Is it worth considering trying to boost the Merlin too? Potentially using the same trick we did for our emergency announcement earlier.
Since we're getting generic information about the maze anyway just shout a warning and our cheat guide to everyone inside it.
Your prerogative of course. I can only quote to you what happened in canon.
Perhaps they brought in senior wizards with previously unsanctioned techniques that were considered too harmful, too dangerous or too invasive.
Perhaps they called in debts from other supernaturals; McCoy was able to whistle up an army of not!tengu ninja to show up in Chitchen Itza as a personal debt in under 48 hours, so what the Council as a corporate entity has access to is probably orders of magnitude more.
Perhaps they just papered over the issue.
We dont know.
We do know that mental defense would be something that wizards would autonomously pursue of their own accord after the events of Turn Coat
It would explain some things if large portions of the council was experiencing the same psychological side effects of partially treated mind magic damage that had Harry acting so dumb in the later books. I'd like to assume some competence, but I have a lot of questions about how they organize and utilize resources when they screw up so hard and then remember they have all these tools hanging around to hand wave their problems afterwards.
The one comment worth making there is that I dont think those numbers for wizard populations work.
But thats not the subject of this conversation
In any case I took the shifting numbers as a sign that there is some fuzziness in what counts at subverted. Those 80 people being the ones victimized enough to be agents where say the noobs who had cameras installed or basic hypnosis effects applied like we saw at the Last Station wouldn't show up.
As I understand it, Renfields are essentially walking corpses.
The person behind those eyes are gone, and their physical body is just walking around with some programming and a limited lifespan measured in single or low double-digit months.
My point was that people can and do inflict things on mortals that they do not ask for. Unlike zombies Renfields are biological alive and I think can technically be soul gazed. The person in question suffers ego death in their own soul instead of being kicked out.
1) The Council HAS suffered significant casualties.
The TPK of Simon Petrovsky and his cabal at Archangel, then the 70% Warden losses at Dead Beat are just the prominent episodes; there have been others.
Its entirely possible that Luccio was the only living source of those blades because the backups were killed in the first couple years, or during Dead Beat; Luccio implies there were other makers previously.
The swords used in the last 40 years when the war only started in the last few. The council has suffered losses, but they also rely extensively on single points of failure and outright ignore critical issues routinely.
2) Internal defenses explicitly exist.
Stuff like Mai's wardhounds have been seen in service at major meetings, but they have to be commanded by trusted Wardens.
Automated internal defenses would have simply played into the hands of Peabody and his conspirators.
Defenses dont help if the minds of the users are compromised.
3) Unit coordination was never accounted to be an issue in canon.
If the QM chooses to make it one here *shrug* But as far as we know, when someone with inside knowledge isnt deliberately fucking with the system, Warden unit coordination usually works fine.
2) Depends on what you mean by defenses. Stuff like the willpower boosts of the Pathfinder wards would have been nice and not overly problematic. There's also the core matter of internal awareness.
One of the key elements of defending an area is knowing what's happening within it and communicating with your people as close to real time as possible. Which is why WoD has so many ritual effects for doing so.
When we encountered Ancient Mai she was guarding a room of guppies, but didn't seem to be doing anything else. I don't expect her to build this stuff on the spot, but the council should have installed it ages ago. Especially since we know she had the tools for it.
The wind spirit thing was just sitting in her room. Why wasn't someone using it to follow the senior council members or do spot checks on the Warden patrols? Hell, why wasn't that an array to allow monitoring the whole fortress?
Sure it can be blocked, but Mai immediately managed to use the blocking to notice a problem and send us after a Denarian super sorcerer. If there are better ways to avoid that sort of detection than a mind blank style void in space then he would have been using them.
Communications are similarly lacking. Even discounting magical telepathy, why not have wind spirits carry real time information in their own territory? It's possible they had this, but I doubt it because it never came up.
This gets into the competence problem I've been salting about. Being beaten isn't the problem, it's the hallmarks of bad planning that are damning.
When reporting to each other in front of us we didn't hear "The comms are down and none of the not!cameras are working, so we're on manual patrols. Our backups are messed up too so we're trying X solution". We didn't see Mai at a bank of gadgets installed a century before she was born trying to convince a subverted elemental to accept her commands, or using her obviously still functional personal kit to try limping along without the primaries.
What I expect from competent people betting their lives on winning is a minimum of:
A) a robust primary system.
B) a backup plan
C) active attempts to try things on the spot when A and B fail.
3) The Wardens seemed entirely out of contact with that not being presented as inherently dangerous or unusual. No efforts seemed to be underway to correct that either.
Not everything can be shown to us, but places where it should have come up didn't mention anything and nobody seemed to be working on these issues like they were new problems.
No, it's not below freezing down here.
Can't Molly just turn the temperature down in her bubble?