MiS is inherently more mass producible than any potion, though. The only advantage the potion has over it is that others who are not Molly can in principle make it, thus allowing the entrenched nobility of the court to remain in power.
That's not the only advantage.
MiS can't fuel their abilities, and our other options can't necessarily scale themselves. A bottle-o-power is something that can be eaten quickly, stealthily, and ethically.
It also has the advantage of not requiring or enforcing loyalty towards us. Now we want to cultivate that, but it's important to think about this from the perspective of other people.
Most aren't going to be interested in switching employers right off the bat. If they were we aren't the only ones who could do something about the hunger if they're willing to pay the price.
Such a potion is a huge point of leverage that can be used to spread influence and acquire resources ourselves.
Then you work the game in stages; you start with a light touch that gets people involved and invested, then you draw them in one more step at a time. It's like adopting a feral cat; if you try to bring it inside by picking it up it'll run away, but feed it for a while and it'll get used to you and let you start to pet it and eventually life into the house.
Even with that there are inevitably going to be people who aren't interested in getting that close to us, who value their independence and direct interests over ours. For those people we can try to force the issue, but that has a lot of potential to backfire by poisoning our reputation and scaring off fence sitters.
Pursuing low level benign influence in a broad area lets us maximize our ability to effect change and reach people. The lower barriers of entry make it easier to get more people into our ecosystem, where we can work on drawing them deeper without driving them off.
On a general level, I feel like the thread has an issue with getting out of Molly's head. Pledging loyalty to a hell princess isn't exactly something people will jump into for a variety of reasons.
There's a reason all of our recruits are desperate people or otherwise in some sort of special case.
Not at all really potions do not last every extra success either makes another potion or makes it last a day longer. Even for Molly turning out a 4-5 dot potion full time maxes out at most 10-15 or so people. For anyone not an exalted your down to 1-2 potions, for a full scale operation with many people working, with a chance the potions will kill the person you make it for.
That depends a lot on details we don't have right now. Even if that is a concern as long as we don't exceed the known risks of alchemy it's an issue we can manage on a reputational level.
White vamps are the target group and they're pretty stupid tough, so soaking alchemy consequences is a lot more viable for them anyway.
