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Messages - Snark Knight

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1
DF Spoilers / Re: Whose the backup plan for...? - Battle Ground Spoiler
« on: November 01, 2024, 07:57:18 PM »
Vanilla humans have always had the power to summon Outsiders.  I believe that was the point in Blood Rites.

Free-willed humans, anyway. And, sure, the ritual to summon a champion like Behind worked OK with one low-level talent and two unpowered helpers, and maybe didn't strictly require Madge having been a weaker practitioner to pull off (although that probably helped get it done multiple times before making a fatal mistake). But the other methods that involve calling up a squad of individually weaker outsiders, like in CD, or DB / PG when the Reds were supported by mortal-summoned outsider foot soldiers, those do seem to need at least a low-level practitioner.

Even with the little fish being a lot more common than council-level talents, relatively few people want to sign on to unmake the world in the name of tentacled horrors from beyond.  As Harry puts it, most people don't want to mess up the place where all their stuff is.  But if you can upgrade a non-powered cultist who already has sufficient insanity, or empower some random victims who are too addicted to care about anything beyond more of the drug, that eliminates a bottleneck to bringing over actual armies.

2
DF Spoilers / Re: Peace Talks line about Thomas
« on: November 01, 2024, 07:43:50 PM »
A good point.  So, that would probably only be the British (sounding) prisoner that Thomas might talk to, but only if that prisoner wanted to speak to Thomas. 

A near certainty. Harry's narration when confining Thomas to stasis and setting his communication rules said only one other prisoner was under the 'contemplation' protocol.  He didn't specify the Brit, but it's not exactly likely any of the raving monstrosities got the unique containment.

That said, yeah, the Brit didn't exactly seem like he much wanted to say anything to anybody anyway.

3
DF Spoilers / Re: Whose the backup plan for...? - Battle Ground Spoiler
« on: October 31, 2024, 02:39:36 PM »
However the addict lacked any further talent or enough talent to be of use, so he was discarded and became yet another victim to drug addiction.

Perhaps ... but what I'm suggesting is that maybe the 3-eye project was working towards not just expanding perception, but granting vanilla users enough power to perform summonings.  Either through longer term use of what they were already making, or maybe Sells was stopped before he worked out a technical difficulty in getting a fully working formula.

From Nemesis' perspective, addicts who would summon some of its foot soldiers in exchange for their next hit would be pretty much ideal.  It doesn't need them to be high-functioning for much else.

Which leads to another related speculation ... what if Sells' lack of fear of the Wardens wasn't, as Harry assumed, because his tutor just kept him ignorant of how dangerous they were, but rather because Sells meant to summon a protector that could tank anything the Wardens tried to do to it?  That's got me wondering if Sells' toad demon that Harry fought was actually a minor outsider, and Harry just never considered it anything more than a Nevernever demon because his power actually worked on it, and it's received wisdom for him at that point that that means Nevernever demon, not Outsider?

4
DF Spoilers / Re: Whose the backup plan for...? - Battle Ground Spoiler
« on: October 31, 2024, 03:16:52 AM »
What I find striking about that encounter, is the three-eye addict; who would have been a total newbie to the world of magic compared to a wizard, recognized the name of the Walker, as if it was written in bold letters on Harry.

A newbie, yes ... but the drug was a project of some of the outsider affiliates.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Sells and at least some of his accomplices had also been recruiting a lot of their customers into becoming outsider cultists, and teaching them enough of a smidgeon about the outsiders to become dangerous.  The whole project starts to make a lot more strategic sense for Nemesis if you consider turning on the sight in otherwise negligibly magical humans as step one of mass producing summoners. (If so, JB is *really* owed some big props for burying a clue that deep, that early)

All of which is to say, sure, the addict saw something and knew what it meant ... but he might have been more educated about that narrow slice of the supernatural than one would think at first.

5
DF Spoilers / Re: Whose the backup plan for...? - Battle Ground Spoiler
« on: October 29, 2024, 12:56:44 AM »
3.  Drakul (probably on team evil - possibly a former human starborn who sucked in an outsider and now cohabitates with it mentally, immune to its control but warped by it anyways?)

That would be a real stretch of the WOJ that Drakul is "something inhuman that got trapped in human form".  The WOJ frames the inhuman part as the part that makes Drakul what he is, he's more than just a warped human.

6
I had been presuming a sort of pre-programmed simulacrum, a miniature "spirit of knowledge" along the lines of Bob (or Lash & Bonea (and likely the Archive)) that Margaret had constructed for Harry before her death; albeit a vastly-lesser one.
But for this thing to be tracking all sorts of extra info -- Thomas, and Thomas' girlfriend -- happening out in the world, it'd need to be considerably more robust, not just pre-programming.  Able to conduct reconnaissance, to learn, to adapt... not really "lesser," in fact quite robust.

What if holo-Margaret was talking to Harry during the soulgaze because she placed it in Thomas, like a miniature version of the Fallen leaving a shadow?  The simulacrum's ability to learn would be limited to accessing whatever Thomas experiences.  She'd believe Justine was dead because Thomas believed it.  That would probably cut the difficulty factor considerably. And a simple construct would probably have pretty limited capacity to account for the host believing something but being wrong.

While Justine was near death is an excellent possibility for when she was Nemfected, though. Thomas thought she was already gone, Lord Raith would have had ample opportunity to let his allies get at her while she was convalescing.  It's not conclusive though, have been other Outsider collaborators in the White Court who could have got to her later.

7
DF Spoilers / Re: Whose the backup plan for...? - Battle Ground Spoiler
« on: October 26, 2024, 01:00:54 AM »
The stain left by HWWB might be very disturbing for a wizard to look upon and if Morgan had ever used his Sight on Harry before, this would explain why he wouldn’t want to do so again.

The residue of the walker certainly seemed to make an impression when the ThreeEye addict looked at him all the way back in SF.

I've also wondered for quite a while about a connection between wizards looking at each other with the sight and a soulgaze shared between wizards and mortals.  Seeing the walker's residue would contribute to the running away screaming or psychotic breaks from some of the mortals who have looked Harry in the eye.  Sure, he's powerful and somewhat prone to a temper, but agent Denton thought he saw actual Hell in Harry all the way back in the second book, when he hadn't really done anything all that disturbing other than (probably) kill Justin in a fair fight.  But if Denton got a conduit to looking at the Outside?  That would do it.

8
DF Spoilers / Re: Whose the backup plan for...? - Battle Ground Spoiler
« on: October 24, 2024, 06:13:16 PM »
If Listen is still alive, which seems doubtful after Harry buried him under a wall of dirt, he might be a candidate, but I'm just not feeling it.

Listen is a cockroach. Unless the body is seen on page, assume he's going to continue causing trouble.

I doubt he'd be amenable to switching to team Mab, though.

9
Yet Elaine seems to know about about the White Council, where is she getting her information?

That much is explicable by her making low-powered contacts pretty quickly after leaving Aurora's protecting ... she probably heard about the Council being a bunch of trigger-happy Inspector Javerts from the forerunners of the paranet.

The wizard the Council should *really* be afraid of is Simon Pietrovich having faked his death to become Cowl, though.  Elaine is just the apprentice.

10
DF Spoilers / Re: Has Carlos sided with the merlin against Harry
« on: October 18, 2024, 05:12:41 PM »
Jim stated that Drakul thought that Kemmler's behavior was amusing, something that was funny.  While that gives us a clue just how twisted Drakul is, I think it also tells us that he didn't rate Kemmler that highly.  Kemmler was a very dangerous person, but even though things like setting up World War One was supposedly one of his projects, I suspect the mad necromancer was somewhat random in his depravity.  Beings like Nemesis and Drakul rank higher on the bad news scale because they have a plan.       

I'm still a bit confused what to make of that bit, given we know from DB that Kemmler's research interests included "how to use necromancy against the black court".  Looking for weaknesses in his elite personal guard seems like the kind of thing Drakul would find pretty far from amusing.

Unless the WOJ meant Drakul found Kemmler's earlier career with the world wars and stuff funny, until he crossed a line in his final publication?  The timing seems awfully coincidental that the Council had been after him for the best part of a century and only got him for good shortly after he published the one thing that might have genuinely pissed Drakul off.  I wonder if Drakul took a page from the Stokerlypse and exploited the council into being his mob to burn down Kemmler and purge (almost) all the copies of his last book.

11
  LOL!  I agree, the worst thing he finds out about Lara is she is a strict vegetarian! :o

Eh ... somebody probably needs to point out to Harry that if you're planning for a lifespan in the centuries, you probably don't want your arteries clogged for the back 80% of that life expectancy.

12
Also, I keep forgetting to answer the titular question, every time I come into this thread.
I keep getting side-tracked by all y'all's interesting ideas!

Alright, we're all thinking it, I'll say it.

Harry takes Lara to dinner ... at Burger King.  Diplomatic incident ensues.

13
Agree about Mab's characterization. She was also much more cruel in Summer Knight. I think Jim decided to change his alignment from legal evil to legal neutral.

Nearly freezing Harry's eyeballs in SmF was pretty cruel too.

I'm not sure if her characterization change was organically done on the fly, or a planned shift based on how the narrator is also changing.

14
I think the most likely partner for Summer is the Svartalfs.  Wizards and the Fae don’t really trust one another so I don’t think the White Council would make a good candidate, though I’ve been wrong before.  The Swartalfs probably suspect that Lara Raith had something to do with Thomas Raith’s escape from the dungeon in what was formerly Marcone’s castle and of course they are right about that.  The Svartalfs still have a score to settle with Thomas and they may suspect that Harry has found a magical way to shield Thomas.  The Swaretalfs are normally a very insular people but circumstances might make them rethink their normal policy of remaining aloof.

The svartalfs didn't seem like they held any grudge against Harry for Thomas' extrication at the conference at the end of BG.  Their high lady word-gamed some support for Harry's play to claim the castle from Marcone when she didn't particularly have to.  They're smart, they must have figured out in retrospect that Harry and Lara being out of the conference room when Thomas was taken was a Clue - I'd guess they figured that any help Harry gave was probably owed under an obligation.

Titania and Langtry do have hating Harry's guts in common, though, and Langtry isn't so rigidly honorable as the svartalfs.  That teamup therefore seems like a good way for Jim to torment his protagonist.

15
   There still is the issue of "true love" to get around.  Was what Harry and Murphy had true love?  And if is was, is Harry still protected?

He accidentally burned Lara when they brushed into skin contact while busting Thomas out of the cell.  It definitely was true love.  (Also, despite a distractingly painful burn, Lara figures out right away it must have been Karrin and seems genuinely approving for them to have found a healthy relationship.  First time through, it reads like irony that the monster understands and reacts much more positively than Harry's supposed friends. Second reading ... yeah, I feel a bit dumb for not seeing that for the foreshadowing it was).

Uncertain if that protection survived Karrin's death, but I tend to think it would for as long as he's heavily occupied by mourning.

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