Just a thought here, but how viable would making Ortega's head into a curse splendor targeted at her father be?
Typically hero's shadow requires you be close to the target, but thaumaturgy is a thing and we'd be making this hypothetical item out of his kid's head. The rules don't specify this for splendors, but I'd also hope that making something so narrow in use case would allow us make it stronger too. Prodigies definitely do this, so it's not a totally new idea.
He's a strong supernatural with a nation backing him, so the odds of it being permanently crippling are low, but we could make it really awful and expensive to deal with since splendors are congealed ancient sorcery.
If that doesn't work, as I mentioned prodigies do have an explicit dot cost per level of effectiveness reduction mechanic based around adding restrictions to an item.
Ortega's head should at least qualify for a 3 dot item, and might work for a 4 alone. Under the right conditions a 3 dot prodigy will yet you pull stuff like short hops through time, so getting 4-5 narrowly focused on screwing with him seems viable and horrifically unpleasant. There are all sorts of options here, but I favor intelligence games over something like a super stake.
I mean, we've talked in circles about how it's not really that easy to see the future and instantly predict what someone will do but wouldn't it be kind of hilarious to inflict the next best thing to that on someone else?
From a ritual symbolism standpoint one's children can be a lot of things, but a strong element is that they're pretty heavily tied to your future plans and hopes. The red king might not have been a doting father, but it's undeniable that he used Ortega to shape the future in his own image in so far as he was able to.
So what about a prodigy made from his daughter's own skull that has only one function: to assist in any attempts to divine the mind of her father solely in terms of his plans for the future.
He almost certainly has wards, but a really good focus crafted into an exalted grade item designed exclusively to fuck him over given into the hands of the greatest collection of mages on the planet* sounds like just the thing to stress test them a bit.
* Who's current leader is a warding specialist, making him uniquely suited to figuring out how to break them.
I want crafting materials people we earned them.
[X] Trade him elder bodies for it (Opposed roll to decide how many)
why are you trading them away then? Those bodies are our crafting materials, and a likely higher quality ones than the gauntlets at that.
