[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Use Occult Excellency
I'll do a bad thing and change my vote to push for using excellency only. The question is likely to win now anyway, so I can afford it.
I actually doubt that this would count as a supernatural secret since it's so specific to Dresden. Insight and secrets are two different things.
Added Without Honour With Hope for the extra dice.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Molly drops the atmosphere of the catacombs to a near freezing to trigger WHWH.
I actually doubt that this would count as a supernatural secret since it's so specific to Dresden. Insight and secrets are two different things.
Added Without Honour With Hope for the extra dice.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Molly drops the atmosphere of the catacombs to a near freezing to trigger WHWH.
What you would basically be doing is asking how the labyrinth works and telling Harry how to deal with, it would be broad information, applicable to any wizard, or maybe just any starborn. This is like the Soulgaze information you gave him in Arc 0.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
Ah that makes more sense as the Labyrinth isn't public knowledge, the Wizards at least certainly didn't know of its effect. I'd still rather save the extra mote for combat purposes however.
No comments on WHWH huh?
You'd think people would want the player character to have extra dice but I guess not.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Use Occult Excellency
-[X] Molly drops the atmosphere of the catacombs to a near freezing to trigger WHWH.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Use Occult Excellency
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Molly drops the atmosphere of the catacombs to a near freezing to trigger WHWH.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
Ah that makes more sense as the Labyrinth isn't public knowledge, the Wizards at least certainly didn't know of its effect. I'd still rather save the extra mote for combat purposes however.
No comments on WHWH huh?
You'd think people would want the player character to have extra dice but I guess not.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Use Occult Excellency
-[X] Molly drops the atmosphere of the catacombs to a near freezing to trigger WHWH.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Use Occult Excellency
Ah that makes more sense as the Labyrinth isn't public knowledge, the Wizards at least certainly didn't know of its effect. I'd still rather save the extra mote for combat purposes however.
No comments on WHWH huh?
You'd think people would want the player character to have extra dice but I guess not.
Meh it's just kinda late that's how voting works if something's too late it doesn't have much chance to pass.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Use Occult Excellency
-[X] Molly drops the atmosphere of the catacombs to a near freezing to trigger WHWH.
We've had late votes win before. Wouldn't be anything new. Really though if Molly is using Shintai WHWH should be automatic. Nine times out of ten we are going to want the dice and it's not like Molly isn't aware that she's stronger in the cold.
If we had time this would be a neat place to play around with. The trial we made into a forge seemed more generic in a lot of ways, but the idea of a maze that rewards escape with power and confinement with damnation obviously has some resonance with Molly.
It'd be interesting if we could steal this place, or make one of our own, and set the trail to getting damned to our hell/service in exchange for some sort of boost if they win.
… Maybe as an alternative training charm?
Brazen Devil's Dance:
Standing in a desolate stretch of urban sprawl, the infernal dances in strange steps that twist it into a true labyrinth. To those caught in its grasp a poisonous promise glimmers in distance; take the devil's hand as she spirals into the darkness to earn power, and match her grace to earn freedom.
System:
The infernal must find or make a confusing area of urban sprawl at least the size of a large warehouse in which navigation is difficult. When in such a location with other people, she may spend one essence per person while dancing a strange path away from them to draw forth a shadow of the Labyrinth.
The subjects of the Devil's Dance then select how they'd like to spend 30 points of experience on the first use and 20 on any following ones among 5 traits that the infernal has a higher score in or any mortal magic she knows.
For each attribute/ability they choose they must pass one contested roll using it against the infernal, represented as challenges that occur as they travel the maze and the infernal shapes it to stop them. In the case of magic this is whatever the appropriate casting roll would be. The challenger must use each trait once, but the infernal may reply using any of them she chooses using any other appropriate charms she may possess.
The challenger will receive the experience at the end regardless of victory or defeat, but each loss in a given attempt extracts a price.
These are cumulative, and start from 0 each use unless the infernal pays another 2 motes to force it to pick up where it left off on the last use. In which case the challenger must still fail at least once in that use of the charm to suffer any penalties.
1) They must make a lasting change to their habits of their choice that their teacher would approve.
2) They must use this skill, and each they subsequently fail on, to do something they believe is substantially useful to their teacher a single time.
3) They owe the infernal a single major favor, on pain of being banished to her hell
4) They become a creature of darkness
5) They must share one valuable supernatural secret per challenge failed within a year and a day on pain of automatic banishment to her hell.
Or something like that. It's cheaper in some ways, but I like the Devil Went Down to Georgia style contest for power themes. It's a good hook for an infernal to tempt with, though they could cheese it to give easier power as part of schemes before pulling the rug out on someone, and resonates with all kinds of dark side factions.
These should both be in the same number, the 40 that was altered to 80 when DP decided that the number should be bigger due to the scale of people involved.
Turn Coat doesn't happen till years later, the number of compromised would likely be smaller than canon.
He's been at this for decades, I don't think the last few years are really the major portion of this. I don't think that 80 count works for a total when we know he's picking up entire classes of baby wardens without anyone noticing. There's a line somewhere between influenced and compromised.
our too focused on the word subverted here when the Crown question first and foremost used the word compromised. Anyone who's being used like that kid was earlier at the beginning of the Arc along with Carlos would've popped up because their minds were compromised.
And they did show up, Molly says as much in the chapter.
Edit: It was a broad question that got a broad answer. I don't know why your sperating them into categories here
Because we got a red flag about it and the numbers don't line up with other factors.
An example of the difference between effected and fully compromised is the senior council. They don't really need our help, but every one of them was dosed with Peabody's poison and was at some level effected by it. They just largely shook it off by virtue of being some of the most naturally stubborn people alive.
People in the middle ground of resistance and importance will have damage to manage from this.
He's been at this for decades, I don't think the last few years are really the major portion of this. I don't think that 80 count works for a total when we know he's picking up entire classes of baby wardens without anyone noticing. There's a line somewhere between influenced and compromised.
He didn't get the entire class of baby wardens that Molly was with before so he doesn't have literally all of them tapped or something. Probably a result of having to move slowly and not wanting to be caught doing so.
Carlos and the kid from earlier (Tina?) came up on the list of compromised. We know that the Crown picked up people with mental tampering from Peabody. If that's what you mean by "influenced" then we already have a number to take from. It's been said that the Crown isn't some monkey's paw by DP.
Because we got a red flag about it and the numbers don't line up with other factors.
An example of the difference between effected and fully compromised is the senior council. They don't really need our help, but every one of them was dosed with Peabody's poison and was at some level effected by it. They just largely shook it off by virtue of being some of the most naturally stubborn people alive.
People in the middle ground of resistance and importance will have damage to manage from this
I think you have a different reading of it than DP. We're just going to have to disagree on it.
Molly used the Crown to ask for compromised people of the WC. I don't see why that wouldn't include the mentally compromised. Like Luccio, or Carlos, who both showed up on the list.
Earlier people were wondering about the nature of said tampering but that's besides the point.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Use Occult Excellency
-[X] Molly drops the atmosphere of the catacombs to a near freezing to trigger WHWH.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Molly drops the atmosphere of the catacombs to a near freezing to trigger WHWH.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Use Occult Excellency
-[X] Molly drops the atmosphere of the catacombs to a near freezing to trigger WHWH.
[X] Harry should take the risk, listen to the whispers of the Hollow Man's maze in the hopes of solving it. If things look dicey you can extend your influence over him again
-[X] Crown Question, focus: this scene. "What are the right words to help Harry succeed in solving the Maze?"
-[X] Molly drops the atmosphere of the catacombs to a near freezing to trigger WHWH.
It would explain some things if large portions of the council was experiencing the same psychological side effects of partially treated mind magic damage that had Harry acting so dumb in the later books. I'd like to assume some competence, but I have a lot of questions about how they organize and utilize resources when they screw up so hard and then remember they have all these tools hanging around to hand wave their problems afterwards.
Maybe.It would certainly make some sense
However, its explicitly said that, if any, whatever Peabody did with the Senior Council was exceedingly subtle. So I dont think its plausible, especially since everyone else would have noticed a sudden lack of competence.
Im guessing that what looks dumb from Harry's and by extension, our POV, is them operating with a different set of information than Harry has access to. And we do know we are missing significant chunks of the picture, including everything going on with the Council since Changes; we dont even know if Luccio is still alive.
My point was that people can and do inflict things on mortals that they do not ask for. Unlike zombies Renfields are biological alive and I think can technically be soul gazed. The person in question suffers ego death in their own soul instead of being kicked out.
1) Renfields may breathe, and eat, but they are functionally dead.
I dont think they can be soulgazed; fine thralls like the lawyer in Turn Coat can be soulgazed, and can be fixed. So can other rough thralls, but I dont think there's anything left in a a Renfield to soulgaze. As per Bob:
Bob's pen flickered over the parchment. When I draw maps I usually end up with a series of lopsided squares and wavery lines and incomplete circles. Bob's drawing looked like it could have been done by da Vinci. "There were three bodies stacked up in a corner of the basement," Bob said. "A few of the shelter's staff had been made into rough thralls and are covering for them, sort of. Maybe half a dozen people hadn't been enthralled, but they were tied up and locked into a cedar closet."
"Any goons?"
"Big- time. Half a dozen Renfields, and each of them has a darkhound to boot."
"Renfields?" I asked.
"How in the world can you exist in this century and not know about Renfields?" Bob demanded. "You need a life, stat."
"I read the book. I know who Renfield was. I'm not familiar with the parlance for Renfield in the plural."
"Oh," Bob said. "What do you need to know?"
"Well. First off, what did they call them before Stoker published the book?" I asked.
"They didn't call them anything, Harry," Bob said in a tone of gentle patience. "That's why the White Court had Stoker publish the book. To tell people about them."
"Oh. Right." I rubbed at my eyes. "How do the vampires do their recruiting?"
"Mind- control magic," Bob said. "The usual."
"Always with the mental control," I muttered. "Let me make sure my facts are straight. Rough thralls just stand around looking blank until they get orders, right?"
"Yeah," Bob said, pen scratching. "Sort of like zombies, but they still have to go to the bathroom."
"So a Renfield is the fine version of thralldom?"
"No," Bob said. "A fine thrall is so controlled that they might not even know that they're a thrall at all, and it lasts long-term."
"Like what DuMorne did to Elaine."
"Uh, I guess so, yeah. Like that. That kind of thing takes a subtle hand, though. Enthralling someone also requires a lot of time and a certain amount of empathy, neither of which has been readily available to Mavra." "So?" I said, getting impatient. "A Renfield is a…?"
Bob put the pen down. "It's the quick, dirty way for the Black Court to pick up some cheap muscle, Renfields have been crushed into total thralldom through brute psychic force."
"You're kidding," I said. "The kind of mental damage that would do to someone…"
"It destroys their sanity when it happens," Bob confirmed. "Makes them no good for anything but gibbering violence, but since that's pretty much what the vampires wanted to begin with it works out."
"How do you get them out of it?" I asked.
"You don't," Bob said. "The original Merlin couldn't undo it, and neither could any of the saints on record who have tried. A thrall can be freed, or recover over time. Renfields can't. From the moment their minds break they've got an expiration date."
"Ugh," I said. "What do you mean?"
"Renfields get more and more violent and deranged, and they self-destruct in a year or two. You can't fix them. For all practical purposes, they're already dead."
I went over the facts in my head, and admired how much uglier the situation had just become. Over the years I've learned that ignorance is more than just bliss. It's freaking orgasmic ecstasy. I glanced at Bob and said, "Are you sure about your facts?"
The cloud of orange light flowed tiredly back into the skull on its shelf. "Yes. DuMorne did quite a bit of research on the subject back in the day."
"Murphy isn't going to like this," I said. "Dismembering monsters with a chain saw is one thing. People are another."
"Yeah. People are easier." "Bob," I growled. "They're people."
"Renfields aren't, Harry," Bob said. "They might still be moving around but they're pretty much gone."
"Boy, would it be fun to explain that to a courtroom," I said. I shuddered. "Or to the White Council, for that matter. If I take out the wrong person, I could wind up in jail-or in a White Council star chamber trial. Mavra's using the laws to protect herself against us. That's so backward."
"Screw the laws! Kill 'em all!" Bob said with weary cheer.
I sighed. "What about the dogs?"
"Your basic animal," Bob said. "But they've been infused with a portion of the same kind of dark power that the Black Court runs on. They're stronger, faster, and they don't feel pain. I once saw a darkhound rip its way through a brick wall."
"I bet they look like normal dogs afterward, huh?"
"And before-ward," Bob said.
"I guess if the cops are on my case when this is over, the SPCA can come along for the ride." I shook my head. "And on top of all that, Mavra is also keeping those hostages in the closet for food. She'll use them as human shields once fighting starts."
"Or as bait in a trap," Bob said.
"Yeah. Either way it makes things more complicated, even if we go in when Mavra and her scourge are sleeping." I looked at Bob's diagram of the lair. "Any security system?"
"Old electronic one," Bob said. "Nothing fancy. No problem for you to hex it down."
"Mavra will know that. She'll have sentries. We need to get past them."
"Forget it. Rough thralls and Renfields don't exactly make the most observant guardians in the world, but the darkhounds make up for them. If you want to sneak up, you'll have to be invisible, inaudible, and unsmellable. Don't count on a surprise attack."
"Dammit. What kind of weapons are they toting?"
"Uh, teeth. Mostly teeth, Harry."
I glared at him. "Not the dogs."
"Oh. The thralls have got some baseball bats. The Renfields have assault rifles, grenades, and body armor."
"Holy crap."
Bob leered at me from his shelf. "Awww. Izzums scared of the mean old machine guns?"
I glowered and flipped a pencil at the skull. "Maybe Murphy can figure out a way to do this without starting World War Three. Meanwhile, change of topic incoming. I need your opinion."
"Sure," Bob said. "Hit me."
I told him about the entropy curse and who I thought was behind it.
Apparently they dont count for the purposes of the First Law either, IIRC.
Dresden killed two with magic, using wind magic to throw napalm back at them.
2)There are hard limits to how far you are allowed to go
The swords used in the last 40 years when the war only started in the last few. The council has suffered losses, but they also rely extensively on single points of failure and outright ignore critical issues routinely.
The USN has 1 shipyard for building nuclear carriers.
The US Army has 1 tank factory in Ohio. 1 factory for making howitzer barrels in New York. 1 factory for making small arms ammunition in Utah. Nobody has infinite resources, and sometimes single points of failure are inescapable.
Furthermore, keep in mind you dont activate your backups if your primary is working fine.
Prior to the war breaking out, the Council had around 200 Wardens and, as I understand it, an average turnover of less than 1 new Warden a year. It was entirely reasonable for Luccio to be the sole swordmaker under those circumstancs.
There was no reasonable reason I can think of for them to have multiple wizards making Wardenswords.
Until they suddenly had to replace two thirds of their standing army and then grow it by another 50% on top of that under war conditions and while suffering war attrition.
And I wont be surprised if Peabody had been deliberately fucking with Luccio's recovery from ending up in a new body.
2) Depends on what you mean by defenses. Stuff like the willpower boosts of the Pathfinder wards would have been nice and not overly problematic. There's also the core matter of internal awareness.
One of the key elements of defending an area is knowing what's happening within it and communicating with your people as close to real time as possible. Which is why WoD has so many ritual effects for doing so.
When we encountered Ancient Mai she was guarding a room of guppies, but didn't seem to be doing anything else. I don't expect her to build this stuff on the spot, but the council should have installed it ages ago. Especially since we know she had the tools for it.
The wind spirit thing was just sitting in her room. Why wasn't someone using it to follow the senior council members or do spot checks on the Warden patrols? Hell, why wasn't that an array to allow monitoring the whole fortress?
Sure it can be blocked, but Mai immediately managed to use the blocking to notice a problem and send us after a Denarian super sorcerer. If there are better ways to avoid that sort of detection than a mind blank style void in space then he would have been using them.
Communications are similarly lacking. Even discounting magical telepathy, why not have wind spirits carry real time information in their own territory? It's possible they had this, but I doubt it because it never came up.
This gets into the competence problem I've been salting about. Being beaten isn't the problem, it's the hallmarks of bad planning that are damning.
When reporting to each other in front of us we didn't hear "The comms are down and none of the not!cameras are working, so we're on manual patrols. Our backups are messed up too so we're trying X solution". We didn't see Mai at a bank of gadgets installed a century before she was born trying to convince a subverted elemental to accept her commands, or using her obviously still functional personal kit to try limping along without the primaries.
What I expect from competent people betting their lives on winning is a minimum of:
A) a robust primary system.
B) a backup plan
C) active attempts to try things on the spot when A and B fail.
3) The Wardens seemed entirely out of contact with that not being presented as inherently dangerous or unusual. No efforts seemed to be underway to correct that either.
Not everything can be shown to us, but places where it should have come up didn't mention anything and nobody seemed to be working on these issues like they were new problems.
They had high-ranking traitors inside their command structure.
People in position to know the details of their passive and active defenses, and the access codes/passwords to activate and potentially subvert them.
Its like installing all sorts of institutional safeguards against intelligence leaks, and then selecting Trump as president.
All the conventional defences, the detection arrays and any automatic entrapment or kill wards, none of them would work under these conditions; some would be actively detrimental.
I would not be at all surprised if one of the first things that Senior Council members like Mai or the Merlin did when they heard of vampires inside the Halls was to lock down any active defenses.
Because surprise vampires = surprise traitors, and surprise traitors can turn defenses against loyalists.
And she/they would have been right to, as demonstrated by the fact that some random fucking traitor was able to allow a fucking demon lord waltz right through the wards like he was skipping across I-75 after it was shutdown to vehicular traffic.
Note that Mai had her wardhounds under her personal command, unlike the other times when we saw them under Warden command at the entrance to wizard meeting.
She wasnt risking additional power falling into the hands of whoever the conspirators were.
====
This entire affair had kicked off well before we got there.
Any panicking had already been done by the time we showed up. A competent organization has already run through that checklist of canned responses by the time Molly and McCoy got there.
Similarly, a competent conspiracy with the level of penetration demonstrated by Peabody and company already had tailored responses to the Council playbook.
We were well into the stage where the Council had run down the list of canned protocols and was improvising.
====
There was explicitly an Outsider-type presence loose in the Halls, specifically preying on anyone dumb enough to open enhanced perceptions.
Furthermore, the law of sympathy is very much a thing in the Dresdenverse, and a spirit providing a realtime video feed to your location is the equivalent of an arcane focus for a hostile caster looking to send a Correspondence attack past your defenses into your local space. Bad idea.
Also I just remembered that the Urge isn't going to trigger at all because if this was a different scene Shintai wouldn't be in effect as it's only scene long and the Urge was already triggered earlier for this scene by Namshiel. Too bad I didn't mention this earlier.
@Yog we're going to have 5 left if you go for both the question and the excellency.
Maybe.It would certainly make some sense
However, its explicitly said that, if any, whatever Peabody did with the Senior Council was exceedingly subtle. So I dont think its plausible, especially since everyone else would have noticed a sudden lack of competence.
Im guessing that what looks dumb from Harry's and by extension, our POV, is them operating with a different set of information than Harry has access to. And we do know we are missing significant chunks of the picture, including everything going on with the Council since Changes; we dont even know if Luccio is still alive.
Oh sure.
Im just making the point that
1) Renfields may breathe, and eat, but they are functionally dead.
I dont think they can be soulgazed; fine thralls like the lawyer in Turn Coat can be soulgazed, and can be fixed. So can other rough thralls, but I dont think there's anything left in a a Renfield to soulgaze. As per Bob:
Bob's pen flickered over the parchment. When I draw maps I usually end up with a series of lopsided squares and wavery lines and incomplete circles. Bob's drawing looked like it could have been done by da Vinci. "There were three bodies stacked up in a corner of the basement," Bob said. "A few of the shelter's staff had been made into rough thralls and are covering for them, sort of. Maybe half a dozen people hadn't been enthralled, but they were tied up and locked into a cedar closet."
"Any goons?"
"Big- time. Half a dozen Renfields, and each of them has a darkhound to boot."
"Renfields?" I asked.
"How in the world can you exist in this century and not know about Renfields?" Bob demanded. "You need a life, stat."
"I read the book. I know who Renfield was. I'm not familiar with the parlance for Renfield in the plural."
"Oh," Bob said. "What do you need to know?"
"Well. First off, what did they call them before Stoker published the book?" I asked.
"They didn't call them anything, Harry," Bob said in a tone of gentle patience. "That's why the White Court had Stoker publish the book. To tell people about them."
"Oh. Right." I rubbed at my eyes. "How do the vampires do their recruiting?"
"Mind- control magic," Bob said. "The usual."
"Always with the mental control," I muttered. "Let me make sure my facts are straight. Rough thralls just stand around looking blank until they get orders, right?"
"Yeah," Bob said, pen scratching. "Sort of like zombies, but they still have to go to the bathroom."
"So a Renfield is the fine version of thralldom?"
"No," Bob said. "A fine thrall is so controlled that they might not even know that they're a thrall at all, and it lasts long-term."
"Like what DuMorne did to Elaine."
"Uh, I guess so, yeah. Like that. That kind of thing takes a subtle hand, though. Enthralling someone also requires a lot of time and a certain amount of empathy, neither of which has been readily available to Mavra." "So?" I said, getting impatient. "A Renfield is a…?"
Bob put the pen down. "It's the quick, dirty way for the Black Court to pick up some cheap muscle, Renfields have been crushed into total thralldom through brute psychic force."
"You're kidding," I said. "The kind of mental damage that would do to someone…"
"It destroys their sanity when it happens," Bob confirmed. "Makes them no good for anything but gibbering violence, but since that's pretty much what the vampires wanted to begin with it works out."
"How do you get them out of it?" I asked.
"You don't," Bob said. "The original Merlin couldn't undo it, and neither could any of the saints on record who have tried. A thrall can be freed, or recover over time. Renfields can't. From the moment their minds break they've got an expiration date."
"Ugh," I said. "What do you mean?"
"Renfields get more and more violent and deranged, and they self-destruct in a year or two. You can't fix them. For all practical purposes, they're already dead."
I went over the facts in my head, and admired how much uglier the situation had just become. Over the years I've learned that ignorance is more than just bliss. It's freaking orgasmic ecstasy. I glanced at Bob and said, "Are you sure about your facts?"
The cloud of orange light flowed tiredly back into the skull on its shelf. "Yes. DuMorne did quite a bit of research on the subject back in the day."
"Murphy isn't going to like this," I said. "Dismembering monsters with a chain saw is one thing. People are another."
"Yeah. People are easier." "Bob," I growled. "They're people."
"Renfields aren't, Harry," Bob said. "They might still be moving around but they're pretty much gone."
"Boy, would it be fun to explain that to a courtroom," I said. I shuddered. "Or to the White Council, for that matter. If I take out the wrong person, I could wind up in jail-or in a White Council star chamber trial. Mavra's using the laws to protect herself against us. That's so backward."
"Screw the laws! Kill 'em all!" Bob said with weary cheer.
I sighed. "What about the dogs?"
"Your basic animal," Bob said. "But they've been infused with a portion of the same kind of dark power that the Black Court runs on. They're stronger, faster, and they don't feel pain. I once saw a darkhound rip its way through a brick wall."
"I bet they look like normal dogs afterward, huh?"
"And before-ward," Bob said.
"I guess if the cops are on my case when this is over, the SPCA can come along for the ride." I shook my head. "And on top of all that, Mavra is also keeping those hostages in the closet for food. She'll use them as human shields once fighting starts."
"Or as bait in a trap," Bob said.
"Yeah. Either way it makes things more complicated, even if we go in when Mavra and her scourge are sleeping." I looked at Bob's diagram of the lair. "Any security system?"
"Old electronic one," Bob said. "Nothing fancy. No problem for you to hex it down."
"Mavra will know that. She'll have sentries. We need to get past them."
"Forget it. Rough thralls and Renfields don't exactly make the most observant guardians in the world, but the darkhounds make up for them. If you want to sneak up, you'll have to be invisible, inaudible, and unsmellable. Don't count on a surprise attack."
"Dammit. What kind of weapons are they toting?"
"Uh, teeth. Mostly teeth, Harry."
I glared at him. "Not the dogs."
"Oh. The thralls have got some baseball bats. The Renfields have assault rifles, grenades, and body armor."
"Holy crap."
Bob leered at me from his shelf. "Awww. Izzums scared of the mean old machine guns?"
I glowered and flipped a pencil at the skull. "Maybe Murphy can figure out a way to do this without starting World War Three. Meanwhile, change of topic incoming. I need your opinion."
"Sure," Bob said. "Hit me."
I told him about the entropy curse and who I thought was behind it.
Apparently they dont count for the purposes of the First Law either, IIRC.
Dresden killed two with magic, using wind magic to throw napalm back at them.
2)There are hard limits to how far you are allowed to go
The USN has 1 shipyard for building nuclear carriers.
The US Army has 1 tank factory in Ohio. 1 factory for making howitzer barrels in New York. 1 factory for making small arms ammunition in Utah. Nobody has infinite resources, and sometimes single points of failure are inescapable.
Furthermore, keep in mind you dont activate your backups if your primary is working fine.
Prior to the war breaking out, the Council had around 200 Wardens and, as I understand it, an average turnover of less than 1 new Warden a year. It was entirely reasonable for Luccio to be the sole swordmaker under those circumstancs.
There was no reasonable reason I can think of for them to have multiple wizards making Wardenswords.
Until they suddenly had to replace two thirds of their standing army and then grow it by another 50% on top of that under war conditions and while suffering war attrition.
And I wont be surprised if Peabody had been deliberately fucking with Luccio's recovery from ending up in a new body.
They had high-ranking traitors inside their command structure.
People in position to know the details of their passive and active defenses, and the access codes/passwords to activate and potentially subvert them.
Its like installing all sorts of institutional safeguards against intelligence leaks, and then selecting Trump as president.
All the conventional defences, the detection arrays and any automatic entrapment or kill wards, none of them would work under these conditions; some would be actively detrimental.
I would not be at all surprised if one of the first things that Senior Council members like Mai or the Merlin did when they heard of vampires inside the Halls was to lock down any active defenses.
Because surprise vampires = surprise traitors, and surprise traitors can turn defenses against loyalists.
And she/they would have been right to, as demonstrated by the fact that some random fucking traitor was able to allow a fucking demon lord waltz right through the wards like he was skipping across I-75 after it was shutdown to vehicular traffic.
Note that Mai had her wardhounds under her personal command, unlike the other times when we saw them under Warden command at the entrance to wizard meeting.
She wasnt risking additional power falling into the hands of whoever the conspirators were.
====
This entire affair had kicked off well before we got there.
Any panicking had already been done by the time we showed up. A competent organization has already run through that checklist of canned responses by the time Molly and McCoy got there.
Similarly, a competent conspiracy with the level of penetration demonstrated by Peabody and company already had tailored responses to the Council playbook.
We were well into the stage where the Council had run down the list of canned protocols and was improvising.
====
There was explicitly an Outsider-type presence loose in the Halls, specifically preying on anyone dumb enough to open enhanced perceptions.
Furthermore, the law of sympathy is very much a thing in the Dresdenverse, and a spirit providing a realtime video feed to your location is the equivalent of an arcane focus for a hostile caster looking to send a Correspondence attack past your defenses into your local space. Bad idea.
I couldn't see anything else, but I knew there was something there. So I lowered my eyelids almost all the way and focused my attention, Listening. There was the faint sound of something breathing, but nothing more.
It wasn't enough. I lowered the gun a bit, relaxing my shoulders, and poured more of my focus into it, Listening more deeply than I ever had before. The sound of breathing became louder, and I picked out several other faint sources of it. A moment later I began to hear a dull throbbing, which I realized was a beating heart. More heartbeats joined it, a confused chorus of drumming beats, but I was able to identify individual rhythms into a pair of groups. One was a bit faster, lighter-smaller hearts, probably the darkhounds. There were four of them. The other group was human, and there were five hearts beating in an eager, savage cadence-pressed up against the walls on either side of the doorway, out of sight but less than twenty feet away.
And from the back of the room I heard footsteps, slow and deliberate. They slid quietly across the stone floor, and the wasted outline of an emaciated female form appeared in front of one of the glow sticks.
And no heartbeat accompanied it.
Mavra.
The darkhounds appeared, vague shapes, and paced restlessly through the shadows around the vampire. My heart
lurched in sudden apprehension, and I released my attention from the Listening. I raised the gun, got to my feet, and backed away.
Again, that soft, mocking laugh drifted through the basement.
"Trouble," I said over my shoulder. "Five Renfields, four darkhounds at least, and Mavra's awake."
"Indeed," came Mavra's dry, dusty voice. "I've been waiting for you, Dresden. There's something I've been meaning to ask you."
If he concentrates, Harry can hear your heartbeat from across the room and your approximate location.
And can identify heart beats by species.
No external spell cast, innate ability.
Nukes are 1940s technology. Grad students in university can and have designed Teller-Ulam physics packages from open source information. The UK built its first nukes in the 1950s. France, Israel and China built nukes in the 1960s, India in the 1970s, Pakistan and South Africa in the 1980s, North Korea in the 2000s, and Iran is believed to have designs already.
The difficult part has always been building the industry to refine the nuclear material, not designing a device.
I cant imagine any situation in which Sanctuary cant already build the things if they really want to.
If he concentrates, Harry can hear your heartbeat from across the room and your approximate location.
And can identify heart beats by species.
No external spell cast, innate ability.
Fucking wizards.
=====
No.
Nukes are 1940s technology. Grad students in university can and have designed Teller-Ulam physics packages from open source information. The UK built its first nukes in the 1950s. France, Israel and China built nukes in the 1960s, India in the 1970s, Pakistan and South Africa in the 1980s, North Korea in the 2000s, and Iran is believed to have designs already.
The difficult part has always been building the industry to refine the nuclear material, not designing a device.
I cant imagine any situation in which Sanctuary cant already build the things if they really want to.
I mean yeah but lack of need could be a reason they don't have them. Fairly sure dp would of told us if we had nukes. I was never really debating ability
