Do not attempt to eat my porridge, Ms. Raith. You will find it neither hot nor cold nor just right, because, unlike Goldilocks, the bears will have eaten you.

Harry, be real. Everyone wants someone to make us pancakes; we're all just too grown-up to say it.

Pancakes are inanimate!

Perhaps the saddest line on future rereads (if certain expectations are met):

Will Grandpa come for Christmas?

There's no pithy one-liner to it, but I love the conversation with Maggie at the end of Chapter 9.

Lots of things weren't there. I don't think this was really a meeting of the Supernatural World Powers. I think this was everyone who would accept Baron Marcone's invitation to discuss the Fomor problem in Chicago.

We didn't see the black or jade court, or in fact any Asian or African power at all. Are we supposed to believe that there aren't any supernatural nations in the rest of the world?

Out of the twenty Freeholding Lords under the Accords (per White Night), we just get three -- Marcone, Ferrovax, and Vadderung. No second dragon. No Drakul. No Ukrainian shapeshifter.

Even the powers that did show made a fairly mild showing, for the most part -- Lara came with one valkyrie and five guards. No siblings or cousins. Etri and Evanna came with five guards. Sarissa and Fix came with a few sidhe -- no Eldest Gruff, no Erlking. If you discount the sidhe musicians and einherjar serving drinks, the White Council was the largest single faction with four Senior Councilors and five Wardens.

That would imply Lucifer is in the Well, as Uriel was allowed to act in balance of what Harry described as Lucifers power. Or do to mean they used it in some other way? The first time they tried the symbol it wasn't on DR either.

Lucifer's very-unsubtle contribution in Small Favor was the massive rush of hellfire that was used to power the two giant hellfire pentagrams: the first that let them capture Marcone and the second that sprung the ambush at the aquarium.

A few factoids:

• Lara has earned three favors from Mab (Mab and Lara in Harry's back seat, Chapter 6
• She earned them by "working with Mab on some visa issues some of her people were having" (Lara to Eb, Chapter 32)
• Molly has been busy in eastern Russia for two weeks recruiting Leshy (Eastern European shapechanging forest spirits) (Chapter 16, when he summons her)
• Molly says that she has been handling transport for Winter troops and can provide them once they know where they will be needed... right before Mab says that all Winter troops are urgently needed elsewhere, but not that Molly can't actually provide troops(Chapter 30)

Speculative Theory: Molly has recruited a small army of Leshiye and brought them to Chicago using purely mortal transportation, facilitated by the White Court. Reason: The Fomor will know what troops have been brought to Chicago through the Nevernever. These troops can be hidden among the human population (shapeshifters) and won't be accounted for in anyone's balance-of-forces calculations.

Unless by "the great hall" he means the giant living room of Molly's svartalf apartment. It's described in Cold Days as:

The living room was the size of a basketball court, and it had eleven-foot ceilings.

No Einenjaren in jury Duty, is was Riley and his ex-Marines.

Oh. Yeah. Sorry. I got confused when a valkyrie showed up working for Lara. It made me retroactively think that the extreme professionals she had around might have also been hired from Monoc. But there's nothing to support that in the text, and Marcone's einherjar have always been described with nordic names and accents.

1) Use the CPD to spread some kind of story (freak storm event took out the power and caused a mini-tsunami on Lake Michigan!) to clear civilians away from the lakefront.

2) Senior Council and Wardens help Dresden to construct a kick-ass summoning circle somewhere near the middle of the lakefront. (Possibly the Svartalves help.) I'd expect aspects of what we saw in Small Favor -- both the ring that held the Archive on the island and the hellfire pentagrams. For symmetry, I'd expect Harry's soulfire to be used. (Recall that Uriel gave Harry soulfire explicitly to balance Lucifer's use of hellfire to make the two giant pentagrams in that book.)

3) Mab is "bait", present in her jumbo-sized aspect so no one can miss it and Ethniu will have to come right for her (or look like she's afraid or avoiding the big fight) -- and into the area with the prepared summoning circle.

4) Knights (Cross and Fairy) are all on "get her blood" duty. When one of them has a sample of Ethniu's blood, they get it to Harry.

Alternate 4) Toot!! and the 'Za Guard get Ethniu's blood. This only works if they can come up with a weapon that Toot can wield that can get through titanic bronze. (Would that fairy athame from Grave Peril work? Mab's got that now, and it's been cleansed, right?)

5) Harry the Warden Binds Ethniu into a Demonreach cell.

6) Everybody else (Einherjar, WCVs, Wardens, Marcone's hitters, Ghouls, etc) are on beachfront duty -- fighting fomor as they emerge from the lake over several miles of lake. It's possible that CPD SWAT and the National Guard and so on could have a role here.

7) Summer brings the donuts and party lights for impromptu victory celebrations all up and down the lakefront.

I looked it up:
Ghost Story, page 199, e-book:OK, it's not so much difference. " better" - "brighter", but...
Could be misremembering from Butcher's side, but with the comment about having been there as a ghost and not at the end of Skin Game, I'm not so sure.

Oh. Wow. Good spot. It's "Brighter Future Society" in Skin Game as well as Ghost Story, and in most of the references in Peace Talks. It's *just* the plaque that is wrong, not the text anywhere else.

"My comfy, dumpy old apartment was gone, flattened by Gentleman Johnnie Marcone to make way for his stupid little castle and the Bigger Better Brighter Future Society."

"The fete was being hosted at the Brighter Future Society's headquarters..."

"But as I approached the front door, I was struck by two things: First, a modest, plain bronze plaque fixed to the wall that spelled out the words BETTER FUTURE SOCIETY in letters an inch high..."

Ramirez reads the "Better Future Society" plaque and there's some discussion. And then later, when they talk about how Murphy is familiar with the building, it's back to Brighter Future Society twice.

You're definitely on to something, and I don't think it's a timey-wimey mirror mirror thing. For some reason, Marcone stuck a plaque on the door with the wrong name for the Peace Talks. Somethine's going on -- whether it's supposed to keep the low-key paranet-level BFS from attracting Accords-level notice or foil internet searches for them, or something weirder to do with the power of true names.

Perhaps it's Brighter Future Society when Butters and the wolves and the paranetters are the face of the organization, but Better Future Society when Marcone is? Possibly there's even a third name for when it's Lara's people.

But that sure looks like a deliberate switch, especially with that "... Bigger Better Brighter..." line to prime us to miss the difference.