We just need to be covered in a liquid, lining Ebon Scales with absorbent cloth shouldn't require being an enchanter.
Ebon Scales is explicitly light enough and thin enough to be worn under normal clothes as an undergarment.
Absorbent material to hold water is going to absolutely change that. Never mind the weight of the water/liquid itself.
Plus it needs to not leak onto her clothes or just evaporate into thin air.
That requires magic.
They're not the juiciest targets though, and telling them solves nothing.
They are also too weak to defend themselves against anything and we can't actually changes that yet. A white court vamp could walk off with them tomorrow and there isn't anything to be done about it unless we put them in a bunker until we can convert them to demonic cyborgs or whatever.
If we had a solution to bring them in on that'd be one thing, but this doesn't actually accomplish anything.
It's a feel good illusion of progress where we get to feel nice about being honest and they get to live in mortal terror until we do what we should be trying anyway if we want to keep them around and find a way to make them less vulnerable.
They are however the most vulnerable, and thus the lowest hanging fruit for a random miscreant.
The point is to raise the nuisance level of targeting them, so that randos will go after easier prey, and targeted hitters get tripped up lomg enough for Molly or an ally to intervene.
I don't expect them to get hunted down to keep her quiet, but being interesting makes you more likely to be targeted.
It was more an illustration of that fact than anything else.
Your point about the white court plays into my broader argument though. These kids are likely to be shit.
Either they can't see through things being subtle and are therefore no more safe than they already were or they can for some edge case and they have to avoid drawing attention while managing it.
The only general advice we could give would be to avoid certain areas or activities, but that sort of stuff is baked in to a lot of stranger danger people already get. Mortals are ignorant, but they don't lack pattern recognition.
Telling them to avoid the undertown, especially at night, or whatever isn't new or helpful information
-No it doesnt. Most supernatural attackers are predators picking off vulnerable prey.
They dont hunt targets that are aware and wary. Thats how lions get their heads kicked off by giraffes.
-There are three types of mortals in play:
- There's the supernatural community. They are aware of the common dangers, they take the general and sometime specific protections. They will have the lowest routine casualty rate, because they know what to look for and what to avoid, and a nontrivial number are a danger to supernatural attackers. And predators generally go for softer, easier targets. Deaths and attacks in this community are usually targeted action.
- There's the ignorant supernatural adjacent.They live in and around or come into contact with the regular haunts and hunting grounds of supernatural threats, but know fuckall about the threat. This is where the majority of the casualties will come from.
- There's the ignorant supernatural distant.This is everyone else. They very rarely run into supernatural predators
At the moment, Izzy and Alec are Group 2: ignorant supernatural adjacent, just because of their unwitting membership of Molly's circle. They need to be converted into Group 1. That just requires knowledge, not ability.
-Avoid certain areas and places, and certain dates.
The power and value of thresholds, where to find the more powerful ones, and how to use them for vetting. The use of iron and silver, rocksalt and garlic, running water, holy water and symbols of faith. Which religious areas are safehavens. What a basic protective circle is, and how to activate one.
Where courtesy might save your life and sanity, where defiance is more appropriate, where you can get out of a jam by dropping names, and how not to unwittingly sign away your life or your children.
Knowledge is both shield and weapon in this setting.
am fairly sure that Lydia's charm raised zombies would be very different to those raised via mortal necromancy. I mean, Odin't Einherjar are also zombies. She would be using her divine right and ancestry to call someone to serve, not desecrating the natural order of things. We shall investigate first, but I wouldn't dismiss the notion out of hand.
I think its necessary to define the term.
Dresdenverse zombies are necromantically-powered, acoustically-controlled automatons with some standard default behavioral coding. They have no free will, and when not controlled by their summoner often run berserk. The older the corpse, the smarter it was, the more powerful the zombie tends to be. Thats why they are preferrably human.
Its also possible to make a zombie by spawning a body and calling up a spirit to inhabit it. Thats what Dresden did with Sue, where he reanimated her skeleton and called up an ancient predatory spirit, presumably a Trex, to inhabit the body.
They have much the same limitations as the other variety.
Lydia's zombies would still be zombies.
They will have better coding(no berserk mode), and do not require acoustic control.
But they are automatons, not the person or animal resurrected.
People will give you a pass if you're fucking with animals and golems.
Using the body of a sapient is unlikely to go down well. Divine heritage or nah.
Odin's Einherjar arent zombies. They are undead.
Odin uses Soulfire to bind the souls of his chosen into either their previous bodies or to give them new ones, not sure which.
Its the same person, they're sapient and as far as I'm aware they serve freely, and cant be controlled.
I have some disagreements with your fundamental assumptions but setting those aside to avoid getting circular, this doesn't address one of the bigger points I've been making.
If you're going to bring them in, why do so in a way that'll make them miserable? We could just fly under the radar and come back to this when we have a power up that doesn't suck to hand out with it. Instead of leaving them to stew on helplessness that we can barely do anything about for months.
Murphy's father ran SI with no powers. Charity has no powers any longer. Father Forthill never has. Hendricks and Marcone are both vanilla mortals. Karrin Murphy has no powers, and has lived with knowledge of the supernatural for more than a decade now; she ran into a troll back when she was a patrol officer, which wws when she first met Dresden.
Butters was actually temporarily committed to a mental institution for identifying Rampire bodies as nonhuman after Bianca's mansion burned down in Grave Peril, and remained a mortal for a decade after until Skin Game, despite hooking up with and actually dating two werewolves.
The judge in the Jury Duty short story knew who Dresden was, and recognized supernatural shenanigans.
Most children apparently recognize and have experience with entire species of supernatural phobophages when they are young kids below the age of majority.
A lot of mortals have some knowledge of part of the supernatural.
There is risk associated with increased knowledge of the supernatural, but thats risk thats already factored into being Molly's friends. What wee are talking about is at the level of what Dresden has advertised openly since the very start of the series.
Storm Front c1 said:
My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I'm a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I'm the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under "Wizards." Believe it or not, I'm the only one there. My ad looks like this:
HARRY DRESDEN—WIZARD
Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations.
Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates.
No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties, or Other Entertainment
You'd be surprised how many people call just to ask me if I'm serious. But then, if you'd seen the things I'd seen, if you knew half of what I knew, you'd wonder how anyone could not think I was serious.
The end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the new millennium had seen something of a renaissance in the public awareness of the paranormal. Psychics, haunts, vampires—you name it. People still didn't take them seriously, but all the things Science had promised us hadn't come to pass. Disease was still a problem. Starvation was still a problem. Violence and crime and war were still problems. In spite of the advance of technology, things just hadn't changed the way everyone had hoped and thought they would.
Just with additional show and tell.
