Still worth it.
Her job won't be necessary for long anymore, not if more Exalted return.
Better to set her free.
Debatable. It's not like the exalted solved the Rakasha problem. Especially if they're unfocused and running wild.
If anything she'll be more necessary in the transition period when the regular players are falling into chaos.
In any case her neutrality isn't the issue here, it's that the mantle won't let her do dangerous work that isn't directly related to her purpose* for free. Which is fair. Getting her to break that rule is valuable to us because we'd be subverting her, but not terribly good for her.
*Yes this is opposing nemesis/the outside, but she has a very specific duty that requires being slow and cautious to avoid catastrophic failure. Eating these shards is ultimately worth it, but I'm not surprised she's evaluating it to be more of a benefit to us than an action against her opponents.
Thats not accurate.
We've never charged for it. We've never asked money or payment for it before.
The Fae are bound to redress a balance, but thats not the same thing; Mab didnt ask us what we wanted. And not every faction in the setting is bound the way the Fae are.
We came to a negotiation with Mab relating to our personal issues with her and made what was effectively a sales pitch. She made an offer that gave us a serious resource and cleared our personal issues with her organization. This is functionally indistinguishable from doing business with her.
It's worth noting that the fey have to pay their debts, but they don't have to be perfectly fair - just technically correct. This is the basis of fey tricking people to get more than they give. See Harry getting the dumbo feather treatment from his godmother when what he bargained for was more power.
If we wanted to we could have made a counter offer that accepted a truly token payment that we evaluated as equal to the cost and man wouldn't have been obligated to negotiate on our behalf.
We didn't do that, we took the payday. We're about to do it again too.
Unless you're going to suggest that other factions won't count business done with fey as real because they don't have a choice but to pay on time or note that we went to the fey first and most often when offering our services in this manner. Which I think is a fairly dubious claim.
I mean seriously, we've actively been taking advantage of the fact that we did business with Mab to up our informal credit score. We can't simultaneously list Winter as a customer when making deals and deny that what we did with them was business.
Ivy is not the only person in this conversation, the Archive is as well.
And the construct itself has its own judgements and imperatives, even though they are filtered through its current host.
Yeah and? For our purposes Ivy is the only Archive that matters and it relies on her judgement for many things. It's also not a fey with all the alien mentality that implies. Reading when a person is legitimately interested in helping is an important skill for her, as something 5 millennia of memories matched to all written studies of human nature help with.
This gap is why the difference between what she suspects and can confirm matters.
Enough Exalted would flip the balance.
If elder monsters know that entering the world means true death, forgetting them becomes far less necessary.
After all the whole point of the Oblivion War is that mankind couldn't kill these things for good, so forgetting them was one of the few functional weapons to be rid of them.
Exalted being out, particularly in numbers, changes that balance a lot.
As for being allowed to change the Archive, Ivy is clever and any sane person will want freedom.
She can probably find a way to let us knock her out without full resistance so we can operate.
A lot of those things don't actually enter reality.
A favored trick of theirs is to share around rituals that invoke them and invite their power in to perform a transaction. Then evil genie it to fulfill the bargain in a way that serves their interests. Corrupts the user, hurts someone they don't like in the process, harvests something to use elsewhere, the usual.
You can't stab them without going outside or the deep nevernever to do it. Which exalts can do, but isn't trivial or necessarily fast.
