Six AP isn't a lot to work with, but then we don't have a lot of really pressing stuff to take care of before school starts, IMO. Things are calm for now, so that gives us a chance to help Rosie deal with her shit and do some more training with Brother Divsimar, who is a resource we should make use of while we can, since he won't always be in Chicago. A lot of the other options are things we can work on after school or during the weekends.
The bulk of our available time should be spent getting Last Station up to spec as a Dragon's Nest. This will let us get half the work done in a short amount of time, leaving the rest for us to work on as time permits between other obligations that are bound to crop up. If we're lucky, we might have the station refurbished by Christmas.
[X] A Nest for Porter
-[X] Dreaming True, Rosie is going to need help, training to manage her gift eventually, look around for information, books or ideally a teacher
-[X] The Bridges of the Spirit, continue your training with Brother Divsimar in the perilous, powerful arts of his order
-[X] Restoring the Last Station (x4): You promised Porter that you will help restore the Last Station to its former glory, a task what will not be easy or quick even with all your talents, though you are sure it will be rewarding in the end (0/8)
Much of our available time needs to be spread out into firming up our knowledge of the Chicago supernatural scene.
Our father literally got a concerned call from a vampire telling him his daughter might be possessed. 😆
If we dont actively take steps to get to know the Chicago scene and let it know us, other people will frame our reputation for us, and we wont like the results.
Also, critically, Bob time. He doesnt just teach magic, he teaches supernatural lore.
Because Bob knows the Winter Court, and Mab, and we dont. If we dont take the opportunity of the next three months to drain him of everything he knows about Winter before we meet Mab, we would only have ourselves to blame.
If you go back and look at our spending priorities during the last XP spend, we didnt spec for sprinting through Dragons Nest construction. Because we're preparing for Mab. So we're doing things like buying Empathy, Etiquette and social charms.
If we were trying to sprint this, we would be buying Craft, Technology, Tech Excellency and Essence Dissecting Stare.
Ignoring that plan now is a bad idea.
If we are using a trust fund to make it anonymous, our age does not matter.
Waiting till November makes us lose many millions.
1)Minors cannot legally buy lottery tickets.
There is negative value in diving into such obvious legal jeopardy, or risking our lawyer for it.
We do it clean, so that noone can pull a gotcha on us.
2)The lottery is not a one and done affair my friend.
Assuming the QM is using the same historical charts, your own charts make it clear that there's a couple large jackpots within three months of Molly's majority.
There are two $200 million+ Powerball jackpots in January 2007, two months after Molly turns 18. Either of them represents a take-home of ~$70 million after the 50% cut from taking a bulk payout, and a third in taxes. By the time we give away half that to family, friends and charity, we would still have a nestegg of around 30 million and 5 million spending money.
We'll be fine.
Ehhhhh. I am not sure that's really worth it.
TBH we made an absolute fraction of potential money that we could have made from selling diamonds. We are not really at the peak of our crafting capabilities, either. Then, after we get Key and Kingdom at E3, we'll gain access to essentially unlimited amount of mundane workhours and material good, which would allow us to generate humongous amount of money with minimal investment.
Citizens, not employees.
I am willing to assume that Molly is going to be essentially Resources
YES 10 inside her Hell.
In the real world, thats a lot more unlikely.
I would not assume that the resources of our Hell as a corporate entity are automatically our personal piggybank either.
That way lies absolute dictators and the Congo Free Republic.
In fairness there's only so many diamonds we can sell before someone, probably the IRS, goes "No seriously, where are you getting those diamonds?". Sure the sale and possession are legitimate, but long term high value transactions like that start to look sketchy when we can't provide a legitimate paper trail prior to our ownership of them. Most people won't care, but tax guys looking for fraud would.
Really refurbished cars is probably a better idea on that scale; we can at least make the books look right even if Molly in particular is a weird person to have her name on them. I figure we can get one more cycle through fairly risk free, and then use the money to set up a garage to make money on cars and launder our other gains.
1)Tax agents look for undeclared income, and failure to pay taxes on said income
They do not, to my knowledge, look for how you made the money. I took a quick look here, and :
www.irs.gov
Al Capone famously went to jail for tax evasion. Not because of the income.
2)The Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas allows you to pay a daily fee to prospect for diamonds and to keep what you collect. Twelve hour drive from Chicago.
And its not the only potential source of stones in the continental US; Mindat.org points to multiple potential sites for prospecting right in Illnois. When we get good enough to make stones indistinguishable from nature, we're home free.
Just make a yearly trip to Arkansas, or to some other such site for a couple days, and make sure there's a data trail.
Also, buy at least 2 dots in Science, specifically Geology/Chemistry, so you can talk knowledgeably on the subject.
3) Refurbished automobiles is not really a regular cash thing.
Look up the price of used cars, and the margin on them. Not to mention the running costs for both garage and reseller.
The juice isnt worth the squeeze, not for our requirements.
Any refurbished automobiles we're doing is likely to be personal or commissioned work from friends and family.
How is lottery cheating is less reprehensible than any other cheating?
Because its not cheating.
Using a natural ability to win a game of chance is not considered cheating.
Just like card counting in a casino is not considered cheating as long as you're doing it without technological or outside help.
The casino could and will bar you if you're too successful, as is their right as a private business, but its neither a crime nor unethical.
It might be immoral if you keep doing it past your need though.
That would almost definitely qualify as greed in Christian/Catholic theology. But now we get into philosophical questions beyond this quest.
It isn't likely the IRS that would notice or care, but rather someone with a vested interest in the diamond trade, either a commercial producer of artificial diamonds or even De Beers. After all, a quantity of huge, perfect artificial diamonds suddenly coming on to the market signals that someone has, at the very least, developed a new method of reliably creating them. And if they can make them this good, how much more difficult would it be for them to imitate natural diamonds?
Even if they could confirm that it was an artificial process?
The diamond business alone is worth in the 11-12 figures range, and Im not counting other precious stones.
No seller is going to be threatened by some smallscale op selling low 7 figures worth of diamonds in a year.
They might check their own supplies to make sure nothing is missing, but thats about the limit of their interests.
You have to have scale to interest the big and medium-scale players.
If we had reason to think that money would substantial speed up fixing the dragon nest I might focus more that that, but our major big advantage is we always have access to any expensive equipment we might need.
Now there might be expensive materials that would help us fix the nest, but we have not been given any indication that is the case.
Two words: Raw materials.
You want a celltower repeater underground so Molly, guests and any cyberdevils there have cellphone service.
The electronics have to come from somewhere. The fiberoptics have to come from somewhere.
Someone is going to have to pay for them.
You want to pull power from the electric grid for illumination underground, and maybe heating.
The copper for power cabling(or whatever fictional superconductor we might use) has to come from somewhere.
So has the plastic for sheathing the cables. And power outlets. And the lights themselves. And any heaters.
Cable for internet and TV. Pipes for potable water. Porcelain or metal for sinks and lavatories. I could go on.
Raw material ultimately has to come from somewhere. Someone is going to have to buy it and move it underground.
Even if you're just recycling scrap instead of buying new stuff?
Someone presumably has to pay for and transport it.
Well, one could end up with us targeted for some run of the mill industrial espionage, while the other could be considerably worse, though the danger should be relatively low unless we start offloading diamonds indistinguishable from natural ones.
Anyone who thinks De Beers wouldn't try to squash us through any means necessary, including murder, doesn't realize what kind of ruthless stranglehold their cartel has on the diamond market.
It is not the 1960s any longer.
De Beers remains a major player, but does not control the diamond market any more; their share of the market was around 45% in 2003, and is down to around 35% in 2011, and 37% today.
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De Beers settled US antitrust charges in 2003. They are not coming after us for regularly selling a couple mil in gemstones a year.
Nobody is really going to care about someone selling low seven or even eight figures of precious stones yearly anyway.
Not in a triple digit billions industry(diamonds, both gemstone and industrial). We arent statistically significant.
They'll just check to see its not from their own stock or suppliers.
Furthermore, diamonds are not the only gemstones in the market.
They are roughly 80% of the gemstone market according to Google, but stones like sapphires and rubies have a share.
As does opal.
And we have have yet to exploit the bullshit of nuclear transmutation with regards to platinum-group metals, which is an even more fungible source of funds.
We only started with diamonds because they were the most basic to start with.
X] A Nest for Porter
Seems decent. I definitely want to do more then just 1 AP on the Porter action so that we finish it in sooner then 8 turns.
Thats a mistake.
We only have Craft 3, Technology 2, no Tech Excellency, no Sight, no Perception charms, and the stuff we looted from the Fomori base to help build our Dragons Nest's mystical side is still buried in Cleveland.
Our focus for the next three months is on preparing for Mab, so our XP spending priorities will reflect that focus.
So none of that is likely to improve.
We want to slowroll the Nest until we're done with Mab. It doesnt have a time limit; Mab does.
[X]Plan Small marvels of hellish beauty
-[X] Masterworks for Money: 1AP
--[X] Small marvels
-[X] Look into the Minor Talents of Chicago: 1 AP
--[X] A Rose's Tale
-[X] A Friend in Need: 1AP
--[X] Dreaming True
-[X] The Bridges of the Spirit: 1AP
-[X] Not a Wizard, but: 1AP
-[X] Restoring the Last Station(0/8): 1AP
-[X] Instead of taking a shower in the morning and in the evening, get into the habit of using TTC and excellency for supernaturally good body (and hair and nail) care and beautification procedures
Sorry, internet is too poor in Kazakh plains for a proper discussion. Basically, small wonders has a far better plot generating potential, and thus possibility of xp profit. Lydia, Gard, Lara Raith, Maeve and even Mab herself are far more likely to be personally interested in jewelry than in plain diamonds. Commissions from supernatural beings should be possible once we establish ourselves. Diamonds are just Diamonds. They are Money, and nothing else.
I have no objections to other choices, but this one is suboptimal from xp and plot perspective
Neither Gard nor Mab wear jewelry to my recollection.
And I think you are badly mistaken about the interest in commissions from supernatural customers.
I mean, the Leanansidhe was literally just poisoned a couple years ago by a gift from the Red Court. And the jewelry that Summer gave to both Dresden and Morgan for excelling against the Red Court were also magical trackers.
Nobody from the Winter side of things(and I mean both Mab and Odin) is in the market for jewellery commissions.
And the Whites are not going to risk it either.
[X] A Nest for Porter
I really don't think that's a priority.
We still have lots of other things to spend XP on, and we are simultaneously learning the Qiao.
1)The Sight, if available, would be an immediate priority.
For general use, like with random supernatural encounters.
For combat encounters where the enemy throws up smokescreens like in Cleveland. But especially for Crafting, given as everyone is voting to work on Dragon Nest construction, which means we are working in proximity to bigass magical energy flows.
Just like you want good lighting before working on power cables, you want to be able to see what you are doing before working with Dragons Nests. That way you dont do shit like mistakenly trigger earthquakes, which we've been explicitly told is a risk when working with Dragons Nests.
The Fomor had a seismograph after all.
2)Formalizing access to Bob is a Big Deal.
Not quite as big a deal as discovering the Dragons Nest, but only just.
Not just for sorcery scholarship reasons either.
We are preparing to talk to Mab in eight to twelve weeks.
Bob knows the Winter Court a lot better than we do, their goals and motivations and history.
We want his knowledge. That means we need to take Not A Wizard But.