Dragaera

SPOILER for _Dragon_...what's up with Vlad, again?

David Silberstein davids at kithrup.com
Mon Feb 10 14:47:43 PST 2003

On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Gomi no Sensei wrote:

>
>On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Joshua Kronengold wrote:
>
>> [no spoiler space, just spoiler warning :-]
>> 
>> This may have been discussed earlier, but it's my turn to re-read
>> _Dragon_, so I'm going to ask about/mention it anyways.
>> 
>> In _Dragon_, during the denument, Vlad says (about sneaking up on
>> Fornia): 
>> 
>> 	Morrolan spotted me, although I was awfully close when he
>> 	did; he probably doesn't know how I did that, or maybe he just
>> 	thinks he was concentrating too hard on Fornia.
>> 
>> This seems to indicate that whatever Morrolan thinks about how Vlad
>> did that...he's wrong.
>> Now...Morrolan -knows- Vlad is awfully good at sneaking. So that can't
>> be it.
>> And if it were some kind of sorcery, it probably wouldn't have worked,
>> and certainly wouldn't have been a secret from Morrolan, certainly not
>> when the story is dictated, while Vlad is courting Cawti and has been
>> friends with Morrolan for years.
>
>I don't think it's anything other than 'Vlad is good at sneaking'. Morrolan
>doesn't know much about how to be sneaky, as it's not really in his
>nature. So it'd be expected that he wouldn't know exactly how Vlad managed
>it.
>

Agreed, and adding some more thoughts:

Vlad has received a course in Stealth 101 from *THE* absolute
top-level Jhereg expert in stealth.

Morrolan not only never had the basics of stealth taught to him, he's
quite aware of his own limitations in intrusion detection (which is
to say, stealth being used tactically to penetrate defenses), which is
why he hired Vlad in the first place.

(I still think of the Vlad-has-super-taltos-powers-if-he-doesn't-eat
idea as being *very* low probability, anyway)