I think this approach is guaranteed to fail. You're treating Eiko like someone who has conventional free will, rather than someone mostly trapped in a web of literally unbreakable orders that she's found a (most likely) very narrow and convoluted way to try to escape from.
We have to discover and work within those constraints on her free will. A blunt approach is, as I discuss above, basically asking to fail. It doesn't matter how intimidating we are or how many social dice we throw down when it's literally impossible for her to disobey her orders and we've no idea why they are or what her interpretation of them are.
We also need to consider that the Will probably has her under surveillance.
If she's under surveillance we're already made. Molly is sitting with a van full of mercs and important figures from the local supernatural scene. Michael got picked up from his license plate of all things being on file with the red court. They'd have to be idiots not to have noticed us by now.
I also disagree with your fundamental assumptions on the Akuma. I don't think it's likely that there's a specific escape plan so much as loose desperation that peaks and falls off with opportunity.
While the Akuma do have limits on their free will, Emma-O's weird fetishes clearly limit the effectiveness with which those restrictions are leveraged. I think it's a good bet that she can work around her limitations if given motivation to take us seriously and try it.
I also think this is our best bet, because shenanigans like trying to claim to be her boss's boss don't make any sense in context. Every Yama king claims that prize, and most of them have better claims than Molly since they're technically insiders to the struggle and she isn't from a political perspective.
Eventually enough force will work, might have to usurp the white god for that one. Which is fairly out of character, but you never know, if the white god fucks up enough and somehow betrays Michal then i can see it happening.
"Eventually enough force will work" is what every schmuck thinks when they try this, and they tend to fail because of it.
Look at the common threads among people who get and keep power long term are. Nice isn't on the list, but reliability for lack of a better term is.
1)You are misunderstanding me.
If this was something that Odin was known for, or was capable of, the svartalfar wouldnt have been trading with the pantheon he was known to have headed because it would have exposed all their secrets.
After all, they both come from the same area; the only svartalfar store is supposed to still be in Norway.
Still talking past each other. I'm not talking about anything special on Odin's part, I'm talking about basic investigative stuff because we've been around for hardly any time at all.
Asking for good swords/tanks without specifying anything else gets him simple and basic information about us from how we fill the order that he can't get elsewhere because the information hasn't permeated the market yet.
If we have him mortal grade work with demons in it making up the difference in performance it'd tell him something different from exalted grade shenanigans backed by weird alchemy.
This isn't trade secret level analysis, which is why the information isn't priced that highly on Odin's scale. It's a read ahead on a data point to fill out a profile on Molly.
2)I dont buy it.
I dont think he'll get more information than he otherwise would from watching us finish Last Station or hear about us creating least gods to guard apartment buildings or expanding our interaction with the rest of the supernatural world.
I mean, do recall that Watchful Bane guards Helen's apartment, and Helen works for Marcone, who has Gard as a magical contractor and bodyguard. There's going to be a lot of passive intel gathering.
He can't exactly give a least god a medical checkup without being aggressive.
This really isn't that big of a point either, I just don't see how the amount of long term headache involved in keeping a custom built one off armored vehicle around could be worth it as anything other than a novelty and minor information source.
Think about the trouble for getting parts and repair work done on uncommon varieties of car. It's like that but worse for something like this.
Thats the point: They didnt screw him, he screwed himself.
This is having an enemy shoot himself with a gun he stole from your house, after you displayed it in the window of your house when you knew he would see it.
No, my assumptions rest on Odin's self-interest.
All this talk about what he could potentially do with a favor are all stuff he can already do, and more, if he's hostile.
Not worth worrying about unless he turns hostile.
That's splitting hairs; they purposefully set him up to fail. Loopholes that make it acceptable by the rules of the game don't change what they were obviously up to and don't render us immune to similar plays.
He doesn't need to be hostile to decide it's in his interest to do something inconvenient or harmful to us. That's what I'm getting at when I'm talking about your assumptions here. You're trusting he'll see his interests the same way you do without actually having a clear picture of what they are.
I don't expect him to hit us like Mab did Nicodemus, but it wouldn't surprise me if set us to do something unpleasant or that introduced us to noteworthy long term complications without too much of a concern for if we choke on it as long as the job gets done.
Agreed that Harry is not the best example.
Arawn isnt a better example either, though; dude made an unprompted deal with Mab and Winter for fealty, then tried to screw her on it. At least Harry has the excuse of being 16, alone and desperate at the time.
That's fair, but when you keep seeing people get screwed making mistakes that seemed reasonable at the time it's probably a good plan to stop and consider if your "sounds reasonable" moments are actually that solid.
Funnily enough, the Naagolshii might be a better comparison here. It got sent on a simple job that left it stuck away from home for a significant period of time and involved in business that ended with it picking fights it probably shouldn't have.
Harry has a strong and distinct reputation, a brand identity in the supernatural.
Gard, as far as I know, didnt.
She kept a low profile by design; Dresden didnt even know she was a Valk until maybe a month before Small Favor iirc.
She represents Monoc and Odin; Harry always represents himself, even when working for other organizations.
I am not saying give Odin a blank check. Or even trust.
I am asserting that even if they tried to get the best deal they can, their best interests do not lie in a screw job or unnecessary friction, especially if said person is presumably going to be around for a while.
One Call For Aid/battlefield intervention card is a marker you only get to play once, and whether or not you get others depends on subsequent relations.
Mab certainly manages to get what she wants 90+% of the time while being abrasive. The risk isn't as high as a straight blank check, but this is a significant amount of trust for someone we have no real information on.
1)Remember that <loosely defined> works both ways.
2) Looking at the Dresdenverse books, Harry has worked with or for people he considered assholes in *checks, deep breath*
Grave Peril(then!Thomas threw Susan to the Reds as a distraction),
Summer Knight(Mab, Maeve, Winter, the Merlin),
Death Masks(Marcone, Martin),
Blood Rites(Lara Raith,Kincaid)
Dead Beat(Marcone, Mavra, Morgan),
White Night(Marcone, Lara),
Turn Coat(Morgan, Lara),
Small Favor(Mab, Marcone),
Changes(Mab, Lea, Martin),
Cold Days(Winter),
Skin Game(Nicodemus, Deirdre, Binder,the Genoskwa),
Peace Talks and Battlegrounds(like half the supernatural world).
And thats just the novels. Even the Knights have had to work with the support of Marcone and his organization in Chicago.
Im suspecting we dont get the luxury of being picky about allies when the fecal matter hits the rotary impeller.
3)No, I am pointng out that we have easy options and always have, some of them inside our own charmset.
Some of those charms we want anyway.
1) Only if he's dumb about the request. Loosely defined maps to "he writes in the dollar value" here. We can evil genie this, but I don't expect us to wiggle out via basic errors on this. See Harry's deal with Mab where technically asking him to pass the salt would burn a favor. That sort of thing can be argued to sound fair, but functionally screws the debtor more than the creditor.
2) The terms under which that happens are different though. We might reluctantly work with Denarians to stop an outer gods from screwing with the gates for example, but helping them pursue their mission statement isn't in the cards if we're primarily calling the shots.
3) You can point out charms for all kinds of things, but what we pick and when we pick them are things with associated opportunities costs and aren't guaranteed to match whatever timetable we're on.
1)By what standards? Kattrin was a renegade Valkyrie dodging that showed up a couple days before the Red Room Murders.
She kidnapped Cindy and imprisoned her in between our initial visit to Old Man Mathews on Friday afternoon and our return on Saturday morning.
Cindy was imprisoned in an improvised Undertown cell with magic bindings and a spectre on overwatch.
All Kattrin had helping her (we are aware of) was EvilBob and Corpsetaker, a handful of neoNazi goons and a bunch of ghoul contractors she paid in stray dog.
By comparison, the Greater Akuma serves a Yama King, with the polity-scale resources Emma-O was willing to spare, and has been here for two and half weeks or so, since September 16ish at least. He had 18 akuma(Eiko + 17 lessers) at his disposal and 4x bakemono. He has the resources and time to have spent more on his unused backup plans than Kattrin did on her Plan A.
2) I dont agree.
As demonstrated canonically in the Raith Deeps fight in White Night, and in our first fight with Corpsetaker in Undertown, minions very much have their place in defending against magical or distraction measures.
Whether its fending off mobs for the hero to act, or just speeding up evacuation of HVTs.
1) I just don't expect it to have preexisting perfect counters for every possible play we could make ready at a moment's notice. People aren't perfect machines, they have biases and make mistakes all the time. See the greater Akuma executing a valuable hostage out of frustration.
Have something? Sure. Have retrospectively built out exactly what they to handle any given change. No. This clearly wasn't a primary plan for them, so I expect it to be less smoothly put together.
Taking your approach there's no point in any of the screwing around we've done, because the GA's nation state resources and super planning have already accounted for us.
Surely they've counter-counter ritualed us by now after they caught Harry's change in a routine status sweep, and their local contacts in the phone company have given them out force composition ahead of time. Maybe they've got mercenaries too, which they bought anticipating us contacting someone for help.
2) Maybe, but even if more mooks than I was buying would be useful I don't think the additional guys you went for will be worth the price.
Not sure why we're arguing over it anyway, since no plan has included it.
Yeah, no need to cycle pointless arguments.
Personally, I think that this is a mistake, because rewriting reality is basically shaping, and, well, shaping defenses are built into exaltations on a very core levels. Holden did mess with the primacy of defense, and that is... controversial in my opinion.
For my part I think it's largely irrelevant because mages != magic users in general.
That quote gives the context that ruling was made in, maintaining mage "I reject your reality and substitute my own " themes above those of exalts. Nobody in the DF operates like that.
It's not just a matter of strength, it's one of leverage. Emma-O for example shouldn't be able to do things even an archmage he's nominally stronger than could for the same reason he can't use Exalted Ancient Sorcery. Biggatons don't grant access to every sort of leverage.
