Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 14

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We immediately pick back up with Susan trying very hard to have sex with Harry, something which would definitely get them both killed, since the magic circle in which they're taking shelter is only about 3 feet across. Falling down, or lying down, would break the circle and let the toad demon either hit them with acid or attack more directly. This is definitely not a love potion, it's a lust potion. And I don't just mean in the sense that a potion probably can't create "genuine" love or whatever. Love absolutely has a metaphysical dimension, and while in the context of The Dresden Files there is no compelling established reason that a potion should not be able to affect is, it is generally accepted in fantasy that this is Something Magic Cannot Do, so fine, let's assume that's the case here. Love is also a biochemical process like any other emotional or relational state, and there's no early reason a potion shouldn't be able to replicate that. (In Fool Moon we see a potion that can complexly affect the emotions of people who didn't even drink it, just by proximity). And inappropriately trying to have sex with someone while a literal demon is watching you and trying to figure out how to kill you and the object of your affections is giving you an unambiguous 'no', is not generally characteristic of that state. The first thing could be understandable, oxytocin is a hell of a drug, and one of the big things is does is create a sense of safety, so it's not unreasonable to think that magically ramping that up, or simulating its effects, could interfere with a person's ability to assess danger, and by extension whether it is an appropriate time to relax and indulge ones urges. But this does not account for her utter disregard for Dresden's consent here. There are emotional states that can contribute to that, but love is not any of them, although it absolutely can influence how, for example, aggression or entitlement manifest in behavior. 

I see five reasonable possibilities for what went wrong here. 

1. Bob was deliberately fucking with Dresden, saying it was a "love potion" while knowing full well that it was not. 
2. Du to a combination of bad romance novels and working for at least 3 different evil wizards, Bob's sense of what love is supposed to look like is wildly skewed. (Textual source of "at least 3". In Proven Guilty, Bob says of Little Chicago, that "none of the evil geniuses I've worked for could have done this". "None", not "neither". This would not necessarily have been significant, but in the previous book, Bob identifies his two most recent previous owners as Justin DuMorne and Heinrich Kemmler, both of whom could very reasonably be described as "evil geniuses", although I that that label applies somewhat better to Kemmler than two DuMorne. If those two were the only evil wizards for whom Bob had worked, it would have been both natural and...tidy to say "neither". The only reason to say 'none' is if he had worked for more than two evil geniuses). 
3. Bob was doing his best with the recipe, but magic responds to the personality and intent of the caster, and Harry, who hasn't had a bilaterally loving relationship with another human since he was 16, and is at this point in the series still pretty sketch, may not be emotionally capable of creating an actual love potion. This would echo some things from elsewhere in the series, like Molly's anger at Nelson contaminating the fear spell she uses on him and Rosie, the impossibility of folding up sunshine in a handkerchief when you're not actually happy, and Dresden's assertion that he's "bad about" projecting his own thoughts and feeling when trying to do object reading. 
4. The ingredient substitutions created a hornier, sleazier potion than would otherwise have occurred. We don't know what the romance novel page said, but we know the ones Bob likes include things like women's dresses getting ripped off, which doesn't bode well for the consent level. And I don't know to what extent potions retain the physical and chemical properties of their ingredients, but if the answer "at all" we're also dealing with at least 10 fluid ounces of tequila, minus whatever cooked off while it was on the burner. 
5. Bob was fine, Harry was fine, the potion was, in and of itself, fine, but Susan is already sort of horrible, already doesn't respect Dresden's consent or autonomy, and already views her potential relationship with him almost exclusively through the lens of its being an opportunity for her to have an exciting adventure and get a good story of it. ("Have you ever thought that you'd like to die while making love? I've thought that many times", an actual thing she says with her real talky parts, barely has anything to do with Dresden as a fellow participant, much less a person). The carelessness and entitlement were already there; the potion just reacted badly with them. 

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Whatever went wrong, the situation is drastically untenable, and Dresden asks Bob to throw him the
bottle with the escape potion. Bob, however, has decided to be a pain in the butt. I sort of don't understand why, given that the acid spitting toad demon seems pretty likely to just keep wreaking havoc and quite possibly dissolve the skull which is his only refuge against the dawn, but as we've discussed, Harry in the early books is sketchy and horny, and I guess the opportunity to ogle co-eds is worth maybe dying for. He's not getting off his incorporeal ass and helping unless Harry gives him a 24 hour pass. 

This also suggests that while Bob needs permission from the owner of the skull to leave it, and parameters can be placed on that permission (24 hours, or he can't leave the lab, or whatever), and while Bob generally has to obey the orders of whomever he's currently bound to, he cannot actually be ordered to leave the skill. This is a very reasonable failsafe against the current owner ding something like ordering him to leave the skull while outside during daylight, and thereby destroying him. And that in turn, is consistent with what Luccio says in Small Favor about his intended function being very similar to that of the Archive, albeit on a smaller scale. Bob may not be quite as apocalypse-proof as the Archive, but he is by design a very durable little depository of magical knowledge. (He survived the destruction of at least two previous owner's labs). Both the existence of those safety features and the way Luccio talks about Bob also imply that he was a purpose-made thing. We know he's a spirit of intellect, and we know spirits of intellect can be created by accident, when mortal have brain sex with spiritual entities. That's how you get a spirit of intellect. Which means that Bob (like Harry?!) was conceived for a specific purpose. Sometime circa the founding of the White Council, either a human decided to get brain-pregnant and then places these "rules" on Bob either before or immediately after he was "born", or a spiritual entity of some kind, a ghost, the shadow of a fallen angel, a demon (maybe), or gods only know what else, decided to have brain sex with a moral for this purpose, in which case they may have been able to build those parameters in at conception. This would be a really clever application of bloodline magic, especially if the initiative were on the part of a human practitioner. Bob is better able to look after himself, harder to destroy, and far longer lasting than an enchanted object, and his continued existence feels less like a consent violation, and is less subject to awkward clashes of personality, than generational magic like the Archive or the curse on Harley MacFinn. One wonders if he might have been an early draft of the Archive, or even an attempt by an ancient Archive to replace her own function so she can stop. If I have my timeline straight, which I very well might not, at the time Bob was created, Archives were still routinely suffering mental health issues. Alternatively, he may have been an attempt by someone like Nicodemus to create a resource akin to the Archive, but able to be kept under the control of the side of evil. In which context, it seems conceivable that his kidnapping of the Archive (again, in Small Favor, which is also the first book in which Bonea exists, even if neither Dresden nor the reader knows it yet) may have been a second attempt at the same idea. Revisiting old schemes centuries later is way is classic Nicodemus, so. I will reexamine this later, when I'm looking at the relevant sections of Small Favor. 

Eventually, Harry agrees to the 24 hour pass, and Bob throws him the bottle with the escape potion. Dresden tells Susan to split it with him, saying that he thinks he can "cover [them] both in the focus department". Given that what you need to focus on to use the potion is "being away from here" (per Dresden's instructions to Susan in the previous chapter), this serves to underscore the he does not want Susan to be trying to have sex with him. He wants to be Away From Here, and that include's Susan's amorous advances. If he kind of wanted to stay and see where this went, toad demons notwithstanding, he wouldn't have the clarity of purpose necessary to get them both out of there in one piece. If the first-person description of becoming the wind is anything to go by, this is not a straightforward bit of magic, and the risks of distractions or internal conflict about which way to go when temporarily transformed from a solid state to a fluid should be as apparent as they are unpleasant. 

But they make it, out of the apartment and into the pouring rain. This leaves me with so many questions about how potions in this setting actually work. A properly made potion can do things the caster could not otherwise accomplish. Whatever it does to turn you into the wind, you can apparently still pass through an active circle and keep the effect going. Same goes for running water; even when you are in a gaseous form, with all the surface area that implies, heavy rain, which can disrupt most evocations if you're standing in it, and complicate the hell out of thaumaturgy. Literally. What. Are. Potions?

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Of course, "outside" doesn't mean "safe". Dresden plans to get to a flooded street a few blocks away, on
the other side of which they should be safe from the demon because running water, but they're slowed down by Susan's recovering from the unpleasant effects of mixing potions. She's not hitting on him anymore, but now she's throwing up. Before the demon can get to them, though, a spooky, shadowy figure appears and starts telling Dresden how doomed he is. It is, of course, Victor Sells, although Dresden doesn't know that yet, but he does make it clear that the whole demon attack thing is his doing.  We don't see anyone else use this specific type sending anywhere else in the series. There are a few kind of similar workings, like the communication stones Harry and Ebenezer use in Changes, and the communion spell between Harry and Elaine. It can't possibly be a question of the Third Law, because literally every other version of long-range magical communication we see, including the mass telepathy spell that the freaking Merlin uses in Turn Coat, skirts closer to that line than this. My best guess is that it's actually just really hard, and that in addition to using the storms, which most wizards wouldn't risk, Victor may actually have some natural talent for long-distance magic. Of course, it's unlikely to matter unless one of the Sells kids resurfaces. 

Dresden delivers a sort of magical slap through the sending, which startles and upsets Victor enough that he cuts the villain monologue short and calls his demon to continue the attack. Dresden catches part of its name, but not enough to seize control of it. Lacking other survivable options, he uses the storm himself, calling lighting down through his own body and channeling it back out at the demon, which kills it pretty good, or at least as good as one can kill something for which a physical body is a temporary convenience. And so of course that's the part Warden Morgan saw. At this point, I'm kind of wondering what exactly Morgan's job even is. He's the White Council's official executioner, and he was apprenticed to Luccio, who at least as of Dead Beat is the Captain of the Wardens (I don't know whether she already had the job as of Storm Front). That would lead one to expect that he's kind of a big deal, but his primary responsibility, apparently since Dresden left Ebenezer's farm, so for roughly the past 7 years, is just hanging out in Chicago following Harry around. Is this a specialized high risk assignment, because Scary Warlock Dresden (or because Starborn)? Is it a punishment for challenging or annoying someone higher up on the Council? Is the relative safety and tedium of mostly watching Harry not get paid to sit in his office and read bad paperbacks supposed to be some kind of light duty assignment while he recovers from...something? He doesn't seem to have any close supervision, which could really be supporting evidence for either a position of particular trust or a deliberately dead-end assignment. 

Regardless of how he ended up with this job, he makes some noises about suspecting Dresden of summoning the toad demon, but mostly he's there to let Dresden know that he's asked the Council to convene the day after tomorrow, to hold a hearing on whether or not Dresden is behind the murders. He's fairly certain that they will decide he is, and expresses a truly distressing level of enthusiasm for the possibility of getting to chop Harry's head off. Harry agrees about the likely outcome of the hearing, although not about how much fun his decapitation will be. Morgan stalks off into the rain, to be almost immediately replaced by the fourth, and least threatening, intrusion of the night - the cops. It's okay though. Susan is sure this will make a great story for the paper.