Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

Okay.

My argument is the following:
If Lara thinks she can handle the consequences of one more execution, we can do it tonight.
If Lara doesn't think so, we can wait.

But if we don't tell her at all, we will miss this wonderful chance for sure.
There is the potential of a leak while trying to do this, which takes the decision out of Molly and Lara's hands.
Like I pointed out, Justine is Lara's PA, and she was Nfested by this point in canon iirc. Wanna guess how many times she handles Lara's phone? Did she put something on it? Magic? Spyware? The juice is not worth the squeeze.


There is no evidence that Vito Malvora has anything to do with Skavis Heir's plot, so there's no casus belli there.
Like I said, we're here for one thing.
We cant just arbitarily expand the scope without justification.


Killing the heirs of both House Malvora and Skavis at the same venue is not an opportunity, its a bloody horrible political risk.
You can just as easily get them to see it as a political power grab, and then the White Court goes boom and we are dealing with the fallout of another conflagration.


Give it to Lara tomorrow.
If you people are right and Vito Malvora is dead, she might even get his mother to help with it, and make House Malvora go after whatever Outsider agents they can find, instead of thinking of them as a cheap powerup.

That requires patience and care, but has much higher potential payoff.
My two cents.
 
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Like I pointed out, Justine is Lara's PA, and she was Nfested by this point in canon iirc. Wanna guess how many times she handles Lara's phone? Did she put something on it? Magic? Spyware? The juice is not worth the squeeze.
If Justine reveals herself by sharing info only she could have seen on Lara's phone, that's a net-good as well.
The sooner we know IC about her and Exorcise her, the better.

As for the rest of it, I don't think the risk is high, because Lara herself chose to contact us via message last time she wanted it to be unnoticed, and I assume she knows the spies in her Court best.
 
Which means we dont have legal casus belli against him by any of the terms of our working treaty with the White Court.
That's bull. He is a direct servant of an Outsider. That's all the justification we need to immediately tell Lara. The mere rumors of Winter Court being compromised was enough for Lara to contact us and insist strongly we talk to her. To try and prevent us from dealing with Mab even. We have much more actionable intelligence. We told Mab about infiltrators in her court. Lara deserves the same courtesy.

You are setting false equivalence between "tell Lara now" and "kill him on our own volition now". That's wrong. Dishonest even. We do not get to ignore this. We need to tell her.
 
Approval voting options that aren't "ignore this for some made-up reason"

[X] Try to pass on what you saw to Lara (Charisma+Subterfuge)
-[X] Use Excellency

[X] Send her a message, you have her number and Cthulhu probably does not read texts. Hopefully she's not one of those people who does not check her phone at parties
 
For all those that are voting *Say Nothing*, you do realize that this is explicitly hiding intelligence to an ally because we can't be bothered, right?

The vote is not *kill the guy right now* so any argument based on what would happen if we did is irrelevant, the vote is *how do you convey to your ally, the one that you know is working against outsiders, the one that gave you informations about the exact same sort of things in a previous interaction, the fact that you found another spy*.

Not telling her is a betrayal of her trust and making sure that she stops helping us since we don't repay in kind, it's appearing as either overconfident in our abilities and dismissive of a very real threat, or appearing incompetent and not even thinking of telling our ally that there is another infiltrator when we are explicitly here to take care of rebellious actors already.

Saying Nothing is shooting ourself in the foot for no reasons, if you think we can't discuss or send a message via phone, do the same thing Laura did and write on a pice of paper we pass discreetly, or something, but do not delay giving important information that can very well leads to big complications *because*.

[X] Send her a message, you have her number and Cthulhu probably does not read texts. Hopefully she's not one of those people who does not check her phone at parties
-[x]Stunt "Vito Died some time ago. Something else is using his face."
 
[X] Try to pass on what you saw to Lara (Charisma+Subterfuge)
-[X] Use Excellency

[X] Send her a message, you have her number and Cthulhu probably does not read texts. Hopefully she's not one of those people who does not check her phone at parties
 
If Justine reveals herself by sharing info only she could have seen on Lara's phone, that's a net-good as well.
The sooner we know IC about her and Exorcise her, the better.

As for the rest of it, I don't think the risk is high, because Lara herself chose to contact us via message last time she wanted it to be unnoticed, and I assume she knows the spies in her Court best.
Its a phone. Wiretaps and spyware is a thing, as is remote surveillance magic.
I think they hadnt even begun encrypting text messages at this point in time, at least on GSM phones.

Its not a net good if we trigger a White Court civil war in the process.
The Baddies have repeatedly tried to blow up the White Court in canon; that was part of the plot of two books: White Night and Turn Coat.I dont want to do their work for them, wittingly or not, or give them ammo to use.

Lara called us personally on the phone and set up that meeting.
And even then she still had a lesser skinwalker sitting in on the site of the meeting and providing a live feed to the naagloshii, demonstrating that her communications are not secure.

That's bull. He is a direct servant of an Outsider. That's all the justification we need to immediately tell Lara. The mere rumors of Winter Court being compromised was enough for Lara to contact us and insist strongly we talk to her. To try and prevent us from dealing with Mab even. We have much more actionable intelligence. We told Mab about infiltrators in her court. Lara deserves the same courtesy.

You are setting false equivalence between "tell Lara now" and "kill him on our own volition now". That's wrong. Dishonest even. We do not get to ignore this. We need to tell her.

We still dont actually know why Lara contacted us, actually; could have been the Archive using her as a cutout, could be internal Court pressures. Or a mix of both. She didnt tell us anything about Outsiders at the meeting either; she was intentionally vague.
And she was after a treaty of some sort. Hmm.

We do not need to tell her this evening.
There is no imminent threat that justifies taking the risk of talking in front of a crowd and/or spending Essence to do so.

Feel free to meet her tomorrow morning to explain, with nuance, somewhere where there are no eavesdroppers.
Just dont try to do it in the middle of a social event with hundreds of sets of superhuman senses around and focused on the fascinating new phenomenon.

EDIT
Gotta go.
 
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We do not need to tell her this evening.
There is no imminent threat that justifies taking the risk of talking in front of a crowd and/or spending Essence to do so.
We did not need to tell Mab about anyone sans maybe Maeve too. We still did

Giving Lara this info now gives her an opportunity to clean house now. Sweep everyone at once. Or at least sweep pne more figure off the board.
 
Large lead for Texting if you merge the stunt and no-stunt votes.
Adhoc vote count started by Artemis1992 on Jul 6, 2023 at 5:39 AM, finished with 113 posts and 22 votes.
 
We do not need to tell her this evening.
There is no imminent threat that justifies taking the risk of talking in front of a crowd and/or spending Essence to do so.

Yes we do?

There is an outsider agent walking freely as a ally of someone who is explicitly a member of the task force against outsiders, you don't hold that kind of information in the back burner, that's how you get people killed.
 
[X] Send her a message, you have her number and Cthulhu probably does not read texts. Hopefully she's not one of those people who does not check her phone at parties
-[x]Stunt "Vito Died some time ago. Something else is using his face."
 
It feels like telling Lara that Vito is dead might be a bit premature, IMO. He might be dead, as far as his consciousness or soul is concerned, but he might not be. Adding that bit could lead Lara to acting differently than she would otherwise, if it later turns out that he is still himself with something extra added to the mix, that could cause issues.
 
[X] Send her a message, you have her number and Cthulhu probably does not read texts. Hopefully she's not one of those people who does not check her phone at parties
 
I think the word husk is strongly indicative that he's basically dead.
But not definitive. Denarian coinbearers can be referred to as husks for their Fallen Angel masters, and in some cases that's basically the truth, but not always.

I agree that he's probably not really Vito anymore, I just don't want it to come out later and that revelation sour our working relationship with Lara. Not that she will have any hard feelings about Vito's death, but we don't know how such information could come out or how the rest of the White Court will react to it, if they find out.

Even if that's a pretty big stretch, it's not something we should rule out.
 
On the vote, I think we got exactly what we needed and as much as we could feasibly have hoped for. The question we asked, which was taken from @uju32 's plan deliberately as part of my attempt at compromise, was about how he was hiding. I don't see how occult excellency would have done anything but give us more details on that topic. The crown isn't an evil genie, but it only answers what we ask it.

HC might have told us more, but I don't think we need it.

I mean to ground this in something more normal it's sort of like our Geiger counter* went off, causing us to snoop and discover someone was definitely in contact with someone capable of teaching him how to make dirty bombs.

We don't know if he's done it yet, but he's got a teacher, has suspicious defenses on his stuff sourced from them, and is clearly being radicalized. Which HC did tell us the first time around, given his perverse religious revelation.

That's enough red flags to start a bulk supply business.

What we do need to do is be precise in our claims. We don't know if Vittorio is a willing collaborator who hasn't fully been scraped out yet, a full husk, or something else. He needs reported but passing biased info to Lara isn't ideal.

I also think it's worth doing now because we need to be as early as possible here. We don't know what Lara knows or has planned.

[X] Send her a message, you have her number and Cthulhu probably does not read texts. Hopefully she's not one of those people who does not check her phone at parties

* Or H.R Giger counter I suppose, because Outsiders.
That particular charm makes disposable minions. Our version can be made less unpleasant, but they're still supernatural Kleenex. There's a reason we've been talking about all kinds of other methods for empowering him.

Personally I favor getting him into alchemy and enchanting. With the right rituals he can spend time to make up for a lack of power and go full Batman.

Once he has any sort of magical baseline at all he can get way more power out of a well phrased VEE wish than he could from being bakemono. We could do both, but I bet that would lock him out of potentially being a knight later. He didn't get a sword in canon, but who's to say it has to work out the same way here?
 
[X] Send her a message, you have her number and Cthulhu probably does not read texts. Hopefully she's not one of those people who does not check her phone at parties

Voting for the version without a stunt, since it does look like Vito being an empty hull was more speculation than certainty.
Still for doing it now though.

More dead Vampires=Better
 
I think the word husk is strongly indicative that he's basically dead.

Husk seems to have more of a metaphysical weight here, though Molly cannot quite pin it down, it would need more research. That said in her understanding of what the Outward Facing Wizard is, the pieces of him that are not in harmony with the world have continuity, so he is not so much gone as surgically divested of his humanity. For most people death would be by far the kinder fate to what he has become.
 

[X] Send her a message, you have her number and Cthulhu probably does not read texts. Hopefully she's not one of those people who does not check her phone at parties
 
[X] Send her a message, you have her number and Cthulhu probably does not read texts. Hopefully she's not one of those people who does not check her phone at parties
-[X] 'Vito is not as he seems. Something may be pulling his strings.'
 
I have a plan for him, and a build that would make him a nearly unstoppable combat monster. It's far more involved than inner darkness unleashed, but it's also more synergistic. It's somewhere upthread, I'llfind the quotes later.

The start of that plan is him learning shape-shifting path. When we deal with a naagloshii, we'll probably loot something related to learning shape-shifting. That, and alphas, and we can start.
 
Vote closed.
Adhoc vote count started by DragonParadox on Jul 6, 2023 at 10:25 AM, finished with 126 posts and 26 votes.
 
The start of that plan is him learning shape-shifting path. When we deal with a naagloshii, we'll probably loot something related to learning shape-shifting. That, and alphas, and we can start.
Alphas sound good, Naagloshii not.

Skinwalker-magic is propably some pretty unpleasant stuff even without the Naagloshii personally making it worse.
 
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