"How are there mortal threats when I was told only a tiny percentage of mortals are even capable of knowing you exist?"

"Because, while the enemy isn't as good at recruiting them as we are, they aren't afraid to send people into danger unable to perceive what they're up against. Hire some Third World mercenaries, smuggle them into the country with fake papers, tell them 'go strike that Amazon warehouse over there' and not worry about their deaths as cannon fodder."

"And the US army and cops aren't able to stop third world militias from attacking an Amazon warehouse why?"

Raven leads the group forward past the checkpoint and waves goodbye to the guards.

"When they first employed the tactic of sending mortal mercs against us—mostly Russians, that time, so not actually 'third world' as classically understood—we did call in the army and cops. But they learned from their mistakes, and the next time some of them saved up enough to hire some, they accompanied them with monsters, and at that point it became lower overall casualties for us to do all the fighting ourselves. Send in a fire-breathing dragon against us, and both their mercs and the army will perceive it as a tank. Conventional weapons aren't as good when you don't know what they're effective against—a weakness that in theory hurts their mercs as badly as it hurts our cops and soldiers, but in practice doesn't because they don't care about throwing away those guys' lives and we do."

"The lives of the goons of the very government you're trying to overthrow?"

"We prefer to think of it more as bringing provinces in various states of rebellion back into closer alignment with the empire."

"So did the Union in the Civil War, but they didn't actively go out of their way to avoid killing Confederate soldiers."

"Um. How do I put this in a non-offensive way?"

"You don't."

"Okay so! If the Confederates had given guns to chimps and sent them against the Union soldiers, would you blame them for hesitating a little to unleash maximum firepower on the chimps?"

"Yeah, but that's because 1. Chimps are endangered and 2, if that was an effective strategy they'd want to reverse engineer how they taught chimps to use guns, and neither of those concerns apply with mortal humans."

"On the contrary, I think if we run with Gwen's oh-so-charming metaphor 'reverse engineering how chimps learned to use guns' is exactly the interest we have in American mortals. Their advances in AI, for example, might come from a place of recklessness but they are legitimately impressive in their technical capabilities and it's worth not throwing away those three hundred million minds for nothing."

"Hey, actually, have you guys done any research into human-chimp hybrids yet? There's gotta be some African deity that fucked a chimp and made some kind of monkey Pegasus type deal at some point so you could even get divine blood in there too."

"I'm not aware of any such African deity? My research into the African supernatural communities is focused on the West African region, though; I could be missing one from Central Africa."

"Human-chimp hybrids are somewhere on my bucket list, and probably the MHE's—uh, the Minister for Health and the Environment's—bucket list too, but they're so far down I doubt we'll get to them in our lifetimes, probably will have to advise our descendants from Elysium on how to accomplish the project."

"Huh, what're you researching currently if chimps are that far down the list?"

"The proverbial Holy Grail would be a less magic-bottlenecked manufacturing process for our longevity and fertility drugs, allowing us to produce them in sufficient quantities for release to the mortal world."

"Oh, yeah, that checks out. What kind of magic are they reliant on?"

"Same thing as most magic—direct manipulation of the Mist through willpower."

"Oh, so not some kind of magic item or species of magical creature. Could I learn magic, or do you have to have divine blood?"

"There have been some cases of clear-sighted mortals learning magic, though very small and limited effects. One's potential varies greatly with ancestry; descendants of Hecate, Pluto, or Venus tend to outclass everyone else."

"Damn, that sucks. I'm vaguely aware that Hecate is goddess of magic, but why Venus and Pluto?"

Raven shrugs.

"Dunno. They do more manipulation of the Mist in the course of their domain responsibilities, I suppose? What with Venus being the goddess of glamour, having the wildest variation in the physical forms with which she appears to people, and Pluto being the god of the Underworld, which isn't exactly physically located 'beneath' LA, in the three-dimensional sense; you couldn't reach it from there with a drill and a team of entirely Mist-shrouded mortals on the job site. Plus two of the most common magical abilities are speaking with a hypnotic voice and the summoning and control of ghosts, which Venus and Pluto sometimes grant directly to their respective children as divine blessings."

"Remind me again if there's some secret task force that kills you if you use magic to defraud people or cheat at gambling or whatever?"

"Nope! Not a single organized one, anyway, there are various local and national interests in the supernatural community that will have various levels of objection to it, usually non-fatal.

In the case of fraud one of those interests is us; the Finance Minister is a big crusader against it and sometimes persuades the Attorney General it's our business. If you're nonhuman and she can tie your fraud to deaths—old person loses their retirement savings and then has a medical problem they can't afford to pay for, stuff like that—you're looking at imprisonment, possibly forced labor.

Cheating at gambling, on the other hand, is technique and I'm a firm advocate. You have to be careful, though—for one, physical casinos will ban you over suspicious looking wins even if they can't figure out how you did it, and for two there's a demigod in Vegas with her tentacles in lots of the gambling industry. Look at the corporate ownership structure of the casino or website; names to watch out for are 'Lotus Corporation', 'Dreamlands Asset Management', and 'Jessica Knuth' as an individual shareholder."