Karen Chance Fans discussion
This topic is about
Touch the Dark
The Cassie Books
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Touch the Dark (Cassandra Palmer #1)
Zeenat wrote: "ha ha I finished reading the book. Some things I noticed:1) I love how Radella goes you're not my Cassandra. lol I can't wait for the next book reread.
2) Pritkin thinks cassie is not human... H..."
I do think Cassie smart, but there's a couple of things I've noticed where she's not correct in her assumptions. I'm not implying for a minute this means she's an idiot, but she doesn't have all the information. There was recognising Tomas for one, and there's another thing I just read where Cassie says the vamps wouldn't be able to feed from Pritkin through his shields. I'm fairly certain that Mircea says in Hunt the Moon that he would be able to drain a fully-warded mage in (I think) about 30 seconds. I remember thinking, when I read Hunt the Moon, that this might be significant (you know, for when Mircea kills Pritkin at the end, right?!!) *runs away laughing*
But, anyway, I'm not knocking Cassie. She can only go by what she's been taught or experienced for herself, and we get to see her learn and adapt as she goes along.
Actually the Tomas thing surprises me too. She should have gotten that I think. I think Cassie is constantly surprised by how powerful Mircea is though. Just like she was surprised to see his not so nice side when he almost kills Pritkin.
@Lannister I think it was a few minutes for a fully warded mage, but whatever, still impressive. And you're right, reading the book a second time makes it clear when the geis kicks in and changes Cassie's thinking. Then again, if Cassie's feelings were all geis, they would have dissipated as soon as the spell was lifted. But her feelings haven't changed. She questioned his motives right from the start, but I think she cares about him now even more than before.
...Oh God. Did we really make "Prissie" and "Missie" a thing? That's even worse than Brangelina.
Claire wrote: "...Oh God. Did we really make "Prissie" and "Missie" a thing? That's even worse than Brangelina."Zeenat did that. It's all her fault. :P
Suddenly I'm glad Pritkin isn't real, because if he ever heard that he'd shoot us
Pritkin might shoot us, but all I'd have to do is flash my newly pedicured feet at Mircea and he'd provide safety for me!
Claire wrote: "@Lannister I think it was a few minutes for a fully warded mage, but whatever, still impressive. And you're right, reading the book a second time makes it clear when the geis kicks in and changes C..."That's my thinking as well. The Geis brought them together, but they still care for each other now. They could have met at a coffee shop, internet dating, a dating show, or the Geis. Either way, that was the gateway.
Zeenat wrote: "Pritkin might shoot us, but all I'd have to do is flash my newly pedicured feet at Mircea and he'd provide safety for me!"Better add some strappy sandals just to be on the safe side!
Claire wrote: "@Lannister I think it was a few minutes for a fully warded mage, but whatever, still impressive. And you're right, reading the book a second time makes it clear when the geis kicks in and changes C..."I looked it up cos it was bugging me. Mircea says he can drain an average mage till he passes out in about 30 seconds. A fully-shielded war mage would take about 2.5 minutes, but that was from across a room. If he were on top of the guy, he could drain him in about 50 seconds.
I find it interesting that KC has spelled this out in great detail for us. That always gets my nose twitching!
Also, I'm surprised and disappointed that no-one freaked out that I said Mircea was going to kill Pritkin ... in fifty seconds!! Unless of course Pritkin puts the demon love moves on him and they mutually self-destruct. :D
Somehow, I think Pritkin will be a little harder to kill than the average war mage
I liked the *runs away laughing* part. And I am a actually a Mirtkin fan. I think that Mircea and Pritkin will get fed up with Cassie's antics and run off together after Pritkin uses his demon love moves on Mircea. Also, about Cassie not noticing Tomas being a vamp...well...she is a sensitive. I wondered if either Tomas can cloak that, he is a very powerful vamp. And she didn't get that feeling from LC either...and I don't remember if she got it from Mircea, but she KNEW he was. AND, if he couldn't cloak it, I wondered if he convinced her he was human, used his vampire willy ways to do it.
I really think it was the 1) sunlight thing, 2) not being twitchy at dawn (like Rafe) and 3) cloaking of power. She DOES talk about in their first fight in Atlanta when she feels his power come out...
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Denmark also has Anders Houmann, the original model used for the Pritkin short story covers.
Check out all the book covers in post #7 of this thread:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
*Ahem*. Most of these are m/m because I read a lot in that genre, and I kept noticing the guy's image from "The Great Model Hunt" when we were wondering who this guy was.
Enjee wrote: "Denmark also has Anders Houmann, the original model used for the Pritkin short story covers. ..."
Clearly, it's time to visit Leodora
I am coming a bit late in the discussion cause I am barely on the second chapter of TtD, but I'll catch up soon(I hope). Now, when I saw yesterday that KC has joined us here I was squealing from happiness and my 14-year-old sister was giving me the WTF is wrong with you look and now I believe she's pretty much convinced the doctor dropped me on the head when I was born!
@Claire, while Cassie from book 1 is saving Radella and Francoise, Cassie from book 3 is at the other end of the parking lot with Mircea fighting off eight-or-so mages. But, Radella and Francoise are from book three, as in two weeks from the future. Man, I am not making a good job of expressing my thoughts. Well, what I wanted to say was that Cassie from book 2 doesn't go back to that night in Dante's, and that during that night there's a Francoise in Faerie and a future-Francoise that came with f-Cassie.
Anyway, I have a question for Karen, and I know we're discussing TtD now, but I have just finished FK and it's still on my mind, and I also thought that my question might be more noticed here, so, will Dory ever see the Irin child again, when it gets enough power to re-create its body?
And I have another question about Jonathan and the were-rat satyrs: they were grown satyrs, which means that Jonathan has been experimenting for years before TtD. And Junior and Mama tell Dory the tale of the war between the ruling light-fey kings, and they said that the reason for that war, which has happened many years ago, were the gods and that the Svarestri king wanted to bring them back. And LC says Jonathan is damned old, so what I am asking is, when did Ragnarok start? Did it begin when the silver sircle and Artemis banished the gods, way back when, or when Apollo bypassed the oroborous spell? And is Jonathan more than just an ordinary mage, like Pritkin, or he is doping on magic like Radu says?
PS. I really hope my questions are not spoilerish.
PPS. My laptop decided to bail on me for good, and I was only able to write this from the goodreads app on my tablet, and I can't mark spoilers there, so my apologies for not marking the FK questions as spoilers.
Claire wrote: "Somehow, I think Pritkin will be a little harder to kill than the average war mage"I agree -- I think Mircea underestimates Pritkin and vice versa. Mircea deliberately downplays his skills, especially around Cassie (which is why she's always surprised to see him turn vicious) and ergo around Pritkin. And Pritkin hides what he is from almost everyone.
Aileen wrote: "Also, about Cassie not noticing Tomas being a vamp...well...she is a sensitive. I wondered if either Tomas can cloak that, he is a very powerful vamp. And she didn't get that feeling from LC either...and I don't remember if she got it from Mircea, but she KNEW he was...."Yeah doesn't it say straight-up in TtD (or maybe one of the other books) that certain (but not all) vampires are really good at cloaking their power levels? That's the whole premise for the second Dory book, after all. Cassie had mostly only been exposed to lower-level masters at Tony's so it's not surprising that she doesn't know all that much about the capabilities of first-level masters. It's not the sort of thing that Mircea would have talked much about when she was a kid, and he's the only first-level master she had (knowingly) met, right? Also, even if she had met other vampires who had the ability to cloak their power, why would they have bothered around her?
What she does know a lot about is vampire culture, and that's what enables her to understand Mircea and the power plays going on at the Senate. It's one of the things I like the best about her as a character; she's like an anthropologist who really knows another culture so well that she is almost a native, and even though she doesn't know much about mages and mage culture, she picks it up really quickly.
Oh, but that makes me wonder something: does Mircea have the ability to cloak his own power? There's that time (I can't remember in which book) where Cassie and Mircea go back in time together and people are looking at Mircea funny because he has more power (having accumulated it over a century or two) which suggests that he can't cloak it. Or maybe it's an all-or-nothing proposition, and he couldn't cloak it part-way and there was no point in cloaking it all the way. Does every vamp who hasn't topped out at the limits of their power just keep accumulating power over time, or does everyone have a personal limit at which they top out? Basically I'm wondering if the oldest vamps (Cleo, Anthony, etc) are always going to be on the top of the power hierarchy because of their age, or can the younger ones surpass them eventually?
I'd love to ask KC for a power ranking of Senate members but I expect that would be too spoilerish, since they all probably hide their capabilities from each other to some extent.
Okay...I know that age doesn't necessarily mean they are going to be powerful, I remember that Mei Ling was/is only about 120 and is/was the Enforcer for the North American senate. She was EXTREMELY powerful (though, obviously not as experienced as LC, why they brought him in) even though she was not centuries old. It says that if they are weak in life, they will be weak in death. The Consul, Antony, and others like Marlowe and Mircea were so powerful in life they are powerful in death as well. I'm sure age HELPS, because they gain more knowledge and skill and whatnot, but that doesn't mean age automatically means they are powerful.I remember a comment I think Marco made in...I *THINK* is was EtN when he said it...maybe CtD, ANYWAY, he was talking about how some people reach their limit power wise and they had to face that and some other stuff I'm not 100% on, but I remember that HE was fine with the level he was at, he had accepted he'd never be a 1st level master but others hadn't.
I have no idea if Mircea can cloak his power, but I have a feeling it's not something they can just dampen and undampen...from what Tomas did in the beginning of TtD it SEEMED like it was an all or nothing, but I could be wrong.
Okay, most of my 'points' have been covered, so I don't really have much to contribute here. Also, I never seem to be here when all the fun happens! *pout*However, on the Thomas topic.
I'm going to take Cassie's side here, and root around in my draw of "excuses".
She was on the run, almost constantly looking over her shoulder, pretty much distracted from the world around her. In short, a sort of extended Cognitive Blindness if you will. Her focus was entirely on remaining alive and hidden.
Alternately... she was sooo used to being around vamps, it didn't even register that Thomas was one. :D
Aileen wrote: "I have no idea if Mircea can cloak his power, but I have a feeling it's not something they can just dampen and undampen...from what Tomas did in the beginning of TtD it SEEMED like it was an all or nothing, but I could be wrong. "This was my impression too. It said in the books that Christine was quite unusual, in that she gave off a weak power signal but she was actually very strong. I didn't think Christine was actively shielding her strength to fool others. I believed that the weak signal was just a quirk of nature for her, like how some people might be double-jointed or whatever.
Yes, but Christine was also "damaged goods" in that her turning was screwed up from the get-go. That could have resulted in the low power signature. Also, but I could be wrong, I thought she could turn her signature up or down; she was after all, made by Louis-Cesar who could hide his signature and was "the most human-like vampire ever." Could be that Tomas, since he "belonged" to Louis-Cesar, could do it, too. I say this because I would think that in order for Tomas to belong to Louis-Cesar, there would have been blood involved, namely Louis-Cesar's, so that LC had a hold over him.
Well, that was that other guy from the European Senate who could do it too. I might be misremembering, but I think his name was Gregoire? Dory commented on him when she first saw him, that if she'd tried to fight him she would have seriously misjudged him and probably ended up dead.I don't think Tomas's power signature was weak. Cassie comments on how incredibly powerful he seemed. I hope Karen can clarify this, as I was definitely of the opinion that having a weak signature (whilst being strong) wasn't something you could turn off and on. It was just the way you were, like a genetic quirk.
That's interesting about Tomas and LC though. I hadn't thought about it, but I think you must be correct that LC put some of his own blood into Tomas, as I doubt he'd have been able to control him otherwise. But I also think there's a difference in the bond created when someone turns a vampire and when someone makes themselves master of an existing vamp. I don't think making an existing vamp your servant would pass on any of your family traits. Those would come from the original maker, I think anyway!
Hmmm, maybe LC just beat the power signature out of Tomas! ;-)
I'm pretty sure I remember from TtD that Tomas could turn it off. ... searching... OK here I found some relevant lines, from near the end of the 2nd chapter: "Given that he'd gone right under my vamp radar and posed as human for months, there was no chance that I was dealing with less than a third-level master, and possibly higher. Make that probably, considering that, on rare occasions, I'd seen him walk around in full daylight..." (suggests that cloaking one's vampire power signature is dependent on power level).
And then, next page: "He was still kissing me when the first burst of energy radiated off him, sending a shudder down to my fingertips. Either something had broken his concentration or he wasn't bothering to shield anymore. And why should he? I was probably the only sensitive there, and I already knew what he was. He may have looked the same to everyone else, but to me, it was like his skin had been dipped in molten gold, causing him to shine like a miniature sun in the dark room. The amount of energy pouring off him raised little hairs all along my arms and at the back of my neck..." (it goes on to describe what his personal force field feels like to Cassie).
So that makes it sound like it's just a matter of shielding in which case anyone powerful enough could do it. Is the difference between Christine and other vampires that she just automatically did it, all the time?
LOL, that I could believe!I wish I knew more about what's going on with Tomas. For instance (Day of the Dead spoiler) (view spoiler)
Karen, I don't suppose there's any hints to be had about Tomas's story?? *puts on most endearing smile*
Thanks Karen! So just to clarify on the matter of vampires hiding their identity/ power levels from sensitives like Cassie (and Dory, too): can any vampire do this if they have enough power to shield their own ... I don't know what you would call it, their energy glow? Or is it something that certain vampires have the ability to do and others, even if they have a lot of power, cannot? (like Christine vs Anthony)
Thank you Karen for taking the time to join us here and answer our questions! One thing I have always wondered whenever I re-read TtD is whether Cassie unknowingly shifted back in time when she has her first vision of Tomas or was she just seeing the vision from one of Tomas' comrades at the moment?
Oh, quick follow up: and for those vampires who can hide their power levels like that, is it an all-or-nothing deal (like either your shields are up or you drop them, nothing in between) or can some vampires manipulate their levels so they give off a little detectable power but not all that they possess?
Karen wrote: "So those two have never really been tested against each other. "FIGHT CLUB!!!
Mircea's going to whup Pritkin's ass. Bring it on, Prissies! :P
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And damn Karen! I didn't know you'd put so much effort into the Cleo pic :S It's a pretty pic, but the boob is still freakish xp But otherwise good job :)
HA! I'd totally forgotten the Pritkin model is danish... guess it's because I don't find him that hot XD (On a sidenote, I think it's really sucky that there's only ONE scandinavian actually playing a viking in the series Vikings! WTF?!)
Anyhoo, I'm a bit behind on me re-read, but I'm off work tomorrow so I have all night, YEAH! :D Will be back with (hopefully) better insight on subjects!
*still totally fangirling over Karen actually writes to us!*
All Pritkin would need to do to defeat Mircea is go in the battle wearing only boot; Mircea would be so enthralled with Pritkin's foot that Pritkin could do whatever he wanted....
It would be an interesting fight, that's for sure! We'll get ringside seats and popcorn. :DI have to agree that I don't think that Pritkin model is all that hot. He's not hideous by any means, but not really my taste. I likes them a bit grungier.
I'm only about halfway through Chapter 9 (I think) but we've got till next Monday to finish, so there's plenty of time.
Man, it would have been so cool if she had shifted! But I think the vision was awesome too!
Lannister wrote: "Karen wrote: "So those two have never really been tested against each other. "FIGHT CLUB!!!
Mircea's going to whup Pritkin's ass. Bring it on, Prissies! :P"
FIGHT CLUB!!!! LOL
Karen, thanks for answering about Tomas. I'm still a little sad that he didn't (view spoiler) I'm looking forward to seeing him again.I think the pic of Pritkin looks good, it's really well done, but we're all so fickle in our tastes and he doesn't quite do it for me. Mircea on the Masks cover is very attractive, but I'm afraid I'll have to refrain from commenting on the Marlowe pic in your gallery!! :D
Finally, the idea of Dory being marketing as gushy romance is hilarious!
d c (Duane) wrote: "All Pritkin would need to do to defeat Mircea is go in the battle wearing only boot; Mircea would be so enthralled with Pritkin's foot that Pritkin could do whatever he wanted...."LMAO! Mircea's already had a look at Pritkin's boots, when Cassie stole them that time. I don't think he was impressed ...
@Karen - Thanks for spending time with us - we know that with your new book coming out you're really busy and could have chosen to do other things instead.Be happy.
Thanks for joining us! We really value your input, especially knowing this is a crazy busy time for you!
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Thank you for taking the time to be here for us, Karen! You are the most awesome author ever!
Lol Mircea would win, even if Pritkin flashed his feet at him, they don't seem dainty and pretty like Cassie's are, more rough and callused from all the running. Also, with how quick Mircea could drain him (and the fact that it would free up Cassie...) Mircea wins. He almost won just by intimidating and scaring Pritkin!! Just think how epic a REAL battle between them would be!!Something I noticed after the geas woke up...how often Mircea switches between names for Cassie. I forgot how early this started. Usually it's "dear one" and you kind of melt because it's Mircea being...Mircea...then he's all "my Cassandra" and then, when they are negotiating he calls her Cassie. I remember Cassie has commented on this before, I THINK it's HtM, but it may have been earlier. I just noticed it on a new level this time. I liked how it changed, as if the harder the geas was working the more you could tell by what Mircea calls her.
I think it was his moods, and how he was mad at her. "Dulceata" when he was being lovey dovey, Cassie for normal stuff. "Cassandra" when he's MAD.
In the intimate scenes between them it seemed that "Dulceata" was for everyday, what he called her all the time, "Cassandra" for...still not sure why. "Cassie" when she is driving him crazy. Whether it be not doing what he wants, OR making him crazy in other ways. *wink*
Cassandra is super crazy, Cassie is normal crazy. I think she explained it in HtM
I think that in a duel, when Pritkin didn't use his incubus powers, Mircea would win. Afterall, Pritkin barely won against the Spartoi and Mircea dropped them easily. As much as it pains me to admit it, I think our DSWM had best avoid a brawl with our favorite sneaky master vamp
Pritkin was just letting the others waste their strength - why take on all of the enemy opponents when some other idiot will do it for you. Then, when your "allies" slow down, you can kick their ass up around their ears! Sounds like a solid plan to me. ;-)
Zeenat wrote: "Cassandra is super crazy, Cassie is normal crazy. I think she explained it in HtM"Ahhhh yesss, thank you!! I knew it was SOMEWHERE...I just couldn't remember what was what. I love how she explains him..."all around cool guy"
Still think Mircea would win. Well...in TtD I think Mircea would win. Pritkin does not know vamps power. He is ignorant to them, he knows demons, that is his speciality. Later on, however...I think it would be a LOT closer of a fight, but Mircea would still win. Unless Pritkin starts using (view spoiler) he'd never defeat Mircea.
Karen Chance Fans
Books mentioned in this topic
Touch the Dark (other topics)Greywalker (other topics)
So, every action Mircea takes for now on is influenced by the geis. Bear that in mind, Missie fans! :D