The dragon is using what appears to be a mix of immense magical power taken from the leyline nexus it's sleeping in and something it's drawing from the probably!exaltation to keep the exalted lineage itself viable.
My impression is that without this life support mechanism for the bloodline it's possible one of the last surviving traces of the terrestrials could go extinct. Potentially the very last of them depending on how lucky they've been.
We should check, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's something important about the exaltation in particular as a source of power here.
I think it's worth considering this as an opportunity to recruit our own terrestrial officers* like a later day hack job exalted host instead of getting a single lunar out of it.
I am fairly sure it's using lunar breeding magic to artificially boost a dragonblooded tribe's breeding (i.e. the odds of the children exalting), to keep the number of exalts at least steady in the population from generation to generation. The Lunar powers align very well with that.
I will absolutely take a dragonblooded tribe as a consolation prize for a lunar circlemate. Gladly so. We'll still need to do stuff to the exaltation so it's not painful for the dragon anymore, and if we can both get the exaltation and the tribe, we should go for that, but I'll take it.
Investigating who he sends power to comes first, though. We need more information, and ideally a friendly face and a proper way to wake the dragon up to talk to him.
* A lot of our disagreements on exalted have been about the celestials, or ancient assholes who are at odds with the modern world. Modern terrestrials have the potential to be very different.
Breedable superpowers and breeding politics where eugenics are, in fact, the correct way to go introduce their own problems. I am down for that, though. Dragonblooded legions, hell yeah! We'll just need a proper warstrider and then, when an inevitable time travel episode comes, we won't be embarrassed to show our face in a First Age party.
I thought talking to the guy in charge of one side of thus potential conflict would help solve it.
And i expected talking to the dragon to be the harder part.
We can wait and gather more info, sure.
But we are trying to get people to not assume we are hostile as default, so i would like to treat odin the same way.
If thats bad strategy, my bad.
The situation is important enough to warrant some social maneuvering, i just didnt think it was required.
We should absolutely talk to Odin. When we have as many facts as possible, and there's as little as possible for him to exploit (like initiating the fight against the dragon, and calling in the favor we owe him to join combat).
When talking about Odin, one has to remember several things:
1) He is, ultimately, one of the "good guys" on the side of Creation and Humanity.
2) He is, however, not a nice guy in the modern meaning of the word at all.
3) He is not our friend, and even if he was, it wouldn't help us.
This is the person with the greatest supernatural spy agency in the world. The Father of Hosts, the chief deity of vikings, raiders of the high seas who terrified Europe for centuries. He is the Gallow's god, whose ideal of a king, and the chosen modern champion is a Chicago mobster Johnny Marcone, the person who willingly became a denarian. He is the Winter's King, Mab's counterpart and in some ways equal to all her cruelty. He is a kinslayer, who murdered his grandfather to create the world.
He is not nice, and he is a very hard man, making very hard decisions in a very hard world. Even if he's also Santa Claus.
