You keep pushing this phrase like it means anything. Yes, everyone is capable of good and evil. Heroes, for the most part, do good, and when they do evil, they seek atonement. Their default mode of operation is defending civilization.
....
You know what?
I've been asked to drop it for the meantime, so I will.
I admit to forgetting who that is, sorry.
Silk is the sorceress who owns and runs Club Xanadu, which is a place of power in the city, and the local safe meeting spot for a lot of unaligned magic users and other supernaturals. Not neutral, but safe.
She's the one who is on speaking terms with at least one Rampire. We saw her in our vision, and Arlene mentioned her.
We want to know whats happening with the Red Court and specifically the Dragon, she's a good place to start.
If whatever Sandra is doing requires more magic users like Kattrin's ritual did, asking around her club for regulars who are either dead or missing is also a great place to start.
Can, and should, be done in parallel to our recovery. We have four people, three of them capable of producing supernaturally good disguises.
You are trying to persuade a 100-plus year old man to do shit that he might find undignified.
I assure you from personal experience that you need Molly, your best diplomat on the scene.
And I dont think time doing so counts as resting.
1) Three others are also quite capable, and time is more important right now.
Molly explicitly has the best, and most reliable social Perception rolls in this group, even before ATB or Excellencies, simply because Empathy is a Key Ability for her, meaning she cant botch.
As we just saw with Fischer, Lash, our secondbest diplomat, can fumble hard, because social abilities are not Key for her.
And Lydia doesnt have the dice pool or the Essence to burn willy nilly on Manipulation Excellencies.
2) Barely of a blip of a one, not worth a priority dispatch of strong forces, it seems. And this is why others are not staying in the same place as us when we port
At the time Molly showed up, at least one senior Whampire had been publicly staked and another(Mayeda) was missing, presumed dead.
And thats just what we know of on the Whampire side.
After something like that, you dont risk valuable operatives blind.
You send mooks with a phone to eyeball the area and get their hands on test sample..
Besides.
A forty minute response time is much better than the several day response time it took the White Council to decide to further look into the Hellgate that opened in Chicago.
3) Sandra is planning to do stuff only on the next day. Rest and recovery are more important.
The
final planned climax of her plan is in two nights hence, at midnight.
That doesnt mean that preliminary steps wont take place in the interim.
If she successfully advances an element of her plan in the interim, it makes our job harder.
See Splattercon for an example of how shit could turn out. Or even the Red Room Murders.
If we are out here in Las Vegas, we can sense and respond if its important enough.
Whether its showing up ourself, or asking other people like Arlene to respond in our place if they can handle it.
4) It's a godzilla threshold solution, like Tony Stark flying a nuke through the portal. It might be required. And I checked,
Davy Crocket's blast radius is manageable and definitely preferable to continent-scale devastation.
Conventional explosives against a non-conventional opponent strikes me as utterly useless, for much the same reason that most weapons cant harm spirits. A nuke maybe, but not a conventional bomb.
Dont bring a knife to a gunfight.
And no, it isnt. For comparison:
GBU/43 MOAB bunkerbuster said:
THAT is a 10-ton yield conventional bomb for the USAF.
For comparison? The Oklahoma City truck bombing(you can find pics on Google) was, prior to 9/11, the largest terrorist attack in the US, and it deployed an improvised explosive yield of around 4000 pounds/1.8 tons of TNT, or a little under 9% the nominal yield of a Davy Crockett. In a city with roughly 25% the population density of Vegas.
Its effects were, and I quote:
Wikipedia said:
Perpetrated by two anti-government extremists and white supremacists,[1][2] Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing occurred at 9:02 a.m. and killed 168 people, injured 680, and destroyed more than one-third of the building, which had to be demolished. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings within a 16-block radius, shattered glass in 258 buildings, and destroyed 86 cars,[3][4] causing an estimated $652 million worth of damage
Bombs, especially big ones, are not precision weapons; the US govt has the minimum outdoor evacuation range distance for a bomb in the 10-ton range as being around 2 km radius.
You do not use them in a populated area if you do not want to kill a fuckton of people, whether its directly, through damaging infrastructure, or causing a stampede.
Especially since, given the nature of a lot of black magic and black-magic adjacent ritual magic, human death and suffering and panic might very well be an integral part of what she's doing.
Or might well supercharge the process, like how Ethniu stoked panic in Chicago to make it easier to use the Eye in BG.
Nevermind the blowback of detonating something that size in a major city, less than ten miles from a major USAF base.
None of us want to deal with that shit.
5) We can ask for her plans, or for the intended ritual area (or a list of areas she thinks she can do her thing in, in descending order of preference). We, essentially, can read her mind once.
We get ONE question.
We dont get followup, which as Seeker's coven demonstrated when we captured his first spy, can change rapidly.
Sandra might not even know the full details of the plan in play if there's a senior Outsider in close coordination with her, feeding her information in bursts as an information security measure.
The more information we gather, the more we narrow things down, the better we can target the Crown.
