Issue with Nemesis going for the Masquerade is that we'll be fighting a losing battle trying to keep the lid on things. The Masquerade has only persisted because everyone wanted it to; remember, the moment the Fomorians decided to screw the rules, they blew that shit wide-open.
Even if the same plot hole that kept the entire city of Chicago dropping of the map and losing tens of thousands of civilians still not breaking the Masquerade existed here, we all know that shit had consequences even in the books. Some poor Middle-Eastern/South Asian country's getting the same response Iraq got to 9/11; even if they weren't the ones responsible, you know the US had to respond.
And that kind of chaos is just gonna build and build in a way we can't truly defang without revealing magic on a larger scale. We simply can't build up our own soft and hard power enough to deal with all the repercussions of Nemesis taking an Infected on TV and slaughtering everybody present with magic and doing it over and over and over again in the name of some random non-western country.
We just... don't have the capacity to keep the Masqerade from shattering, especially since the Fomorians might join in too. We have to look at alternatives.
According to the rest of the Cthulu Mythos, Cthulu is supposed to be a Great Old One.
Looking at the power levels of ExWoD, I would bet on Cthulu crushing the average Essence 5 Infernal 10 out of 10.
I'd bet on Cthulu against a full circle of E5 Exalts that didnt have a designated protagonist character.
GOOs arent really in our weight class.
For one thing, Nemesis Nfection is something that afflicts a very limited number of people at a time.
Its instructive that we have not seen more than four people simultaneously Nfested at the same time in either of the Fae Courts, its primary targets.
Butcher hasnt given a hard number, but I dont get the impression that it can simultaneously possess more than double digit victims, possibly even low double digits.
For another, Molly is closer to a fantasy head of state than a secular head of state.
The President of the United States might not go around to cure people because he has no special ability to.
King Aragorn Elessar of Gondor could and did.
This is not true.
Necromancy is a knowledge/skill like Ancient Sorcery. Its learned, it doesnt require an external patron to operate.
Furthermore, most Exalts are not and have never been practitioners of Necromancy.
Sorcery does what their charms cant.
The weirdass reckless assholes who broke into the Neverborn's tombs did it as much for bragging rights as much as any real utility.
Thats just untrue.
I find it fascinating to see that you actually take the tongue-in-cheek declarations of Exalted superiority as the literal truth.
1) The Primordials would have simply built a wall and made the Wyld pay for it if that was at all possible to keep the pesky raksha away from their playground and prayer livestock, instead of having to have one of their number playing Border Patrol. The fact that they didnt suggests there are significant drawbacks to that plan.
2)We have had this particular experiment play out in Exalted 2E.
When Autochton the Great Maker, one of the crafters of Creation sealed himself off from the outside world, he took a reserve of energy before setting up the Seal, and even he eventually began to starve in his sleep.
That resource and energy crisis is a major plot point of the Autochtonia setting, which is a place where you actually have high-Essence Celestial Exalts running around and actively involved in the setting.
There's literally several times more Celestial Exalts in Autochtonia than Creation, with estimates of between 1000 and 5000 Alchemicals compared to ~700 Solars + Lunars + Sidereals. And they canonically havent figured out any workarounds to getting extra power short of opening the Seal
I consider the idea that building an impassable wall around Creation that would go better as wishful thinking.
No it isnt.
Molly could simply be engaged in enlightened self-interest as a denizen of reality and an associate of Dresden, who has had multiple Outsider encounters thus far.
Or it could be viewed as spite against an entity that was involved by proxy in the death and injuries of her friends at Splattercon, the subsequent assault on her family home, and her kidnapping and torture.
That last bit is probably the leading hypothesis, I suspect.
Nope.
Mother Winter is the first Mother Winter. Mother Summer is the second Mother Summer.
Not sure if Mab is the first Mab.
The Reds dont want to break the masquerade.
Literally part of Arianna's husband Paolo's dayjob was as a wellknown professor of a Brazillian university who made media appearances and coordinated campaigns debunking the existence of the supernatural.
Spilling information there will likely have effects on Outsider agents ability to operate.
The same holds true for a lot of people collaborating with the Outsiders for their own purposes.
You kinda have to be Ethniu and the Formorians, or someone like her to be down with the burn the setting down and roast marshmallows in the embers, and they have the advantage of living at the bottom of the oceans/The NeverNever.
Ivy undoubtedly has contacts there as well.
This is the sort of thing why there exists a neutral coordinatior of the Oblivion War.
One who is credible to most sides.
And if that path says that mushroom clouds are pretty?
Or something less controversial like the US and Britain are currently illegally occupying Mauritian territory in the Indian Ocean?
What if she simply passes through an edgelord phase like many teenagers do?
I have very little sympathy for the argument that we should jailbreak and hand over, among other things, nuclear launch authority and Summer/Winter Lady-plus occult muscle to an 11 year old girl with no restrictions or guidelines.
Thats incredibly reckless.
Not actually accurate.
Summer AND Winter both hold the Outer Gates; Winter are the soldiers, and Summer are the battlefield medics and support
It didn't take us long to get there, but as we came up to the base of the wall and walked along it, we started drawing the eyes of the wall's defenders. I felt myself growing tenser as a marching column of armored Sidhe soldiers came stepping lightly along the ground behind us, catching up quickly.
Mother Summer guided me slightly aside so that we weren't in the column's way, and they started going by us. I didn't think much of it until someone at the front of the column called out in a clear voice, and as one the Sidhe came to a halt with a solid, simultaneous stomp of a couple of hundred boots. The voice barked another command, and the Sidhe all turned to face us.
"Uh-oh," I said.
Mother Summer touched my hand with hers, and reassurance bathed me like June sunshine. "Shhh." The voice barked another command, and as one the Sidhe lowered themselves to one knee and bowed their heads. "Good morrow, cousins," Mother Summer said, her voice solemn. She took her hand off my arm and passed it in a broad, sweeping arch over the kneeling soldiers. Subtle, subtle power thrummed delicately in the air. "Go forth with my blessing."
One of the soldiers in the lead of the column rose and bowed to her, somehow conveying gratitude. Then he snapped out another loud command, and the column rose, turned, and continued its quickstep march.
"Huh," I said.
"Yes?" asked Mother Summer.
"I was sort of expecting . . . something else." "Winter and Summer are two opposing forces of our world," she said. "But we are of our world. Here, that is all that matters. And showing respect to one's elders is never unwise."
"Yes, ma'am," I said.
Mother Summer gave me a small, shrewd smile.
We continued our walk in their wake, and soon reached the gates. There I saw a smaller set of gates—sally ports—built into the main gates. They were the size of the garage doors on a fire station. As I watched, someone shouted a command and a pair of heavily armored ogres each grabbed one of the sally ports and drew it open. The column that had passed us stood waiting to march out, but they did not immediately proceed. Instead, a column of carts and litters entered, bearing the groaning wounded of the fighting outside, being watched over by several dozen Sidhe dressed in pure white armor, marked with bold green and scarlet trim—Sidhe knights of Summer. Medics. Despite the massive numbers of troops I'd seen moving around, there were fewer than a hundred casualties brought back to the gates. Evidently the Outsiders were not in the business of leaving enemies alive behind them.
A lean figure came down a stairway built within the walls framing the gates, at first a shadowy blur through the layers and layers of crystal. He was a couple of inches taller than me, which put him at the next-best thing to seven feet, but he moved with a brisk, bustling sense of energy and purpose. He wore a dark robe that looked black at first, but as he emerged into the light, highlights showed it to be a deep purple. He carried a long pale wizard's staff in one weathered hand, and his hood covered up most of his face, except for part of an aquiline nose and a long chin covered in a grizzled beard. He spoke to the Summer and Winter Sidhe alike in a language I didn't understand but they evidently did, giving instructions to Summer's medics. They took his orders with a kind of rigid, formal deference. He leaned over to scan each of the fallen closely, nodding at the medics after each, and they would immediately carry the wounded Sidhe in question back behind the wall, into what looked like a neat triage area.
"Rashid," I murmured, recognizing the man. "What is he doing here—"
I froze and stared up at the massive gates rising above us.
Rashid, a member of the Senior Council of the White Council of Wizards, had another title, the name he went by most often.
The Gatekeeper.
He finished with the last of the wounded, then turned and approached us with long, purposeful strides. He paused a few steps away and bowed to Mother Summer, who returned the gesture with a deep, formal nod of her head. Then he came the rest of the way to me, and I could see the gleam of a dark eye inside his hood. His smile was wide and warm, and he extended his hand to me. I took it and shook it, feeling a little overwhelmed.
"Well, well," he said. His voice was a deep, warm thing, marked with an accent that sounded vaguely British seasoned with plenty of more exotic spices. "I had hoped we would see your face again, Warden."
"Rashid," I replied. "Uh . . . we're . . . they're . . ."
The Gatekeeper's smile turned a bit rueful. "Ah, yes," he said. "They're impressive the first time, I suppose. Welcome, Warden Dresden, to the Outer Gates."
Their primary role in Creation is to counter-balance Winter, but they do send forces to the Gates as well.
Yes we do want the Masquerade running.
Generally, Nemesis and its peers arent trying to do things that will benefit the rest of the setting.
I see no reason to do their job for them.
Its worth noting that post-Battle Grounds, after sixty thousand people die in Chicago, with fullscale warfare involving hundreds of thousands of troops(counting the Little Folk), fourfivesix major Powers throwing down in the streets, skyscrapers getting blasted out of the skyline by the Eye of Balor and a fullscale helicopter gunship strike murdering most of the retreating remnants of the Formorian legions?
EVERYBODY puts together a coverup. Mortal governments and supernatural powers alike.
A lot of people in Chicago know what happened, but even then thats maybe in the five figure range; if you werent a combatant, its kinda hard to tell what's happening at night in a city thats lost power. And with magic punching out cameras and similar electronic recording equipment, all you have is eyewitness from anyone who was reckless enough not to be barricaded indoors.
Outside Chicago? The story is terrorist attack and hallucinogens. And it largely sticks with a lot of the outside world, because the lack of recordings in a major US city just sounds like a hoax.
Major mortal govts arent entirely ignorant of the supernatural, both in canon and in this AU.
After all, PMCs like Monoc that are explicitly hiring out "consultants" to US underworld figures like Marcone dont get access to former USAF nuclear command centers unless they have serious fucking mojo at the highest levels.
In canon mab is not the first mab. As for being mother the first mother winter I didn't say she wasn't the first that's canon. She is called the queen that was no idea what that would mean in her case or if it's just some kind of hyperbole. Here mabs probably the first and only queen though but in canon she very much isn't.
Also by definition in this quest it'd be impossible for a second mother summer to ever happen as it requires a former queen to take their place which is impossible in a quest where mab is the first queen as Titania became queen basically the same time or close enough.
This strikes me as a self serving interpretation of our behavior that allows us to get paid and be viewed as a philanthropist for the same action.
I don't think there's anything wrong with charging for risky and important work, but you can't do that and expect a plurality are going pay attention to every detail other than the check you cashed. Especially when you're making legendary profits.
There can be lots of motivators around why someone did something that shape but don't tip the balance of their actions.
It's objective fact that four of the five SCE castings we've performed (all of the nemesis ones) have been for significant profit. We probably aren't going to be thought of as a greedy bastard, but anyone with more resources than a literal penniless orphan is going to make some accurate assumptions about how we do business.
Trying to say that we shouldn't dare charge for an exorcism while pocketing the equivalent of "IOU one Desert Storm" tokens from the US/China/[Insert world power metaphor of your choice here] in 80% of all prior transactions is ridiculous.
There's nothing wrong in charging for work. Odin charged us for the use of the Einherjar; no shame in it.
But I happened to think that this particular service is not one that we wanted to give people the impression that they have to pay us for, because its in our interests that people out potential Nemesis plants without worrying about cost.
Moot point now. Maybe Ivy wont tell others about it 🤷
Nah, I think you are missing some details there; four of the five SCE castings we have performed have been for Fae, who are bound by their natures to try to balance the scales whether or not we formally negotiated a fee.
The fifth was for a ten year old, and was done for free.
Furthermore, other than the people we told, there's essentially noone outside the top levels of the Fae Courts who are aware of the fact that we are owed favors for what we did, just like noone knew that Mab owed Nicodemus a favor until she told Dresden.
So it shouldnt come into the calculations of other people.
I wasn't suggesting they'd cooperate with Nemesis, just that they couldn't stop it. I'm not sure anyone can, it spreads too fast and can take such powerful pawns that making the supernatural undeniable should be easy for it.
The red court uses so many outsider summons that I'd be surprised if they weren't hilariously compromised by now, and the war further limits their resources. They're too perfect a propaganda target to pass up if your goal is to push the mortal world into clashing with the supernatural one on multiple fronts.
Note that Nemesis is subtle and powerful, but it only has a limited number of possession slots,
I mean, if it was as virulent as you think, look at all the time that Peabody has had access to the Senior Council in this AU with his mind-warping ink, or all of the Wardens that he was able to brainwash.
Hell, how many people canon Justine had access to in canon, from Lara and Thomas Raith to Marcone.
I get the impression that victims are chosen carefully for position and access because they cant spam that ability.
I will also note that as far as we've seen, it has been able to take possession of Fae, human and near-human supernaturals like White Court vampires.
There's no suggestion you can plug an Outsider into just any supernatural of Earth.
===
I would be surprised if they were that compromised.
Outsider summoning apparently requires human magic to bypass the Gates according to Luccio and Morgan in Dead Beat; Outsider use by the Reds was how the White Council knew that they had human magical collaborators.
Both Walker summonings we have seen in the setting were done by mortal magic-users: He Who Walks Behind was first called by rogue wizard Justine DuMorne, then later called by black magic witch Madge Shelly.
The White Court of vampires might count as sufficiently human to do that sort of summoning and to host that sort of spirit, but the Red Court almost certainly does not.
Which means they have to be using human summoners and human magic-users, who arent in the Red Court hierarchy.
===
That said, this is also a reason to leave this to Ivy.
She, and the Archive, actually know these people well enough to make an informed judgement.
We dont.
They're not deliberately trying to end the world, but they clearly think it's worth risking to win. I don't trust them to do the smart thing instead of trying to exploit their new knowledge of Nemesis' goals with the intent to betray him after their 'inevitable victory' if Ivy thinks she can make it work then I'd leave it to her.
My thought was that it was related to the type and context of the predation.
DF fey are elementals of the soul and Summer is passion, intuition, spontaneity, and similar concepts. They can be just as bad as Winter, but when they hurt you it definitely won't feel the same.
There are exceptions to this, but my rough distinction would be that a Summer fey hunting humans for sport would give them a weapon and head start "for a sporting chance" while Winter would just eat you because they're hungry.
Not that the summer fey wouldn't tear your throat out with their teeth on the spot or a Winter fey wouldn't set things up so they can sadistically enjoy a victim running for their life, but it seems like a good example.
Titania couldn't do it because our method was too cold blooded. She might legitimately believe there's a distinction between this and an ogre running across an open field to club people for snacks and only refer to the winter one as a predatory. Which would be a wise standard to adhere to when speaking inside her magical possibly sapient self renovating castle.
Based on what I recall of Summer Knight, Aurora's entourage didnt really operate that way.
But I dont really have any hard data, and one example may or may not be representative.
Issue with Nemesis going for the Masquerade is that we'll be fighting a losing battle trying to keep the lid on things. The Masquerade has only persisted because everyone wanted it to; remember, the moment the Fomorians decided to screw the rules, they blew that shit wide-open.
As demonstrated in the setting, the Formorians trying to blow the Masquerade open required an occult superweapon and a Titan from the Old Times, coordinated with a massive Outsider attack on the Outer Gates to prevent Winter bringing a significant fraction of their forces back to reality to summarily murder the Formorian armies.
It still resulted in the Formorians getting dogpiled by everyone from the Fae to wizards to Knights of the Cross, Ethniu ending up in Supernatural Supermax, and literally everyone else doing their best to cover it up, mortal and supernatural.
The vast majority of factions, good, evil and neutral like the Masquerade. It works for them.
There is a reason why trying to breach it in a way that cant be covered up has been so difficult for the Outsiders.
Even if the same plot hole that kept the entire city of Chicago dropping of the map and losing tens of thousands of civilians still not breaking the Masquerade existed here, we all know that shit had consequences even in the books. Some poor Middle-Eastern/South Asian country's getting the same response Iraq got to 9/11; even if they weren't the ones responsible, you know the US had to respond.
There is no evidence of this either.
There have been multiple novellas and short stories set after Battle Grounds: The Law, The Good People, Christmas Eve, Little Things, Fugitive.
If a major international war had broken out in the aftermath, thats the sort of thing that would have been mentioned, just like how when the Red Court fell, wars breaking out were explicitly mentioned.
In canon mab is not the first mab. As for being mother the first mother winter I didn't say she wasn't the first that's canon. She is called the queen that was no idea what that would mean in her case or if it's just some kind of hyperbole. Here mabs probably the first and only queen though but in canon she very much isn't.
Also by definition in this quest it'd be impossible for a second mother summer to ever happen as it requires a former queen to take their place which is impossible in a quest where mab is the first queen as Titania became queen basically the same time or close enough.
-They are ALL formally called the Queen according to Bob.
The wizards have all been in duck-and-cover mode lately. And there are too many of them to make a practical suspect pool. Let's assume that it was probably internal faerie stuff. That cuts it down to three suspects."
"Three?"
"The three people who could have managed it. Summer Queen, Winter Queen, Winter Knight. One, two, three." "Harry, I said it could have been one of the Queens."
I blinked up at the skull. "There are more than two?"
"Yeah, technically there are three."
"Three?"
"In each Court."
"Three Queens in each Court? Six?" That's just silly."
"Not if you think about it. Each Court has three Queens: The Queen Who Was, the Queen Who Is, and the Queen Who Is to Come."
"Great. Which one does the Knight work for?"
"All of them. It's kind of a group thing. He has different duties to each Queen." I felt the headache start at the base of my neck and creep toward the crown of my head. "Okay, Bob. I need to know about these Queens."
"Which ones? The ones Who Are, Who Were, or Who Are to Come?"
I stared at the skull for a second, while the headache settled comfortably in. "There's got to be a simpler parlance than that."
"That's so typical. You won't steal a baby, but you're too lazy to conjugate."
"Hey," I said, "my sex life has nothing to do with—" "Conjugate, Harry. Conju—oh, why do I even bother? The Queen is just the Queen. Queen Titania, Queen Mab. The Queen Who Was is called the Mother. The Queen Who Is to Come is known as the Lady. Right now, the Winter Lady is Maeve. The Summer Lady is Aurora."
There is nothing Im aware of that says that you must be the Summer Lady before becoming the Summer Queen.
Thats the expected line of succession, but as we've seen, the Mantles can skip usual protocol if they find an appropriate candidate. Lily was the first mortal ever chosen as Summer Lady in canon; apparently, the Mantle would usually pick from current Sidhe.
And it had turned snow white.
"Harry," Fix said. "How you doing?"
I blinked at them and said, "You? The new Summer Lady?"
Lily flushed prettily and nodded. "I know. I didn't want it, but when—when Aurora died, her power flowed into the nearest Summer vessel. Usually it would be one of the other Queens, but I had the Knight's power and it just sort of … plopped in there." I lifted my eyebrows and said, "Are you okay?" She frowned. "I'm not sure. It's a lot to think about. And it's the first time this kind of power has fallen to a mortal." "You mean you're not, uh. You haven't?" "Chosen?" Lily asked. She shook her head. "It's just me. I don't know what I'm going to do, but Titania said she'd teach me."
I glanced aside. "And you chose Fix as your Knight, huh."
She smiled at Fix. "I trust him."
"Suits me," I said. "Fix kicked the Winter Knight's ass once already."
Lily blinked and looked at Fix. The little guy flushed, and I swear to God, he dragged one foot over the ground.
Lily smiled and offered me her hand. "I wanted to meet you. And to thank you, Mister Dresden. I owe you my life."
I shook her hand but said, "You don't owe me anything. I'm apparently saving damsels on reflex now." My smile faded and I said, "Besides, I was just the hired help. Thank Meryl."
As demonstrated in the setting, the Formorians trying to blow the Masquerade open required an occult superweapon and a Titan from the Old Times, coordinated with a massive Outsider attack on the Outer Gates to prevent Winter bringing a significant fraction of their forces back to reality to summarily murder the Formorian armies.
It still resulted in the Formorians getting dogpiled by everyone from the Fae to wizards to Knights of the Cross, Ethniu ending up in Supernatural Supermax, and literally everyone else doing their best to cover it up, mortal and supernatural.
The vast majority of factions, good, evil and neutral like the Masquerade. It works for them.
There is a reason why trying to breach it in a way that cant be covered up has been so difficult for the Outsiders.
The Outsiders haven't tried to break the Masquerade in canon because they didn't need to. They came an inch from breaking open Demonreach, which would've broken the Masquerade as a side effect of distracting all the forces that oppose it. Can't protect the world from Outside if said world's been destroyed by Demonreach's prisoners, after all.
And it really wasn't hard for the Fomorians to break the Masquerade. They didn't even need Ethniu; they could've sent a few hundred minions to their deaths in downtown Chicago, and that alone would've broken the Masquerade. No need to warn their enemies as they did in Peace Talks, just surprise attack Los Angeles/New York/London and let the chaos do the work for them, even after all their minions get slaughtered. If Ethniu never showed up with the Eye, plenty of cameras would've recorded all that live for the world to see.
There is no evidence of this either.
There have been multiple novellas and short stories set after Battle Grounds: The Law, The Good People, Christmas Eve, Little Things, Fugitive.
If a major international war had broken out in the aftermath, thats the sort of thing that would have been mentioned, just like how when the Red Court fell, wars breaking out were explicitly mentioned.
This is more a failing of Jim then the logical response of the United States of America to one of their largest cities dropping off the radar, from all communications, for several hours before returning sans 60,000 civilians with another 100,000 as refugees on American soil. It's literally canon that the mortal world is in denial and declared it a terrorist attack; that's the worst terrorist attack in history, and you think the US isn't gonna pick a target and steamroll it? Please, the War on Terror just escalated, HARD.
Issue with Nemesis going for the Masquerade is that we'll be fighting a losing battle trying to keep the lid on things. The Masquerade has only persisted because everyone wanted it to; remember, the moment the Fomorians decided to screw the rules, they blew that shit wide-open.
I don't think preserving it is viable long term either; the only possibility I can see is doing something to convince Nemesis that shattering it is against its self interest before it does irreparable harm. Which is dicey at best and only lasts as long as whatever patch you use is persuasive.
Instead the priorities as I see them are
1) Ensure Nemesis and the Outside profit at little as possible or are actively harmed by the situation
2) Prevent other bad actors from profiting by continuing or expanding their undesirable behaviors.
3) Ensure existing good institutions expand their footprint in desirable ways
4) Advance our own power.
So our alternative should be to start by stomping on Nemesis' face even at the expense of other factors, only working to delay the inevitable when and where doing so will enhance our factions' positions relative to the opposition's.
Nexts steps would be something like:
1) Questions for our existing foci
1a) Potentially hand out our notes to Ivy
2) Finish out turn and use Sandra as an additional focus on nemesis
3) Next turn use our previous results to start organizing people through the Archive. Get into contact with the library and try for getting mortals up to speed. Accelerate our plans to up arm the council and their allies, try to get some benefits to pay back the people of our hell if we can.
4) Use our lists of Outsider pawns to go hunting. Exorcise, kill, and eat any Outsider or willingly pawn we can find in an unpredictable blitz. Feed our coalition data through Ivy. The Outside isn't allowed to have secrets from us anymore.
4a) As we go, take targets of opportunity to screw factions we don't like by stealing their secrets for our preferred contender for their seat.
4b) This will obviously get us a little heat, so we should try to get time to make the really broken item builds for our personal use if we can.
5) Once step 4 has disrupted a useful portion of Nemesis' plans step back and reevaluate and prioritize. Shift from random data raids to targeted operational strikes.
There are big risks here, including leaking the crown, but this is the sort of crisis you risk that over. The outsiders will also probably find a way to degrade or effectiveness at minimum eventually, but given the factors involved I don't think a plan much more detailed than this is helpful.
There's nothing wrong in charging for work. Odin charged us for the use of the Einherjar; no shame in it.
But I happened to think that this particular service is not one that we wanted to give people the impression that they have to pay us for, because its in our interests that people out potential Nemesis plants without worrying about cost.
Moot point now. Maybe Ivy wont tell others about it 🤷
Nah, I think you are missing some details there; four of the five SCE castings we have performed have been for Fae, who are bound by their natures to try to balance the scales whether or not we formally negotiated a fee.
The fifth was for a ten year old, and was done for free.
Furthermore, other than the people we told, there's essentially noone outside the top levels of the Fae Courts who are aware of the fact that we are owed favors for what we did, just like noone knew that Mab owed Nicodemus a favor until she told Dresden.
So it shouldnt come into the calculations of other people.
Fey aren't bound by their natures to be fair when they find "balance". This is the part I think I'm not communicating well.
Nobody treats business with the fey as being any less business because they're obligated to work out some sort of deal.
If you had wanted to both work with them and give anyone else the impression that our payment as a token taken for fey reasons then we should have specifically asked for a payment that was token and not taken the most permissive sort of favor the queens of the fey can give.
They fey aren't obligated to police your side of the contract as long as you nominally agree it's fair. Remember that scene with Maeve during her early appearances where she had a party going with an amazing trumpet player on stage.
He falls over dead while Dresden is there and she reveals that she'd been around to catch the guy remarking he'd die to play that well while listening to a better musician work. So she accepted and he was screwed.
Do you think he really meant that he wanted to commit suicide that day in exchange for being able to play the trumpet well while doing it? That he would have believed it was a fair deal if genuinely offered before he accidentally made it?
He agreed it was implicitly by offering, and so for her purposes it was. Mab and Titania had to offer, we didn't have to accept those exact terms. We could also have framed our visit in a way to spare the need to negotiate down. Like asking for assistance killing the shards in a summer appropriate way in exchange for exorcising them, or to perform some equivalent act of spite against nemesis for us. Things they'd do anyway in other words.
Titania publicly addressed us on the lake shore too, so everyone knows about the those ones.
Note that Nemesis is subtle and powerful, but it only has a limited number of possession slots,
I mean, if it was as virulent as you think, look at all the time that Peabody has had access to the Senior Council in this AU with his mind-warping ink, or all of the Wardens that he was able to brainwash.
Hell, how many people canon Justine had access to in canon, from Lara and Thomas Raith to Marcone.
I get the impression that victims are chosen carefully for position and access because they cant spam that ability
I will also note that as far as we've seen, it has been able to take possession of Fae, human and near-human supernaturals like White Court vampires.
There's no suggestion you can plug an Outsider into just any supernatural of Earth
That's nonsense unless you think everyone in the setting is an idiot.
If you had nemesis proof guys running around on a species level it would have come up, because the people dealing with it would have hired on as many as they could get.
They're still running outsiders through their space and using them to serve their goals. Even if they only use blood slaves that's information to exploit when free outsiders already in reality go to use them.
There is no way to safely summon the minions of something that hates you.
The Outsiders haven't tried to break the Masquerade in canon because they didn't need to. They came an inch from breaking open Demonreach, which would've broken the Masquerade as a side effect of distracting all the forces that oppose it. Can't protect the world from Outside if said world's been destroyed by Demonreach's prisoners, after all.
And it really wasn't hard for the Fomorians to break the Masquerade. They didn't even need Ethniu; they could've sent a few hundred minions to their deaths in downtown Chicago, and that alone would've broken the Masquerade. No need to warn their enemies as they did in Peace Talks, just surprise attack Los Angeles/New York/London and let the chaos do the work for them, even after all their minions get slaughtered. If Ethniu never showed up with the Eye, plenty of cameras would've recorded all that live for the world to see.
The Outsider-involved Red Court used a chemical weapon supplied by the Outsider-involved Formorians on a Central African city as far back as Dead Beat in order to kill a bunch of wizards being treated for combat injuries. Killed thousands, if not tens of thousands of people.
And thats just been in the roughly ten years or so covered by the series so far in canon that has come to Dresden's notice.
Not counting any previous attempts.
===
Random attackers in the middle of a major city?
Book 2 had an attack on a police station in the middle of Chicago by a loup garou, with double digit fatalities among police and prisoners alike, a subsequent loup garou attack was filmed and put on TV, and a serialkilling FBI team was covered up.
Book 7 had zombies and spectres running in the streets, and thats not counting Sue the T-rex.
Book 10 had an attack on Union Station in the heart of Chicago by several hundred hobs with significant civilian collateral, and a firefight with a 20 foot tall Gruff in the same location. Book 12 had a search and destroy mass murder attack on the Chicago Field Office of the FBI by multiple Red Court vampire kill teams backed by an Ick demon. In daytime, iirc.
This is more a failing of Jim then the logical response of the United States of America to one of their largest cities dropping off the radar, from all communications, for several hours before returning sans 60,000 civilians with another 100,000 as refugees on American soil. It's literally canon that the mortal world is in denial and declared it a terrorist attack; that's the worst terrorist attack in history, and you think the US isn't gonna pick a target and steamroll it? Please, the War on Terror just escalated, HARD.
Why are you assuming that any scapegoats would be foreign?
Its not like the US has a shortage of domestic kooks, or that the example of Aum Shin Ri Kyo isnt instructive of how a domestic terror group can brew up and deploy a chemical attack in a First World country.
In a setting where the supernatural exists, and elements of the US are painfully aware that the supernatural are a thing, they are very unlikely to be committing forces abroad after a homeland attack.
Hell, go back and look at the history of the real world back when multiple superpower competition was a thing.
Islamic Jihad killed 241 US Marines and 58 French soldiers in a pair of truck bombings in Beirut in 1983. The US couldnt locate a culprit, and werent going to commit tens of thousands of soldiers to an open-ended commitment in the Cold War less than a decade after Vietnam.
Shit like Iraq are the luxury of an unopposed superpower with nothing to fear coupled to an administration with an axe to grind against people they think are pushovers. Not one where those in the know remembers that in 1994, Milwaukee vanished from communications and was replaced on satellite imagery by virgin forest for several hours.
Simply put, everything that's occurred before could be covered up. A nerve gas attack on an African hospital is, unfortunately, easily dismissed as just another mortal atrocity. Bad recordings and minor incidents that weren't blown up all over national TV can be swept under the rug with cooperation from the authorities.
You don't dismiss 60k dead, 100k refugees, and an uncertain number of additional casualties. The moment Chicago went dark, national TV was probably on that shit for hours. Afterwards? The whole fucking world is laser-focusing on this catastrophe, because again there's never been this many killed in a terrorist attack before.
The US has to respond. It just has to. No country would survive letting something of this magnitude go, and they have to annihilate a target to show they're not to be messed with. The fear of 9/11 had the US launch into multiple wars for years. This is much worse than 9/11 and the fear and anger from this event would have the US launch wars to the knife against anybody they think had anything to do with this, supernatural or not. This isn't just about the illusion of American hegemony being shattered, this is literally about survival because Chicago got half-decimated. Big difference between launching wars of pride and wars of survival, after all.
And given the world's decided to blame mundane terrorists, you know some poor country got deleted for this.
I have very little sympathy for the argument that we should jailbreak and hand over, among other things, nuclear launch authority and Summer/Winter Lady-plus occult muscle to an 11 year old girl with no restrictions or guidelines.
Thats incredibly reckless.
And I have even less sympathy for any argument that leaves an eleven-year-old girl enslaved to a millenia-old thing just cause it's risky. That's a SWLiHN level argument against free will cause people don't deserve it.
Here's a question for you, what's the cut-off point for power before people stop deserving freedom? Even ordinary people can commit actions like the holocaust, so how sure of you of the lower floor? And are we ethically obligated to perform a self-lobotomy to erase our own free will because of our power?
Fey aren't bound by their natures to be fair when they find "balance". This is the part I think I'm not communicating well.
Nobody treats business with the fey as being any less business because they're obligated to work out some sort of deal.
If you had wanted to both work with them and give anyone else the impression that our payment as a token taken for fey reasons then we should have specifically asked for a payment that was token and not taken the most permissive sort of favor the queens of the fey can give.
They fey aren't obligated to police your side of the contract as long as you nominally agree it's fair. Remember that scene with Maeve during her early appearances where she had a party going with an amazing trumpet player on stage.
He falls over dead while Dresden is there and she reveals that she'd been around to catch the guy remarking he'd die to play that well while listening to a better musician work. So she accepted and he was screwed.
Do you think he really meant that he wanted to commit suicide that day in exchange for being able to play the trumpet well while doing it? That he would have believed it was a fair deal if genuinely offered before he accidentally made it?
He agreed it was implicitly by offering, and so for her purposes it was. Mab and Titania had to offer, we didn't have to accept those exact terms. We could also have framed our visit in a way to spare the need to negotiate down. Like asking for assistance killing the shards in a summer appropriate way in exchange for exorcising them, or to perform some equivalent act of spite against nemesis for us. Things they'd do anyway in other words.
Titania publicly addressed us on the lake shore too, so everyone knows about the those ones.
As I understand it:
If you make a deal with the Fae, they are allowed to bargain as hard as they can, and make it as lopsided as they can manage.
But in the end, they are obliged to keep to at least the letter of their deal.
However. If you do the Fae a service where they owe you a debt, they are obliged to offer fair value for it by their own standards. This of course, runs into the trouble of Fae morality and understanding not being quite mortal morality and understanding, so what they do for you might not necessarily be something you might want.
The guy with Maeve apparently made a formal deal, not just a random saying.
Unlikely that he wanted to die.
Possible though, because apparently sane people have done stranger shit IRL like hooking up with people for the express purpose of being eaten; but Im inclined to suspect Maeve was just being a dick.
Was that public?
I thought that after the interruption by IT she changed locations and shit.
If it was public, moot point.
Being hilariously compromised doesn't require they all be nemesis thralls, or that if Nemesis is alone that it needs that many to screw them over.
One "senile" red elder and a mangled response to their shenanigans would be a a pretty good start.
Compromise requires subversion at key points of leverage though.
And like I said, the jury remains open as to whether the Red Court can be compromised that way at all.
That's nonsense unless you think everyone in the setting is an idiot.
If you had nemesis proof guys running around on a species level it would have come up, because the people dealing with it would have hired on as many as they could get.
I do not agree.
Reliability trumps all that; doesnt matter if they are immune to possession if they or their command structure are still the sort of people who will knowingly cut a deal behind your back to sell you out.
Drakul, for example, is Starborn, and thus both immune to Outsider shenanigans and can wield great power over them. Doesnt make him trustworthy; we explicitly see him break the Accords in PT/BG.
They're still running outsiders through their space and using them to serve their goals. Even if they only use blood slaves that's information to exploit when free outsiders already in reality go to use them.
There is no way to safely summon the minions of something that hates you.
I know that. You know that.
I suspect there's people smart or paranoid enough to think that IC in the Red Court; certainly Arianna was concerned enough about some of her father's wartime decisionmaking in canon to be planning to overthrow him.
However? The Red Court has people in charge who apparently think thats not true, or that they secured a good deal.
Just how delusional you have to be to have your fingers all over facilitating the poisoning of the Winter Queen's handmaiden and daughter at a diplomatic function you hosted is unclear.
But I suspect we'll find out
Simply put, everything that's occurred before could be covered up. A nerve gas attack on an African hospital is, unfortunately, easily dismissed as just another mortal atrocity. Bad recordings and minor incidents that weren't blown up all over national TV can be swept under the rug with cooperation from the authorities.
You don't dismiss 60k dead, 100k refugees, and an uncertain number of additional casualties. The moment Chicago went dark, national TV was probably on that shit for hours. Afterwards? The whole fucking world is laser-focusing on this catastrophe, because again there's never been this many killed in a terrorist attack before.
The US has to respond. It just has to. No country would survive letting something of this magnitude go, and they have to annihilate a target to show they're not to be messed with. The fear of 9/11 had the US launch into multiple wars for years. This is much worse than 9/11 and the fear and anger from this event would have the US launch wars to the knife against anybody they think had anything to do with this, supernatural or not. This isn't just about the illusion of American hegemony being shattered, this is literally about survival because Chicago got half-decimated. Big difference between launching wars of pride and wars of survival, after all.
And given the world's decided to blame mundane terrorists, you know some poor country got deleted for this.
It wasnt a nerve gas attack on a hospital, it was a nerve gas attack on several city blocks, only one of which had the hospital in it. And the casualties were in the thousands/tens of thousands,
We have excused greater death tolls fairly recently in the West, as evidenced by COVID.
This is an urban fantasy setting where a lot of RL events have very different triggers and there's an entirely different secret history of the world going on.
Like the entire secret history of the world wars in this setting.
I mean, like I've said before, the scapegoats involved could be a domestic group based in the US.
They could be foreigners who all "died in the attack."
Or died in cutody; there's going to be plenty of bodies around in the aftermath.
The presumption that the US is going to freedomize some poor nation rests on assumptions that arent true for this setting.
And I have even less sympathy for any argument that leaves an eleven-year-old girl enslaved to a millenia-old thing just cause it's risky. That's a SWLiHN level argument against free will cause people don't deserve it.
Here's a question for you, what's the cut-off point for power before people stop deserving freedom? Even ordinary people can commit actions like the holocaust, so how sure of you of the lower floor? And are we ethically obligated to perform a self-lobotomy to erase our own free will because of our power?
She isnt enslaved as far as Im aware.
She is restricted from particular actions that put the Archive and its mission at risk while she is its bearer, the same way that POTUS isnt allowed to take some decisions by his secret service detail.
The Denarians wouldnt have spent the time they spent trying to make her pick up a Coin if they didnt think she had free will.
If she wants to stop being the Archive and we can find a willing successor, I have no real problem helping arrange for a change in bearer. I just have zero interest in jailbreaking a world-ending amount of power and handing it over to an 11 year old. 9 year old according to the last couple of updates.
The only reason why Molly is even wielding this much power is because she's a PC.
I'd have much the same problem with handing that much power to her if she was 9, or if I was a resident of the setting and found out that she had no oversight.
We have seen in the case of Maeve that Nemesis allowed her to roll against Mab freezing her.
I presume he cheated here in a similar way, and just got luckier.
After all, just because Lily or Titania roll more dice, doesn't mean they always get more successes. And Nemesis negates the fiat "You don't even get to roll" power a Queen might have over her subjects.
There is no evidence of this either.
There have been multiple novellas and short stories set after Battle Grounds: The Law, The Good People, Christmas Eve, Little Things, Fugitive.
If a major international war had broken out in the aftermath, thats the sort of thing that would have been mentioned, just like how when the Red Court fell, wars breaking out were explicitly mentioned.
I suspect Butcher doesn't want to deal with too much real geopolitics in his setting.
Almost any masquerade must fail eventually if you question the setting enough, especially in modern times.
So instead he keeps it focused on the Wizard with little interest in the larger world and avoids most consequences, or pays them a short lipservice like in the aftermath of the Red Court collapse, without having Harry look too much into the details.
And I think that's a good idea. Simulating the changes to the real world that magic and monsters would cause is an incredible mess that would take an extremely careful and skilled author to actually do justice.
And I mean no offense @DragonParadox but I don't think in our case you could really plan through what the changes in the world, both while magic is hidden but still affects it and when it becomes open would actually do.
Not on a schedule of 1-2 updates a day.
Maybe if someone sat down and spend a few months or years doing the research and planning out the worldbuilding carefully before writing a book, but not like this and obviously not as Butcher did it either.
There's just too many things that should and would be subtly or obviously different and that would in turn change the human development in general.
The simplest example would be the weather, which we did talk about some thousands of pages ago.
With so many magical hidden forces manipulating it, the weather would be significantly less predictable than IRL, meteorology would be a different field. And since gods are real and also all humans have a bit of magic in them, some rituals for praying for rain or sun as necessary for a good harvest would actually work.
Academia could find measurable effects of that stuff, if a friendly minor deity, or Couatl, or unknowing practitioner with a talent for weather reacts to rituals.
How different would sciences in general see the world?
Would western academia ever have come to the current standard of kinda looking down on various kinds of mysticism and superstitions in all fields from meteorology to actual medicine, if it did work?
And nevermind the development of religions. The WG might be the biggest kid on the playground, but others are just as real and more interventionist as well. You think most of the world would be as dominated by a few monotheistic religions as it is today?
Butcher even mentioned that the bible in DF would look somewhat different due to the WG's influence, but he never showed that having any results.
Okay, this got a bit out of hand.
Shot form: Worldbuilding difficult, Urban Fantasy authors usually don't bother too much and let suspension of disbelieve carry a world that is almost exactly like ours save for the masquerade, even when it very much shouldn't be.
There's nothing wrong in charging for work. Odin charged us for the use of the Einherjar; no shame in it.
But I happened to think that this particular service is not one that we wanted to give people the impression that they have to pay us for, because its in our interests that people out potential Nemesis plants without worrying about cost.
Moot point now. Maybe Ivy wont tell others about it 🤷
Nah, I think you are missing some details there; four of the five SCE castings we have performed have been for Fae, who are bound by their natures to try to balance the scales whether or not we formally negotiated a fee.
The fifth was for a ten year old, and was done for free.
Furthermore, other than the people we told, there's essentially noone outside the top levels of the Fae Courts who are aware of the fact that we are owed favors for what we did, just like noone knew that Mab owed Nicodemus a favor until she told Dresden.
So it shouldnt come into the calculations of other people.
Note that Nemesis is subtle and powerful, but it only has a limited number of possession slots,
I mean, if it was as virulent as you think, look at all the time that Peabody has had access to the Senior Council in this AU with his mind-warping ink, or all of the Wardens that he was able to brainwash.
Hell, how many people canon Justine had access to in canon, from Lara and Thomas Raith to Marcone.
I get the impression that victims are chosen carefully for position and access because they cant spam that ability.
I will also note that as far as we've seen, it has been able to take possession of Fae, human and near-human supernaturals like White Court vampires.
There's no suggestion you can plug an Outsider into just any supernatural of Earth.
===
I would be surprised if they were that compromised.
Outsider summoning apparently requires human magic to bypass the Gates according to Luccio and Morgan in Dead Beat; Outsider use by the Reds was how the White Council knew that they had human magical collaborators.
Both Walker summonings we have seen in the setting were done by mortal magic-users: He Who Walks Behind was first called by rogue wizard Justine DuMorne, then later called by black magic witch Madge Shelly.
The White Court of vampires might count as sufficiently human to do that sort of summoning and to host that sort of spirit, but the Red Court almost certainly does not.
Which means they have to be using human summoners and human magic-users, who arent in the Red Court hierarchy.
===
That said, this is also a reason to leave this to Ivy.
She, and the Archive, actually know these people well enough to make an informed judgement.
We dont.
Agreed about Ivy.
Based on what I recall of Summer Knight, Aurora's entourage didnt really operate that way.
But I dont really have any hard data, and one example may or may not be representative.
As demonstrated in the setting, the Formorians trying to blow the Masquerade open required an occult superweapon and a Titan from the Old Times, coordinated with a massive Outsider attack on the Outer Gates to prevent Winter bringing a significant fraction of their forces back to reality to summarily murder the Formorian armies.
It still resulted in the Formorians getting dogpiled by everyone from the Fae to wizards to Knights of the Cross, Ethniu ending up in Supernatural Supermax, and literally everyone else doing their best to cover it up, mortal and supernatural.
The vast majority of factions, good, evil and neutral like the Masquerade. It works for them.
There is a reason why trying to breach it in a way that cant be covered up has been so difficult for the Outsiders.
There is no evidence of this either.
There have been multiple novellas and short stories set after Battle Grounds: The Law, The Good People, Christmas Eve, Little Things, Fugitive.
If a major international war had broken out in the aftermath, thats the sort of thing that would have been mentioned, just like how when the Red Court fell, wars breaking out were explicitly mentioned.
-They are ALL formally called the Queen according to Bob.
The wizards have all been in duck-and-cover mode lately. And there are too many of them to make a practical suspect pool. Let's assume that it was probably internal faerie stuff. That cuts it down to three suspects."
"Three?"
"The three people who could have managed it. Summer Queen, Winter Queen, Winter Knight. One, two, three." "Harry, I said it could have been one of the Queens."
I blinked up at the skull. "There are more than two?"
"Yeah, technically there are three."
"Three?"
"In each Court."
"Three Queens in each Court? Six?" That's just silly."
"Not if you think about it. Each Court has three Queens: The Queen Who Was, the Queen Who Is, and the Queen Who Is to Come."
"Great. Which one does the Knight work for?"
"All of them. It's kind of a group thing. He has different duties to each Queen." I felt the headache start at the base of my neck and creep toward the crown of my head. "Okay, Bob. I need to know about these Queens."
"Which ones? The ones Who Are, Who Were, or Who Are to Come?"
I stared at the skull for a second, while the headache settled comfortably in. "There's got to be a simpler parlance than that."
"That's so typical. You won't steal a baby, but you're too lazy to conjugate."
"Hey," I said, "my sex life has nothing to do with—" "Conjugate, Harry. Conju—oh, why do I even bother? The Queen is just the Queen. Queen Titania, Queen Mab. The Queen Who Was is called the Mother. The Queen Who Is to Come is known as the Lady. Right now, the Winter Lady is Maeve. The Summer Lady is Aurora."
There is nothing Im aware of that says that you must be the Summer Lady before becoming the Summer Queen.
Thats the expected line of succession, but as we've seen, the Mantles can skip usual protocol if they find an appropriate candidate. Lily was the first mortal ever chosen as Summer Lady in canon; apparently, the Mantle would usually pick from current Sidhe.
And it had turned snow white.
"Harry," Fix said. "How you doing?"
I blinked at them and said, "You? The new Summer Lady?"
Lily flushed prettily and nodded. "I know. I didn't want it, but when—when Aurora died, her power flowed into the nearest Summer vessel. Usually it would be one of the other Queens, but I had the Knight's power and it just sort of … plopped in there." I lifted my eyebrows and said, "Are you okay?" She frowned. "I'm not sure. It's a lot to think about. And it's the first time this kind of power has fallen to a mortal." "You mean you're not, uh. You haven't?" "Chosen?" Lily asked. She shook her head. "It's just me. I don't know what I'm going to do, but Titania said she'd teach me."
I glanced aside. "And you chose Fix as your Knight, huh."
She smiled at Fix. "I trust him."
"Suits me," I said. "Fix kicked the Winter Knight's ass once already."
Lily blinked and looked at Fix. The little guy flushed, and I swear to God, he dragged one foot over the ground.
Lily smiled and offered me her hand. "I wanted to meet you. And to thank you, Mister Dresden. I owe you my life."
I shook her hand but said, "You don't owe me anything. I'm apparently saving damsels on reflex now." My smile faded and I said, "Besides, I was just the hired help. Thank Meryl."
I mean that's still a pretty clear line in ranks below lady becomes lady, lady becomes queen, and queen becomes mother. Also yes they're all called queens but the mothers other title is literally the queen that was as in past tense. Now I'm not saying they were winter or summer queen but that past tense probably means something. Also I'm unsure things won't just break to some degree if multiple lines of succession need to be dealt with at the same time. It probably has more consequences if say the lady and queen and mother died at the same time.
We have seen in the case of Maeve that Nemesis allowed her to roll against Mab freezing her.
I presume he cheated here in a similar way, and just got luckier.
After all, just because Lily or Titania roll more dice, doesn't mean they always get more successes. And Nemesis negates the fiat "You don't even get to roll" power a Queen might have over her subjects.
I suspect Butcher doesn't want to deal with too much real geopolitics in his setting.
Almost any masquerade must fail eventually if you question the setting enough, especially in modern times.
So instead he keeps it focused on the Wizard with little interest in the larger world and avoids most consequences, or pays them a short lipservice like in the aftermath of the Red Court collapse, without having Harry look too much into the details.
And I think that's a good idea. Simulating the changes to the real world that magic and monsters would cause is an incredible mess that would take an extremely careful and skilled author to actually do justice.
And I mean no offense @DragonParadox but I don't think in our case you could really plan through what the changes in the world, both while magic is hidden but still affects it and when it becomes open would actually do.
Not on a schedule of 1-2 updates a day.
Maybe if someone sat down and spend a few months or years doing the research and planning out the worldbuilding carefully before writing a book, but not like this and obviously not as Butcher did it either.
There's just too many things that should and would be subtly or obviously different and that would in turn change the human development in general.
The simplest example would be the weather, which we did talk about some thousands of pages ago.
With so many magical hidden forces manipulating it, the weather would be significantly less predictable than IRL, meteorology would be a different field. And since gods are real and also all humans have a bit of magic in them, some rituals for praying for rain or sun as necessary for a good harvest would actually work.
Academia could find measurable effects of that stuff, if a friendly minor deity, or Couatl, or unknowing practitioner with a talent for weather reacts to rituals.
How different would sciences in general see the world?
Would western academia ever have come to the current standard of kinda looking down on various kinds of mysticism and superstitions in all fields from meteorology to actual medicine, if it did work?
And nevermind the development of religions. The WG might be the biggest kid on the playground, but others are just as real and more interventionist as well. You think most of the world would be as dominated by a few monotheistic religions as it is today?
Butcher even mentioned that the bible in DF would look somewhat different due to the WG's influence, but he never showed that having any results.
Okay, this got a bit out of hand.
Shot form: Worldbuilding difficult, Urban Fantasy authors usually don't bother too much and let suspension of disbelieve carry a world that is almost exactly like ours save for the masquerade, even when it very much shouldn't be.
In fairness I'm fairly sure the apocalyptic trio is broken masquerade just you know less geo politics and more mad max apocalypse possibly where things are too chaotic for a simple clear picture of the affects and people are just trying to survive.
The briefcase landed on the narrow hotel desk with muffled thump, like glass in bubble-wrap. A moment later you punch in the code and open it up blue-green light welling up to fill the room until it eclipses the sun in the window. At first sight the contents seems like a pile of gemstones fit for a pirate's treasure, but when Tiffany tries to pick one of them up the rest rise with it like bubbles in the ocean deep, for what are mere Newtonian physics to the blood of Iku Turso thousand-headed, thousand horned? She drops it in mid-air and as it hangs there turns her head this way and that, contemplating the mingling of light celestial and chthonian. "Interesting leaver you have there..."
Gained Heart's Blood of Iku Turso (Tier 4 Splendor Reagent)
"This is where I'm supposed to ask what you mean right?" Harry asks, trying and failing to sound annoyed.
"If you want," she counters, one perfect eyebrow arched.
"I guess she means it in the Aristotelian sense, you know give me but a leaver and a fulcrum and I can move the universe," you hasted to cut the tension whose precise nature you do not want to think about too long. "Now I just have to look for the fulcrum."
Former Fallen and present Archive give you precisely the same long look.
"Point," you allow ruefully.
"That'll be one hundred and sixty seven dollars," Kincaid interjects absently. "For the briefcase." He does not seem to notice when his charge employs a tactical elbow to the ribs.
"This is such a mess, I should have noticed, I should have noticed," the words are barely a whisper, more read on her lips than spoken. Louder she adds: "If this is a faitn than it's a whale of a one. Maybe it started as one and now it's getting repurposed. Warden Dr..." she cuts herself off. "Harry, I'm going to need you to carry a note to the Gatekeeper. We haven't had a potential breach this bad since 1611."
"What happened in 1611?" you ask without thinking about it.
"The King James Bible entered print," Lash answers after a moment's thought. "I'm assuming something untowanted almost slipped in. People are always looking for codes and hidden meanings, if one could actually insert one it would be a masterstroke "
The Archive just shakes her head in what you recognize as the 'I can't talk about it' expression as Harry mutters 'stars and stones,' under his breath.
"Well," Lydia claps, a touch awkwardly, maybe not wanting to draw attention what with the whole 'made a deal with the devil' thing you still don't know how to feel about in contrast to Dad who are both obviously worried. "What matters now is what we do about Katherine, she's more in the know than the others. We have to deal with her."
"Under the Laws of Magic a Changeling who has not made the choice is a mortal practitioner so she'd be a warlock strictly speaking," Harry puts in, making no attempt to hide how reluctant he is to ennact the Law in this case.
"She didn't open the Outer Gates, nothing came through," you speak up, remembering how guilty your dad had been about handing the girl off to the very fey who would brainwash her.
"The Laws of Magic are not within my remit, only the security of Creation. So long as she can me made safe in that regard I have no quarel with Katherine Campbell," the Archive proclaims, very deliberately.
"So to summarize, we have a Warden who doesn't want to do his job, an overworked Seer, a rogue psychopomp, the Hellhound on the prowl for his next paycheck and me all in service of a mission of mercy. Did I get all that?" Lash asks, counting each off on her fingers.
"You seem to have forgotten me," Dad points out softly, maybe a little warily at what she's about to say.
"That's because you break the flow, you actually fit," she offers what might be the most backhanded compliment you've ever heard.
Dad does not seem to mind.
How do you attempt to deprogram Katherine Campbell?
[] Reveal the plot, the way Nemesis killed her parents to make her a pawn in its plots
[] Forge a Splendor to make her forget the dark insights she has been given
-[] Write in
Didn't you say that it was a tier 4 reagent? Or is it a separate one from its soul (i.e. we got Iku Turso's soul, which is tier 4, and heartblood, which is a separate tier 3 reagent)?
Didn't you say that it was a tier 4 reagent? Or is it a separate one from its soul (i.e. we got Iku Turso's soul, which is tier 4, and heartblood, which is a separate tier 3 reagent)?
I thought Archive said that this would result in withdrawal of cooperation?
[X] Reveal the plot, the way Nemesis killed her parents to make her a pawn in its plots
Ignorance is only helpful if it allows you protection for an indeterminate amount of time. As a changeling she's doomed to a life of the supernatural no amount of ignorance could keep her safe. Only strength and knowledge of who her opponents actually are and their nature.
There's manipulation and then there's just outright being tricked. Her family got murdered and then these people behind the frame job manipulate the truth so she becomes in willing Pawn. Now there's Redemption happy and then there's just not being an asshole.
To be honest I agree with most of your point I still wish we had killed Fetch and those other winter fae assholes along with the naagaloshi.
However. If you do the Fae a service where they owe you a debt, they are obliged to offer fair value for it by their own standards. This of course, runs into the trouble of Fae morality and understanding not being quite mortal morality and understanding, so what they do for you might not necessarily be something you might want
What you're not accounting for is that the fey aren't allowed to decide what's worth it for you even then. They offer a payment, you offer a counter. If you attest the counter is enough that's it. They can't decide what you want for you because it's presumed most of the time everyone is going for maximum returns.
Being owed for something isn't a special case, which is why Titania and Man offered us the favors instead of declaring they were our reward unilaterally.
The simplest example would be the weather, which we did talk about some thousands of pages ago.
With so many magical hidden forces manipulating it, the weather would be significantly less predictable than IRL, meteorology would be a different field. And since gods are real and also all humans have a bit of magic in them, some rituals for praying for rain or sun as necessary for a good harvest would actually work.
Academia could find measurable effects of that stuff, if a friendly minor deity, or Couatl, or unknowing practitioner with a talent for weather reacts to rituals.
How different would sciences in general see the world?
Would western academia ever have come to the current standard of kinda looking down on various kinds of mysticism and superstitions in all fields from meteorology to actual medicine, if it did work?
Pretty sure the conceit here at least is that the white god turned off the tap for broad stuff way before modern academics were a thing. Which they tie into irl history with things like mystery cults being viable in the past and dead now because at one point they were valued professionals who legitimately influenced material concerns, but lost their power hundreds of years ago.
It'd be like if electricity stopped working and a successor civilization was looking at ours with only fragments of how our society actually functions.
DF canon doesn't have weather talents like that, so there isn't anyone left who can influence the weather and is interested in answering random prayers.
DF canon doesn't have weather talents like that, so there isn't anyone left who can influence the weather and is interested in answering random prayers.
