Three people are definitly too much when it comes to discussing pretty personal and of course also politcally important secrets with Mab.
And I doubt we can just make them wait at the door, that would be rude.
Respectfully, no its not.
Mab was willing to have this conversation three months ago in front of Lydia, Dresden and Gard.
We were the ones that asked for a deferral.
Mab did have a similar conversation canonically in front of a lot of more than ten people in Cold Days when she tried to get Maeve to stand down and be purged of Nemesis.
I am sorry, but are you deliberately trying to make us Winter's slave? That's what it looks like, and given how you tend to fall on Winter apologia side, I can't dismiss that possiblity. What is your goal with this meeting? Because bringing Harry and/or Lydia to it is just begging to incur more debt to Mab.
This is offensive.
If you cannot make an argument without accusing me of bad faith, I will stop engaging.
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Our previous meeting with Mab had both Dresden and Lydia there, in case you have forgotten.
Marcone meets and negotiates with Mab without losing his shirt, and he's a vanilla mortal.
Dresden has literally had more meetings with Mab than anybody else in the city of Chicago, and he is less in debt with her now than when he actually started in Summer Knight.
His owing Mab a favor didn't actually stop him from infiltrating Arctis Tor either.
Your assertions about meetings with Mab ending up with enslavement of the other person bear no actual resemblance to how things have historically worked in this setting.
Mab has no personal or institutional interest in eroding the worth of Winter's word.
Lydia doesn't have "exalted senses". She has no sensory charms, and rolls 4 dice total for perception + alertness. 3 for perception + awareness or perception + occult. She has 1 dot in politics.
You are wrong.
Lydia rolls 6 dice for Manipulation + Empathy for social perception, and its a Key ability, which doubles with her Excellency to 11 or 12 dice. She rolls 5 dice for Perception + Empathy as well before Excellency.
She also rolls 7 dice for Intelligence + Academics as a Key ability, before Excellency.
4 dice for Perception + Alertness, which is a bigger dice pool than Molly's 3 dice.
And thats not counting her anima power.
So I stand by my statement. Exalted-tier senses.
She also considers Mab, if not an enemy, then certainly not an ally.
???
Molly doesnt consider Mab an ally either.
Im not sure what that has to do with the price of fish in Chicago.
Neither of them have any interest in seeing Winter fail in its duties.
Mab has just recently targeted her for enslavement and brainwashing as revenge for her father escaping his enslavement (or at least this is how she would most likely think of it). She is not aware of Outsiders, and I have doubt if Arawn is aware of them (most likely yes, as necromancers tend to be corrupted, it seems), and it's almost certain her hasn't told her about them.
Mab targeted her for
recruitment.
It was
also revenge against her father breaking his word, but the primary aim appears to have been recruitment. Because she's kinda short of trustworthy agents with Lea in rehab and Maeve unreliable.
Revenge would have been much easier if it was a priority.
Mab doesnt appear to do enslavement, especially not among agents that she is going to expose to Nemesis, which explicitly has the power to erode such things. It would be a glaring vulnerability.
Lydia read Lara's note about the Enemy.
She will know about them if she remains in our orbit, and her father was a high ranking agent of Mab and Winter for over nine hundred years. He explicitly knows about them, he just refuses to tell her details about the War.
"She slipped me this when we shook hands." your friend says, but you can hardly hear her given the gravity of the message.
Winter will seek your aid in a conflict of universal import, but there have been signs of their manipulation by the enemy. Any shift in the status quo might be their work, causing more harm than good. Make no bargains with Mab if you value your life, your sanity or our soul. This is no a war for neophytes, no matter how much power one may hold.
Burn this note
When combined with what you know as her third reason for being here... Outsiders are manipulating Mab, or at least the highest countils of Winter. At least Lara believes it so, you correct yourself. If that is the case then she would be worried about fey watchers and those are far less likely than ones of the White Court to have meddled with mortal feromancy enough to tap the phone lines
"Do you have a lighter?" you ask Lydia, without much hope.
She shakes her head.
At the very least using an arcane blow torch to incinerate the note before you flush the ashes down the toilet should make it so no common magic could reconstitute it
"Soooo are you actually going to heed the warning?" Lydia asks. "Dad does not want to talk to me about whatever the conflict it is, but he says it's real and 'most perilous'." Her accent gets a little stronger on the last two words, the way it sometimes does when she is stressed.
She knows.
Hell, THOMAS knows; he's a True Venator fighting the Oblivion War, and he has no Exalted charms to boost his defenses.
Harry fought a Walker. Harry has mental trauma about said Walker. If I recall correctly, right now he still hasn't worked through his trauma, the memory of the fight is half-repressed, and if he doesn't have PTSD regarding the topic, then only by barest of margins. He only recently learned that Winter deals with Outer Gates. He doesn't know about Nemesis at all. He has issues. And he has a Fallen in his head. Who can mess with him. And, as you yourself argued, who might be able to give the information to Lasciel. Even if she can't, I firmly don't want to drop the bombs on Mab in Harry's presence. If nothing else, as a Warden Commander it would be his obligation to inform Senior Council, or at least Gatekeeper of how Winter is compromised. That would hurt Mab's standing and ability to maneuver.
You are wrong.
Dresden has fought Walkers twice; he fought He Who Walks Behind as a teenager, then fought his magics again in Blood Rites. Both Thomas and Murphy were there during his last encounter with He Who Walks Behind; Thomas was supposed to be the sacrifice.
Harry fought the Red Court, and was sexually assaulted by them.
He has PTSD over them. It doesnt reduce his need to know about them, or the fact that he spent the aftermath learning about them and their operations.
You are infantilizing the dude, especially given his role as Starborn. Ignorance does not help him.
Dresden is already a target of Nemesis, as are those around him; Justine wasn't targeted for herself, but because of who she knew and had access to. And Vittorio Malvora, one of the minibosses of the next book, is explicitly possessed by an Outsider.
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Only Denarians have Fallen in their heads.
Dresden has a Fallen's
Shadow in his head. NOT the same thing, and Lash explicitly knows all this stuff from Lasciel anyway. She canonically knows about Outsiders, she knows about the War, she knows Dresden is Starborn, she knows how to defend against Outsider psychic attack.
She just didn't tell him the details of what she knew before she died in canon.
And surprise, the Fallen dont actually want Creation to fall either.
Thats why Mab was able to safely hire Nicodemus and Anduriel as a stand-in for her at the Gates back when she was new and scrambling without worrying about sabotage or betrayal.
===
Uh, no he isn't.
Dresden keeps secrets from the Council
all the time, and even more so since figuring out there was a traitor in the Council. Starting with the fact that he has Bob in his cellar since he was a teenager, that he has Lash in his head, that Thomas the White King's son is his brother.
Even now in this AU he's keeping Molly's secrets from them, like the Crown.
If we were worried about Dresden feeding secrets to the Council, we wouldn't be telling him any of ours like we have.
You don't talk with U.S.A. president about how you have evidence that their vice president is actually an Al-Qaeda plant in the presence of France's army colonel.
EDIT: My primary goal here is to leave this meeting with fewer obligations (and poisoned debts int either directions) to Winter than when we enter it.
Uh, no. Thats a terrible comparison.
Dresden has been Mab's personal emissary multiple times in sensitive Fae matters.
He killed the previous Summer Lady and uncovered the current Winter Knight's treachery.
She trusts him to keep secrets. He's a wizard; they hoard secrets like squirrels hoard nuts.
Lydia is our righthand woman and will be assumed to know this stuff anyway.
And Michael works for the White God, whose agents appear to know all this shit anyway.
He carries an angel in his Sword.
