It's the cell phone paired with the pair of wizards that were essentially just curse fodder meant to sabotage a party that was coming after him. On some level he's not truly hidden from us because we already have the phone even if we do smash it we also have Tiffany with us so what does listening to him talk do for us really.
You are correct that there's a bit of leeway on how exactly this was going to work but you haven't voted to actually do the things you just said. Hell if you do that I'll vote for you it'll be fine.
It just feels like he's just performing active divination on our position while stalling either through Patsies or direct conversation while he tries to achieve whatever he set out to achieve.
The booby trap was meant for wizards. The cellphone would have been as well.
Its the whole scenario where you set a trap for wolves and it catches a bear.
Like I said, traps meant for wizards dont do so well against Occult-specced E4 Exalts.
I did.
Its right there in the Stunt and the reasoning; thats why Molly is shifting for Tiffany, and motioning to the other wizards.
I didnt think it was necessary to spell it all out because nobody is going to just stop to talk on the phone.
Remote magic casting takes time and effort, even when you are a two thousand year old wizard with a Fallen Angel in your head. You can either sit and try to scry this scene at a distance, or you can try to steal what you came for so you can run away. You cant do both simultaneously.
There's a reason the current effect is piggybacking off a phone; all the magic has to do is boost reception.
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It would have gone the same. We have perfect defenses for everything that spell would have tried and turning them on would have cost the same amount of willpower and motes we spent here. The spell being gone still leaves the wizards too paranoid to use magic so the net result is the same.
We have perfect defenses against mind-control, not damage, and without countermagic there was a non-zero chance it would have reached out to snagged the other wizards in our party.
Or Olivia.
Like I said, shit could have gotten pretty spicy there.
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1) How do you know? All counter spells are based on invoking a specific effect to undo hostile magic. Invoking prime is the closest to an anti-magic field style effect but you don't have to do that. "I eat the spell with X" is the same as "I use forces to undo his kinetic energy beam".
The standing magic disruption is a distinct effect and doesn't really show signs of a particular source. We also don't see it tested against anything but Dresden playing with force so how general it is remains a question.
My point was not that Namshiel wasn't good, it was about the shape of his skills. Namshiel plays like Dresden does, lots of power thrown around in a hurry. He's more skilled, but that's not strictly fungible. All of the abilities you're showing are him being very skilled at blowing things up and messing with other people doing the same.
2) I'd need to check more, but I think he was one of the guys who'd spent hundreds of years getting good under the training of a Fallen Angel. You see the same mechanism in action with Marcone, who gains the ability to perform complex magic despite barely having enough power to close a circle himself.
3) That made the Angel angry, but isn't the only thing going on there.
Edit:
The guy just gave us a focus. Why not use it to check for everything he's done to prepare for this event or something? Breaks the phone so he has a harder time looking at us, but even he should have issue noticing the crown being used remotely when Nemesis can't detect us reading its mind.
1) Because we actually see Ivy counterspelling in the same scene.
Thats how counterspell rules in M20 work for wizards.
They arent persistent effects; you spend an action to counterspell a single spell. We see Ivy counterspelling Denarians in the same scene in the book, so we know it works the same way in the Dresdenverse.
Namshiel put down a persistent effect that both shut down Harry's shield and prevented him casting two separate spells, and then while that effect was in operation, he spun up a death spell while simultaneously beginning to reassemble the ritual shit that Harry destroyed. That does not appear to be a counterspell.
2) The impression Nicodemus gave when Harry spoke to him was that Thorned Namshiel was the real deal.
Not just a sorcerer or occasional dabbler in the arts, like most other Denarians.
Same with Polonessa Lartessa, who apparently had the talent but only recently began to get training for it.
You can see the difference in how the Archive reacts to the Denarians throwing magic at her at the museum, and how Harry assesses them:
Small Favor c30.Shedd Aquarium Fight said:
I was wrong.
It wasn't that Ivy was slinging around a ton of power. She wasn't. But think about this one for a moment: What's really more impressive? A giant truck rumbling around on a great big old smoking engine? Or a little car just barely big enough to get the job done that's powered by a couple of AA batteries?
Seven of them were going after Ivy with magic, and she was countering them. All of them.
Magog had charged her as he had me, but she hadn't slammed him to a stop with a brick wall. She'd trapped him inside some kind of frictionless bubble, and he was spinning uselessly in circles half an inch off the floor, every motion making him spin faster. Whatever additional metaphysical mass he'd brought to the fight hadn't cramped her style much. Her arms, bobbing and weaving continuously between all the workings she had up, flicked by the field containing him every few seconds and, I swear, struck his whirling snare for no reason other than to impart an additional, nausea-inducing vector to his spin.
Deirdre's tangle of living locks danced with purple Saint Elmo's fire, lashing out in a deadly webwork, but Ivy constantly cast out a spinning cat's cradle of light, tiny, tiny threads of power that did not so much stop any of Deirdre's attacks as they fouled any one of her locks with others near it, tangling them together into useless clumps-sort of an enforced bad-hair day. On the opposite side of Ivy, Rosanna launched more traditional lances of flame from her open palms, much like the ones I-
- a savage pain went through my skull for a second-son of a bitch-
- but Ivy dispersed them with delicately applied wedges of air, intercepting each burst of fire far enough short of her body to prevent the bloom of heat as they died from scorching her-though the two more physical Denarians who strained to force their way past the barrier of snapping sparks that formed whenever they tried to get close had far less luck. The Hellmaid's flames scorched them badly.
The sixth, a wizened little thing that looked like a caricature of a woman carved from a dried tree root, seemed to be holding the end of a rope of liquid shadow that curled like a hungry serpent, darting now and then toward Ivy's head. Ivy faced it down steadily, moving her head calmly in a dodge once, swatting it aside with a little burst of silver energy a second later.
But mostly she faced an amused-looking Tessa, who, apparently just for the fun of it, threw another thunderbolt at her now and again. That told me something right there. It told me Tessa was no punk sorceress. She was White Council material herself, if she could make that much flash and bang while expending that little energy. Either that or she'd been able to hold back one whale of a lot more power than I had when she took her deep breath before the battle. Either way she was a big-leaguer, and Ivy's response to the attack confirmed it. Each time the Archive turned to fully face Tessa, and each time she dedicated one of her hands entirely to the defensive measure used to stop the incoming spell.
Gulp.
Small Favor c45 said:
He shrugged a shoulder. "It's somewhat ironic, Dresden, that I can talk to you about this particular aspect of family business. You're the only one that I'm sure hasn't gone over to this new force-this Black Council of yours."
"How can you be so sure about me?" I asked him.
"Please. No one so obstreperous has been corrupted by anything but his own pure muleheadedness." Nicodemus shook his head, never taking his eyes off me. "Still. My time here has not been wasted. The Knights carried away Namshiel's coin, so Tessa has lost her sorcery teacher. I heard Magog's bellow end quite abruptly a few moments ago, just before you walked out of the same building, so with any luck Tessa's heaviest bruiser is out of the game for a time as well, eh?" Nicodemus smiled cheerily at me. "Perhaps his collar is in one of your pockets. And I have Fidelacchius. Removal of one of the Three is profit enough for one operation, even if I did lose this chance at gaining control of the Archive."
Namshiel was tutor to both Lartessa and Rosanna, and Harry said that in his opinion Lartessa was White Council material.
That pretty much guarantees that he was too.
Especially since Namshiel was apparently primarily responsible for the big Circle at the Aquarium.
3)Nah, thats the only thing going on there. You can see him literally rant about it:
"Insufferable, arrogant little monkey," Namshiel hissed. "Playing with the fires of creation. Binding your soul to it, as if you were one of us. How dare you so presume. How dare you wield soulfire against me. I, who was there when your pathetic kind was hewn from the muck."
At the time, Harry didnt even know he'd used soulfire, or what soulfire was, so it was Greek to him.
4) Because we are not operating alone or only with our crew, and its a lot harder to explain pulling shit out of thin air to the Council wizards who are with us and who we are relying on for backup.
Use the phone as a focus if/when he cuts the phone, or if we have to follow him out of the Halls.
But as long as he's willing to talk, goad him to talk.
