I'm against the MG maker. It's not directly useful because we already have our own team and Progenitor will be buffing our rivals as necessary. Reputation with the CBCC isn't important because they already know we have one top-tier Beyond and can probably guess we have a collection of others plus a good amount of backup. It won't actually placate Prism because it only makes seven MGs and they need to upgrade a whole cohort.
What we really need are:
- Cashy money and growth potential. The Conspicuously Expensive Laser is explicitly worth more money than the MG maker.
- Trust-builders for the CBCC. They need to know that they can work with us and that Upgrade isn't going to cause too much trouble. I'm not sure if building a magical-girl maker will have the right effect on the CBCC.
I think that we want to avoid the overtly-villainous options; they're more than a bit freaked-out by us already. If we do go with villainous options we need to make it clear that we're in it for fun, that is to say, we need to buy the cow balloons.
Let's see, other themes to attempt...
"Everyone's Favorite Villains". That suite would be... something big and flashy and distinctive (crystals?) to build a powerset around, a set of cartoonishly nonlethal yet highly effective weapons that we can use to ward off the heroes while we use our huge flashy thing to do our villainous deeds, and some top-tier escape gadgets. I think that demonstrating a
nuanced approach to not-villainy will do a lot to calm down the CBCC, both with regards to their concerns about Upgrade and any concerns they might have about us being as troublesome as Progenitor himself is.
"Exponential Growth". The "quick money up front" one focuses on quick power, but we could probably win bigger by focusing on growth potential over immediate utility. Especially since we have the competition coming up and will want things that we can use to boost ourselves there. So: Something that uses the technology behind the Newscaster and Shrodinger's laptop to let Skye do SCIENCE to other builders' stuff at range. The crystal incubator, but with its interdimensional crystals shifted away from combat utility and more toward energy generation and hax.
...Actually, we can totally combine those. Use the droid wreckage from earlier, the fabber, the bag of holding that Upgrade built for us, and the auto-sorter to turn
literally the entire workshop into a giant Builder assistant robot with the ability to eat tools and scrap and integrate them into itself for use or reprocessing and limb-etless helping hands. Call it... "Grand Theft Workshop"? "Living up to the name"? "Carmen Santiago"? "HAHAHAHAHA SUCKERS"?
