QUESTION 1: Since there are mages who specialize in dealing with the different supernatural beings, and there are more diplomatic mages who deal with the vampires regularly, why haven’t they made any appearances? I would think they would show up in the story since the vampires are currently in alliance with the Silver Circle.
Yes, there are mages who specialize in dealing with the vamps. But if they’re discussing policy with the vampires, where are they going to be? In Senate sessions, or hanging out with Cassie? I’m thinking the former. And you don’t regularly see Senate meetings in the books because Cassie isn’t normally there.
QUESTION 2: I’m not sure if this has been asked before, but has Rosier tried to make any more incubus/human since Pritkin was born?
Not since he realized that Pritkin had inherited his abilities. Rosier was more interested in training up the son he already had, than in trying for more when the odds against success were so incredibly bad. And then, when Pritkin grew up, Rosier was surprised to discover that he was exceedingly touchy on the subject of his mother, and was horrified by the role he had likely played in her death. Not to mention the role that Rosier had played.
It was one of the first big arguments they had, and it took Rosier a long time to work his son back around. And that was accomplished by lying and saying that he hadn’t known that Pritkin’s birth would kill her. So going out and trying for more children was a little hard after that, since it would have undermined the lie. And, in any case, Pritkin gets his stubbornness from daddy, and daddy was determined that his son would do what he wanted, damn it. Leaving us with the situation we have now.
QUESTION 3: In Embrace the Night, in Paris, Pritkin shows some ability to sense Cassie’s emotions (when he’s searching her for the map). I don’t have my books with me, so I can’t check, but I’m pretty sure this is implied a few other places as well. How does this ability work? How limited is it?
It’s a byproduct of the feeding process, which allows an incubus to access a person’s power through their emotions. And occasionally something else will slip through besides just lust, since human emotions aren’t so easily separated. But incubi are not really empathic; it’s very hit or miss, and they have no control over it. What is more likely is that an incubus, or part-incubus, is going to be very good at reading emotions through facial expressions and tones of voice. When your whole survival depends on attracting/interesting a partner, it helps to pay attention! And Pritkin has that ability, whether he normally chooses to use it or not.
QUESTION 4: What’s Pritkin’s real haircolor?
Lol at the Pritkin questions today! It’s brownish/blond. He has dyed it various times as a disguise or to help differentiate himself from his “father,” who had brownish/blond hair and a beard when he was working for the Corps. Pritkin needed to look somewhat different when he joined, since there were still plenty of war mages around who remembered him from before.
QUESTION 5: Pritkin tells Cassie in Touch the Dark that the power won’t pass to a sybil who’s gone dark, but didn’t Myra go dark? Why was she still in the running for the position of Pythia?
That’s explained in the books. The Pythian power has its own definition of what is or is not acceptable, and it isn’t always the same as human norms. Myra had, for example, made it possible for Agnes to poison herself, but she hadn’t put the arsenic in the amulet; it had already been there. And she hadn’t dunked it in Agnes’ tea every day; Agnes had done that. Myra had read up on the rules, and had stayed just on the right side of them. She was evil, not stupid.
QUESTION 6: This is probably the prime example of me overthinking, or not quite catching everything. Feel free to simply tell me to read TTD again, as this is obviously a very long question… From my understanding, Cassie and Mircea change history in TTD, to try to keep Myra from altering history in a way harmful to them. They free Radu, and change the way Louis-Caesare was made. This is referenced again when he becomes a more prominent character in the Dory books. Does Cassie retain the memories of how it was before she changes it, while everyone else remembers the changed version? Does Mircea remember both versions? It severely messes with my head. If she changes history, wouldn’t that negate the need to go back and change it at all, thereby preventing her from going back to change it? I understand when she goes back in time to stop others from altering the time line, but freeing Radu seems like it is outside of the “rules” as it were.
Warning: long, boring answer ahead. Proceed at your own risk.
Yes, Cassie remembers things the way they were before they were changed. You know, it’s easy to keep this sort of thing straight if you recall that Cassie’s timeline is the only one you need to worry about. She is Pythia. She is the linchpin on which everything else turns. Concentrate on her and it all becomes clearer.
So, before Cassie left her own time to go back to seventeenth century France, things were in a mess and her help was needed. She goes back and rescues LC, and changes time in the process. She then returns to the present day. But here’s the kicker: she didn’t go back and relive her life again, did she? She didn’t experience the new timeline for 23 years. She entered it only when she returned to the Senate and found that the world had changed (subtly) because of her actions. Everyone else who was left behind had lived through the changed world but Cassie had not. Because she hadn’t been there. Time had been one way when she left, and was another when she returned, as a direct result of her actions. The same was true for Mircea, because he was with her.
As far as what that meant for the book, keep in mind that all Cassie had done was to insure that the attempt Myra made on LC’s life had failed. She didn’t change anything else. The reasons for the war were still there, and it was still brewing behind the scenes. And since MAGIC was in shambles after Cassie returned, obviously Rasputin and co. had still attacked the Senate.
Remember, their back-up plan in case Myra failed had always been a frontal assault on the Senate. Rasputin preferred to challenge (as long as he wasn’t going to be facing LC) because gaining control of the Senate that way was more of a sure thing than an open assault. But once Tomas spilled the beans about the Senate’s plan to save LC, he said screw it and just attacked anyway. And that assault came before Cassie went back in time, so it wasn’t dependent on anything she did or didn’t do.
So in the altered timeline, the frontal assault on the Senate just went from Plan B to Plan A, with the challenge that Rasputin sent to the Consul merely being used to throw the Senate off guard. It worked. The Senate wasn’t expecting an assault, they were expecting a challenge. Because that was how these things were always decided and because anything else would start a war. The Senate just didn’t realize: they were already at war.
As far as freeing Radu being outside the rules, oh, hell yes. But since when does Mircea follow rules when they aren’t convenient for him? And he was the only one who knew what the rules were at that point; Cassie certainly didn’t. So, basically, Mircea pulled a fast one. Is this at all a surprise?
QUESTION 7: What does Louis Cesare actually remember about being possessed by Mircea in Carcassonne? Why does he think he ended up becoming a vampire courtesy of Radu, and how on earth did he explain what was going on to himself after Mircea stopped possessing him and he was left in a dungeon with a women missing a toe and a starving vampire?
Lol—I like how you phrased that!:-)
Louis-Cesare thought he was going mad, which is what any normal person would think when they suddenly lose control of their bodies and someone else starts speaking out of their mouths. He heard a different explanation (the one Mircea gave Radu when they were alone together) about what was going on but he was too busy being fed on by a vampire to really pay attention at that point. Radu tried to explain later, but mostly what LC got out of that was that a) Radu was a vampire and b) the people coming to investigate what had happened to the garrison were likely to hunt them down and kill them both if they didn’t get the hell out. But if they left before those people arrived, everyone would think they’d died in the tragedy (whatever the humans decided that had been) and nobody would look for them.
So they ran like hell, but in the process of feeding Radu enough to keep him alive, LC became infected (as Radu had intended). And then when he woke up, Radu was gone—because he’d had to disappear or risk changing time even more than had already been done. That left LC a brand new vamp with no maker, which was what he’d been in the old time line. But this time around he had a sense of betrayal he hadn’t had before, especially after he tried to track Radu down only to have his master flee at the sight of him. It left him with some serious trust and abandonment issues, making for a somewhat altered LC.