Lex Sedet In Vertice: A Supervillain in the DCU CK2 quest

[b-wolf95]

[X] [Lex] Upgrade box opening robot
[X] [Lex] Look into the Japanese market

[X] [Mercy] Buy a Mozart CD and see if Cassandra can recreate it just by hearing it
[X] [Mercy] Inform Carl of his new positions responsibilities
[X] [Mercy] Confiscate the alcohol Dr. Moon is illegally brewing in an unused lab

[X] [Pam] Go out on another date with Katherine
[X] [Pam] Go and meet up with all of the individuals from Gotham and have a night on the town
[X] [Pam] Discuss Ivo's Nobel Prize with Karl Helfern
[X] [Pam] Sunbathe
[X] [Pam] Practice her new powers in isolation

[X] [Roxy] Try to convince Rebecca to let her roast marshmallows on hellfire
[X] [Roxy] Buy Nygma a puzzle cube
[X] [Roxy] Buy Leonard Snart a giant novelty snow-globe

[X] [Cass] Make something to impress Lex
[X] [Cass] Learn about a foreign country
[X] [Cass] Put Janus in the vents
[X] [Cass] Play games with Jinx

[X] [Dahl] Thank Samuel for the mirror he gave her
[X] [Dahl] Submit scripts to Oswald under a pseudonym

[X] [Cub] Run away from loud metal fire spitter (run away from Roxanne's rocket)
[X] [Cub] Hit all the shiny dots in Up-Down Box (hit all the buttons in the elevator)
[X] [Cub] Chew up the bad green bowls (Chew on Nygma's hats)
[X] [Cub] Roar at cold man for making things chilly (roar at Leonard Snart)
[X] [Cub] Show four armed monkey that he will not be vanquished

[X] [Monkey] Investigate light boxes (play with a phone)
[X] [Monkey] Collect hidden fruit stashes (Collect fruit baskets Mercy places in hard to reach locations)
[X] [Monkey] Steal unattended food piles (Steal unattended sandwiches)
[X] [Monkey] Fight the cold box (attempt to open a refrigerator)
[X] [Monkey] Distribute grapes to friends

 

[Silvereagle21]

[X] [Lex] Write a book
[X] [Lex] Speak with Carol about potential budget increases
[X] [Lex] Have Cerise Orielle double check for mystical interference in Santa Prisca
[X] [Mercy] Take Rose to the shooting range
[X] [Mercy] Inform Carl of his new positions responsibilities
[X] [Mercy] Speak with Felicity about cybersecurity
[X] [Pam] Go out on another date with Katherine
[X] [Pam] Sunbathe
[X] [Pam] Practice her new powers in isolation
[X] [Roxy] Visit Carol
[X] [Cass] Make something to impress Lex
[X] [Cass] Spend time with Rose
[X] [Cass] Learn about a foreign country
[X] [Dahl] Thank Samuel for the mirror he gave her
[X] [Dahl] Submit scripts to Oswald under a pseudonym
[X] [Cub] Play with Packmate (Play with Cassandra)
[X] [Monkey] Collect hidden fruit stashes (Collect fruit baskets Mercy places in hard to reach locations)

 

[Swedish15]

[X] [Lex] Speak with Carol about potential budget increases
[X] [Mercy] Buy a Mozart CD and see if Cassandra can recreate it just by hearing it
[X] [Pam] Discuss Ivo's Nobel Prize with Karl Helfern
[X] [Roxy] Buy Leonard Snart a giant novelty snow-globe
[X] [Cass] Play games with Jinx
[X] [Dahl] Thank Samuel for the mirror he gave her
[X] [Cub] Say hello to the man who comes in to talk with surprise ambush (pounce on Jarret Parker)
[X] [Monkey] Sit in warm water pool in cold man's house (sit in Leonard Snart's bathtub as part of a prank by Lisa)

 

[Kkutlord]

[X] [Lex] Upgrade box opening robot

[X] [Mercy] Speak with Felicity about cybersecurity

[X] [Pam] Correct some of Cassandra's misconceptions on how plants work
[X] [Cass] Talk to Pamela about biology

[X] [Roxy] Try to get Snowy to dance
[X] [Monkey] Collect hidden fruit stashes (Collect fruit baskets Mercy places in hard to reach locations)

[X] [Dahl] Submit scripts to Oswald under a pseudonym
[X] [Cub] Hit all the shiny dots in Up-Down Box (hit all the buttons in the elevator)

 

[Simon_Jester]

I actually kind of wish people wouldn't copy my votes exactly for "Personal Action" preference voting, because with how preference voting works it creates weird results. I'd be happier if people looked over my big list and deleted at least a few of the items that are more boring to them.

Whenever my insomnia is acting up I can count on an omake by Simon Jester to give me something good to read. This in particular while transitory did contain some fascinating information most notably how John Wilkes Booth was killed is radically different from our history (where he died of a gunshot wound). The mystery of what just happened is intriguing as there are a few good candidates for who did it.

Click to shrink...

There was a lot going on at Rich Hill; I know the story but it's enough of a digression from the story of the Luthors, specifically, that I don't want to tell it in the main sequence of Metropolitan Clan omakes. It's a sidestory, and one I've only broadly sketched out.

 

[Negation]

Kryptonite Battery Plans

Once we understand enough about it after Due Diligence tests etc, I think we should just leave it to Keystone Motors for the automobiles.

The real market to tap would be the PMDs before China gets in on it.

The prototype would of course be one for Marie with extendable platform that raises her to adult height so she does not have to creak her neck so much when talking to people.

1st generation model available to the public would be targeted towards the Elderly which may or may not come with an exo-frame to assist their mobility.

2nd generation models onwards will be for civilians too damn lazy to walk/jog/bike. Of course we will need to have built in speed limiters (removal of which will result in voiding the warranty & our legal liability) there's already enough traffic accidents in real life as examples.

Of course with the release of every new model, there will be an increase in electronic/Kryptonite battery trash. To keep ahead of the environmental issue & keep in line with our Go Green policy & Best Practices, LexCorp will enter into the Recycling business with something like:-

[ ] Open Recycling Center
DC 28 One man's trash is another man's treasure. Admittedly a rather cliche phrase but with a new composting program you can use other people's trash to grow things that others treasure and thus make more money. Plus this is a good PR move

Killing Superman with recycled Kryptonite will also warm the cockles of my cold dead heart.

Good for our employee, good for profit, good for PR, good for the enviroment and good for killing Superman, 5 birds 1 stone.

 

[King crimson]

So I have some disappointing news. An update will not come today. It will come tomorrow though

 

[Simon_Jester]

Kryptonite Battery Plans

Once we understand enough about it after Due Diligence tests etc, I think we should just leave it to Keystone Motors for the automobiles.

Click to shrink...

Maaaaybe.

Heavy industry (including automotive) is actually a pretty significant LexCorp competency. We have manufacturing technology that is literally out of this world because Ivo reverse-engineered it from xenotech.

So we're not in the position that, say, Elon Musk is, trying to build the Tesla and outcompete major car corporations and learning to his shock that they know things he doesn't about building cars. We actually have a competitive edge that might enable us to make the cars cheaper and more widespread if we build them ourselves.

The real market to tap would be the PMDs before China gets in on it.

The prototype would of course be one for Marie with entendable platform that raises her to adult height so she does not have to creak her neck so much when talking to people.

Click to shrink...

I like this idea but I don't think it'll catch on on a wide enough scale to be as useful to us as the cars, at least not in the United States.

We'd also need to downsize kryptonite batteries.

[ ] Open Recycling Center
DC 28 One man's trash is another man's treasure. Admittedly a rather cliche phrase but with a new composting program you can use other people's trash to grow things that others treasure and thus make more money. Plus this is a good PR move

Killing Superman with recycled Kryptonite will also warm the cockles of my cold dead heart.

Good for our employee, good for profit, good for PR, good for the enviroment and good for killing Superman, 5 birds 1 stone.

Click to shrink...

A specific

[] Kryptonite battery reprocessing facility

action might be appropriate, once we're selling the things on a commercial scale.

 

[NMS]

I can't remember. Have we discussed sticking Ivo into cryo-stasis until we've done more actions to lower AMAZO's DC?

 

[Simon_Jester]

I can't remember. Have we discussed sticking Ivo into cryo-stasis until we've done more actions to lower AMAZO's DC?

Click to shrink...

It's been discussed but we don't actually have the tech (if we'd managed to snag Victor Fries things might be different).

The catch is that Ivo probably won't trust us to ever actually thaw him out, given how many extremely steep and punishingly difficult conditions the man puts on achieving his own goals.

 

[NMS]

It's been discussed but we don't actually have the tech (if we'd managed to snag Victor Fries things might be different).

Click to shrink...

Send Snart on a Joint Project with Wayne Enterprises? That is who Victor is working for, right now, right? Or at least working for a company that works for Wayne Enterprises? I can't seem to recall the exact details off the top of my head.

 

[Negation]

I like this idea but I don't think it'll catch on on a wide enough scale to be as useful to us as the cars, at least not in the United States.

We'd also need to downsize kryptonite batteries.

Click to shrink...

Yeah. The market for PMDs is mostly East & South-East Asia. The damn things are a traffic hazard here.

I'm hoping that breaking into the markets there will lower the DCs for building LexCorp HQs.

 

[Negation]

Send Snart on a Joint Project with Wayne Enterprises? That is who Victor is working for, right now, right? Or at least working for a company that works for Wayne Enterprises? I can't seem to recall the exact details off the top of my head.

Click to shrink...

King_Crimson mentioned that we would have to have Lenny do the Learning Action about Cold 1st and roll well to unlock Cryotech for ourselves. Otherwise, sending Lenny along to WayneMed will not trigger Victor.

 

[Erumpet]

hey @King crimson did we get any coop increase for saving Ivo's life with the organ transplant?

 

[King crimson]

hey @King crimson did we get any coop increase for saving Ivo's life with the organ transplant?

Click to shrink...

Nope.

 

[Reader of all]

Really not even saving his life will get ivo to like lex more wow he is truly an ass I for one vote that the next time he is near death we do not save his life so that we can shelve amazo and use that action for something more productive.

 

[Gumiho]

Really not even saving his life will get ivo to like lex more wow he is truly an ass I for one vote that the next time he is near death we do not save his life so that we can shelve amazo and use that action for something more productive.

Click to shrink...

Nah we milk ivo until that final transplant, when he delivers, he delivers.

 

[King crimson]

he is truly an ass

Click to shrink...

So I'll probably go back and do an apocrypha post on this but yeah you are right. Ivo is an ass. He is rude, condescending, narcissistic, judgemental, is paranoid and megalomaniacal and is misanthropic.

He is not at all a good or pleasant person and is super ungrateful for any attempts to help him (in an old comic the JLA prevented him from dying and he then decided to kill them all for leaving him trapped in a hideous form rather than letting him die. You know the very thing he himself was trying to do).

While he has some sympathetic traits and is three-dimensional (I hope), Ivo is most certainly a terrible person. I think Ivo is interesting as a terrible person because he serves as a foil for Lex. Ivo has many of Lex's flaws ratcheted up to eleven (high opinion of themselves, single mindedness, distrust of others, looking down on normality, megalomania etc.). He serves as a warning to what Lex might become if he tunnel visions too hard, a bitter lonely individual who undermines his own goals through his refusal to rely on anyone other then himself since all others are inferior or untrustworthy.

Ivo is an ass but him being an ass makes him better for the narrative and themes of the quest rather than worse. He isn't the best hero unit due to being incredibly high maintenance and a raging dick but I do think he is a solid character for it. Also Ivo was deliberately designed to be an incredibly suboptimal hero unit considering the route he opens up is a borderline instant win button.

 

[Reader of all]

Nah we milk ivo until that final transplant, when he delivers, he delivers.

Click to shrink...

Can we at least not get anyone to help ivo and let him ram his head on the wall all alone I mean marie may not be much of a hero unit but she can still give a bonus to other actions rather than helping him.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Send Snart on a Joint Project with Wayne Enterprises? That is who Victor is working for, right now, right? Or at least working for a company that works for Wayne Enterprises? I can't seem to recall the exact details off the top of my head.

Click to shrink...

That's an option. That's definitely an option. The problem is that the clock on Ivo seems to be ticking so fast that we'd have to get right the fuck on this as a high priority action... AND we'd need Ivo's cooperation.

Also... well frankly, I'm not sure we want Ivo to succeed badly enough to try this. Remember that his end goal is an ultra-powerful robot body. If he could settle for a normal robot body he'd probably be done by now. We owe it to him to make a good faith effort to support his project, but we don't necessarily have to make immense extra sacrifices beyond that in my opinion.

King_Crimson mentioned that we would have to have Lenny do the Learning Action about Cold 1st and roll well to unlock Cryotech for ourselves. Otherwise, sending Lenny along to WayneMed will not trigger Victor.

Click to shrink...

Oh? Darn.

So I'll probably go back and do an apocrypha post on this but yeah you are right. Ivo is an ass. He is rude, condescending, narcissistic, judgemental, is paranoid and megalomaniacal and is misanthropic.

He is not at all a good or pleasant person and is super ungrateful for any attempts to help him (in an old comic the JLA prevented him from dying and he then decided to kill them all for leaving him trapped in a hideous form rather than letting him die. You know the very thing he himself was trying to do).

While he has some sympathetic traits and is three-dimensional (I hope), Ivo is most certainly a terrible person. I think Ivo is interesting as a terrible person because he serves as a foil for Lex. Ivo has many of Lex's flaws ratcheted up to eleven (high opinion of themselves, single mindedness, distrust of others, looking down on normality, megalomania etc.). He serves as a warning to what Lex might become if he tunnel visions too hard, a bitter lonely individual who undermines his own goals through his refusal to rely on anyone other then himself since all others are inferior or untrustworthy.

Ivo is an ass but him being an ass makes him better for the narrative and themes of the quest rather than worse. He isn't the best hero unit due to being incredibly high maintenance and a raging dick but I do think he is a solid character for it. Also Ivo was deliberately designed to be an incredibly suboptimal hero unit considering the route he opens up is a borderline instant win button.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, that's all very fair.

And, again, this is why I'm not sure we want him to succeed. Investing resources into his project makes sense because of the spinoff benefits, but only up to a point.

Can we at least not get anyone to help ivo and let him ram his head on the wall all alone I mean marie may not be much of a hero unit but she can still give a bonus to other actions rather than helping him.

Click to shrink...

It's worth considering. I consider Marie's actions to be worth it, but now that she has another Intrigue hero unit she actually has good co-op with (Mirror Master), I'm definitely reconsidering the idea.

 

[Negation]

Can we at least not get anyone to help ivo and let him ram his head on the wall all alone I mean marie may not be much of a hero unit but she can still give a bonus to other actions rather than helping him.

Click to shrink...

He's still the 1 Hero Unit with bonus to study Alien tech until we get others on a near-equal level.

 

[Simon_Jester]

He's still the 1 Hero Unit with bonus to study Alien tech until we get others on a near-equal level.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, but it's a pretty small bonus, and collaborations with good co-op tend to outweigh it. Like, Ivo+Marie scored a really great crit on the alien tech result, but that was because they got lucky- we could have easily engineered a comparable result ourselves with a three-hero teamup if we'd wanted to.

Ivo is very good at what he does but he's not so good that he's worth unlimited sacrifices on our part. Especially when you consider how ugly things could get if he fully succeeds- one of the most asinine people we've met in the setting to date, in a virtually invincible robot body we have no means of stopping.

 

[Negation]

Yeah, but it's a pretty small bonus, and collaborations with good co-op tend to outweigh it. Like, Ivo+Marie scored a really great crit on the alien tech result, but that was because they got lucky- we could have easily engineered a comparable result ourselves with a three-hero teamup if we'd wanted to.

Ivo is very good at what he does but he's not so good that he's worth unlimited sacrifices on our part. Especially when you consider how ugly things could get if he fully succeeds- one of the most asinine people we've met in the setting to date, in a virtually invincible robot body we have no means of stopping.

Click to shrink...

Which is why when we put him on ice, we only wake him up after our Everyman Project is online as well as every other Super Soldier/Post-Human/God-Mode Project is sucessful & in place.

Side Note:- @King crimson, when Ignition appears on the news, do LexCorp employees throw rubbish at the tv screen in the LexCorp lunchroom?

 

[King crimson]

Side Note:- @King crimson, when Ignition appears on the news, do LexCorp employees throw rubbish at the tv screen in the LexCorp lunchroom?

Click to shrink...

I could see it go either way. Considering that the dude murdered some of their co-workers in an incredibly brutal way this is not an easy topic to fully answer as it deals with death loss and needless brutality. I personally do not have enough experience to really give a definitive answer. Like the less serious answer is that of course those who don't know the people who died do (as that works best for comedy) but my own personal experience leans towards no (I was in preschool with someone whose father perished in the United Airlines Flight 93 and as such was taught not to mention it at all and as far as I know no one threw garbage at a TV when Al Qaida showed up. I have other reasons as well but suffice to say I wouldn't throw garbage at the TV screen) but I acknowledge that I am not everyone and that people cope with things differently.

I think it ultimately depends on the individuals in question and how well they knew the people who died in the attack. I don't have a good answer that covers every LexCorp employee.

 

[Negation]

Oh yeah Kobra-Venom is a thing. Gingo Fruit extracts should help with the skin-hardening/splitting side effect. Need to work on cultivating those.