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Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

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BronzeTongue said:
While I would like to talk to Lydia, this would be the first time we've done so since FCF happened. That seems like a conversation that should happen in person, for security reasons and because it'll probably be way funnier that way.
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I agree.
[X] Just get some rest before it is time for the hijacking
 
[X] Call Lydia, it feels like you haven't spoken to her in an age

I feel this might be our last chance of catching Daniel before he goes off on his quest.
 
VOTE
[X] Talk to Broken Seeker more
-[X] See if you can get some rumors from the darker side of the supernatural side


RATIONALE
We would be talking to Lydia over an international phone call, over unencrypted phones, through the Mexican phone network that is monitored by the US natsec complex, US drug law enforcement AND the Red Court via Mexican law enforcement/natsec, as well as anyone else tapping the Mexican phone network.

That just sounds like tempting fate. Hard pass.


I would rather talk to Seeker. Why? For those who dont remember:
DragonParadox said:
The girl just looks confused, though not quite bold enough to speak up.
"Be weary for small demons might the greater draw, there have been worrying rumors of late...." the elder peers at you expectantly, as though anticipating that you know something of these rumors.

Darn it, was that why he wasn't surprised to see a 'bodhisattva' in Chicago?
What do you do?

[] Admit you do not know what he's talking about
[] Try to draw out more clues without admitting ignorance (DC 8 Charisma+Subterfuge roll)
[] Write in

OOC: And so the plot thickens.
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The last time we got this kind of vote option was in Arc 5:
The Will of Kakuri had just come to Chicago and was settling in. Leinth hinted about it when we met him, and we didnt follow up.
Then we got surprised when it started killing people and kidnapped our minions.

I think we should talk to the elder abomination to avoid more nasty surprises.
Commentary and replies in a bit.
 
DragonParadox said:
Contentious Contacts
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COMMENTARY
Hmm. This team seems to be all American.
Thats odd. Or they are intentionally playing themselves off as American when they arent, up to the point of freely spouting names in front of the stranger.

Well, you cant say Ms Newton lacks brass ovaries.
Threatening someone you think is on par with an elder vampire in power is a very Dresden move, only that Dresden has both the power and luck to carry it off. Whether Ms Newton does as well remains to be seen.

For an insurgency that does assassinations and bombings? They are oddly caught up about the assassination of Ortega, especially given that it wasnt just him, but essentially all of his best operatives that Ebenezar murdered in one fell swoop, after the dude had made a point about boasting about coming after a WC wizard personally:
I opened an envelope, read it, and blurted, "Oh, you're kidding me."
"What?"
"I just opened a letter. It's from Larry Fowler's lawyer. The jerk is suing me for trashing his car and his studio."
"He can't prove that," Susan said. "Can he?"
"Whether or not he can, this is going to cost me a fortune in legal fees. Smarmy, mealymouthed jerk."
"Then I hate to add more bad news. Ortega is back in Casaverde, recovering. He's called in all his strongest knights and let it be widely known that he's coming to kill you personally."
"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Did you see the subtle humor there? Vampires, cross? God, I'm funny."
Susan said something in Spanish, not into the phone, and sighed. "Damn. I have to go."
"Saving nuns and orphans?" I asked.
"Leaping tall buildings in a single bound. I should probably put on some underwear."
That kill almost certainly avenged more than a few Fellowship deaths.
Im assuming they had people embedded in the area.

Their numbers are off as well; Ebenezar attests to killing under a hundred civilians at Casaverde.
So their hundreds as a number is well off, in an area where they should have good intel
"Like at Casaverde," I said. "You hit Ortega's stronghold when he escaped our duel."
"Yes," he said, still remote. "Ortega killed more of the White Council than any enemy in our history during the attack at Archangel." His voice faltered for a moment. "He killed Simon. My friend. Then he came here and tried to kill you, Hoss. And he was coming back here to finish the job as soon as he recovered. So I hit Casaverde. Killed him and almost two hundred of his personal retainers. And I killed nearly a hundred people there in the house with them. Servants. Followers. Food."
I felt sick. "You told me it would be on the news. I thought maybe it was the Council. Or that you'd done it without killing anyone but vampires. I had time to think about it later, but… I wanted to believe you'd done what was right."
"There's what's right," the old man said, "and then there's what's necessary. They ain't always the same."

As for the bitterness about not being told?
Susan Rodriguez is a Fellowship member, but she wasnt told that Martin was going to try and assassinate Paolo Ortega when he accompanied her to Chicago. The Fellowship practices need-to-know as ruthlessly as any other organization in this setting.

Im actually wondering how much of those complaints are genuine, and how much were them trying to pump Molly for information.


Molly has a pretty current table of organization for the White Council in her head.
She should know that the White Council has a hitman, and who it is.


Similarly, Casaverde made the international news two or three years ago, not like around a week or two after Shiro died.
We see Dresden watching the news in a diner about a satellite accidentallying a village in Honduras.
And that was the end of that.
I woke up to a ringing telephone the next day. "Hoss," Ebenezar said. "You should watch the news today." He hung up on me.
I went down to a nearby diner for breakfast, and asked the waitress to turn on the news. She did.
"- extraordinary event reminiscent of the science-fiction horror stories around the turn of the millennium, what appeared to be an asteroid fell from space and impacted just outside the village of Casaverde in Honduras." The screen flickered to an aerial shot of an enormous, smoking hole in the ground, and a half-mile-wide circle of trees that had been blasted flat. Just past the circle of destruction stood a poor-looking village. "However, information coming in from agencies around the world indicates that the so-called meteor was in actuality a deactivated Soviet communications satellite which decayed in orbit and fell to earth. No estimates of the number of deaths or injuries in this tragic freak accident have yet reached authorities, but it seems unlikely that anyone in the manor house could possibly have survived the impact."
I sat slowly back, pursing my lips. I decided that maybe I wasn't sorry Asteroid Dresden turned out to be an old Soviet satellite after all. And I made a mental note to myself never to get on Ebenezar's bad side.
She should remember this if she thinks about it a little.


BoredMan said:
I don't wanna spend essence during a conversation but yeah I forgot about that plotthread entirely...
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Neither do I, but I hate being blindsided even more.
And each time we've had a heavy incoming so far, we've gotten something like this waved under our nose at least an arc in advance.
 
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uju32 said:
I think we should talk to the elder abomination to avoid more nasty surprises
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This is an eyes on the prize moment in my view. We haven't even gotten to the dangerous and flashy part of time whole thing and we've already written our presence across the supernatural landscape with a flood of screaming ghosts.

That whole exchange with St. Giles also has good odds of getting back to the red court soon since we implied we were hunting reds to them.

It's entirely possible Ortega has already changed her plans, that security has been tightened enough to pose significant issues, or something else we don't have enough information to guess at yet.

Trying to draw useful information from Broken Seeker isn't the best use of essence right now.

I also think you're misreading the situation with this vote.

In one case we were told that rumors of something concerning existed and given the chance to ask for more information. In this one it's just pumping him for rumors while he's here. Could be that we learn something timely, but that's a significant difference.

Even if there is an active event to track we haven't typically only been given one chance to look into something. We can look into this when we get back to Chicago.
 
The complaints seem quite genuine and Molly suspects they lost friends or contacts in the attack, people get upset about civilian deaths, but the way they focused on trying to warn her away from the Council moments after threatening her it seems at least partially personal.
 
BronzeTongue said:
This is an eyes on the prize moment in my view.
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Its a fair argument to make.

I just dont agree under these circumstances.
We dont need to burn Essence in order to talk to it; it is necessary in a focused meeting, but not for a fishing expedition that doesnt include his personal secrets, so the DC is much less.

And I dont really see any other reasonable circumstance under which we'd sit down and shoot the shit with Seeker.
DragonParadox said:
The complaints seem quite genuine and Molly suspects they lost friends or contacts in the attack, people get upset about civilian deaths, but the way they focused on trying to warn her away from the Council moments after threatening her it seems at least partially personal.
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Fair.
Would explain it, especially with Demonic Primacy working its social effect and making them a lot more loose-tongued in the presence of a stranger than they would normally be.
 
fictionfan said:
It's not that odd. We are in Mexico -an airport in Mexico- there is a huge bleed over across the border both ways.
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Its still Mexico, not the US.

The Red Court has predated on Latin America; the heart of their power is in Mexico, but they essentially run every country south of the Rio Grande. And I mean every country; Arianna Ortega may be personally based in Mexico, but her late husband's public personality was as a professor in Brazil, who owned a manor in Honduras.

So just as their victims are multinational, you'd think most of the people fighting them would be as well.
Just playing the numbers game would suggest at least a local or two on a Fellowship team, which is why I got suspicious that they are all presenting as Americans.
 
uju32 said:
Its a fair argument to make.

I just dont agree under these circumstances.
We dont need to burn Essence in order to talk to it; it is necessary in a focused meeting, but not for a fishing expedition that doesnt include his personal secrets, so the DC is much less.

And I dont really see any other reasonable circumstance under which we'd sit down and shoot the shit with Seeker.
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We've done well against BS by hitting in areas he's not good in and leveraging our usual strengths, but that doesn't mean he's safe to engage with casually.

I'd say a fishing expedition needs essence than something more focused, because we don't know what we're going for and it won't necessarily stay in areas we can easily manipulate.

I don't see a specific thing giving us actual cause to believe we need to do this. If there's actually rumor level knowledge relevant to us we can probably get it from the Shen or something too.
 
Question, as someone not entirely up to date with Dresden lore, why does the Blackstaff bypass the First Law?

Furthermore, could this capability be replicated? Might it then be possible to bypass the other Laws as well?
 
Negentropy said:
Question, as someone not entirely up to date with Dresden lore, why does the Blackstaff bypass the First Law?
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We don't know for sure. The big theory, unconfirmed, is that it's Mother Winter's missing walking stick.
When we see McCoy use it to kill some mercenaries in Changes it seems to physically deal with whatever corrupting impact taking such an action would have had on him, unpleasantly so.

Negentropy said:
Might it then be possible to bypass the other Laws as well?
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Presumably he can break the other laws as well, but McCoy hasn't done any time travel, necromancy, etc. that we know of.
 
Anaja said:
We don't know for sure. The big theory, unconfirmed, is that it's Mother Winter's missing walking stick.
When we see McCoy use it to kill some mercenaries in Changes it seems to physically deal with whatever corrupting impact taking such an action would have had on him, unpleasantly so.


Presumably he can break the other laws as well, but McCoy hasn't done any time travel, necromancy, etc. that we know of.
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Even if it could be done I suspect the council would react murderously to the idea regardless of where it came from.

The laws of magic are an ideology to them as much as they are something with tangible consequences.

Edit: replicated I mean.
 
BronzeTongue said:
Even if it could be done I suspect the council would react murderously to the idea regardless of where it came from.

The laws of magic are an ideology to them as much as they are something with tangible consequences.

Edit: replicated I mean.
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hes probably allowed on the invading other minds thing. But, none of the other ones most likely. Can't see any practical reason he'd need to transform someone or enthrallment most of the time for the latter. The rest just seem like big no nos.
 
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