So, with Last Station finished, we will need to talk to Porter. Because I remind everyone, while we were treating it as our base of power, technically it's Porters, and there was no agreement about letting us stay after we finish renovations. We would need to work out the arrangement with him. It'll probably involve him allying with us formally (I hope). But we need to think what we promise him. Train body for certain, probably gradual expansion of his territory via underground train tracks / building a hidden subway. Maybe some material wealth, and possibly some small amounts of mortal prayers?
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
Fixed, thanks for the heads up now, it would have taken longer to fix as this went along.
6 months and ~8 AP later, Last Station's basic operating is finally done. Hallelujah.
We'll need to do the upgrades to get it to higher tiers later.
But for the meantime, we have basic operations.
Now we can go back to Cleveland and bring that Alchemy lab over and install it.
Yeah thats a bit much. Too high a risk for collateral damage among your own people if one of those things takes damage.
I'd settle for the ability to flood an area with holy water mist through the ventilation ducts, plus maybe the narcotic drugs.
Neurotoxins and paralytics dont really add anything to this, and are a danger to residents.
Given as Thomas lived with Harry for a year, I suspect this isnt the first time he's seen someone too focused on magic shit to pay attention to others.
VOTE
[X] Getting documents for strike teams
This is the third time in six months that we have had to deal with hostiles bringing strike teams into the city from outside.
First the Kakuri affair, then the Ants trying to kill sorcerers, and finally the naagloshii.
And the naagloshii still has their coven running around.
Acquiring the ability to deploy tactical teams to cover Molly's flanks and watch over people while she deals with the primary problem takes priority over transdimensional trade for the moment.
I suspect a lot of our people are going to end up with Brazilian ID documents, because Brazil is likely the biggest multiracial society outside of the US, with the broadest range of phenotypes from Indigenous American to Japanese to European
And is still enough of a developing country that you can plausibly make up identity documents.
We'll need to do the upgrades to get it to higher tiers later.
But for the meantime, we have basic operations.
Now we can go back to Cleveland and bring that Alchemy lab over and install it.
*cocks head*
Yeah thats a bit much. Too high a risk for collateral damage among your own people if one of those things takes damage.
I'd settle for the ability to flood an area with holy water mist through the ventilation ducts, plus maybe the narcotic drugs.
Neurotoxins and paralytics dont really add anything to this, and are a danger to residents.
Molly went full Heterodyne tinker-fugue here. Lol.
Given as Thomas lived with Harry for a year, I suspect this isnt the first time he's seen someone too focused on magic shit to pay attention to others.
VOTE
[X] Getting documents for strike teams
This is the third time in six months that we have had to deal with hostiles bringing strike teams into the city from outside.
First the Kakuri affair, then the Ants trying to kill sorcerers, and finally the naagloshii.
And the naagloshii still has their coven running around.
Acquiring the ability to deploy tactical teams to cover Molly's flanks and watch over people while she deals with the primary problem takes priority over transdimensional trade for the moment.
I suspect a lot of our people are going to end up with Brazilian ID documents, because Brazil is likely the biggest multiracial society outside of the US, with the broadest range of phenotypes from Indigenous American to Japanese to European
And is still enough of a developing country that you can plausibly make up identity documents.
Russia or one of the stans. You get foreign strange sounding languages (and bad knowledge of English), pretty much all ethnicities (African descent population is low, but present through the whole USSR territory due to USSR active policy in Africa and numerous exchange students), and easy to obtain passports (it's 2006, a statistically significant population might still be using USSR issued passports).
Honestly figured rolling thou a few minor warlords nations. Take out the top people, and replace them with crafted lookalikes form the hell.
Imagine if we had had the Crafting charm, how much more glorious it would've been.
This is precisely why I wanted it before and not after, no we missed the opportunity to do it with Ap that was already taken, and would have to use more to craft to better standards.
[X] Getting documents for strike teams
We already have money, this is not a very interesting reason.
Hope we'll have the crafting charm for that one, because at this point I am absolutely anticipating a new thing to make people not vote for it, like an attack grazing us and suddenly everyone is clamoring for perfect defenses, or something.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Our kingdom almost certainly has the capability to forge USSR passports. Or any other earth documentation that isn't in a computer system. They could counterfeit money if we actually wanted to.
Arc 9 Interlude 1: Wizard's Woes
Wizard's Woes
19th of November 2006 A.D.
To say that Arthur Langtry was unhappy with his lot in life at the moment would be as great an understatement as to call English White wine as opposed to faintly alcoholic gutter water, praise be to phylloxera outbreaks as the marks of divine providence they had surely been. Swirling the glass of Chardonnay in one hand he sighed and motioned to the animate violin with the other, the soothing notes of Primavera cutting off mid-note in a way that was almost satisfying in how utterly jarring it was. This was in truth a quiet time, perhaps as the Bard had put in the mouth of Richard the Second' of graves, of worms, and epitaphs'. After all there were plenty who would imagine me a scheming tyrant and now they get to add incompetent to the list.
"Harald what do you imagine would happen if I were to just say 'sod all of you and sod Ebeneezer's hooligan of a grandson the hardest I resign'," the Merlin of the White Council asked his lifelong man servant aloud.
"I would imagine the gentleman in question would strenuously o the description of his family m'lord and the council would fall apart into bickering and thence become a vampyr's midnight wine." came the somewhat brass-y response.
Harold after all had been dead for more than a hundred and fifty years, he still called the lar, the house spirit of his sprawling Midlands manse after him and to its credit the Harold the Second was quite good at imitating the speech patterns of his human predecessor, though it could not quite match the earthy wisdom of the old yeoman, no more than Richard the Second Could match the heroism of the First.
Sometimes Arthur wondered if the Council had made a mistake in keeping the name Merlin as an honorific, not so much for the expectations it set up, he thrived on unreasonable expectations, a past master at being just vague enough to seem wise while he investigated something or delegated someone to investigate so that the actual wisdom would arrive. No what annoyed him were all the children who thought of him as the embodiment of the Council, as though he were some kind of wizard king for them to rebel against because they had not quite gotten that out of their system with their parents as one did in the old days. Now it was in fashion to let school raise one's children and they would get a lifelong notion that the best way to deal with any institution was to rebel against it the way they did with the headmaster who would not let them smoke behind the music hall.
Normally he would send someone like young Ramirez to ask Dresden what in heaven and hell had happened in Chicago yesterday that that set the Finger of St. Roch one of the most potent and least used oracular instruments in Edinburgh pointing right at Chicago. As three people had reminded him over the last six hours alone the last time the bones so much as twitched they had been pointing at Sarajevo there heralding the outbreak of the Great War and the secret war against Kemler. As Arthur had to remind them repeatedly there was a dearth of confirming signs. Oh certainly a handful of seers, mostly in North America, had reported troubling dreams of calving ice and crackling lighting of five towers that scratched the starless heavens, but apart from Ancient Mai clamming up more than her 'charming' norm the most the council had to work with was cryptic in the way the marks an ape makes in the walls of its enclosure in its own shit is 'cryptic'
Someone had opened a gate to a place far more remote than Faerie there, that much was clear from what Listens to the Wind had gotten out of the far-traveling wind spirits, but they had closed it almost as quickly and nothing significant had passed though, Arthur would stake his reputation on that, he was staking his reputation on that. It had most likely been Mab doing something, some follow up to Halloween. Snowstorms out of the blue on that of all days means she had something very important to hide, maybe not all traces had been removed.
Rashid's assurances that it was good news, for all he could not share them even with with the Senior Council yet had only given Arthur cause to suspect that this was the other shoe dropping, but he could not even worry in peace since he had to calm down the cretins who thought the Gates of Hell had opened. Normally panicking about the end of the world was the province of the aged and most invested in it, but this time Ramirez and his lot had seized on the notion that he was letting the grass grow between his toes so now if he send one of the younger wardens to Chicago it would practically be admitting defeat... to children.
If the Warden in situ was more reliable he would have summoned him for a talk. Empty Night, if Dresden has even a modicum of discretion Arthur would have summoned him away and offered some kind of quid pro quo, but frankly he did not trust Dresden to even know enough Latin to understand what that was much less follow through.
This could all be a distraction, take advantage of whatever Mab was doing to throw shadows at the proverbial wall. That would imply a subtly of magical weaving beyond what the Red Court had ever shown before, but not beyond the realm of possibility. God knows the local environs are probably opaque enough to hide in Chicago after Kemler's leavings were in town... twice in the last two years
That thought was almost enough to make Arthur feel briefly sorry for Dresden's atrocious luck, but the flicker of compassion did not last long against the wind of utter frustration. Were he a century younger he would have thrown his glass at the wall. As is he set it gently down and began carefully weaving light sound and purest magic into a form familiar as his own reflection... mostly because it was. The second Arthur Langtry combed his beard with his fingers and set off towards the garden, where hidden in an old hickory tree was a scrying focus left by one of the Red King's more subtle sorcerers. He had not been so subtle that Arthur did not know it was there, but a spy you knew about was as good as a spy on your side... especially when the fidelity of the farsight would make it impossible for them to see though the false Arthur on his rounds of the gardens. If this was a blood-sucker's trap than they would see him doing nothing he had not done many other nights.
In the meantime the real Arthur Langtry, the real Merlin was heading to Chicago.
OOC: Harry is about to get a hell of a visitor, but hey at least it's not Morgan. To be clear the Merlin does not actually think Harry does not know what quid pro quo is he just does not think very much of his dedication to stuff like learning Latin.
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We have some money, we do not have Money!. And their is lots and lots of open land for cheap in the US. By founding our own town, not only do we get to decide policy for it, it becomes a legal pass thou to legitimize anything we are doing.
The wasp drones are AI controlled so there isn't much risk of friendly fire even if they are mostly poison by volume.
You keep saying this, but that's not what the charm does.
It gives us access to special crafting systems with specific requirements and one known homebrew extension that may end up getting folded into arcana crafting because it's so similar.
Unless there's a WoG I missed there is no reason to believe it would matter to our regular crafting checks.
It does not but if you had the charm and you rolled that I would have given you the option of an artifact capstone with the rest of the rebuilding action this month.
Russia is a smaller country: ~145 million to Brazil's ~190 million by 2010.
It has proportionately has fewer minorities than Brazil; in the 2010 census, 77% of the country were ethnically Russian, and over 90% were of one phenotypically European ethnicity or another.
By comparison, Brazil had a much more multiracial population, with, and I quote:
Wikipedia Brazilian demographics said:
Furthermore, the Brazillian passport allows you access to more countries in this hemisphere than the Russian one; as of 2023, Google says that it has visa-free travel to 170 countries, as opposed to Russia's 114
Henley Passport Index - Wikipedia
And its not a big geopolitical player whose government has global ambitions; noone's looking at a Brazillian passport holder the way they might look at a passport from a permanent Security Council member.
The country has no popular culture associations with drugs like a Colombian passport, or with Islamic radicals like one from the Middle East or Pakistan. For all the poverty of the lower classes and viciousness of the Brazilian crime scene and a police culture thats arguably worse than the US, Brazil's international reputation is of a fun-loving soccer mad nation.
That combination is why its allegedly a popular nationality for spooks to use as a cover.
Its not about forging passports; North Korea can forge passports.
Its about the ability to build a legend that mortal authorities find unremarkable. Russia is still an inheritor to the USSR, and one of five permanent Security Council members, and pre-Ukrainian invasion Russian organized crime had carved out a reputation for itself both in real life and in popular media. Its passports draw attention.
Collateral.
Aerosolized poisons are very much a To Whom It May Concern hazard, and you can assume that combat damage will leak some of this shit into the same environment that we will have people in.
There's a reason why noone uses chemical weapons in combat anymore, and its not because of inhumanity.
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That basically sounds like it does matter to be honest.
Not going to object to more power, but the vagueness of this particular one resulting in everyone reading it differently is getting annoying.
It is not so much that he does not trust him to report, there is some of that, but he does not trust Harry to come when summoned and not make a fuss of whatever if going on that would cause more panic. He thinks of Dresden as something like a human shaped hand grenade with a loose pin when it comes to anything political which this is at least in part.
Well in Molly's defense those drones came with poison containers... then again they also came from the world with reliable reincarnation so YMMV
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Honestly that sounds like Dresden perfectly in the early to mid books.
Arthur is many things, among them a good judge of character.
Oh boy, Harry is going to feel like he needs to cover for Molly and her weird but not seemingly sinister kingdom isn't he?
I don't expect the cyber-devil to evade the Merlin's notice, for all his faults the man is a certified badass so I would imagine that said devil will only see what he wants it to see.
As for his opinion of Harry...well he isn't exactly wrong, Harry is young (for a wizard), brave, impulsive, very driven by a clear code of morality and thanks to DuMorne very suspicious of any authority.
I don't expect the cyber-devil to evade the Merlin's notice, for all his faults the man is a certified badass so I would imagine that said devil will only see what he wants it to see.
As for his opinion of Harry...well he isn't exactly wrong, Harry is young (for a wizard), brave, impulsive, very driven by a clear code of morality and thanks to DuMorne very suspicious of any authority.
This is an interesting tidbit. Seers could apparently get meaningful details about the FCF in dreams, possibly because of the connection between dreams and the nevernever.
Ancient Mai's reaction is also concerning. She might just choosing silence because she doesn't know what's up, but she's an old wizard who lives and works within spitting distance of the thousand hells' primary areas of influence in the mortal world. If anyone is likely to see our hell being created and make that connection right on the spot it's her.
I'm also surprised that Arthur's information network was so limited.
He was reacting like Chicago hadn't been exploding with signals ranging from Molly going Shintai to a walker of the outside dying a true death.
Not all of those would set off global magical sensors, but they probably hit the rumor mill like an atomic bomb. Harry of all people has multiple spirit contacts he uses to get access to that level of information. You'd think the Merlin would have had the data available to see a pattern here even if he couldn't pin down what was happening or who was involved.
Next Arc: Dueling Banjos between a minor wizard crusade and assassinating vampire nobility.
Molly, out on the town plotting mayhem and murder with a Naagoloshi: "I swear this isn't what it looks like!"
Harry did not gossip about Molly at all.
COMMENTARY
-Arthur has a house-god. Or at least a house-steward. For more than a hundred and fifty years. Huh.
A little surprising that he's living in a house in the Midlands in the middle of an ongoing war. One that he knows is bugged.
Instead of behind the many and multifold protections of the Hidden Halls at Edinburgh.
This is how people get Archangel'd; he's just begging to get a throwaway assassination team dropped on him.
Like a plane with a suicide pilot. Or a truck bomb.
Or gas.
-Phylloxera outbreaks in English vineyards as an act of divine providence?
Lol wine snobs.
-Noting that its been around three weeks since Molly exorcised Maeve in a room with half her retinue outside, something that Odin knows, probably the whole of Faerie knows by now, but the White Council still dont have a clue what happened, or that Molly was there. They apparently didnt even know that Molly was scheduled to meet Mab that day, which is something that Lara knew.
None of the Council's contacts in Faerie has said a thing.
And even wizards who may know (looking at you Rashid and Mai) arent sharing with the Merlin. I'm not sure we told Harry what happened there either.
Oh, and the White Council apparently missed the death of a Walker in Chicago, to boot.
This is an illustration of that point both I and @BronzeTongue have made:
Just because one faction, or even a member of a faction knows something doesnt mean everyone in that faction does, let alone the entire supernatural world. Information control is like the bread and butter of this setting.
-Noting that Ancient Mai has some idea of whats going on.
Which suggests that Molly shanking a greater akuma of Kakuri is the sort of thing that has caused ripples on the Asian side of the supernatural that a connected wizard has followed up.
-To be fair to the "cretins", the Gates of Hell did open
And Molly rolling around glowing like an archdevil on vacation is certainly not trying to dispel that impression.
I suspect we are going to be very grateful for that Mentor 5 before this arc is through.
-Oh dear.
The Merlin is coming to Chicago with a protective detail of Wardens, coincidentally at the same time that a naagloshii who was previously hired by the Red Court has been lurking around here with around 12 skinwalkers.
Seeker is going to wonder if Molly has the pull to bring the Merlin running, and if its her calling backup or arranging a betrayal or both. The Merlin is going to wonder if he's been drawn into a Red Court trap to be fed to an eldritch abomination.
Harry is going to wonder who exactly he pissed off for this much excitement in his life.
Not to mention that I suspect that Langtry cant step into Chicago without sensing Molly; she's supposed to feel like a mini-Darkhallow, and thats not the sort of thing a senior wizard will miss. Its one thing for Ebenezar to report something back to the Senior Council, and quite something else to feel it yourself.
This has the potential to be all sorts of FUN.
-On the bright side, if we get a look at him or his bodyguards?
We might well be able to Crown question our way to Peabody and the other Black Council moles in the White Council.
We might even pick up on the ink-influence thing.
Eh. This is just Dragons Nest 1, and it goes up as far as 5.
There's always next upgrade.
Ebenezar McCoy, Senior Council member and Blackstaff met us personally though, same meeting where he met our Dad.
Even probed us mentally.
So unless McCoy is also keeping secrets from the Senior Council, they should know about Molly being here.
Though they might not really have the right referents to understand what it means.
They might think she's some sort of scion from the report
And of course, she's grown in power since then.
I specifically said "Russia and all the stans". All the post-soviet republics really. As others mentioned, it's easier to fake USSR passports, and in 2006 you still had them in use (I know, my family got into trouble because my grandparents didn't obtain Russian passports at that time; and we were in Moscow). Professional soldiers speaking foreign language? Better to pretend to be USSR GRU turned mercenary, then Brazilian narcos.
This version is far easier to make legit. Fake a USSR passport from one of the soviet republics, insert data into paper-only archive, get legit Russian / post-soviet republic passport. No bribery needed.
When Merlin arrives, he's going to see:
1) A genuine temple dog with a devil-possessed cellphone / text to speech device
2) Arcane machinery out of sci-fi movie not susceptible to techbane
3) A kakuri-made sword
4) A sword of the cross (I think Harry has one at this point?)
Harry has a very eclectic collection of artifacts right now.
Assuming he doesn't notice Bob that is. And we don't visit.
Also, on the interlude - Ancient Mai knows something. And Merlin hasn't read our book on Yomi Wan. I am interested in why.
Arthur is the Council's warding specialist and he has been warding that house for most of his life, before that his master, also a ward specialist had been doing the same the land it was built on. When it comes to protecting him specifically it is a tougher nut to crack then the Hidden Halls. You cannot buy that amount of wizard habitation and attention.
There is a level of attack that place could not take, but it is a level of 'exchange elites against traps and then get ambushed by the Wardens'