsed the departing face of a champion he had once chosen himself.

Personality and Abilities

Asena is blunt, brave and gloriously incautious: “I’m not really that cautious.” She skips the checks and takes the shot. Her own stated flaw is “I have no patience for sitting around or the vagaries of society. I prefer direct action wherever possible.” She forgets things easily, “the next day, everything just kind of goes away,” and cheerfully calls herself “pretty dumb.” She has a cast-iron stomach, considers raccoons sacred, and cares so little for gold that she once spent it on hot dogs. She also spent a fistful of it buying a boy’s finest wooden spoon, which she kept. She rarely calls Ralzamon by name. “Ralzypoo” and its variants stick.

She fights as a fast martial artist with dragon blood. She runs up walls, falls slowly, punches with fists of silver misty light, binds foes in astral chains, and drains life with banshee-like “wails from the grave.” Her dragon side shows as spectral wings and a terrifying frightful presence. She can open telepathic links in other people’s heads (“if there’s anyone in your head in the future, it’s probably me”). She can draw visions from the dead, and she has a feel for portals and planes that set even one of Lyrus’s void portals unraveling. Her gear includes the Fang of Goltharius, an amulet of planar slips, soul-ripping and astral wings that later lets her step through space once a day. She also carries a double-barrel shotgun, a ray gun, and a smart laser she stole from an airplane, which leaked radiation and eventually blew its whole power core. She wears a crown taken from Santa Polka’s tomb during a dreamscape that was “also like really there.” She carries a photograph of her family’s ill-fated jungle expedition, the one that cost Josiah Parsons his life and changed hers.

Relationships

• Ralzamon: her nemesis, alias of Josiah Parsons, who believed she was an abomination. She beat him in the arena and spared him at the end, and she will “miss Ralseypoo.”
• John Carmichael: her partner across worlds, who “usually does the talking” and never believed her dreams until they proved true.
• Lyrus: the Faithful werebear who brought her back to the arena memories. She opened a telepathic link into his head.
• Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: crowned her “queen of the fight” and told her to decide for herself what her dragon power means. Asena liked her.
• The Arbiter: opened the portal that brought her to the arena, then kept and remade her beaten foe for his coup.
• Circe: shrank her, then grew her; “I hate her.”
• Slakura: her bouncing, flower-scented slime companion and occasional key.
• The Seer: sensed her otherworldly dragon nature and admired her laser. “I like him.”
• Lawrence Booker Green: the scholar who took her blood as an anchor and brought her home.
• Kenny: the goblin spy she rescued and startled with a voice inside his “steel trap” brain.

Memorable Quotes

• “I break a lot of things, including people’s faces.” (S2E2 — Prize Fight — Asena v Ralzamon)
• “Take that, now you can’t have any milk.” (S2E2 — Prize Fight — Asena v Ralzamon)
• “Oh, I’m Asena. That’s John. He usually does the talking because I get us into trouble.” (Coriander Society, Fate of the Faithful Part 1 (A Crossover))
• “Well, know that if there’s anyone in your head in the future, it’s probably me.” (Coriander Society - Fate of The Faithful Part 3 — A Crossover)
• “So you don’t think I’m the downfall of Yord anymore?” (Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 5 (A Crossover))
• “I will miss Ralseypoo.” (Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 5 (A Crossover))

Appearances

• Coriander Society, Fate of the Faithful Part 1 (A Crossover)
• Coriander Society - Fate of the Faithful Part 2 (A Crossover)
• Coriander Society - Fate of The Faithful Part 3 — A Crossover
• Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 4 (A Crossover)
• Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 5 (A Crossover)
• S2E2 — Prize Fight — Asena v Ralzamon