Mayhaps a use of the Superman Foundation?
Lex Sedet In Vertice: A Supervillain in the DCU CK2 quest
- Thread starter King crimson
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We just added DR. Moon to count Vertigo's hero units. If he is contributing to the Metahuman research then it's doomed to suffer the way bone serum actions he contributed to did. We would be better off focusing our efforts elsewhere. I view research collaborations with Vlatava as unlikely to succeed in beneficial ways as I do assassination attempts on Lois lane to result in her death.
Ehh, that assumes that Vertigo can even assign hero units to collaborating with us never mind that it requires him to assign Moon to it.
It's a possibility sure but as far a so can tell there's no reason to assume that that's the default position. More likely in my opinion is that Vertigo will have Moon working on other projects.
Zviad fundamentally misreads Lex Luthor's motivations. He assumes that Lex is simply annoyed because others weren't willing to prioritize his interests. In reality, Lex (and by extension, the players) is frustrated because King Markov misled him. The key moment here is that as soon as Lex attempted to act in good faith based on expressed interest, he was immediately rebuffed and undermined. That betrayal, not mere opposition, is what prompted Lex's response. Fundamentally, he has an incorrect grasp of Lex's personality and attitude at least to some degree.
Zviad also mistakenly believes he can manage the public relations fallout in such a way that Lex will be effectively neutralized. This is despite the fact that Zviad is personally pushing Markov toward engaging in metahuman trafficking, without any real effort or ability to distance himself from the operation (he is going to be the one pushing for it.) He assumes that Lex's only likely response would be some spiteful overreaction (saying 'fuck it' and coming after his head) but fails to plan for the more likely systemic attack.
Zviad doesn't seem to anticipate that these trafficking activities could be discovered, publicly exposed, or directly traced back to him. Even more critically, he appears unaware that his associate, Savage, is already in contact with Lex. Meaning he is under the impression that Lex is "taking his ball and going home" but in reality he's merely reshuffling assets. Lex intentionally positioned Savage to gain influence over a large portion of financial assets and infrastructure across both Markovia and Vlatava which could lead to a long-term advantage Zviad hasn't accounted for.
In addition, Zviad fails to recognize that the reconstruction fund is not a bureaucratic nuisance it's a trap. It serves as a proxy economic war, carefully designed to drain Markovia's resources and push the regime toward increasingly questionable and desperate strategies. This, too, is part of Lex's long game. Zviad significantly underestimates Lex's patience and his willingness to play for long-term dominance rather than immediate retaliation.
He also neglects the broader geopolitical context. Markovia failed to secure any meaningful international support to strengthen its position or to isolate Lex from influencing Vlatava through indirect channels. For example, if Lex pays for Vlatava's civilian infrastructure, it frees up Vertigo's budget to expand metahuman research. Zviad hasn't addressed this, nor has he accounted for the fact that Vlatava has its own metahumans with identical powersets, strongly implying some form of mass-production or enhancement program. Zviad perhaps wrongly assumes that such capability can be matched through raw trafficking alone, when in reality Vertigo's metahuman production can be scaled a lot more easily than whatever black market Zviad and Markovia can find metahumans in due to being mass-produceablem reliable (will probably not have the same hang-ups as trafficked metahumans) and done in-house (Markovia will need to spend resources to covertly bring in metahumans. Notably, they are a land-locked nation, so that presents it own problems.)
Additionally, he assumes that he will be able to replace Lex Luthor's support with these metahumans, and that's also a big mistake.
I could go on but I'm pretty tired by now so I'll wrap things up.
Overall, Zviad is reading the situation through a cynical, opportunistic lens. That perspective blinds him to several critical dynamics. While some of his missteps stem from a lack of information, in many cases he is outright ignoring the warning signs that are already visible. He overestimates his control and underestimates Lex Luthor. He also assumes that he can reposition himself fairly easily should worse come to worst, but in reality he probably can't without adjusting his plans at least somewhat.
Last time we tried this, Vertigo ended up discovering the metagene just before Wayne Enterprises published their findings, so let's not be too quick to dismiss it. Outsourcing some low-level research has its perks.
I do want to give the guy a push, but after that, we should back off for now. Especially now that we've sent him Moon.
With Moon shenanigans and (potentially) spying for the League of Shadows, Talia infiltrating his government (and potentially further compromising Vlatava next turn), Markovia entering the metahuman trade, and Savage stirring up both nations, the whole region is a powder keg. These investments just help us manage the chaos a bit.
Ideally, the next time we step in, it'll be to catch Markovia and Zviad red-handed in the slave trade. Otherwise, let those idiots sort themselves out.
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Both of these points are assumptions, same as the ones regarding our leverage in the recent negotiations. My points are also the assumptions but their ones based on factual detriment to both our bone serum effort and Karl's mental health. We're only funding the research. Someone has to carry it out afterwords. We have other, Zero DC research options, before we even bring up the fact that we are supposed to be taking more risks since we've recently gone overboard on High dc avoidance with the recent turn.
We've never particularly cared to carry out research in vlatava until now. Frankly, with our connection to Vlatava being outed on the international stage, I'd rather stick with perfectly legal none research interaction with them incase Lois is about to stick her nose in. Again, lets not get fixated on Markovia.
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
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So omake review time. I'm not going to say too much on this because the most interesting thing about this omake to me is the formatting. As someone who has read actual treaties, you did a really solid job mimicking the form of an actual treaty
If I were being really myopic, I could make the argument that because this occurred on turn 33 it should only cover January, February, and March. That being said the four turns in a year was never meant to correlate one to one with actual periods of time and so I'm perfectly fine with giving a touch of flexibility that this was made for the 12th of April.
This is a little thing but I'm curious as to why the words are all capitalized here. The format generally aligns with what I've read of treaties (for people who want to know what real treaties look like typed out, you can check out the Avalon Project by Yale University for free), but this in particular is a touch I haven't seen too often when it comes to actual treaties. The one place I can definitively remember seeing this style of formatting is actually the International Conference on Military Trials : London, 1945, colloquially referred to as the "London agreement" (here's an Avalon Project link if people want to read it The Avalon Project : International Conference on Military Trials : London, 1945 - Agreement and Charter, August 8, 1945).
Obviously this doesn't really matter but I'm just kind of curious as to what's going on here, especially since its a pretty particular choice to have made.
A draft (and this is a draft) being signed is really weird, but I'm going to choose to interpret this as the drafter modelling where people would sign rather than actual signatures.
That's actually all of my relevant notes on this. If you were actually drafting a treaty as a law school assignment, I'd ding you for not including some kind of dispute resolution mechanism (likely via third party arbitration), but I think it's ridiculous to hold you to that standard so it's not really relevant to the discussion of this omake.
I actually enjoyed reading it a fair bit. I couldn't turn my brain off at times and just enjoy it (I read it like something I need to study for a research paper), but I think it was a fun bit of experimentation and I'm glad you tried something like this.
This is good enough to earn 500 exp and canon status.
No, Almerac is not exceptional on genetic tech (though they are more advanced than Earth). They specialize in "biological processes to enhance powers" but they're not outright cloning people (they can clone fruits and vegetables).
That being said I would like to say that its included in "terraforming technology". What Maxima is giving you is tech to reshape earth and create powerful excavators, things that can mess with weather even further than your current drones, genetically engineered food that rapidly reproduces and the tech to quickly clone them, tech to create a breathable atmosphere, efficient gravity generators, and purifiers that can turn most organic liquids into drinkable water. I just labelled it all as "terraforming" since that's way simpler than listing out everything I just did.
I will say that Almerac isn't providing you with their eugenics research, and if you really want that you can get it, but it's probably not going to be relevant for you (they're working with Almeracians not humans so most of it would be junk data for you if you were attempting to replicate it).
This is somewhat a joke, but considering Cassandra's reaction to her crush included the following reactions
I kind of think having Markovia hate her isn't really a dealbreaker for her and actually might be a positive for her. Now she has a justification for stuff she already wanted to do.
That's a fair critique.
jonasquinn already answered but I'll elaborate that Trigon's invasion is most likely to occur at "points of change" for Raven (as it makes the magic he wants to do a little easier), so he's likely to launch it on Raven's 18th considering he hasn't done so on her 16th (since that's a day associated with changing from an adult to a child, it makes it easier for Trigon to invoke magic that involves redefinition and a changing of Raven's nature to get out of Azarath).
As for the Kryptonian invasion you don't know just yet.
So I'm not going to comment too much on this but I would like to point out something interesting for this analysis.
"Zviad Baazovi" isn't the Bad Samaritan's true identity. I tried to make it a point in both of his POV's that he's referred to near exclusively as "the man known as Zviad" or just "he", because he doesn't really have a true identity. The Bad Samaritan isn't really attached to the identity in any meaningful capacity and he knows how to make use of his abilities very well, even if he's not exceptionally powerful. Furthermore he's stayed pretty under the radar despite also attempting to orchestrate a public assassination of Count Vertigo.
The Bad Samaritan is a man with no real name, nationality or true loyalty and a substantial amount of experience in espionage. As such he's very, very good at slipping away and reinventing himself.
Edit: Some context on the non-Young Justice take on the Bad Samaritan character, the dude was smart enough to single-handedly take on the Outsiders (a superhero team) multiple times without ever getting caught. He achieves such feats as stealing printing plates from Fort Knox, capturing the entire Outsiders team (albeit with help of a supervillain team) and shooting down the plane that the Outsiders were in while they were over the ocean, which left them stranded on a desert island unable to escape until the US government found and picked them up several weeks later which ultimately would have killed them if they hadn't been rescued by outside forces and again unlike basically every other villain, he never got caught or stopped.
I'm not going to pretend like he's invincible or unstoppable, but Bad Samaritan is very, very good at spy games and at making sure he personally gets out alive and free even if his plans fail.
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Also, we specifically offered him up as a researcher and Vlatava is going to be testing Quixium on metahumans, which we said he'd be interested in. It's all together all to likely any research carried out in Vlatava has at minimum equal chance of being impacted by moon as that not being the case. .
I'm not AizenMD but I actually read a point like this that he made a while back when talking about the ages of Siobhan and Rose.
Basically, due to how you set up birthdays, it's impossible for any turn to be be Jaunary-March. If that was the case then April-June would be the same turn, and that wouldn't align with their birthdays and Rose being 20 and Siobhan 19.
Another example that I just looked up is that Cassandra and Jinx have a birthday on the same turn (December, January) and Raven has her birthday three turns after jinx (Raven is born in October iirc) so you need the turn to either be Novemeber-January or December-Febuary. That way Cassandra and Jinx have their birthday on the same turn while fulfilling the requirement of Raven being younger than Jinx as well as having her birthday three turns after Jinx.
This is super pedantic but that's what I think the confusion stems from.
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
I hope I don't come off as mean here, but I don't think there's any confusion save on your part. Here's what you quoted me saying
Myopic means "narrow-minded and shortsighted". What I'm basically saying is the following, "if I were being really narrow-minded and shortsighted, I could attempt to make this argument that the omake should be non-canon. However because turn and period of time were never meant to line up so strongly, I'm not going to make that argument and it's fine as is".
The statement I made was not a critique and was more just sort of color commentary that I thought people might find interesting. I don't think there's any confusion. I appreciate you trying to step in to clarify, but in this case, I think you're not clarifying anything here, I've known for a while that turns don't line up with any perfectly equal four way partition of the year despite that being how they work mechanically.
Edit: I'd have asked for a change if AizenMD had said that it was July, but I'm generally fine with dates so long as you're not off by a large margin or not contradicting other date and time placements.
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This style is typical of ceremonial proclamations—a meta joke highlighting the contract's grandiose yet meaningless nature.
It's a purposefully flawed legal document riddled with issues: no dispute resolution, oversight, or verification; excessive power in the trustee; and ample potential for conflicts over funds.
The point is that resistance from all parties led to a messy, dysfunctional contract framework.
Adrian XXIV
Average User, from Poland
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- Poland
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Honestly, Victor Markov's situation will soon be so bad... that I almost pity him.
Like, when people catch him red-handed about "metahuman trade", all he will be able to do, is pointing fingers at "Man who doesn't exist" (because Zviad Baarovi would just "suddenly vanish, as if he never existed at all")
Like, when people catch him red-handed about "metahuman trade", all he will be able to do, is pointing fingers at "Man who doesn't exist" (because Zviad Baarovi would just "suddenly vanish, as if he never existed at all")
All that sounds pretty neat. Good for setting up a potential moonbase or something on Earth. Does the Amazon still need some help? If so we could help it with this new tech while investing a new LexCorp building in Brazil, Bastion does have permission to operate in South America, so a base there would be good.
Overall the turn so far has been pretty good. Fire and Ice have a good showing, Toyman is setting up shop, Eiling has Supergirl and a mind switching machine while Diana owes us big, and this deal with Maxima is great. The peace deal could have been better, but the outcome is fine I think. I'm excited for spaceship tech for Almerac, if we can build good ones now we can set up a moonbase or visit Mars in the near future.
Fair enough on this point I suppose.
I do think that you're underestimating Zviad a tad here. Like KC has said he is exceptionally talented at intrigue and while he definitely isn't infallible he's almost certainly planning to take precautions to protect himself even if he is underestimating Lex.
Hell, we literally see him considering the possibility that he'll lose and have to run but so long as he escapes he doesn't care what happens to Markovia.
Ehh I feel like this all depends on Savage playing ball with us which there is no reason to believe he will do. If Vandal decides that he cares too much about his metahuman smuggling operation or his investment in Markovia to align with us then V3 Investments being in charge of the fund is entirely to Zviad's benefit.
Yes but it's made clear that Zviad intends to pursue the latter outside of the conference.
This is a minor aspect but are Markovia landlocked? I was under the impression that they were in the loose vicinity of Montenegro. Could be wrong though.
While you do make some good points I also feel like you're underestimating Zviad somewhat and assuming that Vandal will align himself with us in a way that benefits us here.
Yes but that's only relevant if we assume that Moon will automatically be assigned to the action rather than literally any faceless Vlatavan scientist.
Yes but again we have no reason to assume that that person is Moon especially when Vertigo could be assigning him to literally any other project.
Not taking as many doesn't mean taking none and relatively few other actions benefit one of our allies so directly.
And maybe if we had the at would have gone better.
Firstly, I still find the idea that our connections to Vlatava have been "outed" ridiculous. We've never tried to hide the fact that we have ties to the Vlatavan government, we have a goddamned tower in their capital, and evidently the other involved nations already knew we had said connections because that's the reason they entrusted us to bring Vlatava to the table!
Secondly, cooperating with Vlatava is completely legal. There is nothing inherently questionable or shady about us doing so.
And finally, Lois has enough stuff going on what with her boyfriend's company being blatantly corrupt and undermining him to commit a crime that out thousands of people across the country at risk.
So what I'm hearing is enhanced metahumans, a way to help global food shortages and infinite gingo fruit?
Yeah I noticed that but in casual conversation it's just simpler to call him Zviad.
Man I forgot about that.
God damn this has been a good turn so far, fingers crossed it stays that way.
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There is no reason to assume general metahuman funding won't make it's way to the Quixium research we suggested Moon would be interested in, nor does Vertigo have any reason to not use him far as he knows. This is an action I am committed to not taking so to reasonable concerns in relation to a character who has ruined multiple turns of effort previously. I don't know why you think vague uncertainty over whether or not Vertigo would use him for this is supposed to convince me of anything.
No it's relevant because we gave Moon to Vlatava as a researcher and fund metahuman research is a broad action that could cover all the metahuman research action Vertigo has underway or starts up using the funding. There is nothing keeping Moon from working on this and plenty indicating he can be incorporated.
The whole reason I wanted to give him up to Vertigo was because I wasn't expecting him to even potentially be a problem. I'd have disposed of him more permanently if I'd thought we'd be engaging in research with vertigo soon.
I don't support this. I don't understand where the incentive to support this is coming from, and as long as there are more interesting, controlled options, I'll be pushing for them instead. We're supposed to be trying to cut down on the number of Zero DC actions we feed into the turns anyways.
Which we never cared about enough to do anything with. This absurd buyers remorse where in aftermath of a less than gracefully handled nemesis events is ridiculous. We discussed interfering in the war, and always concluded it wasn't priority. We exploited a few opportunities it created and were complete satisfied with how things were concluding until this event. All this discussion is doing is killing what interest in getting involved in the Markovia & Vlatava I still have rather than focusing on Bialya or Japan or the new Doma School in Alexandria instead.
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Okay there's a simple way to resolve this. @King crimson if we take the action to cooperate with Vlatava on metahuman research can Vertigo assign his own hero units to that action and if so what are he odds of him assigneing Dr Moon to it?
You're right, we had good reasons for not getting involved before but now that LexCorp is getting a bad name in Markovia I'd rather it be over sooner rather than later before the hints escalate even more that's all.
Looks like the Moon station idea just got moved up on the priority list. Some of the spacefaring stuff may also help with the ODIN project but that's a lesser concern. compared to the potential prestige new military contracts and unrivaled(for the time being) resource extraction.
If we want to hit two birds with one stone there's also our toy division if we want to funnel funds through there. Use some false names and paper trails to pay him* for some new toy designs. We'd have to go over them to make sure there's no bullshit but he likes toys and is going to use the cash to help his operations so it is a option.
*We'd have probably done that anyway.
This is the reason? Why should we care? Does Lex can't stand the thought of anyone in the world thinking bad about him?
We should really start working on some global scale mind control plot if so
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
I don't want to sound rude but that kind of doesn't make any sense and this answer feels like a non-sequitur.
Ceremonial proclamations are generally performed by mayors and governors and are very different from treaties, having a completely different form and purpose. Furthermore the answer feels like a non-sequitur (to me at least) because while you can argue that treaties are contracts (they can be argued to have an offer, an acceptance and consideration), functionally they are not governed by the same rules and generally aren't governed by the same rules to the point where generally you don't refer to a treaty as a contract.
On top of that it kind of doesn't really work as a meta joke. I've seen people use this format for non-ceremonial proclamations (the London Agreement very much was not a ceremonial proclamation), so if you were attempting to mimic the form of a ceremonial proclamation it just straight up doesn't work, especially since the joke seems to be "I'm going to write X like Y".
If anything this answer kind of disappoints me even though it probably shouldn't.
I think that this attempt doesn't really work. A lot of actual treaties are written even less in depth than this one was with even more flaws, and the more robust and filled out treaties (like say the Treaty of Versailles) have something like 400+ articles which I don't expect any omake writer to reasonably mimic.
I think the point gets lost in that I do not expect anyone not to get anywhere near what I would expect from a robust comprehensive peace treaty, and that it's actually more filled out than some historical treaties. I don't think this quite lands.
You can quibble on whether it's enhanced humans or enhanced metahumans (it's not reliant on the metagene so it's technically not metahuman related) but it is research involving powers, helping global food shortages and nearly infinite gingo fruit (you're still constrained by the amount of oxygen and water available on the planet you're growing the cloned fruit and while the terraforming tech can raise that there is an upper limit even if it's not one you'll ever hit or need to worry about).
I get that, though I call the character "Bad Samaritan" and generally think that's good enough.
Generally speaking, the way I'm handling this is when I see that you select the action to contribute to metahuman research, I drop at least one of Vertigo's actions and set things up to try and match what your plan is. From there I add what was Count Vertigo's degree of success into your collaboration and use that as the final number.
I likely will assign Dr. Moon to the action if you put a mega-team on researching with him, but the results are likely to be not overly determined by Dr. Moon's presence (remember Count Vertigo's previous experiments with Quixium involve killing a large number of his own citizens without fully understanding why they died).
To somewhat answer things, whether or not Dr. Moon is assigned to things isn't really relevant and Count Vertigo is already covering for a large amount of incredibly unethical experimentation.
Edit: To give some further elaboration, don't expect it to necessarily lead to uselessly malicious stuff, but also expect ethics to be treated as a suggestion and a performance at best.
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That could work though my concern would be that then we'd have a paper trail connecting us to Toyman.
Though to be fair to Toyman I also don't think that he'd do anything dodgy to any toys he made, his whole thing is kinda about childhood joy and the importance of childhood.
It's not that Lex can't stand anyone thinking badly of him it's that the longer the Markovians stew in their anger and dislike of Vlatava and LexCorp the more likely they are to cause problems, the more likely someone else is to start asking why and the more of an issue they'll cause for Vertigo and by extension us when he eventually conquers them.This is the reason? Why should we care? Does Lex can't stand the thought of anyone in the world thinking bad about him?
We should really start working on some global scale mind control plot if so
The sooner that Vlatava is in a position to deal with Markovia once and for all the sooner we don't have to worry about this side of things and the sooner we can look like the good guys by helping to rebuild the war torn country.
I'm not saying to bombard Vertigo with support, just a few bits and pieces here and there.
Ooh even better. Between this, the bone formula, our new laser rifles and Supergirl how much are we Eiling's favourite person?
Fair enough.
So basically Moon probably won't be assigned unless we put our own super team on the action and even then he won't have too big an impact on the results but don't expect the experiments to be particularly ethical either way.
Sounds good to me.
We could always pay in cash or something. Or leave a fake paper trail that leads to a person that doesn't exist or is a lexcorp shill.
And to be honest I kind of want to see what toys he makes.
Don't forget ODIN and the spacecraft tech we're going to have soon. Whatever Almerac and Brainiac kitbash we come up with is going to be leagues ahead of anyone else's hypothetical space fleet.
I also favor Quixium research with Vertigo next turn. The whole point of setting up ties with him and Queen Bee was so we could have them do things we can disavow. If someone finds out and it becomes an issue, we make very public statements that we never knew the full story on this and would not have gone along with it if we did and eat the PR hit. PR is meant to spent on taking the occasional risk. People are getting not just risk-averse but cripplingly risk-averse.
We had Moon on the payroll for years, tortured people to death in-house, and have never faced serious blowback from our employees or outside parties from this. We know Japan's metahuman law enforcement is run by a hilariously corrupt guy enslaving a supervillain, Bialya is openly run by Queen Bee, and the US has skeletons in their closet aplenty.
I will note that one upside of the peace agreement that was brokered is the Demilitarized Zone being unsupervised makes it hilariously ideal for smuggling - we wanted inroads with Markovia for Quixium, but it should be VERY easy to obtain on the black market in Vlatava and there's something to be said for not paying the Markovian government itself for the privilege of getting it.
We had Moon on the payroll for years, tortured people to death in-house, and have never faced serious blowback from our employees or outside parties from this. We know Japan's metahuman law enforcement is run by a hilariously corrupt guy enslaving a supervillain, Bialya is openly run by Queen Bee, and the US has skeletons in their closet aplenty.
I will note that one upside of the peace agreement that was brokered is the Demilitarized Zone being unsupervised makes it hilariously ideal for smuggling - we wanted inroads with Markovia for Quixium, but it should be VERY easy to obtain on the black market in Vlatava and there's something to be said for not paying the Markovian government itself for the privilege of getting it.
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We have a bad reputation in one tiny european nation. Why is that such a major problem? Lexcorp is looked on poorly in a number of larger, more plot significant nations, one of which has indirect proof of our Pheromone use on one of it's agents, and we haven't made it a priority. We have so many bigger priorities, detractors elsewhere, but Markovia is now critical because it's a recent botch? Markovia is a joke and the only person of real competence in the nation is planning to cut and run if lex proves spiteful.
I'm will to build up our PMC and Maybe buy out Black Watch and let Vlatava hire both. Anything more than indirect support I've been thoroughly galvanized against by what a big deal we're making of this when we have so many far more notable threats and worthwhile opportunities.
Sounds terrible. I thought Moon would be negatively impacting the research but it turns out it's just typical Vertigo sloppiness in general.
A paper trail of pure funding pored into QM acknowledged ethics are a performance research isn't particularly easily disavowed. There are better options.
One of them is improving our PMC. We need to do this anyways to ready for the Kryptonian Invasion, and Vlatava can still hire it.
Another option is having Vertigo commission exo/power suits from Toyman. It's a distinct work around to not being able to buy our tech, and it gets toybro funding and possibly even metahuman test pilots.
Finally, we can always pay savage to traffic Markovia dangerous metahumans with Sabotaged restraints and damage the nation further via metahuman rampage.
There's a difference between the likes of Russia or China not liking LexCorp because we're a munitions company with close ties to the US government and it's allies and a small country having a personal reason to dislike LexCorp like us funding and supporting the country that intends to invade conquer them.
The former isn't newsworthy the latter could be if it draws enough attention. Obviously that's not going to happen immediately but the longer the situation drags on and the angrier the people of Markovia get the more likely it is that someone notices.
It's obviously not our number one priority but it's worth a couple of actions to give Vertigo an edge that could speed things up.
So basically the more that other people want to do stuff, even if it's only a little, the less you want to out of spite?
Also nobody is really arguing for direct support. Just develop Vlatava a little and some metahuman research, neither are us directly getting involved.
You… you've changed your argument though.
Before this you were arguing that we shouldn't cooperate with Vertigo on metahuman research because Moon would impact the results table but now that KC has said that's not the case you've seemingly pivoted to just being against unethical experimentation in general despite one of the main reasons we have allies like Vlatava and Bialya is to be able to do stuff like that out of the public eye.
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The more people push the ethically questionable research as a must have and make the situation out to be a bigger deal than it is while we have so much more important things to worry about, the less interested I am in taking actions that benefit primarily Vlatava and Vertigo rather than multipurpose actions instead with inadvertent boons to resolving the situation.
Yeah, because I was previously overestimating the degree of discretion being practiced. Vlatava has already been caught out using human experimentation to create living weapons based on bone serum and Quixium. Vertigo has spoiled himself for that, which is again the whole reason I was comfortable tossing him Moon. Now I prefer conventional methods or third party sabotage.
Firstly I would argue that the collaborative research does benefit us as well as Vertigo because it allows us to learn more about the meta-gene while also receiving a bonus from Vertigo's contribution.
Secondly, I don't mean to imply that this is anywhere near our top priority just that if we can spare an action or two to give Vertigo a boost over Markovia we should.
But okay fine if you really don't want to go down that route, and the voters agree, then we can find other ways to do so.