- Location
- washington
That's immensely disappointing that our top expert has 4 dots in something some of these characters are literally thousands of years old. Fuck Lara had a 6 dot skill in appearance she's only a couple hundred years old. There are 4000+ year old practitioners of some kinds in our hell. Not debating you just immensely disappointed in our hell in that aspect. Like I didn't expect a lot I wanted like twenty people with over 5 dots in various skills when the population is in the billions and some people are legit older than 4000 years old that would of been nice.1)Anything thats going to bring in money will cost AP. Thats more or less a given.
2)The US govt does not do multi-billion dollar trade deals with private individuals.
Anything thats going to interest the various elements of the US govt sufficiently to hand over billions of dollars for exclusivity will involve thousands of people of oversight and review, and be sufficiently destabilizing that we will be dealing with the aftermath for the rest of this quest.
And likely in ways that makes it more difficult to work with people outside the US, where the vast bulk of humanity is from.
Significant constituencies in India, China and South America do not regard US political policy with fondness, after all.
3)The attention would be...adverse.
The top expert that Molly had available to deal with a defect in the weapon shipment to the White Council only had Fortune 4.
If that was the top expert available to the head of state of Sanctuary, I suspect there arent many Tier 5/5+ experts anywhere in the population. Just like there are no wizards.
You're looking at a lot more cooperative work from a lot of mid-rankers than a handful of top experts.
Broad talents, not tall talents.
===
Like I said, Sanctuary's conditions are weird.
I have serious doubts about the development path of radar, in a domain whose natural conditions involve exceedingly powerful magnetic fields, huge metal outcroppings, and aerosolized metal blizzards. I quote:
This does not appear to be a radar-friendly environment to me, and is the sort of thing to incentivize alternative technological paths for sensing purposes.To venture into this hellscape in an attempt to escape the kingdom of your heart without permission and a guide, is to face an almost guaranteed demise, for even if one was to clad themselves into a space-worthy thermally sealed suit, they would still be fleeced to the bone by a never-ending blizzard of ferrous snow. Electrically charged iron and nickel dust cyclone with the wind speeds far exceeding a hundred meters per second obscures the borders of your realm from outside observation to eye and any electronic equipment. Only those wise in the ways of your soul can dare hope to navigate this terrain.
And yet, not every place within your self is so inhospitable. For even as the iron cyclone rages at the border of the world, a no less ferocious anticyclone expands from its center. Where they meet, in a strip of land 496 kilometers wide, their clash in the skies is both ferocious and life giving. In that narrow space, the titanic magnetic fields generated by them cancel each other, and their particles' collisions generate heat enough that eternal ring of lightning plasma is raging in the skies, unable to escape its natural confinement. The temperature is high enough that liquid water can flow in this equator. The light is soft and bright enough that photosynthesis is effective. And life, or at least life recognizable by Earthborn eyes at first glance, strives there, desperate to occupy this narrow ring of space allowed to it. Dense and ever shifting forests rustle in the ever-blowing winds, their deep blue crowns endlessly shrugging metal dust from themselves. Their trunks stretch ever further in hopes to catch the lightning and fill their underground capacitors with vital energy. Fast and dangerous beasts, iron hided and sharp toothed traverse metal coated land of ever shifting shadows below, seeking either fruit or prey, for life is short and dangerous in this world, and no source of nourishment is to be dismissed.
It is among these forests that civilization of your world exists. It is confined mostly into five great megacities sitting in five corners of a great pentacle, 5747 kilometers from the center of the world. Each city-state is positioned on top of a great pole of metal, large enough to generate its own magnetic field and prevent metal dust from passing into the city, and to serve as a source of free electricity for the city-state's industry. Only the tips of the great pillars protrude above ground, but they are still more than ten kilometers high, extending far enough into the skies that the air pressure at their tops is barely a half of what it is where they enter the ground, and akin to the one you are accustomed to. The size of each settlement is far larger than any that could be found on Earth. Each boasts the population equal to the largest nations of your birth world. They are connected to each other by a vast cavern system, partly natural, and long since expanded with intelligent intent, forming the beams of the pentagram, with great armored trains coursing through the tunnels.
Part of the issue with the two places being so radically different is that we cant automatically assume that shit built to work in one place will necessarily work in another.
:le shrug:
They werent casting drills.
They were alertness and responsiveness drills, to which he could respond with magic or just physically. I quote:
She trained his senses and his responses. And his paranoia."I have no use for weakness, wizard." She shivered in a kind of slow, alien ecstasy. "Rest. Heal. Sleep. I shall most likely kill you on the morrow."
"You? A Princess Bride quote?" I croaked.
"What is that?" she asked.
Then she was gone. Just gone.
And that was day one of my physical therapy.
* * *
I could describe the next few weeks in detail, but as bad as they were, they did have a certain routine to them. Besides, in my head, they're a music video montage set to the Foo Fighters' "Walk."
I would wake in the morning and find Sarissa waiting for me, keeping a polite and professional distance between us. She would help me take care of the needs of my weakened body, which was rarely dignified, but she never spoke about herself. At some point after that, Mab would try to kill me in increasingly unexpected and inventive ways.
In the video in my head, there's a shot of me eating my own meal again—until, just as I finish, the giant bed bursts into flames. I awkwardly flop out of it and crawl away before I roast. Then, obviously the next day, Sarissa is helping me walk to the bathroom and back. Just as I relax back into bed, a poisonous serpent, a freaking Indian cobra, falls from the bed's canopy onto my shoulders. I scream like a girl and throw it on the floor. The next day, I'm fumbling my way into new clothes with Sarissa's help—until a small swarm of stinging ants comes boiling out of them onto my flesh, and I have to literally rip the clothes off of me.
It goes on like that. Sarissa and me on waist-high parallel bars, me struggling to remember how to keep my balance, interrupted by a tidal flood of red-eyed rats that forces us to hop up onto the bars before our feet get eaten off. Sarissa spotting me on a bench press, and then Mab bringing a great big old fireman's ax whistling down at my head at the end of my third set so that I have to block with the stupid straight bar. Me slogging my exhausted way into a hot shower, only to have the door slam shut and the thing start to fill with water. Into which freaking piranha begin to plop.
On and on. Seventy-seven days. Seventy-seven attempted murders. Use your imagination. Mab sure as hell did. There was even a ticking crocodile.
Not his casting.
Wizards have sensory feedback with life and magic, and the patterns of nature.
As far as Im aware, we've never seen a wizard experience sensory feedback from something technological in the setting.
We see Dresden sense lightning and storm patterns, but not electricity in the wires, for example.
My point is that Molly wasnt recruited for her skill at veils or illusions.
Lea displayed an interest in Molly before she even developed any magic; she spoke of her to Michael back in Grave Peril, iirc.
I am.
Im also pointing out that they have/should have sufficient alternative sources of information for something this public that it does not benefit the White Council in any way to be less than forthcoming about this.
Especially since Dead Beat was only 18 months or so away, and the Council is, according to Ebenezar McCoy in Proven Guilty, still very reliant on the efforts and goodwill of allies and friends picking up the slack for it in the aftermath of the Council's major military losses of that time.
===
Im aware of what the history of the United States with regards to its Native American citizens has been.
At least as bad as its been with its African-American citizens.
However, we know that whoever wrote the basic field manual for Daedalus appeared to be better informed about Native American magical phenomena than just normal human magic.
And that it is explicit for this quest that the Feds intervened decisively in the lesser skinwalker-Navajo war:
There arent many magically-knowledgeable US Federal organizations around.Such were the gifts of the Great One Bobby explained in the dreamy infatuated voice of one wholly enthralled to the allure of a vampire, to break man's works and man's minds, to make hearts race with terror and then rip them from bleeding hearts. Unsurprisingly perhaps the Broken Arrows have a special loathing for the Navajo though it is taboo for them to hunt them without a direct command from their foul 'god'. All that had changed when 'that whelp Ralph' killed and devoured the heart of a medicine man. There had been open war for almost a full month kept from the outside as much by the sheer remoteness of the desert before somehow the feds had gotten involved and driven the cannibals put into what they called 'the bone wood' and which you recognize at once as a particularly macabre layer of the Nevernever. There the survivors had honed their craft, grown their power, feasting on the essence of unfortunate spirits driven into that tainted place...
And based on their performance in Chicago, that aint Daedalus; if they cant handle anti-muggle wards, lesser skinwalkers would have eaten them alive. Possibly literally.
I dont know if we can assume modern human legal precedent has any bearing on supernatural common law.
Human wizards were almost certainly involved in the creation of the Archive, for example, but you dont see them trying to give her orders.
The White Council formally claims a lot of things, not all of them enforcible.
Prior to the war breaking out, the Reds had mortal or part-mortal sorcerers in their employ. So, apparently did some of the Whites. The Council never formally pressed the issue.
When the Sin-Eater chose the Dragon as its representative in 1905, whatever agreements or treaties were made did not give them veto power either.
Besides.
Most Native American magical practitioners appear to be shamans, and the shamanic magical traditions appear to meld religion and magic; generally the Council appears to prefer not to go out of its way to tussle with gods and the servants of gods.
Good point about the DBs.
Porter did say he'd met an Exalt once(or at least someone who felt like Molly) a long time ago.
Something we might want to follow up on in the future.
This doesn't even take into account our hell explicitly has a culture where excellence is highly valued as they believed it would determine them actually existing. There should be some motherfuckers who broke their limits.
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