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Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

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[X] Explain that you cannot actually brew up a cure for the Hunger
-[x] Tell her the truth of Mercy in Servitude
--[x]Tell her as much as you have told Isabella. No sense in having conflicting stories when you are trying to spread it around.

I am leaning toward this. I can certainly see full disclose going poorly. A potion or drug that we are being paid for is something she can control, but being paid in servitude is one step toward usurping leadership of the white court. That's not even an incorrect concern since our power is explicitly designed for dominion of creatures of darkness. This could make Laura an enemy.

That said encouraging this misunderstanding could be dangerous too. Especially since the truth could be easily discovered if we give her incentive to investigate. Lying about how our power works would certainly make her an enemy.

Besides, our ultimate goal is to give mercy to creatures of darkness. Spreading the word will help that goal. We just need to word this carefuly and make it clear that 1. they can stop serving us at anytime because there is no actual binding contract and 2. "service" can be as simple as getting a cup of coffee. I think our pitch to Isabella covers this well enough but if anyone wants to throw in a write in it could be helpful.
 
[X] Explain that you cannot actually brew up a cure for the Hunger
-[x] Tell her the truth of Mercy in Servitude
--[x]Tell her as much as you have told Isabella. No sense in having conflicting stories when you are trying to spread it around.

She is a metaphysical big deal as leader of her faction?
While she is certainly much weaker in practical terms compared to say Dracula, she might still have some extra-omph from being the White Queen, for the purpose of esoteric effects determining wether she is a "lesser" CoD or not.

Edit: For the current vote, we have just recently voted to send Isabela out to get us more Whampire minions, I am certain that the terms we offer come back to Lara quickly.
 
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Have all those who want to tell Lara about the servitude aspect considered what she'll think about her brother obviously fulfilling that criteria?

She might not take that well.
 
LightLan said:
Have all those who want to tell Lara about the servitude aspect considered what she'll think about her brother obviously fulfilling that criteria?

She might not take that well.
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I dunno, the vibe I got off her in the books was that she cared for his wellbeing a bit more than the others, but wasn't willing/able to sacrifice her position to truly help him out while Lord Raith lived. I think she'd be okay with things provided that he's happy and not being abused; it never read as sibling love rather than fondness/lesser care.
 
[X] "This isn't the type of talk I am willing to have over a phone. I have some free time the day after tomorrow. If you are serious, meet me at Chicago Synthetics"

Yeah, let's be careful about what we say over such channels.
 
LightLan said:
Have all those who want to tell Lara about the servitude aspect considered what she'll think about her brother obviously fulfilling that criteria?

She might not take that well.
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The issue here is that she'll learn anyway. And it's better to control the narrative. But I want to actually meet her. "not a CoD" is too strange.
 
Yog said:
The issue here is that she'll learn anyway. And it's better to control the narrative. But I want to actually meet her. "not a CoD" is too strange.
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It's not "not a CoD" it's "DPE does not apply".

It might be due to not a CoD, or it might be due to her being the actual power behind the White Court, due to her Dad being a mere puppet.
 
DragonParadox said:
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COMMENTARY
-IS this Lara Raith?

They are throwing enough dice to be a supernatural, but we've never spoken to her before, and we aren't supposed to know her phone number.It seems a little odd that she's going to broach shit like this over the phone.
Especially since Thomas would presumably be available to talk.

Its entirely possible this is a neat piece of social engineering with a cloned number.
Especially since she introduced herself as Lara Raith, when her legal name we are aware of IC is Lara Romany.



-We told Leinth Skavis how this power works with regards to his grand-niece.
And he saw it work with his own eyes. This suggests either that no-one on his end of things has said shit to the Raiths or this isn't a Raith or some of the Raiths are keeping secrets from the others.

All are interesting possibilities, especially since Isabella started openly attending Molly's public school, which Im sure Lara Raith is aware of.


-The implication that Molly and Thomas are together is something I only picked up on a second read.
And Lara Raith would know better than to suggest that.
Because she knows he's dating Justine exclusively, and uses that as part of her information security measures.

I dont think this is Lara Raith.
Whoever this is appears to have less knowledge of Molly than I would expect from Lara.
It might not even be a White Court vampire, or at least one from a different faction.

Its not the first time people have used impersonation in this series.
The Denarians, the Red Court and the Fae have all done it.
Calling herself Lara Raith does rule out this person being Fae.


-Whoever this is, only just found out that we were meeting Mab recently.
Molly hiring out Mac's place on Halloween, and Mac announcing the bar will be closed on that night.
I suspect these two things are related.


-We need to get cyberdevils into the local phone exchange.
We'd be able to find the location of the phone if we had access to the network.
And while we could HMP the phone being used now, I dont want to expose that ability to the person on the other end of the line in case they have high Awareness.

DragonParadox said:
Rolls
Lara tries to get you off balance vs Molly to See Through her
Molly playing dumb vs Lara to see through it
INT+Empathy to realize what she means
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"Lara"
Man+Subterfuge = 11.
Wits + Subterfuge =10

A dice pool of 11 suggests we are looking at a supernatural, or a very high specced mortal with some buffs.
That she's leaning on Subterfuge suggests an attempt to deceive or manipulate in play here.
The Manipulation roll was an attempt to manipulate, but the Wits roll is a reaction roll.
 
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[X] Explain that you cannot actually brew up a cure for the Hunger
-[x] Tell her the truth of Mercy in Servitude
--[x]Tell her as much as you have told Isabella. No sense in having conflicting stories when you are trying to spread it around.
 
[X] "This isn't the type of talk I am willing to have over a phone. I have some free time the day after tomorrow. If you are serious, meet me at Chicago Synthetics"

ssskkkeeettcccchhh
 
It's worth noting on a general level that while we can't do this right now, it's been on our docket to work towards for some time now.

We have a ruling stating that alchemy 4 can make MMP into universal food, and I think we also got one about it being 3 if we burn whole maggots to make specific emotion juice instead of something general*.

This is just even more reason to move in that direction, because exporting emotion juice is a potentially lucrative business.

The scaling issues I've exhaustively mentioned prior to this still apply, but rarity isn't as big a problem when exporting a luxury good as it is when trying to produce a staple crop.

There's also the potential for finding alternative bases for the potion once we've figured out how to do it one way, giving us something much more practical for all our use cases.

To name one possibility, Harry routinely draws the cast off emotional energy in the environment around him to power spells. Part of it is amping himself up, but it's also very real energy in its own right.

Setting up collectors seems like a reasonable place to start if we go that direction. Almost certainly costly and complicated to pull off, but that's what the expensive limited run stuff is there to finance**.

To get back to the point, it seems counterproductive to me to shut her down completely and give her free information if our inability to sell what she's looking to buy is temporary.

Helping the white court is very sketchy at best, but Lara isn't wrong in that it could prevent a lot of deaths we can't actually meaningfully stop.

It's also reach and influence to use in recruiting more dedicated minions.

It's at least worth thinking about first even if we don't end up going that way.

* I haven't found the quote on this yet, so it could just be my memory failing me. @DragonParadox was this roughly what you had in mind?

**Critically, even if it doesn't work we'd only be out some research money and still have the political benefits, so such a project comes with a reasonable floor on losses.

uju32 said:
Not really.
She's his sister, but she has no idea how old Lara is.
Or how age and position affects the magical importance of a Whamp.
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Age and position are likely part of it, but I think a more critical bit is that she caught her father in a moment of weakness and basically ate him alive.

He may have been living on stockpiled power, but the white king was still at least a thousand years old and had spent a lot of effort to make himself stronger than he'd otherwise be from age/feeding alone. Like his immunity to mortal magic to name an example.

In a way Lara ate an energy sphere larger than her head and actually got away with it.
fictionfan said:
Well I can't really see any reason to tell her less then we have told Isabella.

[X] Explain that you cannot actually brew up a cure for the Hunger
-[x] Tell her the truth of Mercy in Servitude
--[x]Tell her as much as you have told Isabella. No sense in having conflicting stories when you are trying to spread it around.
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Isabella is one of ours and Lara isn't, that's enough to at least make her work for it when looking into our business.
 
Alratan said:
ChatGPT doesn't exist yet in quest. Molly using TTC can code ten times fast as a software developer using the tools available to a contemporary of hers, not ten times as fast as a software designer using tools that don't exist yet (Chat GPT is not good for the kinds of tasks needed
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The military and national security establishment have been using algorithms and expert systems for decades now for everything from military aircraft design to signal intelligence.

ChatGPT is new as in a large, model being accessible to the public at a relatively affordable cost.
Its not likely to have been anything like the first of its kind in the classified world.

Alratan said:
As above on the speed. And no, downloading the compiled code is basically useless. We'd need the source code to modify the software to work on a custom model that has many differences to the one you copied. The complied code would only be useful if you were cloning a car, and we didn't.
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This I know is not true.

Yog said:
There's no logical reason to believe that whamps lose CoD status as they age. It's not a matter of power level, it's a matter of power type. Frankly, the only reason I can see is direct WG meddling. Pr this isn't actually her. Or... did we actually check that DPE (our only way of checking for CoD status right now) works remotely through a phone conversation? By rules as written it should, but the description so far might mean it doesn't.
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DPoE mechanics:
The Infernal garbs herself in hellish authority; all lesser wicked things are like writhing worms or mere grains of sand cast before her, and instinctively recognize this imbalance.

System: Whenever the Infernal deals with a lesser creature of darkness than herself, she permanently reduces the difficulty of all social actions (including the activation roll of powers to suborn the will of such creatures) by two. "Lesser" creatures of darkness include all beings that qualify for that moniker which are of lesser power than ancient vampires, Maeljin Incarnae, Yama Kings, Malfeans, the greatest of Black Spiral Dancer heroes, other Exalted, and the like. Jaggling or Gaffling-level Banes and all fomori are always lesser beings.
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Doesn't work on ancient vampires.
We dont know how old Lara is, just that she is the White King's eldest living child and heir, apparently raised all her living younger siblings, and was old enough to remember Luccio as a young woman in Italy.

That puts her at a minimum of two hundred years, and possibly a LOT older.
And she would have very good generation-equivalent in Kindred terms due to who her father was.

And even if she was a baby vamp, her effectively diablerizing her father in order to take over control of the White Court might have given her effective jumps in power.
We dont know enough about how Whampire physiology and society work to be sure.

EDIT
For comparison, Thomas is around 40. Maybe 10 years older than Dresden.
 
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DragonParadox said:
MMP can indeed substitute all dietary needs, but that does have the issue of making people more suggestible towards Molly
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I was talking about these rulings:

DragonParadox said:
The problem is not that they are addictive, it's that they make the user more suggestible vis a vis the infernal who made them. As for what you would need to boil off that aspect of them. Well it's not quite philosopher's stone Alchemy 5 level since you have the maggots... Alchemy four would do.
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DragonParadox said:
Ah you need getting just despair as opposed to maggots that do not lower social DC, yeah you could do that with alchemy 4, but you would have to do it in two steps, since they are very distinct processes.
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Since they describe functionally what maybe-Lara is asking for.
 
[X] Explain that you cannot actually brew up a cure for the Hunger
-[x] Tell her the truth of Mercy in Servitude
--[x]Tell her as much as you have told Isabella. No sense in having conflicting stories when you are trying to spread it around.
 
[X] Explain that you cannot actually brew up a cure for the Hunger
-[x] Tell her the truth of Mercy in Servitude
--[x]Tell her as much as you have told Isabella. No sense in having conflicting stories when you are trying to spread it around.
 
[X] "This isn't the type of talk I am willing to have over a phone. I have some free time the day after tomorrow. If you are serious, meet me at Chicago Synthetics"
 
Yog said:
Which is why the correct solution is to set up a meeting face-to-face.
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Yeah, I have doubts this is Lara Raith.
Very much not her usual style to call personally out of the blue. She literally has minions for this.

She doesn't even have any reason to assume that Molly knows who she is.
This is sketchy as fuck.
Especially since there is no reason to assume that any business with Mab precludes business with others.
BronzeTongue said:
Age and position are likely part of it, but I think a more critical bit is that she caught her father in a moment of weakness and basically ate him alive.

He may have been living on stockpiled power, but the white king was still at least a thousand years old and had spent a lot of effort to make himself stronger than he'd otherwise be from age/feeding alone. Like his immunity to mortal magic to name an example.

In a way Lara ate an energy sphere larger than her head and actually got away with it.
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Lord Raith was at least two thousand years old.
Possibly up to four thousand.
So yeah, quite potent.

bengalqueen said:
[X] Explain that you cannot actually brew up a cure for the Hunger
-[x] Tell her the truth of Mercy in Servitude
--[x]Tell her as much as you have told Isabella. No sense in having conflicting stories when you are trying to spread it around.
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This isn't Lara Raith. At the very least, its not behaving like her.

Its not good practice to give out information to random callers over the phone.
Arrange a physical meeting. AFTER Mab.
If its Lara they'll show. If its someone else, it'll smoke them out.

EDIT
Also, we can call Thomas and have him check with his sister if she did call us.
Or if it was someone else.
 
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[X] "This isn't the type of talk I am willing to have over a phone. I have some free time the day after tomorrow. If you are serious, meet me at Chicago Synthetics"

Both for obvious reasons, and curiosity reasons.
 
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