So, we've been told multiple times that this vote isn't for "who do you want on the team?". It's for "what sort of team do you want? So... what sort of team do each of these people imply?
[] HITMark VII Test Unit 02 'Astrea'-The Ideal
Inexperienced, unenlightened dedicated command and control. Gets us some ItX bennies. This one says both that we're willing to play testbed for ItX ideas and that we expect/intend to field significant numbers of units at once, perhaps in coordination with other teams, particularly Shock Corps - enough that hypercompetent unEnlightened C&C actually has value.
[]Captain Lixing Zhao-The Treadstone
key phrases here are "primarily engaging in espionage support activities such as hot-zone extraction, long-range reconnaissance, and special forces assaults" and "lower profile... can act in plainclothes and hide from enemy senses". This guy shouldn't be over where the plasma is flying, but he's great at achieving quiet objectives while the rest of the team is being productively loud, at running small team C&C/prepwork from afar, and at the sort of infiltration/sabotage prepwork that can be Really Handy sometimes. He's going to tend to imply missions with fewer assets deployed, achieving more specific and complicated objectives.
[]Alex O'Shea-The Cyberspace Cowboy
Cyberwarfare, traditions contacts (with a good chance of intel coming out of that), fighting Threat Null in cyberspace, may have some discipline issues. That's... well, it's already laid out pretty simply, really. Do you want to assault the cyber-constructs of Threat Null while managing a cat-herd of VA support? There you go.
[]Lieutenant Anjali Sylia-The Champion
More of what we have, plus a minimal amount of extra influence through the Sylia family. Zero integration issues. This one... first, solidifies the ideantity of the team that much more. Given a chance to shake things up a bit, we're turning it down. We're also promoting from within, which means that there's resources and favors out of the hiring budget that aren't being spent.
[] Agent Alya al-Saud-The Dilettante
This one's dicey. There's a lot of potential there - she *wants* to be someone who would be awesome for this - but it cold go very sour, and she's pretty weak for right now. Has some influence in the Syndicate, and is likely to see the Syndicate trying to push some influence back, especially as we do what we need to do to turn her into who she needs to be.
[] Elias Richter-The Troubleshooter
"avoid prolonged operations on earth" plus absurdly capable assassin means that if we're pulling this guy in, we expect to be eliminating some viciously hard targets, in ugly, ugly ways. We'll probably pick up at least a bit of that "Most deserved it. Many did not." thing. There is a significant chance that he takes over the team himself. Might not have much *influence*, per se, but can get a lot of respect from a fair swath of people both for what he is capable of doing and for what he has done.
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So, of that group, the stuff that sticks out at me... I like the idea of bringing in Al-Saud. If we can train her right, she turns into a highly effective combatant who also has significant influence on the Syndicate side. The trick is who to bring in with her to maximize the chances that she winds up useful rather than useless.
Alex is a terrible combo with her. He's a discipline issue waiting to happen, and the turbulence from trying to keep control of him and whatever VA help he brings in is going to make everything harder with respect to getting her to actually integrate into the unit right. Elias Richter is probably also a bad combo, if only because he's lost much of his ability to human and is reasonably likley to push some sort of leadership challenge. Also, taking Al-Saud straight from "milk run" to "assassination missions" may not be the best idea. Zhao... might not be terrible, but he won't help. He's going to tend to bias things to more complicated missions, which might nto be best for her, and he is, of all things, an NWO with no dots in Mind.
That leaves two.
Astrea might fit. Going somewhat larger-scale means that we're more likely to interact with other parts of the technocracy, and having someone who speaks fluent Syndicate is bound to be useful there. There's some overlap between "We have an in with the ItX experimental equipment divisions" and the influence and money stuff that comes out of being an Al-Saud, but that isn't necessarily terrible. The fact that this would almost automatically mean that the princess would be taking direction from a construct could get interesting.
On the flip side we have Sylia, who has a decent grasp of Mind, and is fully integrated with the unit, giving us that much more internal cohesion with which to pull her into place as one of us.
The other part of "could be a liability" comes from having her influence turned against us (whether intentional on her part or not). Our best insulation from that is having extra influence of our own. Of the available influence bits... Sylia's our best bet. She can't swing but so much, but the influence she can swing at least hits the right levels. Things like "VA contacts" and "ItX experimental design team likes you" are handy in other ways, but they wont' much help here.
[x]Lieutenant Anjali Sylia-The Champion
[x] Agent Alya al-Saud-The Dilettante
