Dear participants of the topic, why are we discussing canon? This is not canon. This is an AU by the Dragonparadox. We have a different story fpr Mab. Yes, I understand, we have no other sources. But the canon disappeared at the start of the quest where Exaltet is the past of this world.
We've talked about this before.
The conceit of the quest as I understand it is that the divergence point from the events of canon is Molly's exaltation. There is a merged setting but the actions people took remain the same. This is necessary for the world to look the same, because oustentably it was like this the whole time.
So rolling forward things can change quite a bit as people react to the world being different, but looking back a change that would have made people act differently in the past is no good. It would require people to either forget what they could do for the bulk of the timeline or for the setting to suddenly change its laws of physics without anyone noticing or caring.
So when I'm making an appeal to canon like "Peabody shouldn't be able to do X because it's contradict how he's behaved" I mean that whatever issue at hand is one that seems to create a backward compatibility issue. If he could do that in this manner then it calls into question why he didn't sooner and therefore why the quest doesn't look radically different already.
It's like the vertical line test for plot consistency. The same character under the same circumstances shouldn't have two different sets of options which would materially change the results of decisions which impact the plot.
That doesn't make any sense.
The white council is a much smaller organization, and has more at risk in any one facility.
The primary political issue is an unavoidable one, you might as well call people stupid for keeping all of their brains in their skulls instead of spread through their bodies.
Even if the whole senior council survives along with the key elder members also present on site, which at least some wouldn't, the loss of the center of their power is a blow to idea of the council as a coherent entity capable of protecting its members.
War is not a math problem and people aren't cold staticians. The numbers matter, but how people emotionally respond to things is a make of break issue.
The difference from a pure military perspective between losing control of say Rhode Island as a whole is probably higher than losing New York City, but the impact they would have on how people act would not be the same.
I imagine that in all their years the Council has dealt with worse loses than a single highly valued base and yet they're still around. You don't seem to think much of them
They haven't that we have evidence of.
This isn't happening at a calm time in their history. They're barely staying in a very nasty war, their internal political factions are starting to experience significant friction, and now they're going to learn the council not only wasn't able to keep them safe but that it was actually the source of a major threat.
In canon just Peabody being revealed then dying was enough that the council almost splintered. Literally the only thing that saved it was filling an empty council seat with the leader of the splinter faction.
This is all of that, plus an monument to how profoundly incapable the council was at dealing with him.
There is no nation on earth that would deal with an equivalent loss calmly.
The scenario your suggesting here is not at all equivalent to the one in question. The Hidden Halls is a single asset. It is not the equivalent of a city and multiple key nuclear facilities. Come on man.
It is their capital.
It's where they keep all their nuclear teir people. Where they run their military's high command. Where they host meetings of their entire citizenry to hold votes and set policy. Where they accept diplomatic envoys and perform various functions of state. It's where their operational records, most important library, and highest power artifacts are.
The white council doesn't have cities to lose, this is the equivalent value of DC and NORAD packed into one fortress.
The material loss is a huge problem, but the lethally serious one is the political aftermath. It's basically the equivalent of a person getting stabbed then going into shock until they bleed out.
Even if they just moved the senior council to another less impressive fortress it wouldn't change the fact that they'd have a smoking hole in the ground declaring them powerless and untrustworthy failures.
