Sure, she could do that but it's not good for much beyond screwing everyone over with no benefit to herself. It's not even very good as a nuclear option/threat, since the Venatori are the only people who would have any idea what she's talking about.

Plus, there are limits to her ability to use all the knowledge she has; I wouldn't be shocked if one of those limits involved Oblivion War related stuff.

 

Well, when I say "noise," I'm including the contradictory answers. For any important event in history (for which there would necessarily be many accounts, including those of people caught in the wake of the event), the truth of the matter would be self-evident for someone with Ivy's power.

The key here is that Ivy doesn't see history the same way a historian does. A historian might look at many sources, try to weigh each one objectively and cross reference it with other contemporary sources, etc. And yes, for certain events the historian is going to be SOL because of a lack of good sources to draw on.

Ivy doesn't have this problem. She doesn't look at two contradictory sources and think "Oh no, there's no way for me to know who was telling the truth." If the Archive is trying to learn the truth of some historical event, she simultaneously cross-references all the sources...to the entire expanse of human history and knowledge. Instantaneously and effortlessly. Not just the direct accounts of the event, but everything that came before and after.

When you can do that sort of thing, figuring out whether a source is accurate or not isn't a problem. Incorrect sources stick out like sore thumbs, in that they don't correspond to the rest of human history and knowledge. They can be eliminated, either logically or probabilistically. And just to emphasize the point, Ivy doesn't work through all this logical deduction in her head. The Archive's power does it instantly, and perfectly.

That's how I imagine her power works, anyway. I'm having trouble explaining it, but it makes sense to me. It's why I used the example of the noisy photograph - if you look at the individual pixels it looks like a collection of random dots, but you can step back and see the pattern. The Archive can do this, where the "picture" is the entire documented history of humanity.

 

In the case of rituals you're forgetting that spells such as those have a pattern to them that can be found, which is enough to sort out which ones could work, which ones will, and which ones would do nothing.

But that's not the Archive's true power. If a Name has been written down at any point in time, Ivy knows it. That, I imagine, is why she's neutral, because otherwise she could take down pretty much any being in the world if she wanted to.

 

You're still not getting my point.

She knows all about the dark gods we've purposely forgotten about, yes. We're agreed there.

She also knows all about the Warhammer Gods of Chaos, Lolth and every other fictional god ever created. A number of the fictional gods, especially for lore-heavy things like D&D, have just as much, if not more, documentation on their corresponding beliefs, rites, rituals and practices as every other deity in human history.

And in the Dresdenverse, it's not exactly unlikely for at least some of them to be based on, or at least very similar to, real rituals the creators didn't believe were real.

In that case, there's little she could do to determine which are real deities and which are fiction, unless the magic of the Archive covers that as well (and there's been no indication of such in the books).

In order to actually cause any chaos with such knowledge, she would need to spread it. To do so, she would need to either A) determine which are the real rituals or B) share everything.

In the case of A, it's likely the Gatekeeper, if not the whole White Council, will pick up on her tests and stop her with extreme prejudice.

In the case of B, she is limited by a human lifespan and all the standard human limitations. She could share it with some people, but it's likely that someone will find out about it before the knowledge spreads too far and put a stop to it.

It's fully possible she could just fuck over everyone whenever she gets in a mood, especially if her magic flags fiction for what it is, but it's not terribly likely.

 

Dude, this isn't some passive database that simply stores information. This is Intellectus. As in, ask it a question and it will know the answer. You may simply be overthinking things here; if Ivy wanted to know how to summon Nub-Shiggurath and someone had written the ritual for it down (as well as a dozen fales), chances are she could just ask the Archive and it would just know.

 

This not hard to get. Ivy knows. There's no struggle from her to comprehend or sort out fakes. There is knowledge, and Ivy knows it. Or rather, the Archive, and by extension her, knows it. There's no process of understanding or analysis. Just understanding.

"""A kind of intellectual construct. [...] A kind of entity composed of pure information. [...] The Archive is a magic so complex that it's practically alive-and it just knows. Anything that gets printed or written down, the Archive knows. [...] it was created as a repository of learning, a safeguard against the possibility of a cataclysm of civilization, a loss of all knowledge, the destruction of all learning. It was bound to neutrality, to the preservation and gathering of knowledge."" Small Favor, Chap. 35 (taken from Dresden Files wikia)"""

 

Well... so she knows, but she's completely neutral - she can probably only draw on her power in self-defense or in situations where it doesn't matter (like decorating her house, or something). Or I guess as an arbiter between parties (Death Masks). Still, she held off several Denarians, including a sorceress, with limited magic and no trouble at all.

 

It's likely a limited Intellectus. If it were the real thing, she certainly wouldn't be limited to human knowledge. Besides, Dresden is a very unreliable narrator, and he might very well be totally wrong about her ability.

 

Yes. She knows everything ever written down. Nowhere does it say, or even imply, that she "just knows" whether it's a fictional account or a real record. She knows everything that has been put onto paper (or otherwise passed down), regardless of its basis in reality.

That does not mean she knows whether it's true or not. Hell, the vast majority of human records are false to varying degrees. No one is saying she doesn't have the knowledge, just that there's no guarantee everything she knows is factual. A lot of human knowledge generated over the years, especially in the scientific field, has been proven time and again to be either incomplete or blatantly wrong. Nothing in the books gives any indication that the Archive is capable of sifting fact from fiction, just that it knows it.

 

Past versions of the Archive used "her vast knowledge of the past to build models to predict the most probable future," as the Pythia and a bunch of others. That by itself doesn't really say anything, because the Dresden canon never mentions how detailed the predictions were in its universe.

But any model that isn't extremely simplistic would be hard for a single person to make without a) a heck of a lot of time to put it together, or b) a supernatural ability to integrate humanity's documented history into an accurate assessment of the facts.

 

I don't think she's going to confuse things with, say, DND gods. Those tend to come with DND stat blocks. Or page numbers. Or otherwise be part of an obvious DND book. You were probably using that as some example, but still...


The interesting thing is that she has people's research notes and journals. She can cross-reference research somebody was doing and what they wrote about it, and cross-reference THAT to another account that described the situation. And these would be MAGICAL journals; I'm sure there were stupid equivalents of wizards thinking the earth was flat or something, but still.

She'll get the equivalent of myths and tales told throughout the ages which are nigh-useless superstition. But she'll also get examples of wizards teaching apprentices, who would be more in the know about the supernatural.


Still though... Dresden IS an imperfect narrator, and we don't necessarily know everything about the Archive or how it works.

Chances are, though, that it can probably find out DND gods by the fact they show up in the 20th century and are in DND books. I'm not sure if I understood this point correctly.

 

Of course, that's assuming that all the fictional deities that crop are actually fictional. If were an evil crazy cultist who wanted to screw over the Venatori and cause trouble with the Oblivion War, doing something like slapping one or two actual ancient demon gods into a fictional pantheon would seem like a good way to spread the knowledge around without getting noticed. Plus a lot of fictional deities are just drawn from older mythology and tweaked/repackaged for marketing. And then there's the possibility that, with the way faith works in the Dresdenverse, enough people believing in a fictional deity could actually make it real.

That matter aside, I'd also say that when it comes to Ivy's ability to assess her knowledge and make judgements about what is reliable and what isn't, it's not going to be a perfect thing. If nothing else, there will be the oddball cases where 99% of the documented evidence is wrong or skewed. Even if the Archive-magic is capable of making judgement calls about which records are reliable and which aren't, the most reliable sources are not always going right.

Then there will be cases like when weird magical stuff happens and gets blamed on mundane things. If Ivy has a couple hundred newspaper articles/official records about how there was a gas main explosion, up against one random psycho warlock's diary entry about how he blew up a bunch of people for the evulz, which one would the Archive believe?

One final thought; maybe one of the mods should split the Ivy discussion and Faerie discussions off from all the talk about Ghost Story, since they're pretty off-topic.

 

I just had an awesome idea for a Dresden/Elder Scrolls crossover. :awesome

Personally, though, I think that it's not about comparing accounts to decide which one is right, the Archive just knows which one is right and which isn't. If not, couldn't Nicodemus and his lot have tried to copy what Dresden did i.e. send Ivy a fake message, purportedly from Dresden and co., to screw with her mind in some way? There's no indication that they tried that. Maybe it was just something Butcher hadn't thought of, but still...

Also, yeah, this is getting pretty tangential.

 

I'm pretty sure it's been established that Ivy knows who it is that actually wrote something down; when Harry wrote to her in Changes he got the call from her before he finished writing his name, so trying to fake her out like that wouldn't work.

Thing is, being a collective storing point of human knowledge and memory means she's still limited by human perspectives. If she had some kind of omniscient, godlike perspective then she wouldn't be a record of the human memory.

 

The way I interpreted it, all intellectus is limited. Demonreach's intellectus is limited to things involving (if i remember correctly, anything physically touching) his island, though I would assume there is a bit more we've yet to see about him and his badassery. If intellectus had no limits, it would be, in effect, omnipotence... Provided the being involved had any power to act in and of itself.

Ivy's bailiwick would be recorded knowledge (though I haven't really speculated much on the "only written" vs. other forms of intended knowledge-passing issue), which naturally would include unimaginable amounts of opinion, misinformation, conflicting perspective, and general bullshit. She would, however, know that the page detailing facts about the history and powers of the Tanar'ri was written in a book that said Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Game Manual on the cover. Or, if she were to be looking at the entry in a book recalling someone's interaction with this Tanar'ri, she would probably be able to determine the approximate date the entry was made; If not by virtue of her Archival powers, then by the little blue lines printed horizontally across each page, and the cover saying "marble notebook," and "Fanfic by Jimmy." This would probably tell her that this is not a true historical accounting of these things, and give her a frame of reference by which to (instantly, mind you... yay intellectus) judge anything relating to the things written within.

Now for something only one person has written about, or two people with conflicting opinions, there would be a few things a being with her specific intellectus could do. She could call up anything that even remotely could tie into the subject at hand, like news records, journal entries of people in the area, even local myths that sprang around the locale in around the time of the entry, checking for someone elses observations, whether they understood what was going on or not... And make a judgement from that. Barring any firm knowledge her intellectus gives her on a subject, she could take everything and simply make a judgement call using her human reasoning.

I think that that is exactly what she does anyway, to be honest. I don't think the Archive part of her tells her what is true and what is false, I think she simply takes one giant google search of all relevant information and downloads it directly into her knowledge base the instant she calls it up. Otherwise, she would be simply a tool of the power that makes her, and not the other way around, as it has been implied she is. Now, that still leaves her vulnerable to human error on those things in which she has no frame of reference, but really... This is one VERY smart little girl. The smartest person in the world would have to take an amount of time to think about something, and then could only reference their knowledge base a bit at a time, while Ivy skips that part, and can act. Granted, the fact that she received the Archive as an infant, with no real life experience from which to judge things as a normal adult Archive would might hamper some of her decision making a bit. But I'd imagine that somewhere along the thousands-of-year long history of the Archive, one of them might have written an instruction manual of sorts, yeah? Anyway...

Tl-dr; Ivy's a smarty-pants. A lot of these limitations we're imagining for her might apply to one of us normal people, but it's a bit hard to imagine what our thought processes would be like when augmented by all that funky magic. Even just a set of encyclopedias that we didn't have to take time to think about to know the stuff inside would make someone a force to be reckoned with.