I think it was shock, a deliberately ingrained hesitation to attack mortals and especially each other, with a splash of narrative handwavium. It certainly wasn't enough for more than some hesitation if that, and extrapolating that to whatever degree is you choose is arbitrary.
I dont agree.
I can see why you might think that way, but I dont find that a plausible argument in an organization that has been fighting (at that point) an eight year war against the Red Court and their half-vampires and mortal minions. Not under the eye of the six surviving Senior Council wizards.
Especially since less than half a page later, we were given a ringside look at the reaction speed and multitasking of the Merlin.
that seems way more effort intensive than it needs to be just to get started. You're infantilizing the council to a ridiculous degree. Even if we do need to spend AP on it what we need is one foci to ask "what's this guy done to work against the council" and we know enough to do the job.
It is not infantilizing them to point at their demonstrated canon performance and draw conclusions about their performance under similar circumstances.
It is especially not infantilizing them when the threat is an insider threat that has been embedded for more than fifteen years at this point in this AU, and has actively subverted most of the people who would normally be entrusted with dealing with this sort of thing. The immune system cant defend the body against HIV because HIV targets key cells of the immune system first.
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Peabody literally made Warden Captain-Commander Anastacia Luccio seduce and date Dresden so he could keep tabs on him through her. Yes, she was more vulnerable to this after swapping bodies, but she would have been under regular medical surveillance by senior people like Listens to Wind because she swapped bodies. And he did it anyway.
That speaks to horrifying things he can have done to ppl under less scrutiny.
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One foci wont cut it.
What he did =/= how he did it =/= what he's currently doing =/= how to defuse it. Our experience with the Crown thus far in this quest has never been such that one question unravels all the important details of a person's guilt.
Which is functionally irrelevant. If we personally hunt down and assault Peabody without including the council in some capacity, which pretty much all of your examples do by the way even when it's manipulative, there will be political consequences. I would rather this situation go as poorly as it did in canon than explode our relationship taking unforced errors that will make cooperation and trust even harder to maintain.
Though I maintain the wizards aren't idiot children who can only be saved by our direct efforts.
You keep bringing up the mind fuckery, but the same section of the book calls out how it had a hard time getting even limited influence over the senior council. You can't pick and choose which of the establishing facts are correct from the same source when they're equally substantiated.
Is McCoy the best possible option? Maybe not. He is what we have to work with though, and almost any option is better than completely ignoring the sovereignty of people who are supposed to be our allies. Especially since they're already worried about how good our goodwill is, our growing influence, and Peabody isn't the end of the problem.
How do you think they'll take it if we do this, and then another thing comes up where we don't include them for the same reason, or otherwise act against the black council? The politics of this matter because how this round goes will heavily influence how willingly they work with us and how much trouble we'll have with these issues going forward.
We're a social Exalt with social Excellencies as Key; we can deal with political consequences. We cant do fuckall about death, and it would take decades to even begin to replace wizard losses. There's a reason why enemy attacks have repeatedly targeted Council training facilities; those losses have ripple effects decades and centuries later.
In canon this affair ended up with the death of Peabody, but at the cost of fifty dead wizards, the death of Donald Morgan, a significant loss of internal faith,
and with the Black Council putting their candidate on the Senior Council.
Which proximately contributed to White Council paralysis during Changes.
THATS what we are trying to avoid.
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If your entire objection is involving the Council in some way? Thats why we have a relationship with Dresden.
He's officially a senior Warden, and this would be his responsibility. The only reason we havent read him in yet is because we have doubts about his ability to keep a poker face, else we'd ask him to look.
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Titania actively had her assassins out to kill then senior Warden Harry Dresden during Small Favor without any worry about diplomatic consequences. Eldest Gruff still walks around with the stoles of three Senior Council members on his belt, denoting Senior Council wizards he has personally killed.
There is considerable overlap between the personal and political in the Dresdenverse.
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The wizards dont have to be idiot children when they have at least one highly-placed hostile mindcontroller leaking information and influencing the decisions of their ruling council, as well as the implementation of those decisions.
As well as an apparent fifth column of witting or unwitting traitors.
You know the White Council almost won this war eight months ago when they and Summer cornered the Red King and his Court after they attacked a Council target?
If Peabody hadnt fed the Reds enough information to stage a diversionary attack with Outsiders on the Council bootcamp for trainees that forced a diversion of forces allowing the Red King to escape, the Reds would have gotten decapitated and it would be all over bar the screaming.
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That section of the book only calls out how hard it is to outright control elder wizards.
It makes it clear that influencing them was, while not exactly easy, a simpler affair. And he's been doing it for more than a decade and half.
Its not a coincidence that the Merlin canonically insisted on a defensive strategy for all ten years of the Vampire War in the face of multiple Rampire-inflicted losses, including the loss of a Senior Council member and most of the Wardens, only to swap to a stated policy of gloves-off, wholesale Red Court genocide in Changes, the very first book after Peabody was removed.
The white council kills talents who don't follow their rules, they don't otherwise police their lives. Which is why vampires eating some talents isn't an issue for the council on a corporate level unless they're trying to exterminate them, but eat a couple full members and see how they respond.
Kemmler was an outlaw by the time he got famous, the issue here is attacking someone with the appearance of good standing to retroactively prove he was guilty of crimes against the council without involving them. No sovereign entity is going to take that, especially when this kind of protection for "citizens" is so critical to the base membership assumption. Remember when Dresden compares getting thrown out to a priest getting defrocked, and how the point of that would be to allow them to ignore it if the red court killed him?
There can be a distinction between a random vamp attack and the red court doing something as an institution, but there wasn't in that one. Same here as well, because Molly's personally engaging as an institution to deal with issues of the same scale. It's not personal business.
The council cannot ignore us doing something like this, it has to respond to at least some degree as a matter of legitimacy. This is not a book club, it's an ancient pseudo-nation state /shadow conspiracy.
The White Council doesnt actively attempt to police the lives of everyone, but some people get more scrutiny than others; mercs like Binder get significantly less leeway than a fortune teller in a mall somewhere. And we know from the example of DuMorne that not all Council wizards are honest.
Kemmler could not have been an outlaw when he got access to Demonreach.
Nor could he have been some unknown.
Occult SuperMax doesnt accept just anyone.
Given the involvement of the Black Council in the entire Dead Beat affair, Molly can very easily make a case for personal grievance against Peabody for when the Kemmlerites tried to sacrifice Chicago to create a god.
The exact same legal reasoning we used for dropping a superweapon on the Wicked City, for that matter.
In fact, its the events of Dead Beat that Im looking at to provide the foci to build a case against Peabody.
Thousands died in central Africa.
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Of course they can.
The White Council has always been selective in what they choose to turn a blind eye to and when.
They did fuckall officially when Maggie LeFay was murdered by Lord Raith.
Similarly, White Court vampire Madrigal Raith kidnapped and attempted to auction Harry Dresden, regional Warden subcommander for the eastern US, on Ebay around 8 months ago, with one of the bidders being Red Court Duchess Arianna Ortega. With all the wizard secrets in his head, while there was an ongoing war.
There was no official response to that incident in canon at all, which they chose to treat as a private matter until Dresden killed him a year later in White Night. Just like there was none here when the same thing happened, until Molly splattered Madrigal across the walls of the Raith ballroom.
Peabody alone has personally cost the Council hundreds of wizards.
From Simon Petrovich and the brute squad of Archangelsk, to the one hundred and forty three Wardens killed during the two or three days of Dead Beat. Nobody is gonna make more than a pro forma fuss when we make our case.
And if he starts dropping Outsiders, well, that pretty much makes the case right there.
