- Location
- Venezuela
Exalted solutions are something else. Curing addiction by making the drug better...
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
Maybe, but poaching could be a real waste of an opportunity.
Sure if it worked we'd have an asset, but the library is going to get someone involved here. Depending on how you do the math it might be more valuable to us to cultivate a business relationship with her as she grows in magical and political power.
Depends on what other recruiting options are available really. If we have a bunch of people who we can help develop a good wizard impression her supernatural power could easily be less useful to us than the magical equivalent of golfing with the District Attorney. Not that she'll start there, but trying to keep a powerful talent playing gopher is an exercise in frustration.
I'd be surprised if they had something like that, though it's possible we might be able to work something out with them on the basis of not being an inscrutable spirit older than the country they represent.
Most patrons are going to expect service and loyalty for their power. You're not going to stay independent for long if all your most powerful and talented people are beholden to other powers.
By making a version of the drug that is not harmful, keep in mind she is addicted to vampire venom in the same way someone with depression is 'addicted' to their meds. True Silk's self destructive behavior is magically self-inflicted and a lot more harmful to others, but the principle is the same. She is medicating with one of the few things on the planet more addictive than Black Magic with allows her to stay in control, she no longer feels the urge to help people with mind magic.
If it's a choice between this later and real action now I don't see it as a real contest.
She just healed the last of it a couple chapters back, and it's going to take at least 15 minutes to get set up. We have time for a little regen.
We're operating in an opposed environment, perfect isn't going to happen, that's the entire purpose of Sandra's prep work. If she doesn't cast more curses, stage more atrocities, or send more hit squads at us over the rest of the day specially to keep us down I'd be very surprised.
Done now is unequivocally superior to perfect later.
She got six months of prep because we deprioritized her, it arguably necessary but still the reason she had time to set this up. Our tactical level delays have allowed her to complete and deploy her prepared counters, and I see no reason to believe she's run out. Giving her more time is just allowing her to activate more of her resources and optimize their deployment.
Suppose she sends her mafia goons at us again in an hour, then some ghouls she scraped up, maybe hits the temple again or techbanes critical infrastructure like power stations and hospitals. If she's got city scale rituals to throw around hard would it be to weaken the Hoover dam just enough that we might be able to do something about it?
On a tactical level we have been slow and passive. We haven't actually done anything that caused meaningful damage to her plans the entire time we've been here save stopping the attack on Xanadu; which we showed up at just in time to catch six grenades, a bomb, a gunman and a lifetime supply of VX for dozens of people being deployed. Maybe narrative logic dictates we'd at least get a chance, but the IC result is that a poorly timed red light or increase in traffic could easily have stopped us from saving anyone.
Unless the point is to be the backup plan. It puts a thumb on the scale and even if we stop the main plot they still have a shaken Masquerade to work with later. I'm not against knocking it over, but not with this kind of delay.
The clock is counting down to her victory. All she needs to do is keep us screwing around instead of messing with her for long enough and she wins.
The hitmen were an aimed attack, and the chaos is clearly intended to hamper effective response from anyone who might interfere. Everything she's done has been multi purpose enough to be useful against anyone who showed up to stop her while also advancing her boss' new agenda.
Under the circumstances you can assume Harry would have run as many red lights as he had to on the way to the Xanadu.
Anyway good night guys, see you tomorrow with... well I don't know yet, that's why I wrote the interlude.
BoredMan
Everyone gets a tariff now. Even the penguins. wtf
May not have been. They were programed to attack us on sight and were probably driving around with weapons for that purpose.
Sandra herself was present for that one, in hindsight it does look aimed, specifically to test the group's abilities and maybe run you out of resources.
Mind controlling experienced killers to attack you on sight with RPGs and then sending them into the city to do so is pretty much exactly an aimed attack even if she didn't know precisely where we were.
But as @uju32 pointed out at the time organizing that and getting them to an intercept point required significant effort and specific knowledge.
Fair, though I was thinking more in the sense that major city traffic wouldn't let you even if you're not caught in rush hour proper.Under the circumstances you can assume Harry would have run as many red lights as he had to on the way to the Xanadu.
Anyway good night guys, see you tomorrow with... well I don't know yet, that's why I wrote the interlude.
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
Indecisveness:
[X] Plan Don't wait for nightfall and waste another 6 or so fucking hours
[X] Plan Don't wait for nightfall and waste another 6 or so fucking hours
- Location
- Germany
C'mon just one or two more votes and we won't try to stop the ritual at the last minute...
In hindsight, we really should have gone all in on catching Sandra when we saw her after the rocket-attack.
In hindsight, we really should have gone all in on catching Sandra when we saw her after the rocket-attack.
No, thats the choice now if we move now.
The choice later is full Essence, full troops, and the rainstorm getting rid of the chaos ritual/hex that is currently being used to boost Sandra's conspiracy.
Yeah, BoredMan pointed that out to me.
I would be surprised if she did. Sandra does not have infinite resources. They are vast, but they are the result of six months of stockpiles and preparations. Every human and supernatural asset she has expended over the course of the last 12 hours is not going to automatically replace itself in her inventory.
Her goal here isnt to contest Molly for the Red Court, its to break open the Hellgate.
This is not true.
We heard about Sandra Marling being a hostile on Halloween night/Morning of November 1st, which was when we yanked Nemesis out of Maeve. That was Arc 7 ending. Post-exorcism Maeve claims to have tracked her down by mid-November, and approached us about it on 18 December, in Arc 10. We came after Sandra immediately in Arc 11.
The very earliest we could have found Marling would have been that November, which would have still given her four months of preptime in Las Vegas.
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Little Tommy presumably is corralling his own people with the help of his father's organization.
Ghouls run into goblins right now.
She hits the Pallbearer temple, the killer robot is active there. She hits the Hanging Gardens, Arlene's paramilitaries are there.
You are making a mistake in assuming that she has infinite strategic-scale options in a city on alert
Just because she has done this strategic scale hex does not mean she can repeat it at will. Nor does the fact that she has attacked multiple spots out of the blue mean she can repeat that successfully, at least if the chaos ritual is down.
Even the US takes time to replace nuclear missiles.
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That is plain not true.
I have gone over this in detail previously, but of the last 24 hours or so, we spent 8 hours healing and 16 hours tearing the city up.
We cut off Sandra's supply of milspec hardware from the Shadowkillers. No replacements for anything expended.
We took a significant chunk, if not most, of the Shadowkillers out of her assets list, which is partly why none of them were attacking Mafia assets. We took the Blampire off the table
I could go on.
We have been blisteringly fast at both delineating the dimensions of the conspiracy and moving to oppose it.
No, it isnt.
We know from Cowl in Dead Beat, and again from Ethniu in Battle Grounds, that large black magic workings use this sort of cityscale chaos and disruption as a first-stage booster, because that level of agitation among the mortal population essentially softens the consensus and enables the working and manipulation of huge amounts of magic.
Extreme case being Chicago in BG, where Ebenezar essentially began to find it easy to fly and Dresden begins to actually manifest physical objects spontaneously.
This is not true.
Sandra Marling defaults to failure, not victory. Any time that she isnt actively trying to break open the Gate, she's failing.
Any effort she devotes to screwing around with Molly, or the city, is effort and attention she isnt spending on the magical operation to get past the Sin-Eater and then break the seal that keeps the riff-raff out.
There is even the potential that she or her cohorts fuck up the ritual and get eaten by the Sin-Eater, with literally no intervention by outside forces. This thing has stood for more than five thousand years, after all, and I doubt she's the first who has tried, especially back when Vegas was open wilderness.
I agree that the hitmen were an aimed attack; both a probe and an attempt to overwhelm us out of the blue.
But after that, she's largely avoided us since.
However, the chaos is principally intended to buff and enable the magic working they need to get past the Sin-Eater and break open the Vegas Hellgate. Debuffing hostiles and first responders is a secondary function.
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@Yog, are you really sure you don't want to vote for not waiting? Because the vote is so close at this point one vote matters.
Also:
I want to say that not only I agree with this post in its entirety, it points out an assumption about waiting that is most likely false:
We won't necessarily have more motes at the end of it. In fact, it is extremely likely we'll have less.
Our experience in vegas has been nothing but running around putting out fires, and Sandra has lit the mother of all fire right now, just look at our past wait, we barely had time to recover our motes and we got back to having *only* 10 right away.
If we wait, we're going to regain 2 motes… then something will happen and we'll use 3. Repeat until the six hours are past and we still don't have a full tank.
That's why I think uju's insistence on the curse not being a distraction because it allegedly costed too much ressources is false, it is pulling lots of duties at once just as a distraction:
It makes sure everyone that could react is too busy to search for who's the culprit.
It depletes the resources of those that are searching by forcing them to deal with the shit that's on the way.
Just those two things are already invaluable by themselves.
Also:
I want to say that not only I agree with this post in its entirety, it points out an assumption about waiting that is most likely false:
We won't necessarily have more motes at the end of it. In fact, it is extremely likely we'll have less.
Our experience in vegas has been nothing but running around putting out fires, and Sandra has lit the mother of all fire right now, just look at our past wait, we barely had time to recover our motes and we got back to having *only* 10 right away.
If we wait, we're going to regain 2 motes… then something will happen and we'll use 3. Repeat until the six hours are past and we still don't have a full tank.
That's why I think uju's insistence on the curse not being a distraction because it allegedly costed too much ressources is false, it is pulling lots of duties at once just as a distraction:
It makes sure everyone that could react is too busy to search for who's the culprit.
It depletes the resources of those that are searching by forcing them to deal with the shit that's on the way.
Just those two things are already invaluable by themselves.
No, we'll have to do so while we and our forces are under a global debuff and Sandra and hers are being buffed by a ritual
That should horrify most people.
You mean in the full light of the multiple cameras that filmed the exploding RPGs, with civilian meatshields in the line of fire and a Sandra ambush backing her up? We'd have literally just ended up with law enforcement chasing us around in Vegas.
And potentially following us home to Chicago.
Bad suggestion.
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Current tally:
Tied.
We really dont want to leave our combat medic and best sensor away from our forces.
We really dont want to leave our only wizard away from the magical seal
We dont want to fight Sandra without our Red Courtmeatshields allies in place, and they cant move in daytime.
We certainly dont want to fight Sandra while she has her chaos ritual up to buff her and debuff us.
We have an opportunity to undo this ritual by getting Molly involved in doing so, and TTC will allow her to do it faster than it would normally take. We should take it.
Tied.
We really dont want to leave our combat medic and best sensor away from our forces.
We really dont want to leave our only wizard away from the magical seal
We dont want to fight Sandra without our Red Court
We certainly dont want to fight Sandra while she has her chaos ritual up to buff her and debuff us.
We have an opportunity to undo this ritual by getting Molly involved in doing so, and TTC will allow her to do it faster than it would normally take. We should take it.
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- Location
- Germany
Better than Vegas on fire and hundreds dead.
Harry can take care of cameras, we can make ourselves unnoticeable to witnesses.
Too late now anyway.
We are leaving a good part of our team at the ritual precisely to break the debuff while Sandra is least capable of acting against that.
That's the plan, to have her preparations fall apart while we are also attacking, so she doesn't have time to pull the next surprise, or rather the next two or three surprises given how much time is left till sundown.
What's horrifying me is that we're letting the doomsday clock run closer and closer to midnight to resolve a problem that most likely will be instantly followed by another problem we'll *have to solve*.
As Artemis said, the entire point of going in at the same time as everyone is working on the ritual is to try to preempt Sandra just pulling out her next card out of the six months of preparation you keep pointing out.
No, that would have just resulted in us being the subject of a manhunt while trying to unravel this conspiracy.
There was no real chance of taking her in that location.
Someone who can create and manipulate a veil is sufficiently magically potent to escape while we're drowning in mooks.
Harry can take care of cameras he sees.
The fact that the explosions literally ended up on TV says that you greatly overestimate how many cameras he can see.
And Molly making herself unnoticeable to witnesses will not stop her being captured on cameras either.
I've done the math previously on this thread.
They cant do it. They cant do it in time to be useful. This is supported by prior precedent when Dresden couldnt undo Cowl's hex on Chicago, and didnt even try.
You just split the party and weaken both components, making the chances of either task much harder.
There is a reason why the options the QM gave for attempting to fuck with Sandra's chaos buff was either
1)Leave it to Harrowmont (and accept he'll fail) OR
2) Involve the entire crew.
Seriously, its conjuring up a magically-potent rainstorm in the middle of the desert in less than an hour.
It was always a legendary task even before you account for magical opposition by Sandra and her people.
The main reason we're even countenancing it as an option is because there's two Exalts here to throw motes at it.
Remove the Exalts, and its essentially not a factor.
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Those were not the options and it's dishonest to represent them as such, in my opinion.
Except there was a clear case of miscommunication going on on when we wanted to attack that affected the vote options.
We never voted explicitly to wait till nightfall, and thus lots of voters thought we weren't going to, but DP made it so that the vote to get the Rampires would make us wait.
We were reading it as *recruit them while you are rushing the place*, not *get them on your side then wait till they can move, in several hours, to attack*, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of the discussion was about how to not waste minutes, which would've been irrelevant if we had thought that we had six hours or more.
Since DP thought we wanted to wait anyway, the options are both things that require lots of time, which runs into the problem that we don't have said time, as we're running against the doomsday clock.
Edit:
That too, thanks for pointing that out.
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@Yog
Since apparently we're canvassing votes now, care to switch votes to mine?
Its the closest thing to yours.
With supporting evidence.
Since apparently we're canvassing votes now, care to switch votes to mine?
Its the closest thing to yours.
Give me a moment to pull them up again.
With supporting evidence.