Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

As an aside, it's kind of funny that her name means 'not a rabbit', but we've shortened it to 'rabbit'.
One of said vampires practically jumps out of his skin when the cat turns into a woman.

"Calm the hell down Jack, it's a cat not a bloody wolf," another of his companions laughs. Had your new allies gotten into trouble with the Alphas, you wonder.
To be fair, they live next door to some very unpleasant magical cats that probably got up to some shit with the ghouls when they were still the red dogs. Tuzi isn't the same, but I can see it being close enough to make someone reflexively flinch.

Not related, but when we're through this we should really make the time to produce some mirror armor and good weapons for them. They need time to train, and our mooks are a little squishy right now for my taste.

We should also make a note to figure something out about warding their place so that they don't need to use lights and mirrors for a security system.

Lydia might actually be the best choice for that. We don't exactly have a threshold to work with, but ghost warding glyph should still work and would provide some protection if she gets it.

That plus some golems set to patrol the place would be decent.

"Or to set your eyes forward to the age to come," you counter with quiet conviction.
Saying that kind of shit while radiating demon power is the sort of thing that makes elderly religious figures nervous Molly. :V

One advantage of your new state is that the detective does not hear you when you giggle at the muttered. "Shesh... I thought Dresden was bad."
She really had no idea; the hijinks are endless. Personally I'm looking forward to silly stuff like hiding in a pendant so that our allies can sneak us into places.

Better, once we have SBS we could technically murder someone without leaving RVD.

So we could smite people from inside our pokeball, or kill anyone we wanted within line of sight of a major body of water.
[] His apartment using Little Chicago (Safer, but guarantees giving away his identity if caught)
I think he's better off with this honestly. We're not talking about a cakewalk working here, getting interrupted would be nasty.

Plus it's unlikely he would stay out of it if we really get in trouble, so long term the potential revenge issue is pretty much the same.
 
Do we have the essence or a focus to be able to ask a question about details of the ritual that Dresden may be able to leverage to overcome it?
 
@DragonParadox is Harry doing this alone, or are we helping him?

I think Harry has to do this alone. We need to hit them the moment their ritual collapses to maximise the advantage of surprise. We may well have lost strategic surprise by evacuating Tzuzi, so we need to have tactical surprise.

We've already probably messed up very badly as we probably can't contact the traitor Wan Kuei any more (as they'll be asleep, being lower Dharma Yin aspected vampires), so we won't have traitors backstabbing the Will at a critical moment.

As I've said before, elder Wan Kuei are incredibly dangerous with prep time.
 
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There is no good reason for Harry not to do this from the safety of his heavily warded apartment. He's the Warden Commander for the region and a very well known figure in the local supernatural community, and he regularly sticks his blasting rod in what various creatures think is their business.

Trying to obfuscate his involvement in the ley line tinkering is all but futile. If someone sensed the manipulation and attempts to investigate, Harry would be the prime suspect anyway. Better that he's behind his magical defenses if they come knocking.
 
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Having Harry go to either the place where we know the big bad is living or the park that's explicitly a trap for us seems like a really bad idea. He has wards for a reason.
 
I think Harry has to do this alone. We need to hit them the moment their ritual collapses to maximise the advantage of surprise. We may well have lost strategic surprise by evacuating Tzuzi, so we need to have tactical surprise.

We've already probably messed up very badly as we probably can't contact the traitor Wan Kuei any more (as they'll be asleep, being lower Dharma Yin aspected vampires), so we won't have traitors backstabbing the Will at a critical moment.

As I've said before, elder Wan Kuei are incredibly dangerous with prep time.
Depends on how serious we are about it. Eiko is bunking alone, if she's the traitor getting to her while everyone else is asleep might work.

Tuzi could have been timed better, but there was risk in letting her walk away and potentially get flipped twice. We should take the time to get a list of exactly what she told the Akuma if we can.
 
Thinking of other ways to help, could we get Harry to draft the counter-ritual he's planning to use on paper and use the Crown to find any flaws?

Might count as a magical secret as well, and we're in a new scene.

Depends on how serious we are about it. Eiko is bunking alone, if she's the traitor getting to her while everyone else is asleep might work.

Tuzi could have been timed better, but there was risk in letting her walk away and potentially get flipped twice. We should take the time to get a list of exactly what she told the Akuma if we can.

There's a good chance Eiko is also asleep, as she appears to be Yin aspected. She'll almost certainly have the wards to bring her instantly to full wakefulness if there's an intrusion, but staying up during daylight hours is hard for Yin aspected Wan Kuei. Unless there's a good reason for her not to be and to push through, she's probably in torpor waiting for the sun to set.

Also, even if she is the lead traitor she can't contact any others she's recruited to coordinate the backstab or to stay awake to sneak us in.

It seems very likely we've lost the chance to work with the potential defectors, and now need to fight them all head on.
 
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@DragonParadox does Harry have anything other than Little Chicago we could use as a focus for "how do you hide manipulating the leylines with mortal magic" question? Books on the geomancy, a map of local leylines that's not Little Chicago, etc.
 
There's a good chance Eiko is also asleep, as she appears to be Yin aspected. She'll almost certainly have the wards to bring her instantly to full wakefulness if there's an intrusion, but staying up during daylight hours is hard for Yin aspected Wan Kuei. Unless there's a good reason for her not to be and to push through, she's probably in torpor waiting for the sun to set.
If we want her to talk to use we want her awake anyway. The trick would be timing it so we don't screw ourselves over, and the potential issues of her having other people keyed to her defenses.

If Eiko is smart she'll have made sure any such minions are as loyal to her as possible, but we can't necessarily bank on that. It's always possible that she screwed up, or the greater Akuma is paranoid enough that "as loyal as possible" isn't that loyal at all.
 
If we want her to talk to use we want her awake anyway. The trick would be timing it so we don't screw ourselves over, and the potential issues of her having other people keyed to her defenses.

If Eiko is smart she'll have made sure any such minions are as loyal to her as possible, but we can't necessarily bank on that. It's always possible that she screwed up, or the greater Akuma is paranoid enough that "as loyal as possible" isn't that loyal at all.

The issue is that she's probably now asleep, so we've lost our chance to talk to her as the next time she'll be awake is when the wards wake her up as we're attacking the steelworks, and we won't have time to negotiate a deal and persuade them to deal with us rather than J after he's inherited our Exaltation.

I think we've squandered the opportunity to make a deal with the potential defectors. We needed to make contact before they went into torpor at dawn and we chose not to.

No, a map would not be a good enough representation, there is a reason he made the thing.

Would a written description of Dresden's proposed counter-ritual be enough to get something useful to improve it?
 
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The issue is that she's probably now asleep, so we've lost our chance to talk to her as the next time she'll be awake is when the wards wake her up as we're attacking the steelworks, and we won't have time to negotiate a deal and persuade them to deal with us rather than J after he's inherited our Exaltation.

I think we've squandered the opportunity to make a deal with the potential defectors. We needed to make contact before they went into torpor at dawn and we chose not to.
My point was that we could wake her up in advance of that, or tweak our timeline a little if we need to. Still, you've got a point about the potential length of negotiations.

Really, given the timeframe here even if we'd voted to talk before they went to sleep we might not have made any progress.
 
My point was that we could wake her up in advance of that, or tweak our timeline a little if we need to. Still, you've got a point about the potential length of negotiations.

Really, given the timeframe here even if we'd voted to talk before they went to sleep we might not have made any progress.

We basically can't wake her up remotely once she's gone to sleep, as a vampire's sleep is pretty close to being dead. It's hard for them to wake from it; which is why sensible vampires have various forms of magic to force them awake when intrusions into their lairs are detected, which is presumably what they're using.

And even with the time limitations, backed by Crown questions we should have had a good chance of cutting a deal as they wanted to escape anyway. That option is now pretty conclusively closed.

The crown cannot improve successes it cannot make the caster more skilled... but much like the soulgaze you could ask a specific question about it which might lead to improvement on his part. That would be your one question on Chicago Dragonlines though.

I wanted to ask about flaws in the proposed counter-ritual, rather than the dragon lines themselves. Harry could then patch those gaps.
 
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[x] His apartment using Little Chicago (Safer, but guarantees giving away his identity if caught)

No reason not to do it here, he is suspect number 1 no matter what. Making a note to spend an AP on improving Little Chicago next month.
 
There's a good chance Eiko is also asleep, as she appears to be Yin aspected. She'll almost certainly have the wards to bring her instantly to full wakefulness if there's an intrusion, but staying up during daylight hours is hard for Yin aspected Wan Kuei. Unless there's a good reason for her not to be and to push through, she's probably in torpor waiting for the sun to set.
Not Yin-Imbalanced at least, since she appears human enough, instead of corpse-like.

Could be running on either Chi on any given day.
 
We basically can't wake her up remotely once she's gone to sleep, as a vampire's sleep is pretty close to being dead. It's hard for them to wake from it; which is why sensible vampires have various forms of magic to force them awake when intrusions into their lairs are detected, which is presumably what they're using.
Wan Kuei also have low-level Ritual to awake them in case a threshold is breached.

It would indeed be crazy not to use that, particularly since the must know by now that we know about the hotel.
 
Not Yin-Imbalanced at least, since she appears human enough, instead of corpse-like.

Could be running on either Chi on any given day.

Yin aligned rather than permanently Yin imbalanced.

She may well, as she's an akuma of Emma-O, have the Eternal Cherry Blossoms merit, which means that being permanently Yin imbalanced doesn't change her appearance, as Emma-O targets female Wan Kuei with that merit for recruitment.

Wan Kuei also have low-level Ritual to awake them in case a threshold is breached.

It would indeed be crazy not to use that, particularly since the must know by now that we know about the hotel.

I'm sure she's using that ritual, it's the magic I said would wake her in response to intrusion. However, by the time we're intruding it will be too late, as by that point we'll be in combat with the akuma.

We needed to contact them in advance of the assault to negotiate for them to backstab the Will in the middle of it and work with us to defect afterwards.
 
Yin aligned rather than permanently Yin imbalanced.

She may well, as she's an akuma of Emma-O, have the Eternal Cherry Blossoms merit, which means that being permanently Yin imbalanced doesn't change her appearance, as Emma-O targets female Wan Kuei with that merit for recruitment.



I'm sure she's using that ritual, it's the magic I said would wake her in response to intrusion. However, by the time we're intruding it will be too late, as by that point we'll be in combat with the akuma.

We needed to contact them in advance of the assault to negotiate for them to backstab the Will in the middle of it and work with us to defect afterwards.
We have a huge advantage in that the team of human-looking Akuma are in one place and the Greater Akuma in another.
We can try to either attack or talk to one of them and in daylight it will be hard for the other to react, I think.
 
We have a huge advantage in that the team of human-looking Akuma are in one place and the Greater Akuma in another.
We can try to either attack or talk to one of them and in daylight it will be hard for the other to react, I think.

Thing is, the Greater Akuma are used to akuma plotting against each other and them. If they have any sense at all, and they will, they'll have devils keeping an eye on the other group of akuma, watching not for defection, but for attempted credit theft or selling them out to a rival greater akuma.
 
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