2025-2026 Eeveeyear Goals

So this year went pretty well, actually, especially compared to last year and the year before. It helps that, once again, I haven't had to move, and that some of my most intense freelance work has wound down. I hit at least 45% on every goal, which doesn't compare well to the first few years since I started tracking my work this way, but I have a lot more goals now than I did then.  It will come up several times throughout this post, but I really cannot emphasize enough what a difference it made not to have this huge, unending freelance project sucking up all my time. I think the format from last year worked pretty well, so we're gonna cover this in four sections: Core Goals, First Year Goals, Non-Core Goals, and New Goals. We've got a couple more things this year that have been around long enough that I could do graphs, but I'm not entirely sure whether they actually 

Core Goals

These are the goals that pertain directly to books, reading, and writing, since that's what this blog, and my career, are primarily about. The things in this section mostly either consist of or support those activities necessary for me to maintain this blog and make progress towards that whole "published novelist" thing I've been aiming for since adolescence. Fiction writing is still trending up, and seems likely to continue to to do. Books read is still trending down, but there is cause to hope that this will be corrected. 

So as not to bury the lede, this is the best year on record for fiction writing. Which is kind of the most important goal, so we're gonna call that an unqualified success, even though I still have yet to even really get close to where I'd like to be. Aligning the number of pages I try to read and the number of words I try to write really seems to be working here, and so does using a randomization tool to determine which writing projects to work on at any given time, rather than using a bunch of mental energy like, deciding. If I wanted to make decisions more than once a year, I wouldn't be doing all this with the spreadsheet. But actually having time to sit down and do it does make a difference - please assume that's a factor in basically everything this year. 

After two years of only 50 books read, I managed 83 this year, which is also what the target would be for the coming year according to the standard formula, but I'm still not comfortable allowing it below 100, so the actual target will be 119. I've gotten a bit more willing to just drop books if I'm not having a good time with them, even if I can't point to anything in particular they're doing wrong. I've never precisely been one of those "Oh, I always finish books once I start them, I have to" types, but I like to have a reason if I'm not going to finish something, and I've started to occasionally consider "I'm bored and annoyed" a reason. Honestly the high page count target has helped here as well, because like, I trust myself more not to capriciously abandon books when I know it will mean they don't count towards a pretty challenging target. Like I said, I don't like making decisions. 

This somehow isn't actually the worst year on record for rereads, but that says more about how awful I've been about rereading the past few years than it does about any particular triumphs for this year. I suspect this is why, despite keeping mynewreading up appropriately by entwining the target for pages read with the one for fiction word count, I've continued to feel somewhat under-resourced when drafting. I considered tethering rereads similarly, but I think for the time being we're going to take the much simpler route of just doubling what the standard formula says the target ought to be, putting it at 96 rather than either letting it be 48 or just pinning it at 75+1d10 like we did last year. I must note again that we could probably have avoided this entire mess had I just let it be 89 the second year rather than getting cute.

Honestly I think nonfiction writing is still kind of finding its level after the tumultuous circumstances of its introduction, but we did hit one exciting mile marker with it this year - my original nonfiction word count document is so long that Google docs will no longer allow me to add to it, so I was forced to start a second document.

26 blog posts written is a substantial improvement over 17 last year or 16 the year before, so I feel I've kept my word on that even if there's still substantial room for improvement. It's not yet enough that I can return to using the standard formula without letting the target fall below acceptable levels, but maybe I'll be able to in a few years if we keep heading in this direction. 263 and 45.66% is the most blog posts I've read in a year in absolute terms, although as a percentage of the target, it isn't as good as the year the goal was introduced. Honestly I'm starting to wonder why I even bother with the standard formula, since I end up having to drop it for everything important - assuming that there's a relationship between how many blog posts I read and how many I can write seems to have held up (more on this later) so the goal will once again be "pinned" at 593. The Light send there are enough blogs left in this world that are still blogs rather than podcasts. Also, I'm giving real consideration to having a subgoal for non-Series Reread posts, but I've got a whole year to think about that. 

I only finished one song translation this year, and that pretty early on, and I still managed to straight up exceed my fanfiction writing goal by 3, so I don't think we need a new category for those after all. The goal's only going up by 1, from 8 to 9, but I think this might be the first time since I started doing all this record keeping that my target for something has organically gone up just because I did such a good job. Most of the time even when I exceed the numbers from the previous year, the goal is still dragged down by some abysmal failure or other. I did start counting each subsequent chapter of fics I caught up on before they were finished as an additional fic, partway through the year, which somewhat accounts for my having exceeded this goal, but I should emphasize that some of this is the result of deliberately reading more fanfiction, because I'm writing and releasing more fanfiction, so reading and commenting is part of being a good community member. This target has also gone up modestly as a result of my just doing it a lot. 

I did not do well on reading short fiction, and the target slipped by another 5 short stories. I'm hoping this one can be fixed by trying harder, but if trying harder doesn't work it'll be getting doubled next year.

It looks like I spent more time reading this year, but it honestly may well be that I just did a better job of accurately counting reading time. I continue to be really bad about this. Writing time came in pretty high again, which I think is probably accurate to the amount of writing I did, what with a three year high on blog posts and a record high on fiction word count.  

First Year Goals

My patience for using the print button turns out to be pretty damn high. I could do math and make some kind of claim about the relationship between reading nonfiction and writing nonfiction, but so far no tidy, obvious ratio has presented itself, so for the time being we're going to let this goal do as it will according to the standard formula. Also, I read a lot more nonfiction in the course of a year than I thought. A little bit of this was books, but honestly most of those nearly 5000 pages was, so far as I can recall, just reading blog posts. The target for this year is probably too high, but since this is almost exclusively a derived stat, I'm not too worried about weirdness while it finds its level. 

The cleaning goal was not actually set high enough for what I need from it, as I was able to keep cleaning on track with everything else without actually getting any better about the laundry or at all on top of the things I need to organize. Since failures in this area have consequences in real life, I'm gonna just manually set it higher this year, rather than see what trying harder can accomplish. Cleaning time actually looks okay. It's also likely that both these goals were undercounted a little.  

Non-Core Goals 

I was worried that TTRPG Words had gone down every year since I added it, but for the first time since it's introduction, it actually went up this year, although not enough to stop the average, and consequently the target, from falling a little. The difference isn't huge, so we're just going to go with it for the time being, and reevaluate if it goes down again next year. Elements is in a similar spot - the goal is gonna go down a little, but not very much. It's mostly just how bad last year was, and I don't mind letting that take another year to get back on track, as long as back on track is the direction it's headed. Something went wrong with that metaphor. 

For the programming stuff, I did pivot, heavily, into romhacking. This has the dual advantages of occasionally being fun, producing tangible results that look cool within a timeframe I can tolerate, and being supported by a small and responsive community of other people who are, by definition, hobbyists, so there's less of this weird tech bro, startup kind of culture, even if programmers, as a group, continue to be kind of mean. To that end, I'm adding a target for programming tasks, because after a while, adding new guys to the Pokedex or whatever doesn't build any new skills, but you still have to do it for the game to get done. I strongly suspect programming time got at least a little undercounted this year, so since it's a time goal and the drop wasn't dramatic, I'm not gonna interfere with it, especially when I'm adding another thing that will work off of the same timer.  

Orbs and Video Game Time both got a substantial late boost from the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong, while basically every other goal likely took a commensurate hit. Silksong is great, by the way, you should play it. You should also play Hollow Knight but you're not gonna be much more confused if you play Silksong first. These games are Soulslikes, as well as Metroidvanias, so they're confusing by nature and also hard on purpose. At some point I should write a blog post about Soulslikes, games that are hard on purpose, and Bloodborne in particular. 

We're doing the "double the standard formula" thing for the goal formerly known as Duolingo too, and changing the name to Language Learning since I'm using Mango now but like, who the hell knows what will happen with that anymore. Podcasts too, because I know I'm godawful at actually listening to them but that doesn't mean I don't want to. 

I honestly expected the amount of TV I watched to be higher this year, relative to prior years, given that I did a fair amount of TV watching while I had Covid back in January. It's possible this got undercounted a little, but I'm not too fussed about it. The actual goal here isn't shifting much from last year, and the goal for Movies is shifting at all, so I guess they're finding their balance, the way things are supposed to. The YoutTube target is going down, substantially if not dramatically - this is partly due to changes in the way I've handled reading blog posts over the past couple of years, but if it continues slipping I may have to pin it for a while, as part of the idea here is to get through the backlog of channels not yet on my RSS feed, and I can't do that if the goal is low enough to be met with only the RSS feed itself. Television rewatch also went up organically, which is probably also Covid related. I feel like I need to get more structured about when I rewatch what, but that's still in the planning stages, so watch this space. 

I thought that how badly I did on walking this year was mostly attributable to, y'know, the Covid again, both in the extended confinement and taking it easy after so I didn't do myself further harm, but apparently the goal was straight up set incorrectly. It was set at 761km, when it ought to ave been 1132km, and I honestly don't know what went wrong there. 

I appear to have no record, anywhere, of how many SCP articles I actually read in 2023-2024, although based on my 2024-2025 target it must have been in the neighborhood of 40. That's what we're going with for the purposes of setting this year's target, anyway, although this is another one that I'm vaguely considering pinning, even though it's non-core, if it slips much further than it already has. I appear not to have a tracker set up for it anymore. On the other hand, I do still have a tracker set up for handwritten pages, even though we got rid of that, so the former can pretty smoothly replace the latter this coming year. I am making an explicit note here that I did 40 this past year, since in the absence of a tracker I don't have any visual record of that either. 

Music ran into a new problem this year when Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist started throwing AI slop at me, so now I'm mostly working through the catalog's of artists I already like but haven't listened to like, comprehensively. That and the steep drop that so many goals experience upon hitting their third year are the bases on which I'm keeping this goal around for now, but honestly it's still on thin ice. 

Sewing time went down because I didn't spent as much time playing tabletop games, basically, and while there was originally some notion of doing it while I listened to audiobooks etc, in practice that hasn't mostly been what happened. Repairs is holding steady for the time being, because I started darning a lot of little holes in my socks, which just doesn't take that long. Both goals are in line for either pinning or doubling if this coming year isn't as productive as I want it to be, but I'm gonna give it another year to see how Trying Harder goes. 

The TCGO stuff has also really started to find its level, with this coming year's time goal being virtually identical to the past year's, despite some pretty broad fluctuation in the records. This is probably somewhat undercounted, and I do want to get better about that, but not so much that I'm gonna try and correct the targeting right now. New Cards is going up a fair bit, but that's largely due to changes in how I play, not how much I play. 

New Goals

So the big new thing here is that Admin is getting dropped, which is why we didn't talk about it earlier. And by "dropped", I mean split into 7 separate categories, several of which are getting the same initial target that Admin would have had this year if we weren't breaking it up. The new goals are:

• Sorting: Putting stuff were it goes. This includes organizing files on my computer and making some kind of sense of the things I tagged for later on Tumblr. Sometimes includes just going "y'know what, no, I don't need to keep this". 
• Sifting: Sorting through big piles of things I mostly don't need to keep, determining any that I do need, doing something with those. Includes dealing with emails. 
• Listing: Making and adding to lists, whether they're static lists for randomizers and the like or dynamic lists like my TBR. 
• Updating: maintaining the trackers and read list here, a couple other projects that we'll talk about if they go anywhere. 
• Data entry: Copying information from one place to another, without doing a lot more to it than maybe applying an Excel formula. If I do have to do more that's probably listing. 
• Transcription: This is technically a new word count goal, and covers trying to make searchable transcripts for things that don't have them, write down all the quotes and lore in Eternal pursuant to making a lore wiki, etc. 
• Correspondence: Getting back to people, reaching out to people, filling out forms and applications, mail. 

The other two new goals are both reading articles, one for like, magazine articles the other for journal articles. The latter goal is called "Science" but does of course also encompass the humanities. 

We'll have the new trackers up in a little bit, probably not all at once. Next Dresden Files post should be in the soonish.  Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 14

Photo by Kevin Bonilla on Unsplash

Elidee leads Harry and Billy in more or less a straight line, rather than looking for the shortest route, at one point taking them over the top of a building. It's about a 30 minute walk, in the beginnings of a Chicago summer, so they're cranky and sweaty by the time she takes them to a door that will allow them into the pedway, which is apparently closed this time of day, and will be until six the next morning. I am once again having difficulty figuring the time here. Harry arrived at Murphy's apartment sometime between sunset and midnight. It's June 18th, so that's maybe 9 or 10pm. Too late to visit unannounced unless you're very close to someone, earlier than most adults go to bed of their own volition. Suppose he's there for a couple hours, gets home around midnight. Chapters 8 and 9 are mostly dialogue and should therefore play out mostly in real time - in the audiobook these come out together to 27 minutes 17 seconds, round up and call it half an hour, maybe 40 minutes to allow for Elaine's circuit of the room at the beginning of chapter 8 and then time Harry spends straightening the mantle and having feelings at the end of chapter 9, although the almost-fight with Morgan probably took longer to describe than it did to experience. So Harry falls asleep on the couch sometime between 12:30 and 1:00am. In chapter 1, Harry says he "hasn't slept", indicating that he may have been up for over 24 hours at that point, so it's possible he sleeps for as much as 12 hours here, although given the nightmares I honestly kind of doubt it. So let's say he gets up around noon. The conversation with Bob cannot be more than 23.5 minutes, since that's the full length of chapter 10, but showering, cleaning himself up, etc probably takes a while so let's call that an hour all-in, meaning he leaves the house at 1pm. Someone worked up a plausible looking approximate location for Harry's apartment, on the basis of which it should take 15, 20 minutes to get to the "southern edge of the Loop" where Reuel's apartment is. Call it 30 minutes to allow for traffic and parking (I may be underestimating Chicago traffic here, but it's not rush hour or anything). So he gets to Reuel's place around 1:30 pm. He wasn't actually in the apartment for that long, but he takes the stairs slowly and he's injured on the way out, so let's be really generous and call the whole thing an hour. He leaves for the funeral/viewing at 2:30. Now, unlike "midtown", River North is a real Chicago neighborhood, and at one time had the largest concentration of art galleries in the US outside of Manhattan, which may be why the changeling kids chose a funeral home there, I guess. Anyway. River North is pretty close to the Loop. Even coming from it's southernmost edge, this should be something on the order of a ten minute drive. Call it 15. So he gets Quiet Acres at about 2:45. Call it another 15 that he spends lurking around trying to spot the murderer among those in attendance before wandering into a back corridor. He overhears maybe a whole minute of discussion there before following the kids outside, has a quick scuffle, then gets thrown in the trash, and after "a minute", Billy shows up. By this time it is maybe 3:15. The pre-summoning conversation with Billy can't possibly have gone on for more than 10 minutes, it takes another 10 for Toot and his guys to arrive (this is specified), and then they have to negotiate, eat the pizza and get underway, let's say that all manages to take 45 minutes somehow, it's 4pm when they start following Elidee. It's "better than half an hour" to get to the tunnel entrance, making their arrival sometime between 4:30 and 5pm. The unfinished building is presumably the Heritage at Millennium Park, which finished construction in 2005. Now, pedway hours are a bit variable, and depend some on the businesses to which any given entrance connects. (I have looked at multiple maps in the last hour that said to assume Pedway hours were x to y "unless otherwise noted" but did not provide any notes. These maps did not agree with each other about the actual times either. I think the signs indicating pedway entrances are supposed to give hours, but like, they don't.) However, the earliest official closing time I've seen anyway is 5pm, that only appears to be after the start of Covid, and I cannot figure Harry getting there that late. He could have slept longer than I estimated, but given that he's sitting on the couch and got woken up by a nightmare, I think my guess is, if anything, overgenerous, and my estimates on the time he spent in Reuel's building and negotiating with Toot were deliberately so. On the other hand the impression I've gotten of the Chicago pedway from Reddit indicates it's possible their entrance just closed at 4pm that day for no particular reason. 

Photo by Julien on Unsplash

In any event, they take the pedway to a section that's gated off with a sign reading "DANGER KEEP OUT". For the life of me I cannot figure out where this is supposed to be. The only reference to any abandoned section of the pedway that I could find anywhere, and I looked, is to a tunnel connection what is currently Chase Tower with 70 W Madison, but that isn't connected to the "main tunnels of the pedway" in the first place. Based on the description, this should actually mark a connection between the pedway and the old freight tunnels. If you're aware of where the heck this closed off section is supposed to be, or could be, you are welcome and encouraged to let me know in the comments. A short way in, the tunnel walls become rough and uneven. I don't know if I'm supposed to be picturing natural stone or crumbling brick here, although if they're in the freight tunnels it should be the latter. Harry pulls out his pentacle for light, and we're given an explanation of what it represents (to him), the five elements held within a circle of human will and intent. Elidee leads them to an apparently blank wall panel which Harry starts fiddling with to find their way into Undertown. When Billy says he doesn't know what Undertown is, Harry explains that Chicago was built on a swamp and that initially, buildings and even streets would gradually sink into the mud, and they started building streets and building entrances a story up, so they would be at ground level after sinking, creating an entire level of the city that was underground and mostly buried in mud. This is... not entirely accurate. Chicago was, an in fact still is, slowly sinking into the swamp upon which it was built, but I can find no evidence that buildings were constructed to sink a full story into the muck, and the buried streets, while real, have a more complex origin and are not still down there somewhere waiting to be walked. Due to constant, lethal outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery, and cholera, Chicago implemented the first comprehensive sewage system in the US. This process involved moving a lot of central Chicago about four feet up, which required the existing streets to be covered with several feet of soil and relaid higher up to correspond with the new entrance level of the surrounding buildings. Those old streets presumably still exist under the new ones, but they don't connect to anything and the space between them and the surface is about four feet high and full of dirt. Seattle actually did end up with an undercity in parts of downtown as part of a similar "we're too close to the water level" regrading process, but as they did it after their big 19th century fire, rather than before, renovation was able to be a little more comprehensive. You don't have to elevate buildings that are currently smoking piles of rubble. I'm skipping over some of the absolutely bonkers feats of engineering involved in both the lifting and the management of its aftermath because they have no bearing on the story we're trying to talk about here, but you can find most of this on Wikipedia - start with the Raising of Chicago and maybe take a look at the one for the water cribs as well. According to Harry, the undercity created by this sinking process was, for a time, home to both vermin and criminals. Again, there was a lot of crime in Seattle's undercity for a while there, and if I remember rightly there were some speakeasies and things in Chicago's freight tunnels, but Chicago never had a secret undeground level of the city proper the way this book describes, although a lot of its rat population is contained in its various tunnels. He asserts, accurately, that there are a lot of tunnels under Chicago, and that the Manhattan project was housed there at one time, which is...complicated. Chicago Pile-1, the first artificial nuclear reactor, was in Chicago, was part of the the Manhattan project, and was underground, but it was housed in a squash court at the University of Chicago, by whose Metallurgical Laboratory it was developed, not in the city's tunnel system(s). It's also hard to say that the Manhattan project was "housed" any particular where - it was a multi-site operation, and work at the Metallurgical Laboratory continued at least through 1944, well after Los Alamos was established, although Pile-1 was eventually dismantled and reassembled in Argonne forest preserve, where the Argonne National Laboratory continues energy research operations to this day.  At some point, vampires and other... Things moved in and ate a lot of the humans and rats down there. A lot of what lives in Undertown are strictly subterranean creatures that don't have a lot of contact with humans, even wizards, in the usual course of things, and about which Harry therefore doesn't know a whole lot. Apparently there might be "wyrms" down there, although I don't think it's ever established what that means in this setting. Billy is less than enthusiastic about this proposition, but Harry reminds him that he wanted to come along. He also runs Billy through the basics of dealing with the sidhe - no gifts, no bargains, be careful of sensual temptation. Billy is a little impatient, leaving Harry uncertain whether he's gotten his point across, but he recognizes that it's hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it. 

Photo by El khalil EL ARFAOUI on Unsplash

After a little more walking in the dark, the tunnel opens out into a low-roofed cavern, and Harry almost
immediately picks up bad vibes. Grimalkin has arrived to guide them to Maeve's court. This is the first time in the series that we encounter a malk, and I don't think we actually see Grimalkin here, just hear his voice and watch his glowing footprints on the floor. He's initially reluctant to introduce himself, although it's not clear if that's the result of nefarious intent, the natural fae reluctance to answer direct questions, or a personal desire to be a butt. Harry explains, for Billy's benefit and the reader's, that the fae are bound by anything they say three times, so if Grimalkin was lying when he initially expressed his intent to get them to Maeve unharmed, he's stuck with it now, but that they don't like being bound that way, so if you do it to a faerie who was actually trying to be helpful, they might reasonably get upset. I'm not actually sure why this was necessary. Elidee hides in Harry's hair when Grimalkin shows up, but she's still there, and the bargain with Toot was for her to guide Harry to Maeve, not just to someone who could. If Grimalkin tries to lead him off a cliff or into an ambush, presumably she would know they were going the wrong way and communicate as much. Granted, this has failure modes, but so does seriously infringing on the autonomy of a virtual stranger who hasn't yet done anything worse to you than sound creepy in the dark. Grimalkin, still apparently invisible, leads them by means of glowing footprints deeper into Undertown, where the stone begins to look like it's been...swirled? "Smoothed into place like soft serve ice cream". I'm only like, 70% sure that I understand what I'm supposed to be picturing here, but it's sufficient to illustrate the level of control that a Faerie Queen has over a place she's claimed as her own. 

They reach a set of tall wooden doors, which initially seem to depict a garden scene, but on closer examination... I mean, it is a garden, but it's a garden with a lot of human corpses and skeletons, and people having sex, and the fae watching from between the branches. This vaguely evokes Mab's ice garden from Proven Guilty, although there were fewer obvious corpses there, and more human ice sculptures. Slightly more tasteful than a big sign that says "Beyond these doors lie beauty, sex, and death, not necessarily in that order", but it conveys the same information. There's a little bit of an audiobook glitch here, where the description of the doors opening is repeated, apparently because James Marsters stumbled a little over a word and redid it, and then the earlier version wasn't removed. Inside, they find big band music, a 1920s ballroom tilted slightly on its side, with a creepy pond at the lower end and a throne on the higher, and about 40 of the sidhe, dancing in period accurate World War 2 era dresses and military uniforms. The description here is very good, but it's also, and I suspect this is deliberate, distracting. We spend as much time on one young woman's hair being sapphire blue, somewhat inappropriate to the setting, than on the period outfits. We're told that the sidhe are in "dress uniforms of both the army and the navy that looked authentic to the month and year". No one speaks of "the army" or "the navy" when they're not referring to to the army or navy of their own country, and uh, not to put to fine a point on it, if any of the Winter Sidhe were in Nazi uniforms, Harry would have said. This pretty much tells us that no one in Winter killed Reuel or stole his mantle, that they didn't initiate hostilities and that to the extent that there are good guys and bad guys here, they are not among the latter. Also, I suppose, that despite their not having picked this fight, a victory here could give Winter a substantial and lasting boost to their power and prestige within the supernatural world. Which, in the event, is pretty much what happens. 

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

The human musicians are exhausted, underfed, and shackled, but they seem unbothered by this and entirely focused on their music. They're also very good. As Our Heroes watch, the trumpeter goes into a very impressive solo, while the other musicians just kind of collapse, until he suffers, I'm not sure, a heart attack or something, and dies, right there on the stage. The Sidhe dancers, who stopped to watch as well, part to allow Maeve through. She looks like a younger Mab - maybe 17 if I'm reading this right, with dreadlocs in the white, lavender, pale blue, and green that comprise Winter's signature colors. Now, the idea that white people shouldn't mat their hair into an approximation of dreadlocs was not anything like as well known, at least to white people, in 2002 as it is today, and certainly I don't think Maeve is above committing a little cultural appropriation, but this is once again making me wonder how the Mantles of the Queens interact with the bearers' racial features. We know the Mantles change the color of the Queens' hair and eyes (the Mantle of the Summer Knight turns Fix's hair white eventually as well, but he was already a changeling, and taking up the Knight's Mantle presumably constituted Choosing - which raises all kind of questions about the nature of the damn thing since Knights are supposed to be mortal, but we'll get to that in later books when it actually matters - I don't think Harry will undergo the same physical changes). We also know it changes skin color at least a little, since the Queens are all somewhere on the spectrum from very pale to inhumanly pale. So like, Maeve could be black, or at least mixed? We've seen her twin sister, and Sarissa's skin tone is described as as a "medium olive tone", which could mean almost anything. "Olive" is what writer's say when they don't want to commit to anything. Sarissa also seems to have fairly straight hair, but that can happen. Obviously, given that Maeve is, y'know, violent, predatory, and hypersexual, I really hope she's not supposed to be black, since that would be super, super racist, like, well out of parameters for what we usually see in this series, which is already pretty racist. But I've been thinking about how the Mantles would work with people of color since the second time I read Cold Days. Anyway, speaking of being predatory and hypersexual, Maeve straddles the trumpeter's corpse, kisses it on the lips, and makes a remark about how he said he'd die to play like that, which probably does more to clarify for Billy the hazards of making deals with the Fae than anything Harry could say on the subject. The other Sidhe applaud, for the death or Maeve's remark or both, which is kinda unsettling, but like, unsettling applause seems to be part of Winter's Thing. 

Maeve announces that they have a visitor, then resumes her throne so that Harry can approach. They go through the absolute minimum formalities, and then Harry just up and asks her whether she arranged the murder of Ronald Reuel. She says she can't just tell him something like that, he'll have to pay for it. He correctly reasons that she wants something in particular or she wouldn't have sent Grimalkin to escort him. She tells him to sit down so they can make a deal. 

Okay, so what happened was, I made a mistake on my spreadsheet and spent a lot of the past week trying to get caught up to where I thought I already was on fiction writing. Needless to say it's unlikely that you'll see another Dresden Files post before the end of the month, which also marks the end of the year in which I track my progress. In the next little bit here I'll be getting all the trackers and things up to date so everything will be tidy and ready to go for the Goals post sometime in the first few days of October. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 13

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Billy holds the pizza while Harry sets up a circle trap. When we talked about Storm Front Chapter 6, I mentioned that referring to "magic circle theory" makes it sound like it's a whole field of study, and how that reading is at least somewhat supported by the variety of circles, and the variety of uses to which they're put, throughout the series. We learn in Dead Beat that literally anyone can put up a basic protective circle - you don't have to be even a minor practitioner, and it's sort of implied in Fool Moon that Kim's difficulty in setting up and maintaining the Greater Circle she uses to help MacFinn is more because she doesn't understand it properly than anything to do with raw strength. So now I'm wondering whether anyone with the right training can create the kind of circle trap Harry uses here, and snare something in it if they have that thing's Name. Regular humans trapping faeries or similar and coercing them or making deals with them is a pretty old and widespread idea, and it sometimes even goes the humans' way, so I think it's within the realm of possibility, given that the Dresden Files is functionally an All Myths Are True setting. 

Harry asks Billy to keep an eye out in case anyone tries to sneak up on them, and Billy complains that he wanted to do more to help than just bringing the pizza. He points out that he could get the scents of Reuel's changelings, to which Harry agrees, acknowledging, although not out loud, that he's forgotten Billy could do that. There's some tasty nuance happening here. Harry did underestimate Billy, again, and didn't consider either his abilities or that he would have more idea about what to do with them than Harry would. Billy, for his part, is being a bit impetuous. He wants to do something more interesting, more exciting, than the legitimately helpful thing he's been asked to do. Hard to say what he would have done if Harry hadn't signed off on his getting the kids' scents; I honestly don't think he'd have wandered off, but I'm less sure than I'd like to be. 

We're briefly reintroduced to the idea of Names, and to how this kind of summoning is a bit of a gray area under the Laws of Magic, which Harry tries to be diligent about obeying since the Council has it out for him. The description of Toot-toot when he arrives is so similar to the one from Storm Front that I had to check whether the wording was identical in a couple places - it's not, quite. In Storm Front he's described as having a "form that echoed the splendor of the fae lords" and in Summer Knight we get "his beauty a distant echo of the lords of Faerie, the Sidhe". Toot is wearing a helmet made from a plastic bottle cap, and carrying both a spear (consisting of a straight pin secured to a pencil) and a plastic cocktail sword. He does his very best to perform a perimeter check of the pizza, then gives a whole cloud of similarly equipped small fae the okay to land. They set upon the pizza, but of course as soon as anyone takes a bite, the circle closes, trapping them inside. Toot initially thinks Harry is there to make them join Winter's side in the impending faerie war, and says he can't make them since they haven't been Called yet. Having extracted extensive assurances that Harry is not there to do any such thing, he and his people return their attention to the slice of pizza, devouring it in seconds. 

Once the all-important business of eating pizza is taken care of, he explains that the "drawing of the wildfae" has begun, and that usually fae who do nice things are called to Summer, while those who do mean thing are called to Winter, but he's not sure which side he'll be called to. Harry offers them the rest of the pizza in exchange for information about the whereabouts of the Summer and Winter ladies. Maeve is in undertown, and has been since last fall when all the local turbulence in the spirit world naturally attracted her attention. Best I can tell, every major city has at least a few spooky underground tunnels. I haven't done a comprehensive survey, but New York City, Paris, and London are all known for theirs, and Seattle has a respectable network. Baltimore is the least tunnel-y city I've ever personally looked into, with only a small set of tunnels under a single neighborhood. So Chicago isn't special in having an undercity, but it is perhaps notable in the depth and diversity of tunnels down there. You got the pedway tunnels, underground streets, sewers, some amount of abandoned subway tunnels, and of course the freight tunnels. Public facing information indicates that the lattermost are wholly inaccessible to the public, after flooding in the early 1990s, but I would be the opposite of surprised to discover that humans had found their way in, because I've met humans. Since Maeve is in Chicago, so of course is Aurora, and since Maeve is underground, Aurora is of course up on top of a "big building", although Toot is not usefully able to describe which building, and eventually agrees to send a guide with Harry - he doesn't want to go himself and miss out on the pizza. I do wonder what Harry would have done if Maeve and Aurora weren't both in Chicago - the urgency of the situation doesn't really allow for travel at the speed Harry can manage it, unless he wanted to use the Ways, which would be like, spectacularly unsafe under the circumstances. 

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Toot introduces Harry to Elidee, a red-glowing faerie so small she resembles a spark from a campfire. I don't know if she's a dewdrop faerie like Toot or if she's some other kind of small, glowing, winged fae. She can understand Harry, but is too small to speak in a way he can hear, instead communicating largely by flashing twice for yes and once for no. Harry offers to let her grab some pizza before they leave, in which context I'm not sure why they couldn't have just waited for Toot to grab himself some pizza, and had a guide who they'd met before and who can actually speak to Harry and Billy with like, words. Maybe it would have taken him longer to eat, since he's like six inches tall, I don't know. While Elidee is eating, Billy returns from scent-getting, reporting, to absolutely no one's surprise, that the kids don't smell entirely normal. Harry warns him not too spend long watching the faeries eat pizza, as looking at faerie lights can be disorienting, which helps establish their relative knowledge levels about the fae, and begins to set the tone as to just how many hidden dangers you can trip over when dealing with faeries. Elidee returns from her pizza and starts drifting in the direction of their first objective, the Winter Lady, and Harry tells Billy to stay alert and watch his back, something Billy is considerably more willing to do now that it involves going somewhere and doing something. He asks, almost hopefully, whether Harry is expecting trouble. 

Got my computer back in working order, but I'm having what feels like more than the usual amount of difficulty getting my shit together to put in the burst of extra work I usually do in September. Still have more done than I did this time last year, although we'll talk more about that at the beginning of October. Realistically I'm hoping to get maybe two more post done between now and October 1st. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things.  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 12

Harry manages to get out of the building and drive away without getting stopped by the police. The run-in with Grum pretty well confirms that someone in faerie wanted to hide something that was at Reuel's place, but this doesn't get Harry any closer to figuring out what it might have been. Grum himself also stands out a bit, among ogres as a group, for being restrained and decisive, for his smooth shape shifting, and for being able to almost completely ground out Harry's magic, although all ogres can do that to one degree or another. Given that "Grum" is not actually an ogre, I'm sort of curious how he pulled off the thing with Harry's magic, actually. As far as I know, this isn't part of the usual Sidhe package. In any case, that such an exceptional Ogre was sent suggests that someone powerful wanted something removed from Reuel's apartment. I note that Harry's conclusion here was accurate, despite being based on flawed premises. I suppose a disguised fae lord indicates roughly the same things as an unusually powerful and intelligent Ogre. 

A great deal of descriptive space is dedicated to how the funeral home, until recently Flannery's Funeral Home, now Quiet Acres, has declined under corporate (rather than family) ownership, and how they didn't do a very good job with Reuel's body. I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to convey. I do think it's a little odd that neither Titania nor Aurora made higher quality arrangements. Aurora is insane, and was the one who had him killed, but she doesn't want anyone to know that. Mab wouldn't let this happen to Harry, although she might have for Slate if he'd gotten a funeral in the mortal world. Lily wouldn't let this happen to Fix. We'll let the Mothers off the hook since they don't generally seem to take much of an interest in the Knights unless the Knights approach them first. If I had to guess, we're meant to understand that the changeling squad were left to handle funeral stuff, but Reuel had money, and presumably life insurance. Maybe he had it set up so the kids were the beneficiaries, and either they went with an inexpensive option because they needed the rest of the money, or he asked them to, if something happened to him, just handle his funeral cheaply and use most of the insurance money to take care of themselves. And of course, if Reuel was secretly J. R. R. Tolkien, the fancy funeral and burial stuff all happened back when he faked his own death before becoming the Summer Knight, and he wouldn't be too fussed about doing it all a second time. This does also underscore the disposability of the Knights, but it might have benefitted from a little more explication. 

Harry goes in without his staff or rod, because in most mundane circles, walking around with a big stick is looked at somewhat askance, and in magical circles, coming in with that kind of firepower makes it look like you're trying to start a fight. This comes up in a few other books, but I think this is the first time it's been discussed. We're told that the funeral is already underway when he arrives, but from the description (open casket on display, people awkwardly hanging out), it sounds like this is the viewing, which in my admittedly limited experience is a different thing, usually held on a different day (occasionally a couple days) before the actual funeral. There aren't any obvious bad guys in the viewing room, nor does anyone show the odd or anarchronistic fashion choices of a fairy trying to pass for human. The possibility of someone hiding under a veil is raised, but not followed up on, but short of opening up his Sight I'm not really sure what Harry could do about that. We didn't do any potions during the Infodumo With Bob this book, and Harry knew he was coming here, so if the story had called for it, he could have mixed up a potion that would help with veils somehow, but since there isn't anyone hiding under a veil, this would have been a waste of time and page space. Presumably in the interests of thoroughness, Harry slips into a back hallway, just in time to overhear several people talking about how Lily is missing, although they don't use her name, and that Harry's here, which they seem to think is a problem. Fix says Harry is rumored to be a decent sort, and Ace says that people who get in Harry's way have a tendency to end up dead, but they both defer to Meryl, whose name I may be spelling wrong because it's not in this chapter, when she says they should leave. There's a detailed description of the hallway, which I'm sure would be very helpful if this were a TTRPG campaign and it wasn't yet certain where the confrontation would take place, as Harry follows them outside. 

Fix sees Harry, and squeaks. Ace goes for a gun. Meryl just backhands him, giving him his first concussion of the book. (If you "see stars" after getting hit in the head, that's a concussion). Harry tries to ask them to hang on second, but it comes out rather garbled, on account of the fresh head trauma, causing Fix to panic further, until Meryl throws Harry into the dumpster. To be clear, this involves throwing him about ten feet through the air, which is our first unambiguous indicator that she, at least, isn't entirely human. 

Harry lies there for a minute, trying to recover, while the changeling squad runs off. A minute later, Billy appears. He brought pizza. I don't think it was actually established anywhere that Harry asked Billy to come here or do this, but I may be forgetting something, if it happened earlier than Chapter 11. 

I apologize for the lack of pictures, and likely greater than usual incidence of typos, in this post. I spilled tea on my laptop charger, like the block part, apparently killing it, which I did not know could happen. It's not like I haven't spilled tea on my charger before. My charger is if a mildly unusual type, and I don't live within easy reach of a decent electronics store, so my new charger won't arrive until tomorrow. (Being this rural also means that sometimes I just straight up can't get overnight or two day shipping, even if I'm willing to pay for it.) It's coming up on the end of my working year, so I'm gonna be trying to get as much done as possible between now and October 1st, but also Silksong just came out which is... likely to affect my productivity. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 11

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Harry enters Reuel's building disguised as a flower deliveryman. The first time I read Summer Knight, I had never previously encountered the name FTD, and didn't know what Harry was pretending to deliver until more than halfway through the chapter, when Grum said he didn't smell flowers. Founded in 1910, FTD was the first floral wire service, which is sort of like Doordash for flowers, originally handled by telegram, although the process was a little inelegant compared to modern food delivery brokerages (partly due to the necessity of having physical locations from which customers could place orders). FTD originated as a member-owned cooperate of florists, but was sold to a hedge fund in 1994, after which it operated as a for-profit company. When the organization was founded, FTD stood for Florists Telegraph Delivery, but in 1965 the name was changed to Florists' Transworld Delivery. Harry observes that a hat, a package, and a confident stride can get you into a lot of places. 

He's looking for residual energy or other signs that magic was involved in Reuel's death, but doesn't find any, indicating that either magic wasn't used or it was cleaned up very thoroughly. It's my vague, misty recollection that while it wasn't done by a human, Reuel really was just pushed down the stairs, and Summer Mantle or no, he's old. Kind of a Hound of the Baskervilles situation - the dog wasn't some kind of hellhound, just a regular dog with some phosphorus smeared on, but it scared the old guy into having a heart attack. Actually, come to think of it, iirc that entire thing was also some sort of complicated inheritance scheme. Might need to reread it so I'm better equipped to catch further references. 

He hears something, and stops to Listen, and we're briefly told what Listening is, which is mildly interesting inasmuch as it was referenced earlier without explanation. To be clear, not explaining during the conversation with the Gatekeeper was the right call, it would have badly broken up the tension of the scene, but it does lead me to wonder if there was some editing weirdness. He hears someone muttering curses down the hall, pulls his blasting rod out of the box, and goes to find Reuel's apartment very directly and physically broken into, and a very large man in a bowler hat going though the papers on his desk. Harry's immediate thought is that this means Reuel was hiding evidence, which like, I don't disagree that it indicates he was in possession of evidence, but "hiding" feels like an odd word to use at this stage. We also get a description of the apartment, which is overdone and Victorian, looking like it could have been imported from "429-B Baker Street". I assume Butcher means 221 and just forgot the actual number, and the Light alone knows the editing on these early books was minimal enough that it could have gotten missed, but it's possible this is referencing some specific story in which Doyle or a subsequent author got Holmes's address wrong. The more overt Sherlock Holmes reference is also making me think there might actually be something to my Hound of the Baskervilles notion, but I haven't read it in like 20 years. 

Harry, who got a proper night's sleep pretty recently and hasn't been hit on the head even once this book, stops to consider his options. Grum - Harry does not yet know his name - isn't gonna just let him look at the papers, and a fight in such tight quarters isn't a great idea. Harry, by his own accounting, isn't very good at evocation, although I wish we had a better sense by this point of what being good at evocation really looks like. He's got the fuego thing and then I think two wind spells all of which seem to work just fine for him, so I guess the issue is one of repertoire and flexibility. I know he nearly has a panic attack in Proven Guilty just at the thought of trying to use fuego in an unusual way. He considers a more physical confrontation, but then Grum picks up a very heavy couch one handed, so obviously that's not a good idea. So he walks in, asks Grum to sign for the flowers, and steals what he thinks might be an index card out of the bag Grum is using to hold Reuel's papers.

The ruse falls apart almost immediately, because Grum doesn't smell flowers and, more to the
point, does smell magic. He picks Harry up by the neck, but Harry pulls an iron nail out of his pocket and stabs Grum in the arm. Grum throws him all the way out of Reuel's living room, where Harry actually lands on the bed. Twice, since he initially bounces off it and hits the wall, but still. Grum drops the human disguise, apparently revealing himself as a twelve-foot tall ogre, although of course rereaders will know he's actually a Sidhe knight or something. I don't remember that guy's name or title. Harry uses ventas servitas to get his blasting rod back, and then tries to set Grum on fire, but the magic just...doesn't take. He shrugs it off like it's not even there. Harry narrowly avoids having his bones ground to make Grum's bread because someone down the hall asks what the racket is, and says she's already called the police. Grum tells Harry he got lucky, and leaves, just as they start to hear sirens. 

Harry takes a moment to look at what he took from Grum, it's not an index card but a photograph of Reuel at one of the Disney parks, along with the four young people whom we will later learn are Meryl, Lily, Ace, and Fix. Interestingly, Harry doesn't even sort of suspect that they might be changelings, instead figuring Meryl and Lilly's green hair for a dye job, and Fix's near-white for bleach. Harry doesn't want to get arrested by the mortal police either, and leaves the building, wondering what would have made Grum want to remove this picture from Reuel's apartment. 

I'm sorry this one took so long. My partner, who I think I have mentioned is a game designer, was getting his first publicly released game ready for open beta for two of the past three weeks, so I was doing editing and page layout for that, making the website, setting up the itch.io page, the patreon, the Discord server, y'know, etc. Shadows From Another World is a social deduction game, sorta One Night Werewolf (or Mafia, if you're old fashioned) meets The Thing. The open beta is free, and the materials to play the game are available at literally all of those links, so you should go check it out. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 10

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 Harry dreams, the same dream he's been having over and over since Susan disappeared. They're kissing - the text is a lot more detailed than this, but you can go read it if you want details about how soft everyone's skin is - and when they pull apart, he asks Susan if she's okay, and she shakes her head, then turns away and tries to go into a nightclub. She wants him to go with her, he refuses, her eyes go all dark and vampirey, and hands reach out of nowhere to start pulling her inside. He is suddenly overcome with lust, and starts kissing her again, now with the addictive vampire venom. They tear each other's clothes off, with help from the hands, and start having sex up against the wall of the alley. Then she bites him, injecting him with more of the venom, until he physically collapses, mid-sex. He leaves his body, and looks down on the rest of the scene as Susan kills him, completes her own transformation into a vampire, realizes what she's done, and screams. 

Harry wakes up, upset and horny, and takes a cold shower about it. He hasn't had sex, experienced much in the way of sexual desire, or (it's sort of implied) even masturbated since Susan left, so that aspect of the dreams tends to hit him pretty hard. He starts guilt spiraling again about how everything that happened to Susan is his fault, but relies on his two best coping skill, routine and activating the drowning reflex by sticking his face in cold water, to start getting his head clear. He shaves, finally, and does all the other shower things, and by the end of it he feels enough like himself to go down to the lab and get to work. 

The lab has seen some changes since the last time we saw it. It's organized now, with most of his supplies lined up on wire shelves, in appropriate jars or boxes with labels telling now only what they are, but how much is left and when he got them. The work tables are clear except for notes, candles, and pens, and the summoning circle is completely clear, although he's been doing that since the toad demon incident in Storm Front. He wakes Bob up, and we get a brief description of who and what Bob is. He starts trying to tell Bob about the situation, but Bob cuts him off to say that they aren't going to be able to find a cure for Susan, other people have tried and the thing simply can't be done. Harry says that he hasn't tried yet, and Bob calls him Captain Ahab, until Harry explains that they're actually gonna work on something else today. He lays out the basic of the case, until Bob freaks out when Mab's name comes into it. He thinks Harry would have been better off stealing a baby to pay Mab off, and it's sort of implied that he warned Harry not to make that first deal with Lea, although I'm not sure the timeline on that works out. He tells Harry that Reuel was the Summer Knight, and lays out roughly what that entails: Knights are mortals granted power by the Queens of Faerie, they can kill people, including mortals, who aren't part of the Courts, which the Queens themselves can't do directly, and they're relatively disposable. I note here that in I think Cold Days, Harry says he's "assumed" that the Summer Knight's role was pretty similar to his own, in its emphasis on killing people for Mab, but I don't think it counts as an assumption if someone who's usually right about almost everything tells you outright that something is the case. Harry asks if that means he won't get himself killed on this case, and Bob clarifies that first of all, his debt to Mab means she can hurt him if he wants to, but also the restriction is only on killing him directly. She could, for example, trick him into walking into quicksand, which is a tidy bit of foreshadowing for the mud pit incident later. In any event, no one in Faerie is likely to be that upset about Reuel's murder per se, which means this is about power, because it's almost always about power when the Fae are involved. 

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Harry, who is a hell of a lot smarter when he's actually slept, puts the pieces together from there. Mab said
something had been stolen, Reuel's power comes from the Summer Queen, it was supposed to snap back to the Queen upon his death but for some reason it didn't, and Titania naturally figured it was Mab's doing. This puts Faerie out of balance, which could account for the rain of toads. It's also pretty bad news for anyone who has to live in earth's ecosystem, since that's gonna get all out of whack if the imbalance persists, until the Queens almost inevitably go to war about it, which could restore the balance but will more likely end up with one side or the other a clear victor, which could result in either an ice age or an era of rampant growth - presumably the latter is what happened with the Cambrian explosion and later with the Cretaceous period. Bob doesn't give examples, but does say he hasn't existed long enough to have seen the last time this happened. It's also noted here that Mab never actually said she didn't do it, although she couldn't have done it directly. Bob says a fall down a flight of stairs, or even several flights of stairs, wouldn't have killed one of the Knights, which given that Reuel is supposed to have broken his neck, may be subtle setup for Harry's becoming the Winter Knight when his back gets broken in Changes. A regular mortal could have killed Reuel, but they probably would have left a smoking crater. A wizard could have done it, but it would have taken both power and finesse to make it look like an accident. Even narrowing it to those with that kind of skill, there are too many wizards to investigate them all just yet, so Harry sets that aside, assuming for the time being that it's internal business, which he thinks leaves three suspects, the Faerie Queens and the Winter Knight. Bob informs him that there are three Queens per court, and describes the system, naming Aurora and Maeve, but not the Mothers. Harry expands the list to seven, and then, reluctantly, to eight.  He tells Bob that Elaine is alive, earning an "I told you so", and pretty directly asks Bob to contradict him and say Elaine wasn't powerful enough to do the thing, to which Bob says that while she doesn't have Harry's raw power, she's basically better at magic. He's also impressed - so am I, honestly - that Harry's willing to consider her a suspect. 

Harry figures that his next step is to learn more about Reuel, so he's gonna break into his house and then go to the funeral and see who shows up. 

As is often the case with the "confer with Bob, get the worldbuilding" chapters, this is kind of a short post relative to the length of the chapter. I've also got an absolutely bonkers week coming up, but honestly I'm liking my chances of getting another post by this coming Monday or Tuesday. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 9

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Elaine tosses Harry his sword cane, and then vanishes into the bedroom. Harry opens the door for Morgan, who has changed into street clothes but still has his sword, now in a golf bag over one shoulder. Morgan asks if he's interrupting something, and Harry makes a joke about watching porn, which Morgan seems to find legitimately upsetting. Harry tries to shut the door in his face, but Morgan keeps it open. He wants to know how it just so happens that Mab had already contacted Harry, specifically, with her request, when that's the one thing that might get Harry out of being sent to the vampires. He thinks the whole thing reflects a "deeper scheme" between Harry, the vampires, and the Winter Court. I'm honestly torn on whether this is unfair or not. Like, it does look like an awfully big coincidence, but anyone who knows thing one about the Fae should be able to figure out that it's far more likely that Mab engineered the whole situation for some mysterious Mab reason, and Harry's just caught in the middle of it somehow. The Gatekeeper also obviously knew it was coming, so if the theory here is that Harry's in some kind of evil alliance with Winter and the vampires, that implicates a member of the senior council as well. Obviously there's a good chance that none of this was actually Morgan's idea, but whoever fed him his lines here is putting a hell of a lot of faith in Morgan's lack of critical thinking skills winning against his paranoia to keep him from noticing that. 

Harry, for his part, starts laughing. He makes a lot of snarky remarks in this exchange that I've left out because they're well-written but don't benefit much from line by line analysis, but I did want to observe that Harry is actually using a social skill here. Morgan's blatant hostility doesn't really leave any constructive options for a response, but deflecting and making jokes at least doesn't escalate, or really Morgan anything to work with to try to push Harry's buttons further or give himself probable cause to just kill Harry. 

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Anyway, Morgan punches Harry in the stomach and walks into the apartment, barely slowed down by
either the threshold or the wards, since the former aren't very strong and the latter aren't mostly meant to stop humans. I think Harry fixes that after this. He starts talking about how Harry might not be a bad person, fundamentally, which is the nicest thing Morgan has ever said to Harry on-page at this point, and probably among the top three nicest things he says to Harry in the entire series, but that he's been compromised, either working with the Red Court or being used by them, and either way he's a threat to the Council that needs to be removed. This, while inaccurate, actually isn't a bad guess, based on the information Morgan would have been able to verify. The events of Grave Peril hinged on several significant coincidences, several adversaries of the White Council knowing somewhat more about magic than they really should have, and Harry's somewhat idiosyncratic personal motivations. That he was working with them from the start to get this war underway is a much cleaner, more straightforward explanation. Harry asks what the hell he's talking about, and Morgan says that Susan is a vampire. Harry says that she's not, and they go back and forth about it a little bit, not just because Morgan's a jerk and Harry's lowkey in denial but because they're working from different definitions of "vampire". Morgan means that she has a vampire's abilities, she has the addictive venom, and she can enthrall people. Harry means that she's still a human person with a human soul. They're both right. Morgan starts picking up the card Susan sent Harry, her photograph, talking about how she's pretty, but that isn't hard to come by, and how unlikely it is that a normal human woman would actually want to take up with Harry, how it's more likely that she was working with the vampires from the beginning. Then he calls her a whore, which I know he didn't come up with himself, because Morgan does actually drink his respect women juice, and considering how offensive he finds the idea of looking at porn, I don't think he's just gonna pull out the word "whore" to be an asshole, y'know? 

Harry draws his sword, which is not a constructive response but honestly, Morgan just called his girlfriend a whore and asserted that she never actually loved him, and he's already had a really long day. Morgan responds by drawing his sword, and Harry reflects on their relative capabilities, how his speed and reach, in the small space they're in, give him an advantage here despite Morgan being objectively the better swordsman. He also thinks it would be an advantage that the weight of his sword is measured in "ounces rather than stones". So first of all, last I checked, as a unit of weight, "stone" doesn't take the pluralizing "s", but also there is a zero percent chance that Morgan's sword is weighed in stone, plural. One stone is 14 pounds. Swords simply are not that heavy. The claymore, among the heaviest sword types to see actual use, topped out at about six and a half pounds. Some Zweihänders are larger, but these were still not heavier than 4kg (about 8.8lbs) and Zweihänders of this weight were not actually used for fighting. For comparison, the weights of various one-handed swords tends to cluster around 1kg (about 2.2lbs), so this is still a lot of sword. But even allowing as Morgan's blade might be a little heavier than what's generally considered usable sword range, since it's partially made of silver for Magic Reasons, it is still not within the reasonable realm of possibility for it to weigh more than about 7lbs. I suppose that could be expressed as "half a stone", but it's certainly not stone, plural. Harry would very much like to stab Morgan, but remarkably, his brain actually kicks in before he does anything irreversible, and he lowers his sword and observes aloud that this would be the Merlin's third plan, the ace in the hole. He tells Morgan that there's probably another Warden waiting outside, a witness to say Morgan was justified, before they deliver Harry's body to the vampires. I do note here that there's an outside chance Harry could have killed Morgan, but that would have justified giving him to the vampires too, so I suppose it doesn't much matter. Morgan attempts to deny this, but he's not a very good liar. Harry sheathes his sword and tells Morgan to get out unless he's willing to kill an unarmed man who isn't offering him violence. 

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Morgan is not, in fact, willing to do that, and is on the point of leaving when there's a thump from Harry's
bedroom. Morgan suspects that it's Susan, but when he opens the door, Mister zooms out, startling the shit out of Morgan before taking off into the night. Morgan, visibly embarrassed, tells Harry that the senior Council will be around, but won't help him with Mab's request, and drops a business card on the floor with the number to call when he's done. (He says 'when you've failed', but I don't think there's a different number for if Harry succeeds.) Elaine reemerges, and, after confirming that Harry's okay and Morgan's really gone, essentially asks "You still want to hand me over to those people?" Harry explains that no, he wants to hand her over to other, better people on the Council, but she is very reasonably not here for that. She tells him she's leaving, that she can veil well enough to stop the Wardens who are certainly watching the house from seeing her (probably true, but how is she gonna hide the door opening and closing?), and that she'll get in touch with him, since he's the one with an office and a phone number. She kisses him on the cheek, too, and he spends a while having feelings about it after she leaves. Mister comes back and rubs Harry's legs, purring, as good as saying out loud "Aren't I a good kitty? Didn't I do a good job? Don't I deserve chicken and scritches?" His coming back so fast does give his running out just then the feel of a deliberate diversion, which I think is our first indication that Mister might be something more than a preternaturally large housecat. 

Harry observes aloud, to that cat, that he's very tired, and the sensible thing to do would be to get some rest, but of course he's not going to do that. He's just gonna sit on the couch for a minute, and then get to work. He falls asleep on the couch less than a minute later. 

Finally a chapter that wasn't 25+ minutes long! My partner's board game is very close to launch, which may affect my schedule for the next couple months, but honestly I couldn't tell you how so don't worry about it too much. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 8

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Harry's apartment is an absolute mess, kinda skirting the line between "just really messy" and "legitimate safety issue". There are dirty clothes all over the floor, notes and papers all over the furniture, and coke cans and pizza boxes spilling out of the kitchen trash can. I guess Harry has been getting carry-out pizza since the bomb incident. Most of the description of the apartment is old information for someone reading the series in order, but this is also when the Star Wars poster is introduced. Apparently it was a gift from Billy, which means that either he and Harry have actually started spending more time together since Susan left, or that they were already hanging out regularly between Fool Moon and Grave Peril and it just didn't get mentioned because Billy wasn't included in the plot of Grave Peril. This is reasonable, since we're still several books away from Harry treating Billy like an adult who can handle himself with the broader supernatural world (he had to have that realization with Murphy before he could even consider applying it to anyone else), but may also be an implicit refutation of the way World of Darkness associates werewolves with the spirit world, although I don't know if that was as much of a thing in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and Werewolf: The Forsaken wasn't out yet. Elayne comments disapprovingly on the mess, but Harry doesn't respond to that directly since he's still pretty focused on the thing where she's alive. His first, not unreasonable assumption, is that it's a trick, or she's some kind of creature out of the Nevernever, but she points out that she was able to cross his threshold and knows his wards, and when that doesn't make the point, begins bringing up personal details. Apparently Harry failed his drivers test three times in one week. I didn't know they even let you take the test three times in a week, although it may have been different in the 1980s. She also makes reference to "our locker combination", which is a really nice little detail for illuminating how enmeshed the two of them were when they were together. At least I think it illuminates that. None of the three high schools I attended actually had lockers.

He asks why she didn't contact him, and she says that at first she didn't know where he was or if he was alive, and then she wasn't sure if he'd want to hear from her since "so much happened". Harry says that's putting it mildly, since she tried to "destroy" him, and there's a little bit of back and forth while they establish what actually happened, most especially the part where Elaine was already Justin's thrall when Justin made his attempt to get in Harry's head. I don't think it had occurred to Elaine that Harry wouldn't have at least considered the possibility that she was magically controlled, considering what Justin tried to do to Harry. That's honestly a more reasonable conclusion than that she just up and betrayed him out of nowhere, and it speaks well of her that she gave Harry credit for being able to figure it out. When she says 'so much happened", she's talking about the possibility that Harry associates her with the trauma of Justin betraying them, about the stuff he went through after with the Council, and probably her fear that Harry would blame her for hiding in the Summer Court and leaving him to face that alone, that by the time she felt ready to look for him it had been years and of course he hadn't just spent all that time waiting for his high school sweetheart to come back to him, he probably moved on. She may also be talking about the secret Mordred baby she 90% probably had by him, but we don't need to get into all that. We do, however, need to talk about the pentacle thing, because I said back in Fool Moon Chapter 20 that we would. Listen, I agree that it's unlikely that Harry and Elaine are blood siblings. For one thing they were born like 6 months apart, and for another they don't look anything alike except for their height. But there's clearly something going on there. It's possible that Justin actually gave Elaine her pentacle, maybe to discourage Harry from asking questions about his. We know Maggie LeFay and Justin DuMorne were associated somehow, so for all I know, Harry and Thomas have those particular pentacles because Maggie picked them up from an occult store near Justin's house, and either Justin got Elaine the same one as part of grooming her (it's still grooming even if the end goal isn't sexual), or Elaine got it herself from the same damn store, or Harry got it for her from there. It's also possible that Elaine is the child of a different associate of DuMorne's, although no candidates are immediately jumping out at me. She doesn't look like anyone on the White Council, or any of the minor practitioners we met, so far as I can recall. She... oh hang on a damn second. Okay this is a reach but she does have gray eyes. Is it possible the connection is that she's the child of another, ah, associate of Lord Raith? We know from what happened to Inari that her Hunger would probably never have manifested, since she and Harry were in love. On the one hand, it's a bit of a stretch, but on the other hand, this series is absolutely dripping in Wheel of Time references, and there's a pretty significant subplot there about Rand, the protagonist, needing to work out that he's not related to one of his love interests, Elayne, but that they do have a dark haired, roughly 6 foot tall, unnaturally pretty half sibling in common. Now unless Elaine is much older than she appears to be, her mother isn't in Lord Raith's portrait gallery, but it's not like, totally inconceivable that he didn't keep adequate track of someone. 

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Harry tells Elayne that he looked for her, that he scryed for her and sent spirits looking for her, but found no sign that she was alive. Which is, of course, why he spent the last like, decade assuming she betrayed him. If she turned out to be evil, and he killed her, that's horrible and tragic but it's still basically something that happened to him. It's a manageable amount of guilt.  If Justin enthralled her, if she was a victim like he was, even if he didn't realize that at the time, and he killed her, that's... that's not a manageable amount of guilt. That's the kind of thing that destroys you. But it might be asking a bit much for Elayne to have put all those pieces together while she was hiding out among the fae and trying to get through her own trauma about the whole betrayal and enthrallment thing. Anyway, Elaine says she's in trouble, and Harry volunteers to help literally on reflex. The whole chivalry reflex thing is still weird and misogynistic, but at least it isn't belabored here. Elaine explains that she found asylum in Summer, and that now she has to pay off her debt. She says there's been a murder in faerie, and Harry figures out that she's the Summer Emissary before she has a chance to say it, letting her know that he's Winter's Emissary in the process. I might be alone in this, but I tend to remember her as just having shown up at his place like "Hi, I'm alive and also the Summer Emissary!" but that is not, in fact, what happened. She had zero idea when she broke into Harry's house that he was already mixed up in the same trouble she was. She honestly just came to him for help. Which I think really cements that she did not expect Harry to still believe that she'd willingly betrayed him. She expected him to figure it out eventually, even if he didn't know while it was all happening. And honestly, if it weren't for all the fucking emotions and guilt and trauma tied up in the situation, that's a pretty fair estimation of Harry's reasoning abilities. If he hadn't needed to believe that she was a villain, he would have figured out years ago that she was compelled to do what she did. 

Harry's in a bit of a spot now, of course, because he and Elaine need different outcomes from the investigation to succeed in their respective missions. Elaine is expected to prove Mab's culpability, Harry is expected to prove her innocence, and whichever of them fails to produce that result is going to be in for a very bad time. After a minute of desperate and ineffectual thought, Harry's best idea is that they go to the White Council and ask for help and protection. I'm gonna go ahead and chalk that one up to the sleep deprivation, because dude, they literally just tried to feed you to the vampires like, six hours ago. They're not gonna suddenly be reasonable about you, or about DuMorne's Other Apprentice, apparently returned from the dead. Among other things, she's an even better suspect than Harry for what happened at Archangel, and since she's not One Of Their Own even to the limited extent that Harry is, there would be no political ramifications to punishing her for it, nor any need for a fully investigation. It wouldn't immediately buy them peace with the Red Court the way handing Harry to the vampires would, but honestly if he wanted to take some of the pressure off of himself around this whole mess, presenting Elaine to the council would be a pretty solid way to do it. Elaine, who trusts Harry a fuck of a lot more than he trusts her, or maybe just doesn't know all the relevant details, does not seem to consider this possibility, but does ask Harry if he's crazy. Harry tries to argue that there are good people on the Council who will help them, even if the Council as a whole kind of sucks, and Elaine points out that those people mostly don't want anything to do with the Council. I do notice that McCoy is probably still in town, and they could approach him directly. I don't think he ever interacts with Elaine, and I'm not entirely sure he knows she exists, much less what he thinks about her if he does. Harry's cognizant that if the Council finds out about Elaine, it will put her under suspicion, and if they find out he knew, it will put him under suspicion, although there's an odd bit here where says she might be "a violator of the First Law". I don't know where that's coming from. Who, exactly, does he think Elaine might have killed with magic? He assures her that he won't report her if she really doesn't want to talk to them, but is on the point of persuading her anyway when Warden Morgan starts pounding on the door. 

Man, I wish I wrote fast enough to do cliffhanger chapter endings like that in my fiction. I am trying to get these posts out faster, I promise, but I still have to do at least some work for like, money. If you want me to spend less time working for money and more time writing about urban fantasy for your education and enjoyment, you are welcome and indeed encouraged to support me on Patreon. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!