Could be that they're twitchy enough to have magical sensing equipment/wards up in their local place of power that detected us. I don't want to overestimate how "loud" we are, but it seems like it could be a factor.
Something like that makes more sense to me than a stakeout of these locations, because they aren't that interesting. It's a waste of manpower to stick people on them in most cases. Molly may need to learn to suck in her supernatural gut so to speak. Heaven help the person who needs to explain that to a 17 year old infernal.
It's either that, or Micheal is under subtle watch by everyone who matters and they tracked us from the moment we left town. But that doesn't seem like the kind of thing the white god would let us walk into blind.
1)Possible but unlikely.
They dont have that much magical muscle to spare, and not enough to risk it in the heart of the US during an active war with the White Council and its allies.
2)Thralls are cheap and disposable; you can literally grab people off the street, dump some Rampire spit in their drinks, condition them for a week and you have a bunch of operatives 90% of the time.
Mass produced tech like surveillance cameras you can buy off the shelf.
Magical talent and magical hardware? Much less so. Let alone skilled operatives.
3)I agree that White God shenanigans makes it unlikely for sustained surveillamce of Michael's movements to work.
Yeah. My bet is that the original group choked in the 50s, and that the red court swooped in to pick up the pieces, which is why this wasn't a problem till now.
Doubt it.
Setting up a nursing home and relying on subtle blandishments and undepricing the competition is not a Rampire thing, when they can just send a vampire round the homes with hypnosis bullshit.
Plus, the Finnish name naming suggests other powers in play.
My bet is that we're looking at a three way. At least.
The original group is back for a repeat, the Rampires got wind and are horning in for a takeover as upstart interlopers, and us as the third party coming in with a steel chair.
Bring it. Even discounting Lydia, we've got a knight of the cross with us against people with a type weakness to faith. We might as well be watching a Superman vs. the incredible kryptonite cyborg cage match. We already shredded a powerful red hit squad, I think it's unlikely that something stronger than they sent for Ebenezer of all people is waiting around in Cleveland.
An ambush team optimized to hit Ebenezer along the Ways with Outsider support?
Is very much not the same as one optimized to operate in reality.
Given as we dont know who they are working with here, I would caution about this.
You've got a point about being on the same page, but I still don't feel threatened here.
I don't want to get high on our own supply, but we're not Harry and this guy is not Mab. Our skill set isn't the same as his, and the set up here isn't arranged in a way that forces us to forgo our most effective options. Further, I'm not convinced that time is on our side here.
Not in the sense that there's a doomsday clock running (though there probably is something if a knight is needed), but in that they benefit from prep time more than we do now that they know we're in town.
Smashing their face in, using the crown to get everything we can out of this guy, and making a full court press before they can adjust might be the ticket here.
For all our advantages, giving them the space to get tricky in isn't good for us.
-Killing a Rampire spy does not actually resolve our issues.
Satisfying as it might be.
-We dont know how long they have been prepping for whatever they are doing here. Or who or what their allies might be.
I do not agree they benefit from preptime more than we do, especially since one of our goals is minimizing civilian casualties.
Hard to do so when you havent delineated the dimensions of the problem.
-I dont agree.
If this was simple, the White God wouldnt have sent a Knight of the Cross; a reporter would have started poking around the nursing home or something similar. There are always more complications than a quick bit of homicide would resolve.
-The Crown has limited uses per focus item or person.
Killing someone off immediately limits the amount of information we can get off the person.
Red Vampire; he literally lives on murder. When they change being sadistic assholes gets burned into the place they used to keep a soul. It's possible that he's the Drizzt of reds, but that sort of thing is significantly rarer for them than it is for white vampires. I can't recall it even being something considered by anyone in the books.
Full wizards can be forcibly changed, and be messily murdering their friends and family within the week.
Point of correction:
They are
turned by murder. They can, and do, feed without killing their victims if they care to; Bianca's Court sported multiple examples iirc. But.
-Their control is often a lot more fragile than that of a Whampire.
-They are vulnerable to blood addiction, where they just lack any control
-And culturally, they just dont care as much about having to hide deaths.
There's a vampire spectrum with Whampires on one end, Rampires in the middle, and Blampires on the other.
Citation:
Word of Jim said:
Q:Are all red courts and black court vampires evil?
This is a pretty huge question and depends a lot on how you view the world.
Red Court vampires, by definition, to become a vampire, have to murder someone else to become what they are. They have to end another person's life to satisfy a desire that does not /need/ to be satisfied in order for them to continue living. Every single one of them makes a choice to sate that desire rather than allow another human being to live–the Fellowship of St. Giles proves that.
(Of course, there are shades of grey involved–a half-vampire who was kept starving and without water in a basement for three days before they were thrown a mortal has a much more difficult time making a clear-headed choice than a half-vampire who was restrained yet cared for by a group of religiously fanatic monks at a Fellowship stronghold, but there's still a choice being made.)
That could, by some people, be considered a working definition of evil. Sometimes unfortunate, sometimes understandable as to how someone could make that choice, but evil nonetheless.
Black Court Vamps are a different story. They're actually tainted by something hideous and unworldly. They are driven to kill to survive. They don't really have a lot of choice about it. They enjoy being what they are, and doing what they do. They can be sad that they don't have someone who loves them, or upset that the world has passed them by and has changed on them, but at the end of the day, they're basically black-hearts who occasionally pull out a few of the tattered remains of their humanity, fail to fit back into them like they used to, and get maudlin about their glory days when they could watch the sun rise
Blampires are driven to kill to survive. Rampires, by implication, arent.
Its worth remembering that Michael went to the Red Court Ball in Grave Peril.
He does not like what Rampires are, and the Knights of the Cross are not Unseelie Accord signatories, but he didnt kill them on sight, and his vocation does not prevent him from diplomacy with them, provided they are not in active contravention of his avowed principles.
