For all that flowery description, the shintai was activated twice so far, and was only noticeable in the immediate vicinity, as far as I know, not over the whole city. Connecting it to us, even if it was noticed, would not be simple. I don't remember Akuma actually noticing our shintai, they tracked us through intelligence reports, from what I gather. And they knew what to look for. And it still took them several months.
Now, I am fairly sure that she has lookouts in Mac's bar. And they probably felt the effects of DPE. But I think she's still operating under very severe misconceptions of what we are.
1)Do recall that our base magic signature has been described as 5% of a Darkhallow when we were Essence 1, and we've gotten a little stronger since. We are not at all subtle. I would not be surprised if every time we use shintai, we ring alarm bells in Edinburgh. It would certainly strain my belief that Molly has been doing this in Chicago and the Whites haven't noticed.
Lara does not know what we are, or what we bear allegiance to.
She is under no misconceptions about what tier of raw mystical power we're in. She is going to be better informed than Marcone, and Marcone has already pegged us as magic Superman.
Especially after the whole Yomi Wan war party rolling into town, starting a war and mass kidnapping in Undertown and getting murdered for their trouble. That was a very mundane and magically noisy fight that left all sorts of tracks around afterwards, and the Will of Kakuri was making no attempts to be subtle.
You dont get to do a large scale manipulation of the Wall between the NeverNever and mortal world without alerting everyone in a hundred mile radius. And I suspect Lydia straight up tearing through the Will's infernal magic wall was just as noisy.
Expect that when Molly breaks out
When The Tigers Run Free, everyone in this hemisphere will notice.
2)Its canon for Kindred of the East that kueijin using demon shintai in the real world do so at the risk of attracting the attention of the Yama Kings. That would not be possible if that was not a magically noisy event.
And Molly is a vastly more massive magical presence than essentially 99% of kuejin.
I mean, Dresden described her going shintai as essentially a supernova that then focused itself.
That does not sound at all like the sort of thing that you fail to notice.
About our armor, I've been looking around in the books a bit and the best I can find are these:
Black Suit, 4 Armor, no Penalty
The legendary MiB suit for top-agents of the Technocracy, doubling as a focus for their mental magic. Might be further enhanced with Bond-gadgets.
Alanson Armor, 7 Armor, -2 Penalty
The Void Engineers outdoor-suit, rated for everything from heavy combat to floating in space or the Deep Umbra. Usually comes with a shitload of other inbuild functions, like strenght-boost, self-repair, plasma-armcannon, various sensor, etc.
To keep in mind, these are the products of real, enlightened magic, not Sorcerer Path Enchanting.
So we might take something along those lines as the best possible product we can make with Enchantment and Alchemy, even with an obscene number of successes.
Bulletproof Hoodie will give you 4 dice of soak against bullets.
M20, page 654-655.
Normal armor seems to cap out around 7 dice before you begin to make significant tradeoffs.
[y]Doubt
Alanson's look like a typical White Wolf "I don't really understand my own system" trinkets that are supposed to be cool, but fall flat on their face before very basic Wonders. Low armor value? Dex penalty? Nah.
Alansons are balanced for M20.
That said, 7 Armor isn't low for that setting.
Especially since there is a Heavy Armor module that adds another +3 Armor on top of that for a total of 10 Armor at a cost of further Dex penalty. And that's before Stamina or you stacking Procedures.
I mean, if you have a standard HIT Mark X with 12 Soak (Stamina 6 + internal Armor 6) and then you give them a basic Alanson on top of that? You're looking at 19 Soak and 9HLs.
Enchanting has a ritual that gives 5 soak agg at 5 dots. Pretty sure we can get around +10 soak between both at 5 dots no dex reductions.
That is a very large amount of investment.
If we really wanted extra armor right now?
We'd pick up the ancient sorcery spell Invulnerable Skin of Bronze (+4 Soak, duration 24 hours or until dismissed) for 10XP, which would give Molly a base of (Stamina 3 + Ebon Scales 1 + Viridian Legend Exoskeleton 4 + Steelskin 2 + 4 ISB) 14 Soak before activating Shintai.
Buy Black Mirror as well and you can even hide the presence of ISB.
So you wake up in the morning, cast Invulnerable Skin of Bronze, use Black Mirror to disguise yourself as being unarmored, and then go about your day.
Personally wouldn't bother until we hit Essence 3 and an Essence pool of 15m.
Lara Raith is magically strong enough not to trigger DPE, and metaphysically very important due to being de-facto and acknowledged as the leader of White Court. She is the closest being to Mab's equal we have directly interacted with. Different videos of her should absolutely count as separate foci. Photos too, but even without those, she almost certainly starred in enough videos and gave out enough autographs to give us virtually unlimited foci. She is basically the most vulnerable important magical person we know of for our crown.
@DragonParadox ?
Use resources to get more resources is my reasoning.
Like I said, the primary issue is Madeline.
This sounds like a perfect job for Harry. His life's been comfortable and stable for nearly a week now, so it's about time we throw some plot his way.
Edit:
And honestly, we're talking about vampire bullshit in Chicago. Harry is going to get dragged into it somehow, the only difference between us bringing him in and the usual course of events is that he gets paid if we call him before the narrative does.
Oh certainly.
Harry is the vampire guy in the Council, at least in the field. Certainly he appears to be the point man for both the White Court and Winter Court.
I do get the impression that its been a very exciting couple of months in Harry's personal timeline.
He doesn't usually handle major cases more than once a year, and under normal circumstances invading Arctis Tor would satisfy his trouble magnet merit for the next eight to twelve months.
Now in the space of four to five months he's had Gorfels dumped in his lap, had to deal with Mab in the Ankou business which led to a firefight with a possessed Nazi submarine, then had his first(though probably not last) combat encounter with a senior agent of a Yama King. And there's still the skin walker in the area.
At this point, even Loki would be like "Wow, slow down."
