Last time, werewolves werewolves werewolves dickery.

Harry heads to his two floor “apartment” and explains his door is now one of those steel-frame doors, the antiburglar kind. I bought it after a demon had come stomping into my apartment six months ago and wrecked my place. despite the fact that I don’t see why that’d have slowed down a demon whose acid melted all your property. Also, while Harry may not realize this because he was too busy learning magic chemistry to know the real version, acid melts inorganic material much faster, so he’s spent a lot of money to make sure the next frog demon can get in more easily.

(This is in addition to the fact that when you’re dealing with something that smashes its way in, it’ll just go in whatever the easiest way is.)

Harry then tells us his rent, while still super cheap for his two floor “apartment”, is slightly higher after the demon attack. Not sure how this even worked – no one seemed to know about it at the time, since Harry is somehow totally alone the whole time despite the screaming and exploding and police, and if they did know, wouldn’t he have just been kicked out?

There is a fireplace, and a kitchenette off the main room, a little bedroom adjacent to that, and a bathroom inside the bedroom. Sunken windows are high on each of the four walls, and one is on the wall of the bathroom.

Surprisingly, this actually does sound like it’s apartment-sized, which would mean this old house is one very narrow miracle of engineering. (Also, it’s unclear how anyone else gets to their apartments given the ground floor door opens directly to his place. Possibly there’s a front door that leads to the stairwell and a back door that goes straight in to his?

I decorate in textures more than I do in colors; there were thick rugs all over the bare stone floors, layered on top of one another in most places. Demon acid had burned away most of my furniture, and I had been obliged to scavenge secondhand stores for replacements. I like furniture with a lot of old wood and soft cloth, and I had made my purchases accordingly. Tapestries hung from my walls, the oldest tapestries that I could find, covering the bare stone.

Not sure if somehow his carpet survived the acid despite all the furniture on top being destroyed or if the author has even less of an idea how ungodly expensive this is than I previously thought and just assumed Harry could replace it far more easily than he could a couch.

THAT SAID, while Harry will not say this and I don’t think it crossed the author’s mind, this is a great secondary explanation for why Harry’s so out of money. He got a whole bunch of money at the same time as a whole bunch of expenses, and ended up spending most of it on replacing his stuff, unaware that his income stream was about to cut off.

I went over to the fireplace and built up the fire. October in Chicago is a cold, breezy month, and my dank little haven is usually chilly until I get a fire going. I dropped a few logs on the fire

Of course, he somehow still has the funds for firewood, presumably because the author figures that there’s trees everywhere so wood is free, right?

And we return to Mister the impossibly heavy cat.

Mister is larger than a lot of dogs. Maybe one of his parents was part wildcat.

Either Chicago dog ownership is now 90% teacup chihuahuas or that’s not a cat.

The wildcat (Felis silvestris) is a small cat native to most of Africa, Europe, and Southwest and Central Asia into India, western China, and Mongolia.

Of course, since those aren’t even found on the right continent here, perhaps he means something else! Let’s see, what else is referred to as “wildcat”…

Bobcats and lynxes! The lynx is the larger of the two and Wikipedia says it’s over twice the size of a housecat. It weights between 10-40 pounds…According to this site, medium-small dogs weigh between 20-40.

So if Mister is somehow a cross between a lynx and a housecat, and somehow manages to be on the highest end of that despite having regular housecat genes in the mix (with Harry estimating no more than partial lynx in one parent), he’d weigh as much as the smaller sort of dog. Actually, come to think of it, didn’t Harry say that Mister had mysteriously lost his tail? Maybe Mister’s just a regular bobcat who’s ballooned up in weight due to getting overfed. Harry’s dumb enough to miss that.

In conclusion, I guess lesser vampires have been eating the largest dogs first, leaving only the smaller ones for Mister to lord over and Harry to think “dogs” are just slightly larger than cats.

I fired up the wood-burning stove and prepared a quick meal of Spaghettios, grilled chicken, and toast. Mister shared in my meal, and split a can of Coke with me, as usual

The author has once again forgotten Harry is supposed to be actually out of money, not “can’t eat out every night” out of money. Or maybe he doesn’t have Harry eating ramen in this scene because he doesn’t actually know what ramen is beyond a thing poor people at, so he’ll only mention it in passing.

The coke issue also suggests the possibility Mister is actually something else entirely that’s pretending to be a cat for nefarious reasons.

I teetered down the stairs, holding a lit candle that cast a golden glow

WE INVENTED LANTERNS FOR A REASON USE THEM

Books, notebooks, defunct ballpoint pens, broken pencils, boxes, plastic containers, old butter bowls, empty jelly jars, and plastic baggies lay next to other containers of every size and shape that held the spices, rare stones, bones, fur, blood, oddments, jewelry, and other ingredients useful to wizardly pursuits and studies.

So he can use plastic containers, he just chooses not to when he’s out and actually needs them. Also, what’s the jewelry used in? He’s already listed “rare stones” separately, we know he doesn’t seem willing to enchant items for other people, and he can barely bring himself to wear a single bracelet when it’s that or die.

I reached the bottom of the ladder, stepped over a precariously balanced stack of comic books (don’t ask)

Porn for rapist skull.

I wonder if it’s superhero comics or if the author’s aware hardcore porn comics are also a thing.

“What are we doing, now?” Bob sniggered. “More weight-loss potions?”
“Look, Bob,” I said. “That was only to get me through a rough month. Someone’s got to pay the rent around here.”
“All right,” Bob said smugly. “You going to get into breast enhancement, then? I’m telling you, that’s where the money is.”

You’re all assholes and I hate you.

If Harry could make a safe weightloss potion, that’d actually help people a great deal, doubly so if, given it’s magic, he could set it so it moved people to a particular weight/fat percentage/etc but no farther and so couldn’t be used to lower weight into actual dangerous zones. Hell, even cosmetic surgery potions would still likely be better than the alternative – plus, if he can do breasts, he can probably make people switch sex. (Also, breast reduction is totally a thing too! Some women would like an option that isn’t their back collapsing OR never breastfeeding) This seems like it’s being done with the attitude only trophy wives/strippers/etc would have reason to change their bodies.

“That isn’t what magic is for, Bob. How petty can you get?”
“Ah,” Bob said, his eye lights flickering. “The question is, how pretty can you get them? You aren’t a half-bad wizard, Dresden. You should think about how grateful all those beautiful women will be.”

But I was looking at it from the perspective of women having autonomy over their own bodies and not whether or not Harry could fuck them, so obviously I am wrong.

Harry then claims to not be obsessed with sex unlike some rapist skulls, and this is actually true. He’s been casually eyeing women but he hasn’t had that seething undercurrent to it like he did last time, presumably because he’s finally getting laid.

Bob grumbled something in Latin

Harry supposedly should know Latin.

Anyway, he wants to know about werewolves and is flabbergasted to realize there’s more than one. So…how exactly could you be sure werewolves were not like the movie ones, Harry?

“There wolf,” Bob replied solemnly, his voice seething with a hokey accent. “There castle.”
I blinked at him. “Uh. What the heck are you talking about?”
“It’s a joke, Harry. Stars almighty, you never get out, do you?”

It’s not a very funny one because that movie came out thirty years ago if this is taking place in the year 2000 and I know the author is a ninety year old man but thirty year old movies are not hip stuff all the young people are doing today.

(Also, Harry presumably can’t see that movie because magic=tech go boom, but Bob could? Do spirits not have the bane effect? And if all he normally does is force orgies, when did he watch it?)

“Murder. Mortal business is so complicated. You never hear about murder charges in the Nevernever.”
“That’s because everything there is immortal.

This is interesting!

Murder is specifically death by non-natural causes, which means it should be the only form of death for immortals. They must therefore be the stronger form of immortal, which flat out can’t die under any circumstances. In that case, they shouldn’t be able to breed, or else their numbers are constantly expanding and humanity (and the entire universe, eventually) will one day be overrun due to us having limitations on our maximum population.

While it doesn’t technically mean they can’t harm each other, it actually does suggest it because if there was a way to leave one technically alive but functionally incapacitated, that’s basically “murder”. So the things in the Nevernever are thinking beings that are immune to any consequences. Also, Harry totally said vampires come from the Nevernever, meaning apparently you can’t kill them either. (The easiest way of looking at this is that they’re immortal only within the Nevernever, but then we have the problem of them never leaving. It’s pretty damn stupid for any intelligent thing to leave the place it’s invulnerable for somewhere it has to stay hidden half of each day or burn alive. They should be luring humans in, not coming out, and also those humans would probably become immortal snacks and they wouldn’t need to bother with it again.)

“All right,” Bob said. “How much do you know?”
“Exactly nothing about werewolves. My teacher never covered that with me.”

So Harry was either lying earlier or his smugness just made him assume whatever the muggles believed in their dumb movies must be wrong.

“Old Justin had a lousy sense of just about everything. He got what was coming to him, Harry, and don’t let anyone on the White Council tell you any different.”
I stopped for a moment. A sudden rush of mixed feelings, anger and fear and mostly regret, washed through me. I closed my eyes. I could still see him, my teacher, dying in flames born of my will and anger. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

So what’s the rapist skull really pushing for here? It seems that Harry still feels pretty badly about what he did, which is reasonable considering that people generally don’t deserve being burned alive. The rapist skull is pushing for him to think that some people do deserve that. That sometimes you’re justified, if the other person is bad enough and you’re angry enough…

It’s a good temptation, isn’t it? Harry didn’t do anything actually wrong – if you’re acting in self-defense and that means the other person dies a messy and painful death because it’s your only option, that’s not your fault. But if you still have a sense of empathy, you’re going to find it painful. It’s nice to be told you aren’t a bad person for doing it…and nicer still to be told that, in fact, you’re a good person for doing it, that the horrible thing was deserved and that the world is right and fair.

And once you’ve established some people deserve what they get, then the next time, it’s easier to say. And you don’t need to wonder if you should’ve tried to at least give them a cleaner death, because they deserved whatever you did and in fact you’re more good for killing them this way.

“Hell, the Council even suspended the sentence on you. You were vindicated. Say, I wonder what ever happened to Elaine. Now there was a sweet piece of—”
“Werewolves, Bob,” I said, in a very quiet, very angry voice. One hand started to hurt, and I saw that my fingers had clenched into a fist, the knuckles turning white. I turned my eyes to him, glaring.
I heard the skull make a gulping sound.

Why would a skull make a gulping sound if not on purpose?

So first he tells Harry he’s totally right to be violent and angry, then he coos that Harry’s got the official seal of rightness for it, then he baits Harry into being threatening…

And then he said, “Right. Okay. Werewolves. And, uh, which potions did you want?”

And he shows it working. Harry was told being violent is good, then baited, then rewarded.

Anyway, what Harry wants is A night’s rest in a bottle. And I want something that will make me imperceptible to a werewolf.”

This is worldbuilding time, where Bob the Rapist Skull will explain what you can and can’t do. Problem is, it once again makes Harry look like an idiot. The skull explains you can’t cheat sleep like that and a coffee potion is the best anyone can do. Now, sciencewise, that’s maybe plausible, as we still have no idea what sleep is or why we need it, we just know bad shit goes down if you don’t get it, unless you’re one of the people who don’t sleep, and basically epic shrug is science’s explanation. Oh, also intelligence is roughly correlated to sleep, except when it isn’t, and also bugs need it.

But that’s the science side! Why should magic care that sleep may or may not be an absolute requirement of complex life? It’s magic! It absolutely makes intuitive sense you should be able to skip sleep, because we don’t perceive sleep as doing very much, a good chunk of our sleep urge is controlled by our environment, and under stress we can refuse to sleep just fine. Humans, like some animals and unlike others, are even designed to do the no sleep for a while then crash thing, so even if somehow magic can’t replicate sleep instantaneously (like maybe you’d have to have science understand a bit better what sleep should be doing for magicians to work out what they need to aim for) it should absolutely be able to push it off. Not “super-coffee” stimulant to literally keep you moving, because that can be accomplished with such existing magic potions as “drink a pot of coffee you dumbass” and “this is literally why we invented amphetamines”. Those things don’t actually keep you in top form at all – you’re still going to get steadily worse in every way except your ability to shake like a leaf. A potion that lets you draw against future sleep to be bright eyed today would be magical while still having a check. And better yet for a magical setup, if you’re feeling hubrisy enough, you can say FUCK YOU LAWS OF REALITY I DO WHAT I WANT to that check and guzzle the stuff to the point where if you ever crash you’ll drop dead on the spot.

There – we keep the vitally important squish of wizards rather than letting them actually ignore human limitations, we have potential tension where Harry could be in a situation where he’s all “I already drank two of these but I just need to stay awake a little longer…”, and we have a puzzle weakness to exploit in enemy wizards!

Back to magic in this book, where Bob goes on to say that also, it’s totally impossible to make a potion to hide from wolves as “Wolves have just got way too much on the ball to hide from every one of their senses without doing some major work. I’m talking, like, a greater Ring of Invisibility, not just a Shadowcape or something.”

And come on. Okay, wolves have super noses, but they have shit eyes. I could maybe see werewolves having the best of both worlds, because why not magic, but Bob the Rapist Skull is saying it’s the wolf. Also, it shouldn’t be that hard.

You don’t need to remove all evidence of yourself, you just need to swap yourself with something else boring, like pavement or a lamp. It wouldn’t be perfect, you’d be a different smelling/looking/temperature/etc than the area you’re in, but who pays that much attention? Plus when the werewolves do finally figure out what you’re doing because you leap out, THEN they’ll be on the lookout and it’ll be harder to pull off the next time.

What about a partial-hiding potion, then?”
“Oh, like a blending brew? Look like an unobtrusive part of the background, something like that? I would think that would be the most useful, really. Keep you from being noticed to begin with.”

That’s way more boring than finding a particular thing, making yourself take on all the sensory characteristics of that thing, and having a known weakness to this rather than a general handwave of “you’ll probably avoid notice, unless something does notice you”, ie, it works until the plot decides it doesn’t.

How much do you know about werewolves, Bob?”
“Plenty. I was in France during the Inquisition.”

Okay so points for knowing that there was a werewolf version of the witch hunts, but the same problem of how those weren’t actually werewolves any more than they were actually witches. This was actually a big problem for the church, because their official stance on the matter was WTF PEOPLE CANNOT WOLF THAT IS NOT HOW GOD WORKS but the peasantry wouldn’t accept this because werewolves were a preexisting belief so they fumbled around and decided it was heresy to think you were a werewolf and then killed people for that and the cannibalism. In the church’s defense, some of them do appear to have been eating people, although given the legal system at the time was basically lynching with more torture, it’s pretty hard to be solidly sure any of them did anything.

Point is, actual werewolves would’ve been a bit harder to hang.

Harry starts the potion and explains the eight parts and base thing. Base for coffee potion is coffee, and now I’m wondering if the rapist skull will just tell him to put in tea leaves and Ritalin and so on and call the result a potion, and base for the masking is water, which eh, water actually has a smell and fresh clear water would likely stand out in a city environment, you know? Water doesn’t mask so much as wash away, so I’d think it’d be a better basis for an actual sense-blocking potion rather than a smell-boring potion.

“Lot of werewolfery going on then?”
“Are you kidding?” Bob said. “It was werewolf central. We had every kind of werewolf you could think of. Hexenwolves, werewolves, lycanthropes, and loup-garou to boot. Every kind of lupine theriomorph you could think of.”
“Therro-what?” I said.
“Theriomorph,” Bob said. “Anything that shape-shifts from a human being into an animal form. Werewolves are theriomorphs. So are werebears, weretigers, werebuffaloes…”
“Buffaloes?” I asked.
“Sure. Some Native American shamans could do a buffalo. But almost everyone does predators, and until pretty recently, wolves were the scariest predator anyone around Europe could think of.”

That is fucking bullshit go look at the really old names and see how many people are named some varient of HOLY SHIT BEAR.

Also no, people turning into rabbits and such is all over too, since those sorts of forms are better for spying. Plus there was a ton of stuff about people being able to turn into cats. The involuntary ones tended to be big predators because turning into a rabbit is unlikely to make you accidentally eat a kid and those were tapping into the horror of losing control and violating the taboo of cannibalism, similar to the wendigo. If you want real strength, you want a bear (unlike our friendly American bears, the European bear started off as basically a less-white polar bear, a huge creature eating an almost all meat diet. Competition with humans changed its diet to the primarily plant eaters found there today, but the terror of something is always going to last longer than the thing itself.) as people would well know given that bear-baiting, which was like the only thing to do for entertainment in the shithole ages, involves one bear and quite a few dogs.

“And there’s a difference between types of werewolves?”

No, Harry, they’re exactly the same but have different names for no reason.

I get this is setting up exposition, but instead of asking something obvious just so you can get the ego boost of “Right,” Bob confirmed. you could’ve just skipped to “So what’s the difference between these types?”

The difference is mostly about the wolf:human ratio and how you do it, which of course it is, you cut out half the interesting thing when you insisted France’s shapeshifting was just wolves wolves wolves.

So: Werewolf prime is a guy who’s a magic user with only a single spell, and by “single spell” Bob the Rapist Skull means a spell to turn into and a spell to turn back. He explains these werewolves are sucktastic because they’re just a human guy with sharp teeth and no disposable thumbs, squinting through their crappy wolf eyes while trying to figure out how the nose works. Let’s also remember that the peasantry in France may have been starving, but shifting into an obligate meat eater was not really a smart way of getting around that unless you’re willing to commit to eating babies.

“You’ve never been a peasant in medieval France, Harry,” Bob said. “Life was hard for those people. Never enough food, shelter, medicine. If you could give yourself a fur coat and the ability to go out and hunt your own meat, you would have jumped at the chance, too.”

There wasn’t any meat you dumbass. The animals were being hunted to death, by putting on that fur coat you were putting yourself on the menu, there were people whose entire job was specifically to murder your particular species AND you were sure to do worse at that hunting than you would’ve with a sling. Turning into an animal that was going extinct at the time is not the winning move you think it is.

You know what a great move is? Turning into a horse. You’re already eating grass, now it actually fills you up!

Also, these guys are totally just regular wolves and die to anything that’ll kill a regular wolf. As a reminder, like most wild animals, wolves easily die of shock. The only thing they have going for them is they have a better immune system than we do, so if your injury has started festering or you’re considering eating really rotting meat, sure, turning into a wolf might work slightly better than doing that as a human.

Next up:

“Transmogrification? That’s illegal, Bob. It’s one of the Laws of Magic. If you transform someone into an animal, it destroys their personality. You can’t transform someone else without wiping out their mind. It’s practically murder.”

And no human has ever committed murder!

Bob the Rapist Skull then says that actually no it doesn’t destroy their personality directly, but they’ll end up thinking like they’re a wolf eventually. The timeframe is a maximum of “several years” and considering wolves are basically high-strung dogs, I’d actually say it’s more likely the aging of the form itself is causing brain degridation. Plus you’d probably start to go crazy if you looked and were treated like a wolf even if your brain was totally human, and that plus the stress hormones you’d be marinating in wouldn’t be nice. It seems unlikely it’s got anything to do with the transmutation magic itself.

Then there’s the hexenwolf, which is your actual old school not-like-the-movies thing.

“The most common way, back in France, was to make a deal with a demon or a devil or a powerful sorcerer. You get a wolf-hide belt, put it on, say the magic words, and whammy, you’re a wolf. A Hexenwolf.“

Anyway, this is totes different than the first time because it’s somebody else’s magic rather than your own AND through an object.

The talisman provides an anchor for a spirit of bestial rage. Nasty thing from the bad side of the Nevernever. That spirit wraps around a human personality to keep it from being destroyed.”
“A kind of insulation,” I said.
“Exactly. It leaves you with your own intellect and reason, but the spirit handles everything else.”
I frowned. “Sounds a little easy.”
“Oh, sure,” Bob said. “It’s really easy. And when you use a talisman to turn into a wolf, you lose all of your human inhibitions and so on, and just run on your unconscious desires, with the talisman-spirit in charge of the way the body moves. It’s really efficient. A huge wolf with human-level intelligence and animal-level ferocity.”

But animals don’t work that way!

This is not an anything-wolf, it’s a berserker. Berserkers do have strong ties to the historical werewolf concept, with the idea that they’d wear bear or wolf skins, although the idea doesn’t seem to be that they were transforming into those things and some sources seem to be that it had no real magical properties and that was just the uniform to warn anyone on their side to give them a wide berth.

The actual spell-werewolves were generally the opposite – if you got a belt or skin to turn into an animal, you got to stay in control, which frankly if you’re going to sell your soul you really should be getting a better deal than a ragespirit. A lot of the oldschool werewolves were not using the werewolfism to excuse their cannibalism, it was just that if you were going to maul someone to death and then eat the raw meat from their corpse, it was easier to do as a wolf. The idea is if you already wanted to eat people, it was good to turn into something better at eating people than another human.

Back to potions, uber-magic-coffee is made of

a morning donut, for taste; a cock’s crow, for hearing; fresh soap, for smell; bits of a washcloth, for touch; and a beam of dawn sunshine for sight; a to-do list, for the mind; and a bit of bright, cheerful music, for the spirit

God that’s stupid.

This seems like a cheerful morning potion or a run out the door potion. Morning donuts are a great way of putting yourself back to sleep. A nice morning shower with warm water to better lather your soap is not going to be super wakey and unless your washcloth is steel wool I don’t really associate that with forcing yourself awake either.

Really, the only one that directly ties to waking is sunlight, since that’s actually a thing that your brain uses. Crowing? Kinda soothing, really. Cheerful music? Not more wakeful than most other music. To-do list? If you’re fine waking up, that might encourage you to get started, but when you’re exhausted they tend to have the opposite effect.

This reads like the potion Harry should be using for rolling out of bed with a hangover so he doesn’t hate the world.

Back to the “hexenwolf” that sounds nothing like the historical myths, Harry is so incredibly smart he can notice something:

“Most people
don’t have the strength to control a spirit like that, I’d think. It would influence their actions. Maybe
even control them. Suppress their conscience.”

Wow really and here I thought a spell that’s nothing but using you as an avatar for insane rage would be totally reasonable.

(Also the rapist skull even directly said it kills all human inhibition, which totally covers conscience. Stop saying the obvious!)

“It’s effective,” Bob said. “I don’t know about the good or the evil of the thing. That’s something that only you mortals worry about.”

Okay, so given holy water is a thing, there’s holy magic and presumably angels and stuff. Therefore, there’s at least some subset of supernatural nonhumans who care about good and evil.

The skull explains the church decided to burn them, which is redundant because what else do you think the Inquisition did, and Harry keeps asking about if they can make more by biting people despite being mocked earlier for the idea any form of werewolf worked that way and the fact that christ Harry the mechanism is an item given to you by a powerful person how would a bite make another item spontaneously appear and convince the other person to do the ritual to use it?

The skull apparently does not see the fact this makes no sense and just repeats that the bitten thing can’t work that way Or you’d have werewolves overrunning the entire planet in a couple of years only no, you wouldn’t necessarily.

There’s two aspects to the disease transmission thing. One, yes, is how fast it can spread under optimum conditions, but the other is how people would respond to it. Rabies, as usual, is a good model here. We can ignore the fact rabies is fatal by just considering how much damage a single rabid animal can do when around people. The answer is, some of the time it straight up kills them and when it doesn’t, we lock the bitten up or even kill them when they start to show signs. Humans are not a valid rabies vector.

This is the same stupid logic behind the idea zombies automatically win because they can bite people. It ignores that people initially outnumber them and work in groups, and it ignores the fact that you’re dealing with something trying to tear apart the other person rather than leave them at maximum health so they can do the most damage upon turning.

If the hexenwolf is functionally “rabid”, as opposed to just turning into a wolf and being all “huh, that’s weird, I guess I’ll play with this squeaky bone until it wears off”, then people would respond to being bitten in the same way a person would respond to a rabies bite, namely, actually fucking telling others. Now, the fact this is a survivable rabies might make people try to keep it a secret…but the fact you’d wake up in the morning with your mouth full of baby would motivate you to not. And recall this is still the time of castles. If the peasants in the countryside don’t have secure enough homes, they can mob whatever church or lord’s property that is defensible. At that point, either the person stays put (and makes it clear by how they’re untouched that they are the wolf) or they come in, transform, and get put down by an angry mob.

Now, if someone is trying to transmit lycanthropy, it’s entirely possibly they succeed. They can move fast and if they have enough intelligence they can nip a whole lot of people, and none of those people will know what’s going to happen the first time and will get up to a whole lot of damage. A lycanthrope traveling quickly can probably outpace the rumors for quite a bit so people can’t take reasonable countermeasures and do a lot of damage, and if they bite enough people who bite enough people in turn on the first transformation, they can start to tip the numbers in their favor.

But this relies on them having enough control not to savage people, which implies the rest should also be able to just not savage people, and also that the resulting werewolves don’t almost all kill themselves or turn themselves in. (Even if you have a super low view of humanity, consider also this is happening to very religious people who believe in a literal heaven and hell and a triggerhappy god who will absolutely bump you from the first to the second if Satan finds a way to trick you. Christianity was a death cult once and it could totally be one again if you apply the right stress.)

Basically, it could happen, but it’s very far from an automatic win.

The less horrific the transformation, the more likely you’d have people hiding it, but the less horrific it is, the less werewolfpocalypse is a concern. If the endstate is everyone turns into doggies once a month, then we’d have a couple issues with medical problems (unless werewolf transformation fixes that, which some versions say it does, and in that case way less issues) and we’d need to design important things to be operated with dog paws just in case. It’s only an issue with slavering uncontrollable monsters, but people tend not to do that to other people.

“Lycanthropes,” Bob said.
“Isn’t that a psychological condition?”

For fuck’s sake it’s a psychological condition that is literally being a werewolf. It’s not even like they made up a different way of saying werewolf for the disease it’s just wolfman in Greek because the people there spoke Greek and not Old English. And it can’t be he’s getting confused with the modern usage because everyone uses lycanthrope as the fancier term for werewolf now.

But okay Bob says that he’s not referring to the psychological condition, he’s referring to the one where the person turns into a beast, but only inside his head. Because that’s different. Because the person is channeling an actual rage spirit. Except if that’s a thing than probably mental illness is generally a matter of getting the wrong spirit in your head and we’re right back to it being a psychological condition.

This is just so infuriating because you know the only reason the author picked this as the term for this type is precisely because it’s the one used medically for the person who has no outward transformations but thinks they’re a werewolf anyway.

The spirit takes over. It affects the way he acts and thinks, makes him more aggressive, stronger. They also tend to be very resistant to pain or injury, sickness; they heal rapidly—all sorts of things.”
“But they don’t actually shapeshift into a wolf?”
“Give that boy a Kewpie,” Bob said. “They’re just people, too, but they’re awfully fierce. Ever heard of the Norse berserkers? Those guys were lycanthropes, I think. And they’re born, not made.”

So the people who every historical source said had wolf pelts and used potions and magic to turn into ragemonsters have nothing to do with that kind of magical creature and were just guys born with a rage spirit despite that not being anything like how they’re supposed to work.

Also those people should be extinct now because all of human history has been about moving away from that.

This is what rageful, aggressive, super-strong humans are like.

Anyway, the last kind is loup-garou, and yes, this whole thing has just been someone thinking it’d be so clever to have every different type of werewolf running around and missed the fact they’re all just werewolf in different languages.

that was the name Etienne the Enchanter used for them, before he got burned at the stake.

Because witch trials were totally killing actual witches!

Anyway, these are our regenerating unstoppable movie werewolves. That’s how stupid Harry’s earlier statement was, not only are werewolves like movie werewolves but there’s they’re like two different forms of movie werewolves.

Someone has cursed them to become a wolflike demon

Unlike having a rage spirit bound into them because obviously that’d totally get you a regular wolf.

That someone’s got to be really powerful, too, like a major heavyweight sorcerer or a demon lord or one of the Faerie Queens.

So Harry could totally make one is what you’re saying.

Anyway, these are the ones you want silver for.

and not only that, the silver has to be inherited from a family member. Inherited silver bullets.”

This is actually an okay twist – in modern times, it’s easy to get your hands on basically anything so long as you know what it is, so purely object based weaknesses are less intimidating.

This actually seems like it’s not impossible to get around, since one can “inherit” objects prior to a family member’s death in general use of the word, but strictly speaking it does require death and that’s a lot trickier.

“Really? Why would that work and not regular silver?”
“I don’t make the laws of magic, Harry. I just know what they are and have an idea of when they’re changing. That one hasn’t changed. I think maybe it has something to do with the element of sacrifice.”

That’s a pile of bullshit.

Okay, first off, saying your laws of magic are random when you’ve got a system with this many moving parts is always stupid. It’s okay if you have a collection of random laws and then have anything follow from that, but when your magic system is huge and you’re introducing new stuff constantly, you need it to make overall sense.

Why would magic care about “element of sacrifice”, especially when an inherited object isn’t necessarily precious? Even back in the day it wasn’t, the people who had most of the silver were also less likely to be attached to any particular item of it. Plus make coins out of the stuff and money is the most straightforward type of inheritance. (Even now, you ask me for an inherited silver thing and, well, my very dead grandpa did collect a lot of those fancy coins…) If it was supposed to be sacrifice, it shouldn’t be any inherited thing but only something you care about. It’s magic, it can tell. There’s so many stories where it’s required that the person actually care about the object for it to work.

And worse, it’s not that hard to find a way this would make sense otherwise.

So obviously, silver is magic. It’s shiny and rare and you can use it to make mirrors. Unlike gold, silver tarnishes and requires care if kept over time. Furthermore, continual ownership is stability, while werewolves are about flux and change. Inheritance is a sort of exclamation mark for the passage of time – when we hear the land/item someone has is inherited, we assume it’s some long tradition and totally theirs, even though for all we know the first person bought it seconds before dying.

The longer silver has been owned by a particular family, the more weight it has in their hands as a weapon against a changable monster but inheritance is a much stronger additive of this weight than pure time, so inherited silver will definitely work even if it hasn’t been with your family for too long. And if you’ve got something that’s been around five hundred years and passed down a whole bunch of times, it’ll work a lot better.

I would then add the caviat that if you melt it down it counts as a new item so no, silver bullets are not an option unless your family thought ahead and put some in the will. Good luck aiming them with your blunderbluss!

Harry’s just all well now that’d be bad if it was one. Or you could just kill the human version? Because it sure seems like it’s only the wolf that’s invulnerable. I mean, that’s how they did things in France and apparently that wasn’t a bunch of random murders of innocent people. That seems way easier than trying to find it while it’s a superpowered monster and shoot it.

“If it was a louper, you’d know,” Bob said wisely. “In the middle of this town, you’d have a dozen people dead every time the full moon came around.

Harry’s all so yeah that’s what we’re got, except how would it only be a dozen? This is an insane ragemonster that is literally unstoppable in a highly populated area. It should dig into the nearest nightclub and slaughter everyone. The killings so far have been once a night. The only time multiple people died is if there were several people together. The only way this makes sense is if Bob the rapist skull doesn’t understand how populated modern cities are, or even what cities are because even a thousand years ago I think a dedicated killing machine could’ve done a lot more rampaging through a city. If, instead of Bob the rapist skull handing us stuff, this was some book, then you could have the writer living in a more rural area and using that number without thinking to mention population density as a factor.

Second potion ingredients:
plastic wrap for sight; a bit of plain white cotton, for touch; a
little deodorant for smell; a rustle of wind for hearing; a leaf of plain old
lettuce, for taste; and finally I threw in a blank piece of paper, for the
mind, and some elevator music for the spirit. The ingredients were boring.
The potion looked and smelled boring. Perfect.

No, actually boring with a touch of dumb.

Plastic wrap okay, clear but distorted. But cotton has a feel, deodorant has smell (and one that very much means human), and lettuce does in fact have taste. Plus have you never seen animals? Their ears move when they hear wind rustle toward the sound. (And the elevator music seems liable to backfire given how regularly people bitch about it.)

If it’s about blending to a wolf, the stuff shouldn’t be getting picked on what humans don’t care about. Considering the point of the potion is to be bland and take on ambient qualities, it’d actually be a bit funny if he just added water to water with some water with a dash of water. Failing that, he really should be going with ambient city items, the kind of thing anyone used to a city would automatically filter out – bits of gritty soil for smell, drop of oil scum for taste, distant wheels on road for the sound, etc.

“I want you to learn more,” I told him. “Go out and see what else you can round up on werewolves.”

Hey, remember that time Harry only let Bob the rapist skull out when he was under duress? What comparatively moral times those were.

Bob’s teeth clicked a couple of times. “Give me a twenty-four-hour pass,” he said.
I shook my head. “Forget it. The last time I let you out, you invaded a party over at Loyola and set off an orgy.”
Bob sniffed. “I didn’t do anything to anyone that a keg wouldn’t have done.”
“But those people didn’t ask for you to get into their systems, Bob.

If the dumb sluts had drunk anything, of course, they’d have deserved what they got. Remember: roofies are wrong, but her passing out from just the alcohol means DO ME NOW TIGER.