Storm Front hints and questions

[groinkick]

One of the hints dropped in Storm Front was the most wizards who can cast a spell together is 13.  Harry mentions that they all must be like minded, and have the same goal for it to work at it would be like a cult or something.  This seems like a big hint about the Black Council and some sort of spell that will be cast somewhere down the line.

Victor Sells to me is weird.  On one hand Harry comments about how inexperienced Sells is while at the same time the examples of stuff he has done are really complicated.  The Three eye for example.  Harry needed Bob's help to put together some potions and here was Victor putting together a potion that Harry didn't think was possible.  How could someone like him do it?  Also the ritual magic he did was complex as Harry notes when he's sneaking into Sells's home.  He also appears to have a lot of horse power while still being inexperienced.  He sounds like a good candidate for someone like Cowl to recruit and use.  Was he a member of the Black Council or possibly a thrall?  Just odd that such an inexperienced person with no known mentor could pull off what he did. 

During their battle Victor used a demon, and Harry obtained the demon's Name.  Can't help but wonder if we will see Harry call upon it in the future.

[Bad Alias]

Victor Sells to me is weird.

That is because he is supposed to for the reasons you list. In the next couple of books, it is heavily implied that he had someone show him how to do what he did. Harry assumed it was the same person who gave the wolf pelt belts to the feds. It is later implied that Sells was infected by nemesis. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

[huangjimmy108]

One of the hints dropped in Storm Front was the most wizards who can cast a spell together is 13.  Harry mentions that they all must be like minded, and have the same goal for it to work at it would be like a cult or something.  This seems like a big hint about the Black Council and some sort of spell that will be cast somewhere down the line.

Victor Sells to me is weird.  On one hand Harry comments about how inexperienced Sells is while at the same time the examples of stuff he has done are really complicated.  The Three eye for example.  Harry needed Bob's help to put together some potions and here was Victor putting together a potion that Harry didn't think was possible.  How could someone like him do it?  Also the ritual magic he did was complex as Harry notes when he's sneaking into Sells's home.  He also appears to have a lot of horse power while still being inexperienced.  He sounds like a good candidate for someone like Cowl to recruit and use.  Was he a member of the Black Council or possibly a thrall?  Just odd that such an inexperienced person with no known mentor could pull off what he did. 

During their battle Victor used a demon, and Harry obtained the demon's Name.  Can't help but wonder if we will see Harry call upon it in the future.

The key here is "ritual magic"

During the 15 books in the series, we saw Harry do many things with magic. Most of them are not as impressive as what Sells do in book 1, but Harry do them on the fly and sometimes under pressure and on a moments notice. Sells wield his magic from his home with a complete ritual circle and a storm to power his spells. If this is D&D, Harry is casting magic on the field with no magic ingredients while sells is casting magic from a wizard's tower.

The thing is, it is likely that the ritual and potion recipe are supplied to Sells by the mastermind. Sells himself does not understand what he is doing. In other words, he is using someone else's tower. He is just someone given a big gun and and only knows how to aim and shoot.

[kbrizzle]

Victor Sells is weird, no doubt.  There has been speculation in the forum that Lord Raith was his “sponsor”, arising from the fact that Sells was previously employed by Silver Capital or something, a naming convention used by the Raith family. This makes a certain amount of sense given Lord Raith’s actions in Blood Rites.

I’m not sure that Sells was Nfected, although it has been implied by both Lily & the Gatekeeper that Nemesis was involved here. Here are a couple of reasons why I think so:

• A Nfected Sells wouldn’t have been goofy enough to make noob mistakes like letting slip the name of the demon under his control in front of a White Council-level Wizard.
• It would also have known Harry’s status as a Starborn & not wanted him dead, or even if it wanted him dead, an Outsider would’ve been called to do it, not a mid-level demon

We have seen the corruptive influence of black magic upon the human soul, and the amount Sells had been doing for a few years would’ve been enough to deeply corrupt him. Especially if it were being guided/ directed by someone like Lord Raith or worse.

I don’t think Sells would’ve been a good candidate for Cowl & would have been rejected by the latter - Sells was too insane to be a good pupil in the long-term - while he possessed a good amount of low cunning, he is too absorbed in power for its own sake to be more than a magical thug. Harry’s appeal to the smarter bad guys is that he is a thug who has discipline enough to accomplish complex goals - he is not swayed by the obviously corruptive power offered to him by people like the Denarians etc.

[Bad Alias]

• A Nfected Sells wouldn’t have been goofy enough to make noob mistakes like letting slip the name of the demon under his control in front of a White Council-level Wizard.

I'm not sure if this is the case. As we've seen with Cat Sith, and probably with Aurora and Maeve, Nemesis tries to leave the personality intact to a certain extent so that it can go undetected.

That said, I'm of the opinion that Sells was not infected, but manipulated.

[Mira]

   I thought that Harry killed the demon, but could be wrong there.   Sells if I remember correctly
had a little talent, got a hold of the wrong kind of books, in Star Wars terms, used the "darkside" to gain power and became a sorcerer as opposed to a wizard..

[Bad Alias]

Harry blasted it with lightning when he was naked in the street with Susan. That "killed" it, but at that point in the series, Harry had said that you couldn't kill demons from the Nevernever, but could basically banish them back by destroying their physical bodies. Victor re-summons it at the lake house fight.

On the whole "where did he get his power" question, that was intentionally left up in the air. What we do know is that he was somewhat strong, he didn't develop his talent until he was older (old enough to have a wife and kids approaching teenage years), and he wasn't well rounded.

In every other instance of developing supernatural abilities, it seems like it is something that first manifests in adolescence or shortly after.

[kbrizzle]

I think that was what made Sells a real danger - the fact that he likely didn’t fully understand what he was making & that he was able to punch way harder than someone in his weight class should’ve been capable of. All of this points to a sponsor of sorts.

We see in Blood Rites that Lord Raith is using the magical number of 3 witches (Harry even jokes about this) to summon HWWBehind - I doubt any of the 3 (even Madge) really knew what HWWB was - Harry didn’t himself until later in the series. So it wouldn’t be a great surprise that Sells didn’t fully understand the implications of 3Eye.

The genius of 3Eye was that it neatly circumvents the Laws of Magic, rendering the Council useless here - they send Morgan to basically stake out the bad guy until he makes the most minor of infractions because they don’t have anything else on him (of course Harry was the wrong target). But 3Eye’s main purpose in my opinion was to open humanity up the reality of the supernatural & make them hostile to it.

[Bad Alias]

I was rereading Storm Front this week. Someone here recently pointed out that Harry notice's something weird about his and Murphy's shadow when they are in the elevator. And then it is never mentioned again. Having recently read that point and this thread, it occurred to me that perhaps Nicodemus was the unseen mentor to Victor Sells.

We're lead to believe that the exploding heart spell is from RCV because Martin knew about it from his time as a priest to Kukulkan. We're also lead to believe that the point of Storm Front was to test out the spell. Why would the RCV need to test out the spell? The Red King was 5,000 years old. Presumably he would know whether or not and how the spell worked because he was around.

Besides the shadow thing, why Nicodemus? All I got at this point is that Nicodemus said that the RCV needed to be destroyed and it was.

[Mira]

    Victor got the juice for his spells from two sources, the lightning storms and the sexual act put on by the  Beckitts.  He also made the mistake of thinking the frog demon was under his control, not realizing that he was being used.   I seem to remember somewhere Harry saying these were the elements of sorcery and black magic, not a whole lot of inborn talent or power needed..  So Victor was a minor talent began to play with it not knowing what he was doing, got a hold of some serious books on sorcery, got addicted to the power trip it gave him and was off to the races..

Besides the shadow thing, why Nicodemus? All I got at this point is that Nicodemus said that the RCV needed to be destroyed and it was.

No, that was Victor projecting himself.

[Bad Alias]

You're probably right that it was Victor projecting himself. I'm fairly certain that Harry says that Victor was strong but not trained. Either way, Victor is commented on continuously as fitting the Black Council/Circle/Nemesis framework. Starting with Fool Moon and most recently in Cold Days.

[Mira]

You're probably right that it was Victor projecting himself. I'm fairly certain that Harry says that Victor was strong but not trained. Either way, Victor is commented on continuously as fitting the Black Council/Circle/Nemesis framework. Starting with Fool Moon and most recently in Cold Days.

Yup, I seem to remember Harry surmising that because under ordinary circumstances he should not
have been able to get a hold of the books that he had, nor pull off what he did without some instruction.