[x] Gard feels like the sort of person who would buy diamonds no questions asked
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
Not water, antifreeze. Water would not stay liquid. Much more reasonable.
Depends on the antifreeze.
Ethylene glycol is toxic and will kill you if consumed. Propylene glycol, on the other hand, with a melting point of -59 degrees Celsius, is safe enough to be consumed by humans, and is both used as environmentally friendly automotive antifreeze and a lot of other applications.
Airplane deicing fluid, e-fluid in e-cigarettes, whipped cream, soda, ice cream, water-insoluble pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, theatrical smoke all contain propylene glycol.
Propylene glycol - Wikipedia
And you can buy large quantities off the shelf for both car antifreeze and for stuff like cooking.
A half gallon of food-grade propylene glycol on Amazon is around $25.
What @BronzeTongue said. They are doing US a favor. They dont need whatever benefit it brings.
To give an actual example from the series?
In the Even Hand short story, Justine went to Marcone for sanctuary from a pursuing Fomori cantrev-lord. He fought and killed the Fomori lord, and he took the details of a bunch of numbered accounts from Justine. But the White Court still owed him a favor, because even though he benefitted, he didnt need it. In intervening, he did Justine and the White Court a favor.
Similarly, the plot of Skin Game was a setup between Mab, Marcone and Hades to get back at Nicodemus.
But Dresden still paid weregild for breaking into a Marcone bank and Nicky's hires killing a civilian guard.
===
Gard is a Valkyrie demigoddess who works for Odin. She's over a thousand years old. Consider what that means financially.
If she'd had 10,000 dollars invested at 4% average yearly return with the oldest Swiss investment bank, Rahn+Bodhmer when it was established in 1750, she'd be worth $181,000,000 in 2000 AD even if she didnt invest an additonal cent after that.
Even if she was a skinflint, and was just investing a hundred dollars every year since 1750, she'd be worth $48 million at 4% return.
Its safe to assume that money is not an issue for her or her boss Odin; compound interest is scary like that.
Even Kattrin Sigfriddottir who was dodging a manhunt could afford hundred and thirty thousand dollar sports cars.
So if she's helping us launder diamonds, its as a favor, not because she needs the money.
Maybe if she needed magic reagents, but Odin probably has suppliers for that. And because she's currently contracted to Marcone, she's probably laundering it through Marcone, which means we would owe HIM a favor.
I have no problem with owing favors if its warranted.
Its not currently warranted here.
It's too late to back out now, but what are the odds that this gets us even more scrutiny from Daedalus?
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Gard obviously has uses for money or Marcon would not complain in his head how she is as expensive as a lawyer with a crack habit.
[X] Gard feels like the sort of person who would buy diamonds no questions asked
-[x] Stunt: I need to fund my superhero habits so I crushed some coal into diamonds. Can you please help me move them?
I just thought of a funny stunt considering that she compared us to superman in the interlude.
With some careful oil spilling Black Rider should be able to make smoke come out of the car hood without actually doing any damage. But I feel like if we leave it up to Black Rider they should be able to come up with a suitably dramatic show. They have days to think about it.
Last edited:
1)They kinda have their hands full with the Museum mass murder case, which happened on the 22nd of July, just four days ago.
And they dont have that many special agents in the Daedalus Group; the FBI had around 35,000 staff nationwide, of which 14,000 are special agents, and most of those are criminal division or have other duties. Daedalus attempting to pull rank on this means they carry most of the weight on this high profile case.
I fully expect they are still going to be pulling double shifts on that for the rest of this summer.
2)Municipal car auctions are Chicago city government/Chicago PD, and not something the FBI have any control, or indeed influence on.Because if this car was linked to the museum case, it wouldnt be up for auction, they'd have just seized it.
I mean, usually the city will seize your car for a month or so before selling it off.
The fact its being auctioned this fast, just around a week after it was impounded suggests someone with some influence in the city administration is seeing an opportunity to score a nice new ride. A little self-dealing, so to speak.
3)Besides, they probably have Michael in their files under known associate, and we know they tried to put an electronic tracker/eavesdropping device on Beige Wagon.
Im not seeing what else they can do here without escalating to wiretaps on phones and home, and Im pretty confident illegal wiretaps of the Carpenter household will either mysteriously fail or they'll find themselves with a shortage of manpower to do so.
Mysterious ways, et cetera.
The fact that she(or rather Odin) is charging him a fee for her services has no real relationship with her actual need for it.
Plenty of people who can afford to work for free dont; see every major NAFDAQ CEO.
The bullet that Gard used to kill Mag the Cantrev lord in canon, for example, is probably worth at least seven figures in its historical significance if she'd put it on the market(she dug it out of Nelson at Trafalgar), and I doubt Marcone is paying her THAT much every year to be a magic consultant.
Odin and his people do shit for Reasons.
The cash is presumably just to keep you honest and to value their services.
Last edited:
Her having a use for money isn't the same as any profit level or type being equally valuable to her. Technically a multi millionaire could make money working at Wendy's flipping burgers, but it's not an attractive offer.
Gard is an ancient Valkyrie, not a Cyberpunk plutocrat; the valuable thing to her in moving gems for us would be the in opening into our business. It's not the end of the world, but we shouldn't act like everyone has an implicit cash motive that will lead to uncomplicated interactions since everyone wants to get paid.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Well yes if we were a random girl on the street she likely would not consider fencing our diamonds worth her time. Although if a random girl on the street tried to sell diamonds though her I suspect that Gard might do it just because of how weird it would be for a random girl to have a bunch of high quality diamonds that aren't stolen.
In any case the main reason she is going to want to do it is because she wants to be in the position of being our go between and she wants a better relationship with us. Also maybe that she is grateful for us helping her get revenge.
However she also has to realize that we have other options for selling these diamonds so whatever favor this might be worth isn't much and if we are counting favors like that she still owes us more.
On the matter of selling diamonds through Gard, it should be noted that even if the handful of diamonds you make now are not worth as much to her Molly can make more of them. So the profit motive gets greater in the long run. On the other side it seems likely to Molly that anything she hands to Gard will get studded to try to figure out more about her power. Whether the contacts for selling jewels are worth that study is up to you guys.
Oh and on the other side of things it's not like you know Lydia's lawyer either, he might put those stones under a magical microscope of some kind to find out how they were made as well. The person who is no concern in that regard is Harry with the trade off that Molly knows he is not very wealthy to say the least and would be replying on his contacts.
Oh and on the other side of things it's not like you know Lydia's lawyer either, he might put those stones under a magical microscope of some kind to find out how they were made as well. The person who is no concern in that regard is Harry with the trade off that Molly knows he is not very wealthy to say the least and would be replying on his contacts.
1)Gard critically, serves Odin One-Eye. God of, among other things, wisdom, knowledge, death and sorcery.
If Molly is looking to preserve some ambiguity about her powers, she probably wont be looking to pass products of them right into the hands of one of his retainers for free. And paying her for the privilege.
The lawyer is frankly a lesser threat to secrecy.
He doesnt have the head of what used to be a major pantheon behind him as far as we know, and if he was trusted enough not to sell Arawn out to Mab for a big payday, he's unlikely to risk it here with someone else.
2)The fallbacks are actually Harry and Thomas.
Harry as someone that Molly knows and trusts implicitly. Thomas Raith as, while a White Court vampire, someone who came to her aid in Arctis Tor, and someone who Dresden has explicitly vouched for IIRC.
Critically, he's Raith family, which an evening's internet search by the cyberdevils will tell Molly are feelthy rich.
You dont own a massive estate near Chicago, much of the porn industry in the area, and tool around in Rolls without coming to some notice. Which means that connections for selling jewel-grade gems are undoubtedly something he can hook her up with.
Using him as a conduit would be safe.
But like I said, there's more than one reason to approach Lydia's lawyer here.
Last edited:
So, regarding meeting Mab and economics of XP spending:
FIrst, let's determine our priorities:
1) Social skills (abilities + attributes) excluding Leadership, Intimidation. That's Etiquette, Empathy, Subterfuge. The last one is a lower priority, but is still required if we want to deceive Mab in any way.
2) Awareness related skills to see what Mab is about: Politics, Law, Awareness. Mab is a political entity as much as she is a person.
3) Soul Rendering Practice. By word of QM only repeated constant use will result in psychological damage. And storing a number of automatic successes to throw at Mab at a critical juncture is absolutely life-saving.
Etiquette and Empathy are favored, and we have excellency for those. To raise them to 5 takes 7 XP each. Those are no brainers. So, that's 14 XP.
Our awareness, politics, law Abilities are all at 0. Raising them to 1 takes 3 XP each. Awareness is the most useful, since we are rolling at -2 dice. After raising them to 1, I would argue for buying excellencies for those (speaking of, @DragonParadox we probably need a way to differentiate between Key Abilities and abilities for which we bought excellencies in the stat sheet). Meeting Mab is likely to be a scene-long affair, so using excellencies for it makes sense, and we can afford to burn essence.
Finally, there's raising attributes. We have Perception and Appearance 2, Charisma, Wits and Manipulation 3, Intelligence 4. So, it would take 8, 12 and 16 points to raise those, respectively. This completely excludes Intelligence from ouur buy list. Upgrading 2 of the three-dot Attributes to 4 would take 24 XP. There's an alternative strategy here: buy and raise Alchemy to 4, which takes 18 XP, then learn this ritual:
•••• An incredibly unhealthy "study aid" that sharpens the user's focus unnaturally, granting them +1 Intelligence and +1 Wits, which can take them above their normal maximums for a scene, after which time they'll typically crash hard, needing a full 12 hours of sleep.
This gives us Intelligence 5 and Wits 4 for the cost of 22 XP instead of 12+16=28 XP, saving us 6 XP.
So, my buying strategy would be, in order:
1) Etiquette and Empathy to 5 - 14 XP
2) Soul Rendering Practice - 4 XP
3) Awareness, Politics to 1 dot + excellency - 14 XP
4) Raising Perception to 3 - 8 XP
5) Alchemy to 4 dots + the intelligence raising potion - 22 XP
6) Law to 1 dot and excellency - 7 XP
7) Raising Awareness to 3 - 6 XP
8) Raising Politics and Law to 3 - 12 XP
Realistically, I think we might hope to finish the third point of this list, maybe. That's 32 XP, 2 arcs worth. As additional preparations I would do the following:
1) Prepare a meeting place. It needs to be below freezing temperature in a subtle way, so as not to be obvious. It also needs to be our place of power. The temperature on Halloween in 2006 in Chicago was higher than freezing point, so we'll need active climate control.
2) Prepare ourselves - clothes, makeup, posture. We could make a 10+ success clothes for ourselves by combining everything we have and making those winter clothes which serve environmental protection and are still super-fashionable. TTC for makeup should also give us at least 5+ successes. This could likely translate to a bonus Appearance dot.
3) Study Mab. We probably can use at least the following as foci: a winter fae, ideally one of high rank, but that's not critical, Romeo and Juliet (first literary reference to Mab according to wiki), Unseelie Accords. If we can get three questions, I would probably go for the following:
3.1) What drives Mab? What are her motivations? Accords probably work here.
3.2) What are Mab's Intimacies? Who does she love, and who does she hate? A winter fae of some high rank is probably a good focus here, as one of her intimacies (as a part of her court)
3.3) This one is less certain. Either "what does she fear most?", "what is her most cherished dream?", "what does she want with us?" or "what is her biggest personal desire at the moment"
4) Prepare a gift for Mab, based on what we learn about her. Something we could give her with "I give you this, incurring no debt between us, as a sign of good faith and in hopes of positive outcome of this meeting. Be welcome here on this night" speech. Probably armor or weapons, really. Maybe Ancient Sorcery Banishment magic, if we learn about Maeve's situation and can get enough XP to get it.
EDIT:
FIrst, let's determine our priorities:
1) Social skills (abilities + attributes) excluding Leadership, Intimidation. That's Etiquette, Empathy, Subterfuge. The last one is a lower priority, but is still required if we want to deceive Mab in any way.
2) Awareness related skills to see what Mab is about: Politics, Law, Awareness. Mab is a political entity as much as she is a person.
3) Soul Rendering Practice. By word of QM only repeated constant use will result in psychological damage. And storing a number of automatic successes to throw at Mab at a critical juncture is absolutely life-saving.
Etiquette and Empathy are favored, and we have excellency for those. To raise them to 5 takes 7 XP each. Those are no brainers. So, that's 14 XP.
Our awareness, politics, law Abilities are all at 0. Raising them to 1 takes 3 XP each. Awareness is the most useful, since we are rolling at -2 dice. After raising them to 1, I would argue for buying excellencies for those (speaking of, @DragonParadox we probably need a way to differentiate between Key Abilities and abilities for which we bought excellencies in the stat sheet). Meeting Mab is likely to be a scene-long affair, so using excellencies for it makes sense, and we can afford to burn essence.
Finally, there's raising attributes. We have Perception and Appearance 2, Charisma, Wits and Manipulation 3, Intelligence 4. So, it would take 8, 12 and 16 points to raise those, respectively. This completely excludes Intelligence from ouur buy list. Upgrading 2 of the three-dot Attributes to 4 would take 24 XP. There's an alternative strategy here: buy and raise Alchemy to 4, which takes 18 XP, then learn this ritual:
•••• An incredibly unhealthy "study aid" that sharpens the user's focus unnaturally, granting them +1 Intelligence and +1 Wits, which can take them above their normal maximums for a scene, after which time they'll typically crash hard, needing a full 12 hours of sleep.
This gives us Intelligence 5 and Wits 4 for the cost of 22 XP instead of 12+16=28 XP, saving us 6 XP.
So, my buying strategy would be, in order:
1) Etiquette and Empathy to 5 - 14 XP
2) Soul Rendering Practice - 4 XP
3) Awareness, Politics to 1 dot + excellency - 14 XP
4) Raising Perception to 3 - 8 XP
5) Alchemy to 4 dots + the intelligence raising potion - 22 XP
6) Law to 1 dot and excellency - 7 XP
7) Raising Awareness to 3 - 6 XP
8) Raising Politics and Law to 3 - 12 XP
Realistically, I think we might hope to finish the third point of this list, maybe. That's 32 XP, 2 arcs worth. As additional preparations I would do the following:
1) Prepare a meeting place. It needs to be below freezing temperature in a subtle way, so as not to be obvious. It also needs to be our place of power. The temperature on Halloween in 2006 in Chicago was higher than freezing point, so we'll need active climate control.
2) Prepare ourselves - clothes, makeup, posture. We could make a 10+ success clothes for ourselves by combining everything we have and making those winter clothes which serve environmental protection and are still super-fashionable. TTC for makeup should also give us at least 5+ successes. This could likely translate to a bonus Appearance dot.
3) Study Mab. We probably can use at least the following as foci: a winter fae, ideally one of high rank, but that's not critical, Romeo and Juliet (first literary reference to Mab according to wiki), Unseelie Accords. If we can get three questions, I would probably go for the following:
3.1) What drives Mab? What are her motivations? Accords probably work here.
3.2) What are Mab's Intimacies? Who does she love, and who does she hate? A winter fae of some high rank is probably a good focus here, as one of her intimacies (as a part of her court)
3.3) This one is less certain. Either "what does she fear most?", "what is her most cherished dream?", "what does she want with us?" or "what is her biggest personal desire at the moment"
4) Prepare a gift for Mab, based on what we learn about her. Something we could give her with "I give you this, incurring no debt between us, as a sign of good faith and in hopes of positive outcome of this meeting. Be welcome here on this night" speech. Probably armor or weapons, really. Maybe Ancient Sorcery Banishment magic, if we learn about Maeve's situation and can get enough XP to get it.
EDIT:
Using Thomas is actually interesting since, in reselling the gems, he would be doing our will, and thus fall under Mercy in Servitude effects. MiS is an automatic effect with no range restrictions or the need for conscious activation on our part. This can have interesting plot consequences.
Last edited:
Can confirm, for the period that Thomas does your will, even in something this short-term his Hunger would be stilled.
- Location
- Germany
Using cold against Mab seems unlikely to work, it would propably give equal boni to her as to us.
That is what happened to the Elder Fetch in any case, Molly could see that.
Nah.
Given unlimited XP, and my own choice? In order of importance:
Etiquette and Empathy to 5: 11xp
Hellscry Chakra: 8xp
All Things Betray: 8xp
Emerald Sorcery Banishment: 10xp
Naked Wicked Souls: 4xp
Perception 3: 8xp
Awareness to 2: 5xp
Law to 2: 5xp
Politics to 1: 3xp
Appearance 3: 8xp
Law and Awareness Excellency: 8xp
Total: 78xp
Etiquette and Empathy of course.
Hellscry Chakra allows us to read her aura for emotional cues.
All Things Betray is a DC adjuster for all Perception rolls by -3, which would essentially massively improve Perception rolls.
Emerald Sorcery Banishment as something that might be offered in trade.
Naked Wicked Souls to see what she's most ashamed about. Also useful against any retinue members, if she brings them.
Abilities speak for themselves.
Nice catch.
I didnt notice that. Thats something to follow up on.
The point is along the lines of not giving away information for free unless you're sure its information you want out there.
Information being valuable currency in the Dresdenverse, and something we can trade to him.
Also worth noting that Odin apparently cares about humanity. IIRC he's supposed to have had a hand in training Merlin, and he was the one who taught humanity to defeat the mythological Grendel.
Doesnt mean that he cares about Molly. Or believes that we are going to be a positive influence.
We should probably not take that for granted.
==========
Putting this here for future reference once we sort out Black Rider's situation
(I assume we're keeping up with Rosie and Molly's other friends offscreen via text and phonecall)
Outstanding Plot Threads for Crown and HMP Resolution
-Gorfel assassination attempt: Bullet focus: Sequence of orders/people that led to a sniper shooting bullets at us/Gorfel
-Lieutenant Greene murder: Grave or personal car or home focus: Sequence of orders/events/people that led to his death
-Warehouse crime scene: Surveillance camera focus: Sequence of orders/people who led to its installation in time to frame Dresden
-Warehouse crime scene: Warehouse focus: Greene's murderer(s) and murder site/weapon.
-Agent John Jenkins: Tried to put something on Beige Wagon, whether tracker or bomb: Find cellphone number, make call and HMP his phone. Use Cyberdevils to go over his life with a fine tooth comb.
-Principle of Consumption research.
Last edited:
I'd need a citation on that, and also a guarantee that it won't be obvious to her.
Requires way too many things to align: her being able to use it, us being able to teach it, us knowing that she would want it, her trusting us enough to learn from us.
Again, we will need to be certain that she won't notice us using it.
1)I've quoted this before.
Hellscry Chakra said:
2)It doesnt matter.
We were willing to use social Excellencies in our previous envounter. And we're banking on using them now.
All these charms are internal charms that boost our internal capabilities, instead of reaching out like the Crown does.
We're not teaching it to her.
Its for us, in the event that the issues with the Leanansidhe or Maeve come up, and it gives us something to bargain with.
Again, doesnt matter.
We happily and openly used social Excellencies during our previous encounter, as well as Imperial Primacy Mantle.
She either didnt notice or didnt make an issue of it. Furthermore, Demonic Primacy of Essence is always active; she's too much of a metaphysical heavyweight to be affected, but there's good odds she'll notice.
If not being noticed is a red line for you, then prepare to get obliterated in social combat because we wont be able to use any charms at all.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I personally like the idea of grabbing E3 and King and the Kingdom so we can negotiate with Mab as the ruler of our own supernatural polity in the NeverNever, but I do acknowledge that that would be expensive. Although it would give us a significant amount of political leverage. After all, you don't just ignore what is essentially a nascent Yama Queen, and you don't try to lead them by the nose too obviously.
Also would be the best way to hammer in just how fast we grow. Just as a suggestion.
Also would be the best way to hammer in just how fast we grow. Just as a suggestion.
Kornet
Quite possibly a sloth abomination
- Location
- Mother Russia
[X] Gard feels like the sort of person who would buy diamonds no questions asked
-[x] Stunt: I need to fund my superhero habits so I crushed some coal into diamonds. Can you please help me move them?
I feel the fact that some people would notice this is a plus, not a minus. This is our entry ticket to the black market.
-[x] Stunt: I need to fund my superhero habits so I crushed some coal into diamonds. Can you please help me move them?
I feel the fact that some people would notice this is a plus, not a minus. This is our entry ticket to the black market.
Goldfish
Friendly Spider-Fish Abomination
- Location
- Formerly of the Far Realm
Speaking of Thomas; we don't know he's Harry's brother, but we do know that they're friends, right?
Molly should know Harry well enough by now (or hero worship him enough to make the assumption) to know that he's not the type to be friends with a "bad" Vampire. This is reason enough that we should get in contact with Harry really soon in order to arrange a meeting with Thomas for us so that we expound on the benefits of minionhood, namely no longer being beholden to his Hunger.
I realize I'm only one voter among many, but I'm not ever going to support learning this Charm and I'll argue against it whenever the possibility is mentioned.
Arc 0 part 27
Thomas has been around since Grave Peril, which was where he worked with Michael.
Molly may not have met him before, but since she was snooping around her parent's house listening at doors she knew about him.
I have no comment on the other proposal at this time.
- Location
- Earth
I second that.
We might get Essence 3 instead, so we can spend more essence a turn.
All the charms people want for Mab have activation costs, I am not sure if we can activate them all from the start with only Essence 2.
we spend 1 each for Hellscry-Chakra, etiquette, empathy.
All Things Betray and Impervious Primacy Mantle can be activated with either essence or WP.
so we spend 0-2 WP and 3-5 Essence right from the start.
We can only spend 2 Essence a turn in combat.
I am not sure how exactly this translates to social talking, but we might need Essence 3 to activate all of them, or be forced to activate one of them later.
While paying willpower for ATB and IPM.
Thirded. Yeah we have a one week cool down, but that's still basically saying "measure how much Molly can torture herself without taking SAN damage and step it back one notch".
We have plenty of other ways to excel that don't have that requirement, or it's potential social consequences.
Right now Molly's parents believe the one thing her powers will never do is hurt her; once we break that assumption they're going to react, and claiming it isn't permanent harm is going to be a tough sell.
