^^^
This rather changes some of our spending priorities.
Primarily for Lydia, but also for Molly. If White Court vampires, who are not the greatest physical threat in the setting, are running around with this sort of tool in their arsenal, Lydia needs better armor, and Molly needs the charms to make it.
Lydia probably needs to invest in soak-boosting charms and abilities as a priority as well.
Lucky she has an old death god in her head as mentor.
COMMENTARY
Legendary Charity is Legendary.
It is kinda hilarious that short of Mab herself, Molly's greatest social opponent has been her own mother.
Somehow, I suspect that after the events of last night, divorce negotiations between Eleanor and Charles will be a lot less troublesome than our earlier projections.
Just a thought.
Lol at Hope. You just know she is going to say this at the worst possible moment.
I do have a detail to point out you may have forgotten: Lydia specifically paid freebie points for the Merit Prestigious Mentor
This does not detract from your larger point about talking with people more, mind.
We ARE a social Exalt after all.
While I would love to just go to the Doane Observatory in Chicago and use its publicly available 20 inch telescope to HMP a bunch of cyberdevils into a bunch of satellites?
The current ruling is that HMP doesnt allow us to remove or recall cyberdevils once they are implanted.
I have trouble seeing a situation where Molly would put cyberdevils in satellites that she cant remove them from short of literally Ancient Sorcery. Especially given that Clippy's description of what happens in a device without power, like a satellite, is basically sensory deprivation; it might be better than the Wicked City, but thats a very low bar.
Or just deploy cash and buy food from the supermarkets and small farms in the Chicago area.
Not everything requires magic.
-Median household income in the US circa 2006/2007 is in the fifty thousand dollar range.
So if you're looking at maintaining fifty ghouls as fulltime dependents, you need around two and a half million dollars each year to pay them reasonably, not counting ancillaries like healthcare, education and housing. Round that up to four million a year for costs to mainstream a procession of ghouls and vampires into society.
-Its fairly common practice to have private arrangements with restaurants or small farms when you need to feed large numbers of people in bulk. If you're willing to pay, you can just take a van down and take delivery of the prepared foods.
Nothing particularly out of the ordinary here besides the quantity, and buying large amounts of food isnt illegal.
Point of correction:
They can eat
up to 50 pounds of meat a day; they dont NEED to eat that much meat, its a function of their Hunger being a bitch.
Even obligate carnivores dont need that much meat; an adult lion can eat twice that much at sitting, but then it can go without eating for a week.
If you're a regular customer at a farm or a restaurant, you can buy a fair amount of discretion.
Or even just dont bother; its not like people dont do buffets for others.
Buying wholesale meats at around a dollar a pound for pork and chicken and an extra dollar per pound of preparation would allow you to put together a weekly fifty ghoul buffet with an allotment of around twenty pounds of meat per ghoul for around a hundred kay a year. Significant money for most people, but not even MSRP for a new CLS63 like the one Black Rider is in.
Historical pricing:
Consumers rate chicken’s value very highly, especially when compared with competing meats. NOTE Wholesale beef price is wholesale choice grade value
www.nationalchickencouncil.org
Not to mention that fish is a thing.
Whether its buying salmon and the like from aquaculture operations, or the fishermen on the rivers catching Asian carp which is an invasive species that the govt would dearly love to get rid of.
Wait till January and the lottery plan.
10 million dollars will buy you a LOT of fixer-upper Chicago real-estate.
Especially if you put two thirds of that on acquisition, and have Molly do most of the internal renovation work herself.
If we were doing mortgage style stuff, you'd only need around 20% down to get a bank loan for things like this.
But I dont think we want to model economic shit that faithfully.
Just write it off to Molly not wanting a bank asking questions about how she is using property she bought.
COMMENTARY
*looks at historical depictions of Old Norse finery, from braided hair and beards, to shiny jewelry to tattoos for both sexes*
Yeah, I think Molly might be surprised about what the standards of finery are among the Einherjar, or the old Norse.
Need more Academics there, Molls.
Odin's got hookups high in the US government.
Because I dont see anyway they would know about this spot, and be able to use it, even if lowkey.
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I was thinking that Odin needed lowprofile armored vehicles.
I didnt realize he wanted proper war machines.
This is probably going to raise Molly's profile as much as Mab's pimpmobile.
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Two squads? *checks*Okay, thats ambitious. But doable.
Assuming a squad is 5 people, like we saw during the akuma mission, it should be within Molly's capabilities to prototype and build no problem, as long as we have raw materials to work with.
We can design and build a wheeled IFV that will seat 9-10 troops/passengers and 2 crew; thats basically just a Boxer IFV 8x8 with a road range of 1100km, max speed of 103kph/64mph and a combat weight of 37-41 tons with full STANAG 4569 Level 4 to Level 6+ armor.
en.wikipedia.org
Alternatively, if they insist on a tracked vehicle, take a Lynx KF41 as the base model; 38-50 tons depending on armor loadout, 65-70kph, 500km range, 3 crew + 8 troops
en.wikipedia.org
The Boxer design entered production in 2006 for the Netherlands and Germany, so we can steal the concept wholesale.
It will still run on fossil fuels because we dont have the magic to make it an EV whose batteries wont ever run out, but fossil fuels are still plentiful, and we can make a multifuel engine, with hydrid tech to further improve range and endurance.
Make it modular like the Boxer design, with a drive module and a swappable mission module for different missions, and they convert an IFV to an HVT extraction vehicle just by exchanging the mission module.
Which will help with response in situations where you dont want to roll in guns out.
Depends on how ballsout the QM is willing to let us go.
Just working with near-future capabilities as of 2006? Efficient lightweight hybrid powertrain, stealthy drive, lightweight armor, hardened computer and comms, lidar/radar/IR imaging systems, CBRN environmental systems and smoke grenade launchers all as standard. Active softkill and hardkill defenses against RPGs, from smoke, jammers and dazzlers to actual antimissile lasers.
Active camouflage and amphibious capabilities as optional.
For weapons we can put anything in a primary weapon turret from a conventional heavy machinegun to an automatic grenade launcher to a double digit kilowatt laser to a dialable yield railgun to a nonlethal LRAD and visual dazzlers, running off the vehicle powerplant and batteries/capacitors.
Just make it swappable.
Exotics would be ammo like depleted uranium/iron rounds for the grenade launcher when dealing with ghost/fae attackers, and remote deployment containment grids courtesy of the Laundry Files; if you have a laser and precise enough motors, you can draw or project a magic circle or similar wards at a distance, and let a spellcaster empower them.
Which might help if you run into a moderately powerful demon or similar magic construct in the field and pure dakka is not enough.
