Archers at the Ready

Question: In the myth of Arjuna on Agni's page, Arjuna and Krishna "battle Indra to a standstill" while Agni is burning down the forest to regain his strength. Do you think in Scion's mechanical system it's even possible for a Demigod and a Probably-Demigod-Level Avatar of Vishnu to fight a Legend 12 God on even footing? (Even in possession of a powerful relic?)

Man, it's a Hindu mythology extravaganza around here these days.

Mechanically, it's doubtful; even with Gandiva, Arjuna is probably not sufficiently badass to take on Indra for even a short period of time, and you're right that Krishna is probably not powerful enough as an Avatar at this time to add sufficient bolstering. Having seen what happens when demigods try to take on Legend 12 gods, it's very clear that Indra could easily have wiped the floor with them.

I suspect the reason he didn't doesn't have to do with their power levels, but rather with political expediency and Indra's generally shitty situation when it comes to the Trimurti. While Indra has no issue with raining all over Agni on his own - after all, Agni's his brother and that's the kind of shit divine brothers do to one another, plus his buddy Takshaka was hanging out there - things change considerably when Arjuna and Krishna get involved.

For one thing, Krishna is the avatar of Vishnu, and Indra probably knows better by this point than to try to electrocute a member of the Trimurti; it's pantheon-politics suicide, and possibly literal suicide if Vishnu and his friends decide to be offended about it. Krishna also makes a point of busting out the Sudarshana Chakra, which is Hindu religious code for "horrible serrated decapitation murderdisk", one of Vishnu's most famous weapons, as if to drive this point home. None of this is really encouraging Indra to give it his all when it comes to smiting the guy, snake-friend or no snake-friend.

Then there's also the fact that Arjuna is actually his son and his own Scion. He probably doesn't want to murder him over this (although with Indra's temper, you can never quite tell), which would be a pretty colossal waste of resources, not to mention that one assumes he's probably vaguely fond of the kid. When your son starts attacking you, apparently because he's siding with his uncle on some subject or other, you really don't have a lot of options that don't end in heartbreak and recriminations from everyone else (plus, there's still that ugly spectre of what happened to him the last time he killed someone in battle hanging over him, and he had the Trimurti's support on that one). It's actually pretty clear that he wasn't going to kill Arjuna, and that his son can't really resist him in terms of power - when Arjuna's about to kill Takshaka's escaping son, Indra pretty much just knocks him unconscious and doesn't let him back up until the snake's out of his range.

So in the case of this particular story, it's not really that it's in any way realistic for a couple of Legend 6 dudes to try to take on Indra of the mighty thunderbolt, but rather that Indra of the mighty thunderbolt is also mightily hampered by a lot of considerations that prevent him from really unleashing his fury the way he probably normally would have. You know how it is; it's all fine to go beating up punks that look at you funny, but when it's your son and your kinda-boss giving you the mutual finger, you're not really sure what to do about it other than get pissed off and yell a lot. Indra just happens to yell with thunderbolts. (And then, because he's Indra and he appreciates a good beatdown, applauds when he calms down.)

(This would also explain how these two guys, moments later, somehow managed to run off basically all the Devas and Yazata combined. It's one of the most hilariously gigantic instances of everybody pretending to lose just to avoid problems ever to appear in an epic.)

An alternative explanation might be that Arjuna and Krishna have Fate backing them in this endeavor, meaning that Indra and company are probably operating under hefty anti-Fate negatives while the two archers are being buffed far beyond what they might normally be able to accomplish. It is declared to Indra that the forest's destruction has been foreordained by Fate and that no one will be able to defeat its protectors, and if that's true this isn't a case of Arjuna and Krishna beating the massed might of an entire pantheon; it's just a case of Fate using them as convenient tools, and Fate beating the massed might of an entire pantheon. Which is kind of what Fate does.

But my money is on everybody realizing that killing these kids off would be a nuclearly bad political move, and thus deciding to just make it look good so everyone could save face and then go home.