Recorded Neutral Territory - A Dresden Files Podcast

Baloreilly (00:00)
one thing that is not a fan theory and not a thing that anybody mentions, but I do want to just throw it out here is I've literally never heard anyone do a Jenny sells his Kumori theory and Internet, I'm assigning you write it today. would

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:23)
Welcome one, welcome all, welcome to Recorded Neutral Territory, a Dresden Files chapter by chapter reread podcast. This week we're taking a look at chapters 18, 19, 20, and 21 mostly of Stormfront, spoilers go all the way through Battleground. I'm Adam Ruzzo, and with me as always is a photographer dressed all in black, it's Brian O'Reilly. Why are you dressed all in black?

Baloreilly (00:48)
Certainly not to try to sneak into a crime scene in the middle of the daytime. I didn't think this through. I'm sorry, I didn't really think this through.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:56)
It's not suspicious at all. So it's now Sunday morning. The case started on Thursday. We went to Bianca's on Friday. We slept in on Saturday and then had a horrible date night with Susan. And now it's early Sunday morning and Dresden is not feeling well. The chapter starts, have you ever felt despair, absolute hopelessness? Yeah, it's gonna be one of those guys, so.

He goes walking for a while in this chapter and he winds up at Linda's place. But before he gets there, he thinks about his father. Why don't you read this first passage at the beginning of chapter 18.

Baloreilly (01:37)
I about my father. I usually do when I get that low. He was a good man, a generous man, a hopeless loser. A stage magician at a time when technology was producing more magic than magic. He'd never had much to give to his family. He was on the road most of the time, playing run-down houses, trying to scratch out a living for my mother. He wasn't there when I was born. He wasn't there when she died." End quote.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:02)
Now, this is a very interesting passage because he describes his father as a hopeless loser. But the way he describes him here and in other places doesn't describe a man that I would think of as a hopeless loser. He sounds like someone that was a good father, that enjoyed making people happy, like making kids laugh at parties with magic shows and stuff. What do you think? Is Dresden

Lying to himself here is what's going on.

Baloreilly (02:30)
So I think this is really funny because I know a lot of people would describe a broke stage magician as a hopeless loser. They're people who highly value material possessions, who value the ability to buy things and to live a luxury. Right. And Dresden's not one of those people. He's in fact internalized all of his father's values about being a good man, a generous man, somebody who gives up

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:47)
ladder climbers.

Baloreilly (02:58)
more than maybe he really can give away comfortably, that's Harry to a T. So it seems to speak to a certain degree of self-loathing or up a situation in which Harry can never see himself as a success because he hasn't reconciled at this point in the books his father's value system to like

the general American value system or something like that.

I think part of why Harry feels this way is because he feels like in this moment, he himself is lost. He's gonna die. He couldn't do it. He couldn't cut it just like his dad. But I wonder, we're gonna find out in one book. So stick with us guys, because we've only got like 10 chapters left in this one. We're gonna find out in one book that Harry's dad

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (03:41)
Hmm.

Baloreilly (03:54)
didn't just die when Harry was a kid the way he thinks he did. He and Harry's mom were both murdered. And I wonder if that knowledge that it wasn't just his dad failing, it was someone working against his family, helps him appreciate that his father did have more figured out than Harry thought. He just never had the time to kind of the life he could have.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (04:20)
Yeah, mean, imagine if Malcolm Dresden, father, had some understanding because Margaret explained to him, hey, so you know, there are people after me. I'm trying to hide out from them. I don't want to be part of that world anymore. Here's what you need to know. And when she dies, Malcolm realizes, ⁓ no, they got to her and she had told me that they might be after her son too.

maybe a low key life on the road without any flash, without any ties to a specific place might be the right way to stay under the radar. That's him succeeding at a different goal.

Baloreilly (05:04)
maybe Harry's father could have been, you know, a successful resident at Vegas or whatever if he'd had 20 years to build a career and the ability to stay in one place. We don't, we just don't know that maybe he was that good, but he gave up that possibility for the woman he loved. And that's a way of reading this that Harry has no access to at this point.

but might equally be the truth.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (05:27)
Yeah, absolutely. The next line says, he gave me the names of three magicians. And this has always made me wonder. Harry has two middle names, which is fairly unusual. is that on purpose? Did somebody, his mother, his father, decide to give him a second middle name because it would make it harder for someone to get his

full name, capital N, to use against him?

Baloreilly (05:57)
So when you asked that question, it really kind of blew my mind a little bit. Because I don't think that wizards think about, I gotta give my kids long names so that it's harder to get their full name. But if you know someone is going to be looking you and your family up, technically I have two middle names. I was raised Catholic, I have a confirmation name. That doesn't appear in any official documents, but it's part of my name.

So your kid having kind of a secret name that they know and the family knows and is part of their name, but which doesn't appear on the middle name form, might actually be a good strategy in this like specific scenario.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (06:41)
we do know in the next book, when he's calling up Sean Zagoroth, the demon, to ask him questions and trade his names away for information, he's already traded two names and he's trading a third name. And that means that Sean Zagoroth and or whoever he sells that information to is like one name short of getting control over Harry to some degree.

would he have been able to get that much information if he only had three names and not four? That's kind of where my mind went with regards to this statement.

Baloreilly (07:17)
Yeah, and I think that, you know, Harry, of course, would have handled things differently if he had less parts of his name to give. Maybe he would have broken it up more. You know, we don't know exactly how you can parse out handing out pieces of your name. But we do know from, I believe, the Morgan microfiction that Justin was not only tracking Harry, but also made him disappear on paper from the foster care system. So it's somebody who has access to these official channels. So you sort of have two layers of protection here.

One, literally the magical one, you just have more names that people need to learn. But two, who are to get your name through official sources, you need some way that that just doesn't give them enough. Now, obviously we know the intonation of the person is key, but it also seems to be the case that just knowing someone's name, even if you don't have the pronunciation exactly right, gives you certain capabilities, if nothing else from Harry's ability to call Elaine in White Night.

not having the specific intonation she uses anymore.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (08:19)
Yep. So the next piece that we want to discuss here, a couple paragraphs later, it talks about when his father passed away in his sleep, according to the doctors, it was an aneurysm. And we know, again, from next book, that that is not the case. And there's a lot of speculation over who killed him and who killed Harry's mother. Was it the same person? And we're certainly going to be touching on that probably next

Baloreilly (08:44)
Right, we're not gonna today delve into that whole mystery, but I think it's really cool that Jim gives us details, like his father died when he was young, as kind of a throwaway part of this chapter, just to lay the groundwork for future revelations going forward. It really shows the benefits of doing that 20-book outline before you've published book one there.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (09:06)
So

In the previous chapter, he is left describing all of the things that are weighing him down. He still feels sick from the concussion. He can see Gimpy Lawrence's eyes as he died. He feels guilty for that.

He could still hear Linda Randall's husky laughter. He still feels guilty for her death. He regrets lying to Murphy. and he knows that the shadow man is trying to kill him and even if he manages to stop that, the White Council wants to kill him. All of that stuff is then dealt with in this chapter 18.

Baloreilly (09:39)
Yeah, it's, I think, really cool that Jim models something about Harry's psyche that does classify him as someone who's a heroic figure who we can admire here. This is depression. He feels absolutely hopeless, like there's nothing he can do. There's no way out of this pit. Now, he has acute reasons for that. I'm not saying he's got a chronic condition or something, but that's what he's feeling. And Harry's antidote to that...

The way he avoids that in other circumstances is by coming up with something to do. And that's how he deals with his stress, by putting it into the necessity of getting the thing done. And that's a really adaptive trait. Some people, when they're stressed and depressed, need to find external distractions. I know I'm like that, you know, certainly some of the time.

find external distractions to allow them to decompress, but that's not really how Harry's wired. He wants to attack the thing head on. And that's why he feels so terrible here, because he doesn't have any idea what to do. And it's really driven home, because the walk from the varsity to Linda's apartment can't be a short one. He took a cab to the varsity in order to follow Gimpy and...

describes the process of having to track him the whole way. So this is not Harry, you know, goes two blocks to this place and circles around it a couple times. He walks probably for, you know, an hour or through Chicago at night in the rain commenting on it's dangerous, kind of how long he did it for, until he ends up at Linda's, just showing the extent to which he has so much on his mind that he can't even think.

Hey, I'm going somewhere, I should get a cab.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (11:31)
Absolutely, and he winds up at Linda Randall's apartment. And it's not entirely clear why. I think he's just feeling super guilty here, and he's going back in here wishing he could apologize to her, right? He wants to go to her and apologize, and this is kind of what his subconscious leads him to.

Baloreilly (11:50)
Yeah, I think that's probably it. I was wondering when I was rereading this chapter, what's driving him there? Definitely that sense of guilt. I wonder if any part of him, part of him that tries to do something, the little voice in the back of his head that, you know, he's gonna converse with himself about later on in this chapter, if that's telling him, if there's a solution,

It's retracing your steps. It's going back over the clues. And we don't get any of that in his consciousness, but it's just so how he's wired that that's how you handle stress that I think combined with the guilt that he's definitely feeling, that's part of what's drawing him to Linda's place.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (12:34)
Yeah, it absolutely could be a hunch that he has, you know, it drilled into him from his time working at, you know, angel investigations where it was like when you don't know what you're doing, you retrace your steps, you go back over it again and again until you find another clue. I could see that being something that was drilled in him so deep that he's now just relying on it on a subconscious level. So he gets back there, dejected.

He curls up on the ground and falls asleep. He's gotta be exhausted by this point. And he probably gets three to four hours of sleep because when he wakes up, the sun is kinda streaming in, And just at the right moment, he wakes up, turns around, and sees under the bed, in the sunlight, a film canister. His salvation, as he calls it.

Baloreilly (13:20)
And man, if you were ever wondering, when did Jim think of Uriel? Mr. Sunshine literally has a beam of light illuminating the film canister that Harry even says the beam is like disappearing as the sun rises just as he wakes up to see it. It's the last couple of moments that the canister is just illuminated in this sunbeam. And the thing he notices about the canister, of course,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:29)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Baloreilly (13:50)
is that it's red. And Adam and I were talking about this, grew up in the 90s, we remember film. And you'd never see that. There are always black cylinders with a gray cap. Always, always, always. So this is to somebody in the year 2000, so bizarre. It's such an identifiable thing. It's the red canister.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:52)
The

Baloreilly (14:11)
It's like seeing the blue beetle, you the car with the one door that's this color and the other door that's this color. It stands out to him immediately. And that's why it's such a revelation to him. He's not just seeing a film canister. I've seen a film canister. No, he knows is so weird. Why is this here? And it instantly starts making the wheels turn in his head. He's immediately struck by there's some connection to the Lakeshore Drive house.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:41)
Yeah, and I think part of it is wishful thinking, oh, this has to be connected, right? This can't just be a coincidence. And part of it is exactly what you canisters are very unusual. It would be very unlikely to happen to find two of these very unusual and rare canisters in both of these cases and not have those cases be related when they're this close chronologically and geographically.

So his mind is putting that together and saying, no, this can't be a coincidence. It's got to be, it's got to mean something. And I love the way that it's described gets his mind lurching into gear again. Like it hasn't really been working for a while and he's like beating it with his hand, like get back into shape, come on now, bang it with a hammer and make it am I going from this?

Baloreilly (15:25)
Yeah, he

literally talks to himself, talking himself through, you gotta get off the floor. And that's when he sees the canister after he's had that conversation to himself.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:29)
Right.

Baloreilly (15:35)
But of course we do find out that it belongs to a professional photographer very coincidentally is about to literally walk through the front door. So before we talk about Harry's interaction with this gentleman, Donnie Wise,

Can you explain to me what Donnie thinks he's doing here? What's his whole deal? Why is he showing up to the crime scene the morning after?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:58)
Yeah, that's a really dangerous thing to do because A, the cop might be coming back here to like work on the case. That's why they're marked off with crime tape and saying, you can't go in here. It's still an active crime So this is already very dangerous. Just from a purely mortal, the cops might show back up.

point of but also...

Why is he doing it? What is his motivation? What does he get out of grabbing this thing and getting out of it? Because does it actually implicate him?

Baloreilly (16:24)
Right, think the worst case scenario is his fingerprints are on it and he is a photographer, so it's not that strange that he'd take photographs. Obviously, they're photographs of Linda having sex through a window, so it seems like it might be nefarious, but it's in Linda's apartment. So if the cops find this, I mean, what are they gonna say? You took...

naked pictures of her and gave them to her, you know, that doesn't immediately jump out as, you're guilty of murder, or even that we're gonna do, even... Exactly, that's the crazy part, right? If you find the fingerprint, if you find a fingerprint on the canister, if you run the fingerprints on the canister, if you do all these things, maybe they call him. If they find him breaking into the crime scene...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (16:59)
But if they found you at the scene of the crime...

Baloreilly (17:16)
I mean, you're getting arrested right there, I mean, just for breaking in, but you're prime suspect number one now.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (17:21)
established, we now have to imagine that there's a really good, like, highly motivating reason for him to take this risk. what could that be? And my thought is, he is at least partly clued in to who he was taking pictures of. Specifically, the crime boss behind 3i, because he's a photographer, but...

Linda knows him, maybe he's involved in some shady business dealings, maybe he does take photographs for people to get blackmail stuff, so he's like on the gray slash wrong side of the law a lot of the time. So he's in that world. He knows people, he hears things about this new crime boss that's running the Three Eye, and he hears that he does really weird magic stuff.

Like people are terrified after they hear what he's done in front of them or whatever. Because we do hear from Marcon that Victor's people, anytime Marcon catches one, refuses to answer any questions. They're way too terrified of Victor to be terrified of Marcon. So that leads me to believe that there are stories going around about Victor. we do know that Donnie knows something about these people because later in this chapter, in chapter 19, when Dresden confronts him,

Dresden uses a Ventos Servita spell to pull his staff to him and Donnie says, you're one of them.

Baloreilly (18:45)
Yeah, that's really the giveaway that, you know, Harry thinks this idiot's too stupid to lie to me and et cetera. That's a giveaway that Donnie is actually able to hold something back here because Harry never finds out why Donnie says that, what he knows about, wizards or people who can do magic or Donnie doesn't seem like, my God, what did you just do? He knows what he just did.

and he knows that that makes him a certain kind of person to be scared of.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (19:19)
Yeah, I do like in this chapter when Harry pretends to be a cop. I thought his pretend to be a cop voice and like the lines that he uses are at once very cliche, he's like, returning to the scene of the crime, I see. And it's like, no, no, it wasn't me. Like he's so taken aback, but then.

Fairly quickly, he's like, wait a minute, this guy doesn't look like a cop. Like, he eyes him up and down, it's like, let me take a little closer look at that. that's not a badge, that says Consulted, you're not a if, again, this is another situation where we could say, Harry, if you dressed nicer, that bluff might have worked.

Baloreilly (19:56)
Yeah, seriously. And it's funny that he asks for Donnie's ID and walks right up to him and lets him get a good look at his own badge. Like, you were doing so well. And then, you know, at the last second, just, Harry is able to get the information he does need. Donnie says, will trade you. You give me that film canister so I can destroy it. Big swishy quotes. And I will tell you what's on the film.

So Donnie tells Harry that there are pictures of Linda, another woman, and three men having sex at the wasn't exactly sure what was going on, but Linda wanted those pictures obviously to blackmail somebody.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (20:45)
Yeah, the obvious answer is that she was going to use it as protection if Victor ever wanted to come after her. But he either found out that she was taking those pictures or, as we speculated in an earlier episode, the Beckets kinda tipped him off that she was talking to someone that may be related to the cops, like a private investigator or whatever, and so he decided to end her before she could talk and she didn't even get a chance to threaten him.

with that. Hey, I have these pictures and I have a thing set up so that if die, they're going to the cops or they're going to the press and you'll, you can't kill me or else that'll happen. She didn't get to do that threat and without that threat, the pictures are worthless. They don't in fact affect his behavior at all.

Baloreilly (21:26)
Yeah, I feel like Linda is sadly somebody who's like half smart and that's really, you know, part of why she gets killed here. She knows she needs something, but she doesn't necessarily put everything together when Harry talks to her. She doesn't necessarily take the necessary actions when she finds out that Jennifer's dead. You know, she's just one step behind the rest of the players in the game and these aren't going to do anything for her.

unless she's put in a lot of additional planning.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:59)
Yeah, So at this point, he finally gets what he can out of Donnie. He destroys the film himself with a little fuego.

We get a fuego for the first time, and I think the last time in this book, I don't remember if uses it later, but he loses his staff and rod really quick when he's fighting against the scorpion. He doesn't really get to use it then. So, then he lets Donnie go, and he puts some pieces together in his head and decides it's time to talk to Monica Sells. And that takes us to chapter 20.

Baloreilly (22:27)
I think we need to discuss something that bugged me when I reread this, and I think you did a good job of kind of assuaging my question about if this makes sense for Harry in the universe. It's a better story that we have this scene with Donnie and the following scene with Monica, but it sort of creates the question of Harry sees the film canister and immediately thinks, my God, this is something.

If it's it means that the house is involved in these murders. If it's anything, if it's anything that could save him, that's already what it means. So if Harry is just doing the next logical thing, why even bother going to Monica? Why does he really benefit from talking to Donnie? Why not go directly to that house? That's where the evidence came from. That's what the

you if you open the film and looked at the negatives, that's what the pictures are of, why not just go there immediately and if nothing else, knock on the door you use more time having people confirm that your hunches merit. I mean, if they don't, you're dead anyway.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (23:41)
Right, I think this is partly a confidence issue. This is an early Harry, and he does not feel that he is necessarily certain to come out on top if he goes and confronts the Shadow Man, quote unquote, in his place of power, which really just means like he's gonna have all his gadgets and gizmos with him, he knows the layout in the house, like he has the home field advantage there. Harry's not super confident that he can do it later on.

after he gets a whole bunch of extra information from Monica. So before he gets that information, before he gets the confirmation from Donnie, he must be even more insecure about going and confronting this guy. I think he's putting many of the pieces together, because he still doesn't put together Jennifer Stanton's relationship to Monica's cells until he gets to Monica's house. He still doesn't have all the pieces clicking perfectly into place just yet.

I think if you were talking about like a later Harry, a turncoat, a changes, skin game Harry being dropped into the same situation, I think it would be much more confident about following his instincts and his hunches and being like, yes, I think I know what's going on now. And just going straight out there because he's had all these other adventures with things that he's confronted before and he knows that the shadow man's not that bad and he can deal with him. But at this point, this version of Harry does not know that. He has not tested himself against a warlock before.

This is the first time and he wants as much information as possible. We even find out in chapter 21 or 22 that he needs an edge against Victor and that's why he wants to go and get the out of desk drawer to use against Victor. Unfortunately, that doesn't work out for him.

Baloreilly (25:21)
Right, and I think that's really compelling and it's easy to forget when you're rereading that the Harry of those future books that I feel like would pursue that lead exists because of things like this scene causing him to trust his hunches because he gets confirmation that they were actually correct. So he gets in another cab and goes directly to Monica's house and description...

of Monica's neighborhood is very telling says quote, for sale signs stood in many of the yards, sparse curtains draped over empty gaping windows like cobwebs. There wasn't a lot of bird song for a street with so many trees and I couldn't hear any dogs barking as I walked along the sidewalk end quote.

Harry connects this directly to the fact that that house, Monica's house, has become a site of black magic. It's beginning to infect the space around it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (26:25)
Yeah, people

can feel it even if they don't know why.

Baloreilly (26:29)
Yeah, it's really cool world building. It's a nice little touch and it makes the whole scene immediately more ominous than if it was the Carpenter's Block.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (26:39)
Yeah, and it's something that Butcher uses several times in future books as well. If remember the Fool Moon Garage, it's used in one of the early books,

And then in later books, you have Madrigal Wraith selling him on eBay in the same garage. And the explanation within that book is that the Full Moon Garage already had like a bad vibe to it, magically speaking, and that it attracted people like Madrigal, like the more evil, the more bad people that were already enjoying that kind of a vibe.

this is just the very beginnings of like pointing out that, hey, that can happen if there's enough black magic or bad things happening in a place. It can have a vibe that is something that people can detect and will be creating an affinity for certain types of people to show up and do more things there. And if it has a good vibe, then it also creates, like I bet the Carpenter's neighborhood probably has like some of the nicest people in town because of the vibe that are there.

Baloreilly (27:39)
Yeah, and not only does he reuse it first ⁓ in Proven Guilty, but I think we also see the same thing where the warehouse in Backup is also the warehouse in Skin Game that Nicodemus has the plot at. And of course, the Ur example, Demonreach, which has become a source for dark ley lines due to the presence of so much bad juju. So...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (27:53)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (28:07)
It really nicely connects this thread of the effects of black magic starting as early as book one. And I thought it was just cool to point out that Jim has been very consistent in his ideas about the sort of effects that different kinds of magic have.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (28:23)
And there's so many different effects that he described, right? You have the for sale signs, obviously people get kind of a bad vibe from the area they want to Got it, okay, that makes sense. But even the people who are there, they like close their curtains and there's no bird song. Birds have left the area because of the vibe.

then you can't hear dogs barking. So there's like, if there are dogs there, they're kind of just cowering, they're not drawing attention to themselves. Like all these different ways that you could observe the same thing, this bad vibe, supernaturally permeating the area because of the things that are happening in Victor Cell's attic for years at this point.

Baloreilly (29:02)
And, you know, of course you probably know because it's chapter 20 and there's seven more chapters in the books that he's not gonna ring the doorbell and it's not gonna be opened by Victor. But it does kind of feel that when he, I rang the bell and waited, there was no answer, is, you know, banging on the door of the dark foreboding castle, which makes it a bit of switcheroo when the door swings open.

and Monica stands inside, peering out with her green eyes, dressed in jeans, a plain flannel shirt, and a Harry is not greeted dark He's greeted by a scared and her terror really colors the entirety of this interaction.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (29:48)
Absolutely, and he says, quote, I don't think she expected me to physically force my way into her house. Hell, I hadn't expected me to do that. I hadn't realized how angry I was until I saw the look of panic on her face when she looked up at me, unquote. Who is he angry at in that moment?

Baloreilly (30:05)
Well, I think he is angry at Monica, and I think that's why the forthcoming scene is partially about Harry coming to terms with why Monica did what she did. And I don't think he's articulated that anger to himself yet. That's why he doesn't realize how angry he is. But he knows on some level that she got him into this situation.

And part of the reason why he doesn't have the knowledge he needs to try to solve the problem is because she held out on

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (30:38)
Yeah, he spent like several hours the previous night coming to terms with the fact that he was probably going to be killed in a horrible way, one way or another. And now he does have some hope, but spend a couple of hours wallowing in that reality and then find out, hey, there's the person that created this mess for me. And this comes back to one of our very first questions for Is Monica culpable?

morally for what she did to Dresden and what she did with the Three-Eye, et cetera, et cetera. We had a whole long conversation about that. We're not gonna rehash it here, but Harry obviously, at the start of this confrontation, feels justifiably angry, righteously angry in his own mind she's responsible to some degree for this. And even if he doesn't realize it himself, the expression is on his face because she reflects it as panic on hers.

Baloreilly (31:34)
And I love that we actually don't get the full details of the soul gaze that they end up sharing because all we need to make judgments about Monica is that Harry's reaction to it is to immediately not be angry at her anymore.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (31:53)
So

This next passage after he turns the taser off, I think is a very interesting set of passages. We're gonna read this first part. He comes to the conclusion that sort of drives the anger out of him. And it goes like this, quote, I won't let you hurt them, she snarled. Not you, not anyone. I'll kill you before I let you touch them, wizard. And then she was coming at me again.

fury replacing terror in her eyes, a grim determination to succeed that made me think of Murphy for a second. For the first time, she was looking at me in the face. For the first time, she forgot to keep her eyes averted from mine. And in that second, I saw inside of her. Things seemed to slow down for a moment. I had time to see the color of her eyes, the structure of her face, to recognize where I had seen them before, why she looked so familiar to me. I had time to see...

behind her eyes, the fear and the love that motivated every move she made, every step she took. I saw what had moved her to come to me, why she was afraid. I saw her grief and I saw her pain. And the pieces all fell into place. Knowing the emotions that drove her, the terrible love that she was showing even now, it all seemed perfectly obvious and I felt stupid for not figuring it out days ago."

That's just such a beautiful passage. I love every passage where they kind of describe a soul gaze. In this one, you're right. We don't get the actual detail of like the vision that he has, but we get the result of that vision and how it immediately changes the way he views her.

Baloreilly (33:31)
And it's shown just a couple paragraphs later as he blows the taser out. Immediately after, quote, I continued holding her wrist, but the driving tension behind her arm had eased away to nothing. She was staring at my face, her eyes wide with shock from the meeting of our gazes. She started shaking and dropped the useless stunner from limp fingers. It clattered to the floor. I let go of her.

and she just stared at me. I was shaking too. A soul gaze is never something pleasant or simple. God, sometimes I hated that I had to live with that. I hadn't wanted to know that she'd been abused as a child, that she'd married a man who provided her with more of the same as an adult, that the only hope or light that she saw in her life was with her two children.

There hadn't been time to see all of her reasons, all of her logic. I still didn't know why she had drawn me into this entire business, but I knew that it was ultimately because she loved her two kids. And that was all I really needed. That and one other connection, the nagging resemblance to someone that I had noticed in her at my office. The rest fell into place from there. And Harry's reusing

the idea of pieces falling into place here. That's a motif through these chapters. And I think it's because it's the first time in his life that he's ever seen this convergence of what seems like purely mortal business and supernatural business into one case.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:11)
love these two passages put together here.

interestingly, this is not the last time that a soul gaze mid-fight helps Harry out. The most obvious is the Kraken fight, but there is at least one other fight I can't remember off the top of my head where a soul gaze in the middle of the fight sort of disrupts the enemy and makes them pause and gives him the upper hand. It's something that maybe he should use more often, but I Butcher...

doesn't like using the same trick so many times.

Baloreilly (35:40)
Yeah, and it's also obviously highly traumatic for him if it's with Wright. But funnily enough, that's not where I thought you were going from that. This isn't the last time, that Harry uses a soul gaze to realize that two people are siblings.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:43)
Yeah, dangerous.

yeah. Blood writes when he finds out that Thomas is his brother. That's so it's revealed a little bit later when he actually talks to Monica, but that revelation that he has right there in that moment is that Monica looks an awful lot like Jennifer Stanton and that therefore they must be related. And that's one of the reasons why she came to him. He then tells her that Linda's dead and

Baloreilly (35:55)
We're gonna see that again in Blood Rites, yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (36:20)
There's then a small moment where the kids come out, worried about their mother, she tells them to go back in the thing and then agrees reluctantly to tell Harry the whole truth at this point. That brings us to chapter 21, when we get the full story delivered by Monica.

Baloreilly (36:38)
Now we're not gonna go through this whole thing in a blow-by-blow. Victor, we're told, was not always the person he is today. We're not sure at this point if Monica is being truly honest when she says that, or if she's coping, but she tells us that several years ago when Billy, who we think is nine or so now, was four, so approximately five years ago.

Victor learned about magic and learned he had a gift. So Dresden speculates this a little bit, but Adam, I want to ask you, how much of a gift do you think Victor has?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (37:23)
That's a very interesting question, right? Because you could always just write him off as like a two-bit sorcerer, warlock or whatever, but he's self-taught. What if Victor had been taught by a member of the White Council in a standard apprenticeship type way? Would he have been White Council level? And is the reason that Harry's able to defeat him later

because he is self-taught, he doesn't have all the formal training. Maybe he actually is that powerful. I mean, he is controlling energy coming to him through a storm and through a lust ritual at the same time while casting this other thaumaturgic weapon over a long distance. So I think, in my head, I think he is White Council level.

Baloreilly (38:11)
Yeah, I think that's actually what Jim and Harry are both trying to get across to us. There's a point where Harry says...

at the end of this chapter, quote, Victor was powerful, strong, a natural mage, but he wasn't practiced. And I think that is Harry admitting that this guy is one of those white council level talents that falls through the cracks in the modern era.

because of the population explosion. We're seeing, as early as Stormfront, the results of that problem that we asked about a few episodes ago, and that leads to, you know, potentially the White Council needing to figure out better ways to deal with the increased existence of people like Victor.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (39:01)
Absolutely, and the next set of lines is she explains quote some nights he wouldn't come to bed some nights I thought I could hear things up there voices or things that weren't voices unquote so she's talking about Victor locking himself in the attic with these magic books and it from what she's describing it sounds like he's summoning up demons or something to that effect like he found books Gave him the names right we know he had the name of the Toad Demon

but he must have had others that he was trading things for information and maybe that had something to do with his corruption. Or maybe one of those things he was calling up was Nemesis.

Baloreilly (39:39)
Right, I mean we know from later books that Nemesis can absolutely hijack your magical creatures. The Lanan Shi needs to be purged later in the story. Cat Sith is a fey who is, piloted by Nemesis as a drone in cold days. It's quite possible that the way that Nemesis gets involved or further involved with Victor if...

he who walks beside actually pushed the book into his hands in the beginning, is that one of the things that is called up is Nemesis, or a drone of Nemesis that Victor communicates with.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (40:19)
If Faye

can be corrupted, then why not demons? But it's also possible that Victor has books, stumbled across books maybe, that allowed him to talk to outsiders directly, right? Mortal summoners are required quote unquote, open the outer gates and bring something like he who walks behind.

into our world. We saw Justin did that. Was maybe Victor doing something like that? Was he opening a way to the outside to talk to them?

Baloreilly (40:53)
We don't get a lot of clarity as far as how Nemesis entered Victor's life and when that happened. But certainly it seems like, and we're gonna talk about this when we get to our question from Bob for last time, in some way, shape, or form,

Nemesis had a plan in this story and whether Victor from the start was driven by contacting the outside or if that came later as he began to discover his talent, clearly when he was up in the attic, he was not just summoning pixies.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (41:26)
No, certainly not. There's another quote that she said, quote, he'd scream at us for no reason or burst out laughing for no reason. He saw things, things I couldn't see. I thought he was going crazy, unquote. So that seems to be describing him using the sight. And one thing that occurred to me, Dresden, several times over the various books,

reiterates that if you use the site too often, it can tear at your sanity. To what degree is Victor's corruption maybe caused by that, right? He's obsessed with using the site. Later on, he develops Three Eye because he wants Monica to see the way that he sees and understand the world, right? That's one of the things that she says when he's coming to her later and forces her to drink the Three Eye for the first time.

So to what extent is he just leaving his site open too long, looking at things, or is this standard black magic corruption, or is it something more? Is he actually infected by Nemesis?

Baloreilly (42:32)
That's certainly a possibility, but I do really like the idea that Victor's just walking around with his sight open on a constant basis. And you can imagine why he might not immediately realize that's bad. If you live in a fairly nice suburb of a fairly nice American city, and you have a fairly nice job and kids and a wife, the things that you see on a daily basis are not gonna be...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:41)
Yeah!

Baloreilly (43:01)
the Negloschi. You're not going to be looking into the eyes of horrors that annihilate your sanity on a daily basis.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:09)
But what you might see is when your neighbor Carl comes out, you see lines of deception around him or something, and you can come to the conclusion having an affair or something to that effect, right? Something that the site gives about, and he becomes addicted to getting more information, because information is power. So he just leaves the site often as he can.

I could definitely see that being one of the ways towards his sort of madness that we see.

Baloreilly (43:41)
Yeah, and of course, Victor might not realize that the reason his memory is getting so good is because of the sight. And it might not be until he starts calling the things up in the attic that he really realizes, ⁓ my God, these images, these things are always in my mind now because I'm constantly doing everything with the sight up. So we find that Victor

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:49)
Hmm.

Baloreilly (44:07)
develops 3i and immediately gives it to Monica so she can see what he sees. And he makes more and more of the drug, but he could never make enough, which seems like, cause he apparently has the site, or maybe he just needed the drug to get the site from day one. But it seems like he finds that other people to see ⁓

gives him a sense of power that is in and of itself addictive and potentially leads to it could be one of the reasons why he's able to recognize that he can use other people's emotions later. We're going to talk about that more in a second. First we should talk about Victor's own emotions started to influence his magic.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (44:55)
Yeah, the underlying reason that she gives, that Monica gives here for what his, like, why did he go down this path is that her parents were fairly wealthy and he was always embarrassed that he could never provide as much wealth for her as they could have. He always felt So.

His original goal is make more money to prove that I am worthy to be in this family. And that underlies all of his corruption here. So when he says he could never get enough, the way that I read that is, I need to be able to sell more of this. I need to make more money. I need to make more, more, more, more.

because that underlying emotion that started him down this thing is avarice, it's greed. So that underlies all of the things that have happened to him. And then when he realizes that when he's angry, he could do more with magic, well now that gives him a new way to get more stuff. And he starts pressing that.

How can I make this work? ⁓ if I make someone else scared, I can tap into their emotions and steal that fear from them and use it in my magic. So he uses that against her and then finds out that lust works even better. And so he gets them together for a ritual. Now, I think he's not figuring all of this out on his own. I think he's getting prodded.

by some of the things that he's calling up. Maybe Nemesis is whispering in his ear somehow, or whispering in somebody else's ear that talks to him, where he goes back and talks to somebody and says, I noticed that when I was angry I could do this. You're like, ⁓ you should see what lust can do, you know? And then prods him into doing ritual, how do you figure out like doing a ritual circle and all this other stuff on your own and have it all work correctly without blowing up in your face? I think he's getting help on this specific track of going in this specific direction.

Baloreilly (46:52)
Presumably there aren't rituals that say how to do this. One, because we get the impression from the unfilmiliarity that Morgan and Harry have with this, that this isn't just lying around in books that somebody can buy in an occult shop. So it seems to be coming from somewhere. I also really love the idea that he started selling the drug immediately. I think that does track with Grieve being his portal into black magic.

And I think it makes a lot of sense that, you know, that leap to using other people's emotions is something that maybe he didn't figure out himself because that is to me a pretty significant leap, not just to use, know, Harry doesn't do that. Harry's magic comes from him or the environment. He doesn't really channel from other people. That seems to be something that Victor's kind of learning to do on the spot. And you said...

that it reminds you of how white court vampires use other people's lust as a way of getting their life force.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (47:57)
Yeah, listen to this quick quote here. and he started the rituals, the ceremony. He said he needed our lust. Her eyes shifted left to right and the sickened look on her face grew deeper. It wasn't so bad. He would close the circle and all of a sudden nothing mattered. Nothing but flesh. I could lose myself for a while. It was almost like an escape, unquote. And earlier when she described how he would make her afraid and then like touch her and steal her fear,

that she would be exhausted afterwards. So what other creature have we met in the Dresden Files that fills you with lust and then leaves you feeling exhausted after stealing energy from you? That's a vampire. That's what it is.

Baloreilly (48:38)
And one thing I want to mention is that there seems to be an underlying connection between the vampire courts and people who really deeply understand them and Nemesis and the whole outsider black council plot.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:53)
⁓

this again, this is your Simon Petrovich here. You think Simon is in with the nemesis and he's the vampire expert.

Baloreilly (49:02)
Yes, I do and you know, it's not I'm not the person who came up with this theory It's very popular in the fandom, but I do subscribe to it But even if you don't I think that it's really a clear line because as we discussed also Redcourt vampires they do drink human blood, but it's not the blood that is what the redcourt vampire really needs It's the life force behind the blood. It's this using other people to fuel that

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (49:06)
Ha ha ha ha!

Baloreilly (49:27)
know, demon or outsider or whatever presence a Red Court vampire is. And there's a really short line between, hey, Victor's Thaumaturgy magic is the magic that the Red Court uses in the Bloodline Curse. Huh, I wonder if the emotion and life force magic that vampires use is what Victor's using to actually make the three I in the first place. It seems to be this kind of closed circle reinforcing itself. And these are all,

enemies of Harry Dresden. So there does seem to be not a, exact quid pro quo direct plot here, but a circle. And that is the actual name the Black Council gives itself, the circle.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (50:13)
Yeah,

exactly. And I'm not saying that he's like a white-court vampire in disguise or anything like that. Obviously, he's using that energy to do magic as opposed to feed a demon. So there's obviously a difference there. It might even be while Butcher was writing this scene, he came up with the idea of, what if there was an entire vampire court based around this kind of, you know, life stealing or whatever? So I think that's entirely possible. One quick side note, I have my own personal pet hypothesis. So imagine...

You're the Beckets, and over and over again, you have this man draining your emotions from you.

We see what happens to Mickey in grave peril when Kravos' ghost gets done with his soul. I have to imagine that what Victor is doing here with the Beckets is damaging their soul as well. So.

the kind of emotionless, sociopathic feeling that we get from them, I think that is partly caused by Victor doing this damage to them over and over again. And honestly, Helen Beckett When we meet her in White Night, seems to have a little bit more...

going on. And when we meet her as Ms. Demeter, Demeter later, she seems even more like emotionally there. Like obviously she's not fully empathetic and she's helping a crime lord do his crime things. But it feels to me like she's recovered a little bit. That's my own personal pet idea.

Baloreilly (51:44)
Yeah, I really loved that and I loved it for a couple reasons. First is that true sociopathy, truly not caring about other people is more basal than something you can develop because something bad happens to you when you're 30 something, right? The Beckett's daughter dying might traumatize them deeply and might make them turn to anger and a bunch of dark emotions, but it's not going to make them emotionless.

in the way that Harry refers to the Beckett's, not as being cold, just cold, but as being almost inhuman, unable to see other people as worthy their consideration. And that's not Helen later in the series. She cares about her girls later in the books and

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (52:40)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (52:40)
because of the relationship that she seems to have with Marcon, it feels like there's a lot more complicated emotions that are starting to change how she operates and feels about things, even if her central goals and central driving forces still orbit around revenge for the death of her child. It's becoming more complicated as she gets further and further away in time from Victor Sells, which I think really supports the idea that

This coldness is in large part a result of what Victor uses them for.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (53:16)
Yep, absolutely. And this moves into the next section here, which I quickly want to read because it really does fit the last of the pieces together about why Monica decided to go to Harry when she did. And it really describes the most recent things that are happening in Victor's life and how he's becoming a real monster now. Quote, I didn't have to go all the time.

Then, either Jenny or I would stay with the children. Victor made the drug. We started to make money. Things got better for a while, as long as I didn't think too much. Monica took a deep breath. That's when Victor started getting darker. He called demons. I saw them. And he said he needed more power. He was hungry for it. It was horrible, like watching a starving animal forever pacing. And I saw him start...

Looking at the children, Mr. Dresden, it made me afraid. The way he looked at them, sometimes I knew. This time she buckled and doubled towards the floor with a groan. shuddered and wept out of control. God, my babies, my babies. Unquote.

these things, the way she's describing them, I get the impression these are happening like in the last couple of weeks. And then Jennifer Stanton is killed. And that's the inciting moment.

Baloreilly (54:39)
Yeah, and obviously that's deeply disturbing. And I think that part of what makes it so disturbing is there's no reason that we understand why from ⁓ just a soulless accumulating power thing, he would start looking at the children. It seems almost like pure sadism. Like, what am I gonna bring into this next? ⁓ I have kids.

Like it could be a drug addict dude, like you don't need to, you know, go after your own family, but he's beginning to revel in the perversity of what he's doing in a way that really does feel like the kind of black magic corruption we see people get so completely taken over by in some of the later warlocks in the series.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (55:29)
Yeah, and it's just such a good, such a well-written paragraph, the way that she revealed that he started looking at the children and just leaving that hanging in the air

Baloreilly (55:39)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (55:42)
It's just such a great way of like show don't tell. Like he didn't ask about the children or anything weird, he just looked at them and she could tell. It's just so good. Even while I was reading it just now, it was giving me chills. I really love that particular piece of writing.

Baloreilly (55:56)
Yeah,

that's one of those things where it's, you you could say what Monica thought, but whatever the reader imagines Victor was looking at them about is so much worse than anything that you could just put on paper in a sentence.

So moving on from that, we get to actually talk to one of the children of Victor and Monica Sells. Jenny, clearly named after Monica's sister, hears the conversation Harry has.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (56:28)
Yeah, I get the impression

she must have been overhearing, like listening in from the hallway or something the whole time.

Baloreilly (56:34)
And after Harry confirms that with Monica that Victor did kill Jennifer and turns to leave, Sells comes out from the room and identifies who Harry is because she's seen him in the arcane. And then, quote, she studied my face for a long minute.

Are you going to help my mom? It was a simple question. But how do you tell a child that things just aren't that simple, that some questions don't have simple answers or any answers at all? I looked back into her two gnawing eyes and then quickly away. I didn't want her to see what sort of person I was, the things I had done. She didn't need that. I'm going to do everything I can to help your mom. She nodded. Do you promise?

I promised her. She thought that over for a Studying me. Then she nodded.

My daddy used to be one of the good guys, Mr. Dresden.

but I don't think he is Her face looked sad. It was a sweet, unaffected expression.

Are you going to kill him?

Another simple question.

I don't want to, I told her. But he's trying to kill me. I might not have any choice.

She swallowed and lifted her chin. I loved my Aunt Jenny, she said. Her eyes brightened with tears. Mama won't say, and Billy's too little to figure it out, but I know what happened. She turned with more grace and dignity than I could have managed and started to leave, then said quietly, I hope you're one of the good guys, Mr. Justin.

We really need a good guy. I hope you'll be all right." Then she vanished down the hall on bare silent feet. It's just such a devastating portrayal of the precocious kid who's been in the abusive household and has seen way too much for a 12 year old.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (58:26)
Ugh.

Yeah.

And it's just twisting the knife into a guy like Dresden that wants to help anytime someone like this is in trouble. But he knows that helping might mean murdering her father. Like, there's no good answer. Like he says, it was a simple question, but how do you tell a child that things aren't simple? that is such a horrible position to be in.

Baloreilly (59:01)
And I love from an authorial perspective that Jim doesn't choose to make Jenny a simple child with simple questions that have hard answers that she can't understand. Because she does understand. She intuits the complexity of what's going on on an emotional level that she can't necessarily express totally in a way that leaves Dresden

saying that she's got more grace and dignity than he does. It's a very empathetic portrayal of a child in a bad situation, it's one of

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (59:37)
one that's had to grow up quickly, has had to internalize reality and not just deny it and block it out and pretend that things are fine.

Baloreilly (59:39)
Exactly.

And not every character in the Dresden Files is three-dimensional immediately and written like it's Tolstoy. But this is one of those ones where you feel like Butcher just had such a good insight into what a kid like this would really say. Not in the way that writers sometimes have 12-year-olds baby talking at adults.

but in a way that is true to life. And it just hits me every time I read it that feels so real and it's so much harder than a urban fantasy series has any right to hit.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:25)
Hey, sometimes things are funny and goofy, like hey, Harry's naked and he's got suds in his hair and he's trying to fight off this demon while he's on a date. Woohoo, this is crazy, isn't it? And then you get here and it's like these things are real. Monica is terrified for her children and she's been living in this terror for so long and so has...

the children, they know something's wrong and they have no power to change it, just like their mother doesn't have any power to change it. It gets you really in that moment and it does hit hard.

Baloreilly (1:00:58)
so moving on from that, Harry runs back outside to the cabbie.

who he's been telling to wait this whole time, just ferrying him from place to place, just throwing whatever money he has on him at the cabbie.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:01:12)
Literally when he finds out Murphy's in trouble, he throws the rest of his money in there and says, me there five minutes ago.

Baloreilly (1:01:17)
and

he tells the cabbie to drive him to the nearest payphone.

quote, then I closed my eyes and struggled to think it was hard through all the pain I felt, end quote. Harry berates himself for being unable to get it together here, but I actually think it's because of the soul gaze. The effect of Monica's emotions is actually clouding his ability to just order his own thoughts. And it's part of why he's furious and sad at this point, not just because obviously his feelings are going to make him furious and sad.

but he can't even control them because he's left with a little piece of her, know, making him unable to get on task the way that he is often able to in other books, in other cases, and other moments in this book.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:02:03)
Yeah,

I love that interpretation because this is in addition to the physical pain that he's dealing with from his concussion Gimpy beating him up earlier, and it's in addition to the guilt that he's feeling over lying to Murphy and the guilt he's feeling over Linda's death and the guilt he's feeling over Gimpy's death. Like he didn't intend for Gimpy to die there and it really freaks him out when it does happen.

All of that stuff had just recently happened to him, and he just spent the entire night ruminating on it, and now he's got Monica's soul gaze and her pain running through his

Baloreilly (1:02:45)
and her fear, because

the last thing he says is, quote, I was still afraid, all tight burning in my gut, Victor cells of the shadows and demons was going to kill me as soon as the storm rolled And he can see the clouds. And yes, Harry has every right to be afraid, but also who did he just soul gaze? The single person in the whole world right now who's most scared of Victor cells.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:03:12)
Yeah, and you know earlier during the Toad Demon incident, he comes to the conclusion that this guy's a chump because he's able to like smack him mind to mind through his little shadow puppet and he realizes like I went to school. Like he's got a confidence boost after that moment but when he get here, yeah, he's afraid of him now because A, he's got his hair and B, he's just had that soul gaze with Monica who's been closest to him for the last

several years and has so much fear built up. I love that take on it.

Baloreilly (1:03:46)
And that's one

of the reasons maybe that Harry ultimately decides that he can't go directly to confront Victor and runs through the other possibilities in his head, which he dismisses. But ultimately he decides that he's going to try to get Victor's talisman to give him a thaumaturgical edge in their confrontation. I know you wanted to talk about though, to a certain extent, the choice he's making about whether to involve Murphy or-

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:04:15)
Yeah, so at this point, like you point out, he tries to come to some conclusion about how he can call in the cavalry. Let somebody else handle this, partly because of the fear that you're talking about, partly because of the fact that he's never handled anything quite like this before. And so the first thing he thinks of is, okay, I now know who killed Jennifer Stanton and who's running the three-eye. I can just tell Murphy.

She'll call in the cavalry, they'll just raid his house, find all the drugs and lock him away. Problem solved. But then of course he realizes there's a problem there. What if the Three Eye wasn't being kept at the lake house? He doesn't know any other stash places that might be. Maybe that whole plan falls apart and he still dies anyway. Maybe Murphy doesn't listen to him, doesn't believe him. There's all kinds of holes in that. Then he's like, what if I call the White Council? They deal with warlocks all the time. If I report this guy, they'll deal with it. Then he's like, but.

They already have me under suspicion. They're gonna see this as like a ploy to get out of my trial on Monday or whatever. So instead he decides it's up to him alone. And that is, by the way, the exact words, quote, so I concluded it was up to me alone, That's just all on its own, that sentence as its own paragraph. that is the person that he is. He decides to be the guy

that doesn't run away from this, that doesn't call for help, he does it himself.

Baloreilly (1:05:41)
And this is where the Harry Dresden that we will see for the rest of the series is forged in the fire of this confrontation that's coming. He decides it is only me who can do this and I am going to. Harry is probably already the kind of person who does that, but it's easy to look back and wonder why is he thinking about calling other people? Harry's not the kind of person who does that.

This is one of the moments where he becomes the kind of person who he is later in the series. So we're not going to talk about Harry actually dealing with the Scorpion talisman plan here, because that more naturally fits into a discussion of chapter 22, where we find out what the problem with trying to use the Scorpion talisman is.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:30)
me a second.

Baloreilly (1:06:30)
With that,

we should turn to this week's question for Bob.

I know it's been trouble to get here before, but I'm really, really glad we have you for this one because this is, I think, a series defining question. I'm not smart enough to figure it out. We know Nemesis was involved in the events of Stormfront, but what was Nemesis' plan?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:58)
Brian, you're gonna kill me. I'm afraid to say, Bob is not here again this week. He said he's depressed. Someone he knew is gone.

Baloreilly (1:07:07)
my God, I had no idea who.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:07:12)
Apparently his favorite author of romance books. All right, let me look it up.

Baloreilly (1:07:15)
⁓ wow. I didn't realize Bob could or would mourn a death like...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:07:21)
Hang on a minute, she's not dead. She just announced she's converted to Mormonism and won't be writing bodice rippers anymore. Apparently Bob is inconsolable. Ay, yi, yi. Well, yeah, he almost had a good excuse this time. Anyway, let's go on and try to answer it ourselves. What was Nemesis' plan in Stormfront? The way that I framed this for the question on the subreddit and on the paranet is if Harry wasn't there to stop it,

Baloreilly (1:07:32)
Well, there goes my good opinion of-

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:07:49)
What was Nemesis trying to accomplish by influencing things in the way that they did? We don't have full information, but we know they were involved in this plot. So I'll quickly give my initial thoughts about this before we talk about what other people have said. And I've actually picked up a couple of things and I think I might agree with them. So my initial thoughts were A, provoke conflict between wizards and mortals. Not only just wizards, but the supernatural community and mortals. That seemingly would cause

problems for the Winter Fae to deal with and therefore they might not be so gung-ho about guarding the Outer Gates. That's sort of ⁓ a through line that I have had in my head for a while. The other fairly obvious answer would be this is testing out that bloodline curse to see how it works and does it work and how much energy do you need etc etc. So thoughts. What about you?

Baloreilly (1:08:43)
Right, Victor only

needed to use the bloodline curse because things went wrong, but nemesis could obviously suspect that there would be some people who needed to get whacked in the course of the drug business.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:08:56)
Yeah, absolutely.

Baloreilly (1:08:58)
So should we take it to Reddit and the powernet?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:09:01)
Sure. So, Talby16 from the Perinat agreed with the spread chaos concept, pointing out the infamous quote that Drustene drops at the end of Battleground. Quote, And that's a good point. They're trying like I said, cause chaos in the mortal world.

Baloreilly (1:09:24)
Mm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:09:29)
spilling it over into the supernatural world to cause distractions and disruptions in the guardians of the gates. That's sort of my own idea.

Baloreilly (1:09:38)
Right, and when everybody all of sudden starts actually seeing vampires other creatures as what they really are with three eye, that's certainly gonna make people think the end is nigh.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:09:51)
Echoing that, PeterWiggin94 in the Paranet suggests that this might happen a lot more often than we think.

Both would be positioned to be major threats to any play that Nemesis made against Demonreach. they would be good people to eliminate as early as possible." Mira, in that same thread in the paranet, then points out that because low-level sorcerers like Victor Sales are fairly routine, that even if the White Council did find out about Victor and shut him down, they would just seen it as a routine thing and wouldn't see Nemesis behind the curtain, so to speak.

Baloreilly (1:10:42)
Yeah, and that's really good in part because of that thought about Demonreach. Clearly, the Walkers know all about it and that explains a lot of why they keep trying to make stuff happen in Chicago. Because that is the place where you would go after Demonreach from.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:03)
And let's talk a little bit more about a different idea. Snowshine Dog on Reddit suggested that Harry may have been the actual target of Nemesis' meddling in all three of the first books. Quote,

He nearly decides to keep wearing the belt and end up losing himself like the FBI agents. In Grave Peril, Harry actually takes the lure by eating the nightmare's magic, but chooses to it by allowing the ghosts of Bianca's victims' revenge instead of casting any black magic spells himself. In every case, the adversary is trying to turn him into a destroyer. Capital D. Unquote. Now this kind of...

dovetails with something that you were talking about where Justin called up the demon to try to mold Harry into something. He called up he who walks behind and maybe he who walks behind allowed himself to be defeated quote unquote in order to mold Harry into something specific. So maybe these are targeted at Harry by being in Chicago. They're not super well targeted but they are targeted.

Baloreilly (1:12:23)
Yeah, you brought up a really great point that, you know, M.A.B. always has six different schemes going when we were talking about this in the pre-show and that Nem... ⁓ thank you, thank you. And that's a true thing, you know, about Nemesis, that it's, you know, a high level player of the game who has multiple aims and definitely a consolation prize every time involved and maybe a reason.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:12:31)
That was somebody on the Reddit actually that pointed that out too.

Baloreilly (1:12:50)
to just kill him in the first three books, which presumably Nemesis could probably arrange if they went after him directly, is because there's this whole back, you know, well, even if I lose, know, heads I win and tails, Harry becomes a dark lord.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:13:11)
And even if Harry defeats it, I learned something more about Harry, right? It's information gathering, and then they can use that against him in the future. It was DVASQUEZ93, by the way, that pointed out that Mab has like multiple gambits going at the same time so that no matter what, she gets something that she wants. And I believe you pointed out that's a concept in the comic book world, a trope there called the Xanatos Gambit, where you have so, you're thinking so many steps ahead that no matter what the good guys do,

outcome is always in your favor, essentially.

Baloreilly (1:13:43)
Yeah, heads I win, tails you lose. That is exactly the way that the heavy hitters like Mabs and Nemesis try to structure the games. And one of the great things about Dresden is Jim is definitely thinking on that level the whole time. He is trying to make everyone's plots gambit pile up into chaotic situations that Harry needs to cut through. So I think that, especially that last one, is a...

one of the levels on which Nemesis' plan is probably working. But I also think that there is a bit more of a wide-ranging thing going on during this period in time, that's that Nemesis is trying to move a lot of pieces into just important places, physical places,

to give it the ability to maybe, during this star-born cycle, finally crack the outer gates. Because we know that in Grave Peril, Nemesis is trying to influence the Red Court of Vampires and Chichen Itza. We know that is trying to defeat the White Council in Africa and that they have agents in Egypt who are wiring Morgan,

through fake accounts and that they're positioning people everywhere, Peabody and Edinburgh. And we know that Chicago is a huge convergence of the ways. And as Peter Wiggin 94 pointed out, very near to demon reach, the source of the most dark ley lines on earth probably. And it would be a really good place to have a drone under Nemesis's thumb.

running crime or in book two, law enforcement or in book three, being the, red court duchess of the area. So it seems like these plays happen in Chicago, not just because Harry's there and not just because, is where demon reaches, but because anywhere that's a magically significant location is a place that now

As we approach the cycle, Nemesis is trying to move in.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:16:03)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, the cycle 20 years after, I think it's gonna be about 20 years after the book start, when Harry's about 45. So 20 years before this thing comes to a head, Nemesis has got its feelers out in all kinds of important geographic locations. Like you said, Chichen Itza, Chicago, which is an important...

conglomeration of the ways, because it's a meeting point in the mortal world. So it's also a meeting point in the ways, and it's close to demon reach, et cetera, et So there's probably other cities where they're doing other shady stuff, and it's not overt, maybe as overt as it is in Chicago. Maybe we just don't hear about it. Maybe Ramirez is foiling some stuff down there, and he doesn't realize it's connected. But we know that there's a lot of stuff happening to the point where Ebenezer even figures it out.

And he's not even talking about the stuff that's happening in Chicago, but they have that conversation later on where they both kind of agree and Harry calls him the Black Counsel. And to me, that suggests that there's stuff going on that Ebenezer knows about that Harry doesn't really know about. Harry's got his own piece of it, but there's more stuff going on in the wide world. So I like your idea of like, there's all these feelers going on all over the world. And one of the benefits of doing this and starting 20 years early,

is you don't have to win on day one, but you're getting information that you can use for the next gambit next year, and then the one after that, and the one after that. And that may be one of the reasons that Chicago, once or twice a year, gets some kind of horrible disaster happening that only Harry Dresden can stop, because they come up with a new way to test him, to push him, maybe if we can corrupt him, this will happen. Every little bit, like they know that he's, if they've done any research at all, they will know.

Baloreilly (1:17:19)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:17:45)
his reputation among the White Council, and therefore he's gotta be a target for them for corrupting and getting on their side, quote unquote.

Baloreilly (1:17:55)
So think that's all true, and I think it's important to talk about this because as you go through the series, you know, there's a little bit of the, you know, poking at your suspension of disbelief.

Why is all this stuff always happening in Chicago? Why do we never hear Harry in New York or Harry in St. Louis foiling some scheme that Nemesis has put into motion? Why does it always come to his backyard? And the point is that there are good reasons for Chicago to be targeted, some of them having to do with him, some of them not, at least not until he becomes the warden of Demonreach. And maybe those things are.

are happening in those other places, and the web is being slowly drawn tighter and tighter, but we only see part

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:18:42)
Yeah, that's my interpretation in the end. All right, that's where we're gonna stop for today. Next time on, next time on Recorded Neutral Territory, we'll see our next big fight scene when Harry takes on the scorpion amulet and tries to save Murphy from his own office.

Baloreilly (1:19:01)
And one of the things that we wanna make sure that we talk about because we're gonna see that fight scene is how does air magic work? So that's our next question for Bob Harry uses a big air spell to end that fight and we wanna know like physically, did you do that? Harry doesn't explain his wind spells the same way he has occasionally explained his fire spells and we wanna know what you guys think.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:19:26)
Yeah, how does physics work? Air moves from a point of high pressure to a point of low pressure. So what's Harry doing? Is he creating low pressure? But then if that's the case, how does shoot the elevator up? We're gonna talk about it next time.