[X] uju32
@uju32
I'd suggest integrating a prayer into the stunt, as Molly 'is' a devote Christian, though not to her father's level. Even a simple plea for help to herself.
Before combat yes. Right now, I dont think she has the same sense of impending mortality.
So what exactly is the follow up here?
We run away and pick up Lydia, trying to stay ahead of Kat.
My preferred followup?
Would be to find Lydia, get both Cindy and her to an exit point, and call Hendricks for a pickup, or even a mundane taxi.
Thats why I included the attempt to have Bunny send updates to Hendricks phone.
If Holt is pursuing along our trail, we hand off to Hendricks and lay ambush around the exit.
Have her come to us and have the fight underground with no witnesses.
And Gard can dispose of the body and/or prisoner.
If she goes back to her car to pursue Cindy's trail, we have Hendricks divert to somewhere without at-risk civilians.
The Ankou's rented estate(it had a driveway, its an estate) might be enough out of the way that we can cut loose, and it does have to have defenses for civilians like his daughter.
If she gives it up as a bad gig and goes back to her base, we use Black Rider to track her down and hit her there.
Necromantic ritual is unlikely to be in the middle of a high traffic area.
Not on a Saturday.
Gard is still a Valkyrie, and has death vision, Kat was kicked out of the office.
Having seer powers doesn't mean she got an entire new form of intellectus. Being flexible doesn't mean she can run powerful divinations from the side of the road.
Getting cliff notes for what's going to happen next week by augury is plenty powerful to name one example.
Betraying your sisters and no longer working for Odin does not imply losing the powers you acquired as a Valkyrie.
If that was how it worked, Kattrin's entire plan with the Ankou would be doomed to failure because Mab would be able to simply lolno any such unauthorized power transfer. Or rescind it.
The fact that she's here, now, trying to nom the Ankou suggests she has experience that she has good reason to believe it cant simply be taken away.
The point about her being a seer is that there's a good chance she has already run that augury.
And nothing that has happened so far has been out of the expected, because Molly's activities havent directly impinged on them.
So if she expects someone to be somewhere and we dont interfere, they'll probably be there.
You're mixing up applications.
She kidnaps people by warping their perceptions, but that doesn't actually stop time. Hitting things while frozen breaks them out, even if it's just an object doing it. Which is why buzzers counter the ability.
It's magic but it's not a charm. That spell lets her freeze time, not selectively play with her physical reference frame. That would be a very different power with very different combat implications that Gard would have mentioned.
As far as I can see, she can't just selectively halt parts of how something interacts with the world. Either it's frozen in time or it isn't. If she didn't freeze herself then she's still subject to regular physics.
If she does freeze herself, then when she unfreezes she's back to doing what she was before. In this case moving 90mph in the direction of traffic.
Hitting people timelocked by Holt breaks them out.
We have no idea about objects, or how it affects Kattrin herself.
Kidnapping people in broad daylight requires that you warp time in an area, else you might well have
There is no way to grab a teenager off the street without touching them and by your explanation breaking any time magic.
Yet here Cindy seems oblivious about how she got here.
Gard's information on Kattrin is based on combat observation and what Odin's spy network picked up.
Odin's good, but he isnt perfect; Gard says upfront that they lost track of Holt in the late 1980s.
I have been using it as a baseline, not a hard cap.
This is not cold blooded murder. It's preemptive defense of self and others against a 1,000+ year old supernatural monster that has performed multiple Human sacrifices, participated in who knows how many murders and other atrocities, is among the leaders of a faction of Nazi warlocks, and kidnapped a child to blackmail her grandfather into participating in what appears to be yet another sacrificial ritual, one intended to make her an even bigger monster, if a pretty one.
If trying to pull off a long-range kill against the deadly sorceress who can manipulate time to her will and is even now coming here to re-kidnap Cindy is what causes Michael to forsake us, then it's better we go ahead and get that out of the way now.
There's no such thing as preemptive defense in any legal framework Im aware of.
If you lie in wait for John Wayne Gacy and attempt to kill him out of hand, thats still cold blooded premeditated murder even though he is a serial killer. You might have an argument to justification, but it doesnt change what it is.
Furthermore, its worth paying attention to the caliber of people we're playing with.
Dresden did not execute Quintus Cassius out of hand in Death Masks, despite the dude being a Denarian dating back to the Roman Empire, who had been involved in the torture-murders of Father Vincent and Shiro, had tried to kill him personally via entropy curse, and was trying to instigate a magic pandemic. Only when the dude came back in Dead Beat and repeatedly tried to kill him.
And Michael is a lot more forgiving than Dresden.
We're talking about the guy who offered forgiveness to Nicodemus, the instigator of the Black Plague. Torture-murderer of Shiro. Who tried to hit his son with the Lasciel coin. And he tried to offer him redemption after Nicky sacrificed his only daughter Deirdre to acquire access to the vault with the Holy Grail.
Remember who our Mentor 5 is.
Crashing it now helps us actually escape; we can't just walk out of here because of the cops at the tattoo parlor, so we need to explore the area and find a way out, then work from there. Stopping to hunt down Lydia would take even longer, especially since just getting to her isn't the same as dealing with whatever she's go going on and leaving with her.
Crashing it mid trip serves that purpose and helps boost us in the next few things we probably want to pursue.
I also don't expect her to just walk this off and get in a cab. This is a huge public mess for her that needs handling, even discounting what should be some very serious injuries.
Just getting to where we are from where she is, will take Holt 75 minutes; 45 minutes by car, and 30 minutes by foot.
And then she'd have to follow us further on.
We're on a timer, but it isnt critical yet.
No it doesnt. Mundane people regularly flee the scene of automobile accidents.
If she's on a timer, she can walk away and call a lawyer to handle the legal case. Or use magic to destroy the case documents so a legal case cant be made. Or just vanish and change identities if its too burdensome. Demigodlike power >>> mundane legal case.
And in my opinion, you are vastly underestimating the sheer resilience available to someone supposed to be a peer to Namshiel.
I mean, just looking at canon feats? Dresden had that whole belt buckle thing for storing energy in Blood Rites.
The Alphas have limited regeneration, and whatsherface, Kumori from Dead Beat, could straight up suspend a dude's death.
In this quest, right now, we've seen Gorfels demonstrate combat-time regen.
Nevermind any time tricks Holt has up her sleeve, or any additional runes on that jacket; few magic users show everything, and Gard attests that Monoc's information on Holt is seventeen years out of date.
Thats a little shorter than the time gap between Storm Front Dresden and Battlegrounds Dresden.
